You probably remember the headlines about “Breadwinner Moms” a few months ago. The Pew Center had published a report finding women are the best-paid workers in a record 40 percent of households with children under 18. That’s practically quadruple the 1960 number.This is not a mystery at all. Women have been taught to believe that marriage is oppressive, stifling, and akin to slavery. They've been taught that they have to go to university and spend their prime fertile years in college and getting their career established. They've been told they need men like fish need bicycles.
But a little detail was often lost in the large-font headlines. Sixty percent of “breadwinner-mom” families are really just single-mom families. In fact, single moms account for precisely one-quarter of U.S. households. Single dads make up another 6 percent.
In other words, the biggest story here isn’t the rise of female earners, exactly, even though that’s a distinct and powerful trend. This is really a story about a more astonishing fact: Single parents have more than tripled as a share of American households since 1960.
Men, on the other hand, have been told that they have to wait until they are nearly 30 before a woman will tire of riding the carousel and be willing to settle down and marry them. They've also been informed that if they do marry a woman and she doesn't want to be married anymore, they will still be responsible for supporting her financially after the end of the marriage.
And both sexes have been told that marriage is nothing more than two people, of any sex, race, or religion, who happen to want to tell other people that they are temporarily committed to each other in some fashion that may, or may not, involve sexual monogamy.
Frankly, taking all these factors into account, the only mystery is that single parents - or more precisely, single mothers - haven't increased by more than a mere factor of three.
