There's a lot of brouhaha about Eric Erickson and Megyn Kelly going at it about the statistic that the number of households headed by a single female is going up day by day. Eric Erickson's "science based" reasoning is that men are there to head the household and that women are submissive and exist to complement men. This has hints of biblical thinking, hearkening back to Adam and Eve. The idea that men need to be the breadwinner while the little woman sews at home is an old American trope, and has transformed in the modern world into something conservatives fear. Conservatives think that the number of single women who are the heads of households is a result of feminism and women giving up marriage to go and become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. This is tone deaf to the point it's comical. No conservative has really understood this statistic, nor have any of them taken the time to get to the reality of the situation. They just want to hate liberals, which is their life blood. If conservatives were actually interested in the American family, they'd be mad about this:
The number of American men who abandon their families and don't take responsibility for their children.
What could be more conservative? Why isn't Eric Ericson at the forefront of this issue? Why isn't he criticizing his fellow males for abandoning their post? There are millions of men who have children and leave their family behind. There are millions of men who don't pay child support. There are countless men who don't visit their children and are content to leave the mother to do all of the heavy lifting. Of these single female households, many of those women didn't tell the man "Bye, I'm a feminist and I don't need my man! I'm going to make it big as a cashier at Walmart! $7.40/hour, here I come!" That would be ridiculous, but that's what these conservative men think is happening.
They're just plain blind.
I was raised in a single parent home because my father is a dead beat. My mother was a shark like businesswoman. The fact that women before her opened doors allowed her to raise me alone so that she wouldn't have to prostitute or marry someone she hated just to pay the bills. Women years back did that. When their husbands or boyfriends left them with the kids, they found someone they had no attraction to but was a good breadwinner to marry. Or, they went from man to man and found that no one seemed to be better than the previous. Feminism was a reaction to a series of sick situations people wanted to be free from. Conservatives never look at the dark side of things, and they are obsessed with blaming their trophy phantom specters.
Many women would love to have a partner! It's not the woman's fault her lover decided he had no balls to raise a family. Even with married couples, many families bring home two paychecks. Women working in the workplace just makes sense economically and for day to day living. Couples work around it. But the number of single women running households is not entirely the woman's choice, but thank god those women have access to the workplace they didn't have years ago, so that even when the male proves to be useless, they have a court system to get child support and they have access to jobs that can aid them in getting enough money to raise their kids.
And by the way Ericson, this child raised by a single parent went to one of the best high schools in the country, then one of the best universities in this country, and got his Masters. In your world, I'd probably be living in a shack.