A recent brouhaha among Fox News anchors and contributors– which the network itself was pleased to publicize— attracted a fair number of headlines in non-Fox media.
As the official Fox News blog reported:
Megyn Kelly invited Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs and RedState.com’s Erick Erickson on ‘America Live’ Friday to respond to controversial remarks made Wednesday night on fallout from a brand new report on the growing trend of women being primary breadwinners in their households. The report details how the dynamic of American families is rapidly changing, with mothers being the primary provider in four out of 10 households with children under the age of 18; in comparison, in 1960 the rate of female breadwinners was just 11 percent.
Lou Dobbs and a handful of male Fox guests, ranging from Erickson, to Juan Williams, to pollster Douglas Schoen, seemed to reach the same consensus, saying that the growing trend ‘could undermine the social order’ of a once male-dominated society.
Kelly asked Dobbs and Erickson to defend their claims. And their arguments didn’t hold much weight in her eyes.
“Who died and made you scientist-in-chief?” she asked of Erickson, to which he quickly responded that what he actually had meant was that in nature, the male of the species is dominant and the protector, and in modern society, a ‘lot of feminists’ think gender roles are interchangeable.
Erickson also posted a blog on Red State furthering his claims of fact and science supporting the notion that women should hold the role of caregiver, not breadwinner. When Megyn challenged him on those claims, he said simply that there ‘are people who agree with him.’
Yes, Erickson and Dobbs are old-fashioned male chauvinists– even Fox News doesn’t have a problem acknowledging that.
But for a moment, let’s consider their argument: that in two-parent households it’s the ideal for fathers to work and mothers to stay at home with the kids.
For millions of families, this is economically impossible. As Ed Kilgore wrote at The Washington Monthly:
[M]any women are in the work force instead of staying home to be “full-time moms” not because they are lacking the beneficent servant-leadership of a man, but because the menfolk can’t earn enough to support a family alone. An economy characterized by high and growing inequality isn’t terribly conducive to large families and stay-at-home mothers outside the very privileged classes. And anyone saying “it used to work” might want to consider the kind of collective bargaining agreements, minimum wage laws, and subsidized housing arrangements we “used to have”—back before we all understood that those items were socialistic and hence un-American. To put it most obviously, you can’t have the family structure of the 1950s without the economy of the 1950s, and few conservatives want that at all.
Better than the entire sum of Fox News talking heads, or feminist tracts, this graph explains the decrease in stay-at-home moms:
Of course this is the sort of thing Fox News celebrates. It’s extraordinary how much effort they put into bashing a movement that is weaker than it’s been in decades.
I’ll give credit to Dobbs for at least touching on the real issue:
“We’re looking at an economy in which jobs are not being replaced with equal pay or near-equal pay with the replacement jobs.”
That’s a point we on the Left have been making for decades.