Legitimate Work:

Out of the work that is being done in America, who is actually producing something of value that customers actually need and use?

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf

Let's be generous and include every category that seems even remotely useful.  Each of the percentages is the percentage of people working in this field compared to the entire labor force.  So 5% of workers of all types are working in management, and so on.

Management - 5%
Business and Financial Operations - 5%
Computer and Mathematical - 3%
Architecture and Engineering - 2%
Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and media - 1%
Healthcare Practitioners and technical - 6%
Healthcare Support - 3%
Protective Service - 2%
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance - 3%
Farming, Fishing, and forestry - virtually 0%
Construction and Extraction - 4%
Installation, Maintenance, and Repair - 4%
Production - 6%
Transportation and material moving - 7%

For a grand total of 51% of the workforce is doing actually useful work.  Aside from perhaps healthcare, which is a dubious 'service' anyway because of its sky-high prices for few actual cures, every single one of these legitimate work fields are massively dominated by men.  I would guess that at least 80% of the jobs in all of these fields are held by men.  Normal jobs make sense -- extracting coal or iron, constructing houses, repairing broken pipes of electric lines, producing furniture, or moving the goods to market from their factories.  All of this stuff makes natural sense and is clearly a valid field of endeavor.  You can immediately point to the beneficiaries and why the country relies entirely on you -- everything would break down within days if any one of these guys went on strike.  Without the police and the fire department and prison guards there would be anarchy in the streets and no one's life or property would be safe.  Without architecture and engineering we wouldn't have any roads, bridges, or buildings.  Without computers and mathematics we wouldn't have any communication and most machines would be incapable of doing what they do.  Without businessmen and financial operators no business ideas would get off the ground, which would lead to no miners, truck drivers, engineers, etc having any jobs.  Without management making sure the right people are in the right job doing the right thing, projects would flounder into sub-par performance at higher costs.

Without the arts and entertainment sector there would be no point working because life wouldn't be enjoyable anymore so there would be no point sustaining life any further.  Without farming we'd all starve to death.  These are good jobs.  People can be proud of themselves when they work in jobs like these.  They can point to the good they're doing in the world, and it's unquestionable that what they are doing is good.

Only women working in jobs like these, that in addition no man can do as well, can possibly argue that they are worth more in the workplace than at home.  For instance, voice actors, singers, idols, female manga-ka, authors, actresses, figure skaters, etc, unquestionably I would prefer they continue in the workforce than get out of it.  They're providing something of real worth to the world that no one else can do, their talents are unique and in great demand.

Female police officers, female firefighters, female soldiers, these abominations have no reason to exist.  All of these jobs require a great deal of physical strength and mental aggression/risk taking behavior, which women are biologically unsuited towards.  Even presuming that some select women have all the attributes necessary to succeed at this job, they would only be needed to be hired if there was a shortage of qualified men who could do the job instead.  I do not think there is a shortage of men available for these jobs, therefore there is no reason women, even the miniscule percentage of qualified women, should apply.  However, this isn't what really happens.  Instead, what really happens is that standards are lowered and women are let in via affirmative action.  When push comes to shove and they're actually required to do the job, like that female secret service member who just let the crazy guy pass right by her in his attempt to meet Obama by invading the white house, they reveal themselves to be completely empty suits and placeholders with no business being there.

Likewise, there are plenty of male computer programmers, engineers, truck drivers, construction workers, and so on.  The pay is pretty abysmal and the number of unemployed male engineers/computer programmers/whatever is always higher than the number of open jobs in these fields.  We don't need to hire women to go be coal miners in west virginia.  This tough, dirty, dangerous work has more than enough men all being paid virtually nothing for it already.  To prove that there is an urgent need to mobilize women into the workforce because men 'aren't getting the job done,' we would have to see some section of the labor force unequal to the task of providing people with their desired goods.  There should be massive labor shortages where companies are willing to hire literally anyone who knocks on their door.  Companies should be willing to train anyone up from scratch just to put a warm body onto the assembly line.  The pay should be rising astronomically as companies lose billions in opportunity costs by not having the necessary labor to match their booming capital.

A world like this doesn't exist.  It probably hasn't existed since the 1800's, but in any case it doesn't exist now.  Wages haven't risen (adjusted for inflation) in forever.  Since 1970.  The minimum wage is actually down from where it was in the 60's/70's.  Companies are becoming more and more choosy about who they hire, not less and less.  They require ever higher certifications before they're willing to let you work, not ever fewer.  Even highly qualified people are being laid off as being not profitable enough for the company's stockholders.  Does this really feel like a time crying out for emergency female labor?

Is this World War I, or World War II, where all the men are gone and in order to survive women must take up the roles of farming and manufacturing for us?  Is there some giant public works project that requires 'all hands on deck' like the interstate highway system or the Apollo project?  No.  There is no giant urgency for more workers to enter the system.  Even if there were, it could be met by male immigrants instead of women.  We've imported some fifty million immigrants into the country presumably for some reason, why on Earth would we need female workers in an environment like this?

Women in the workforce should only be working where their skills are necessary and irreplaceable.  If they were leading edge mathematicians or physicists, I could understand, because there simply aren't enough smart people to unlock all the secrets of the universe by relying solely on men.  There are unsolved problems in math and science.  We desperately need to unlock the mysteries of AI, immortality, space colonization, cheap sustainable energy, etc, and anyone with the brains to work in these fields should definitely be recruited to pursue them.  It would mean a better life for trillions of people in the future, and the sooner it's done the more people we can help.  Recently, the first woman in history won the Field's Medal, the most prestigious honor in mathematics.  Therefore, however small a minority, there's clearly some segment of the women's population that could be used in math and science.  They should be allowed to pursue their dreams.  But this tiny minority of high octane thinkers can be distinguished pretty early in the education system.  They could be put on a 'future scientific leader' track, grouped with other bright and promising students, and taught whatever they need to know in order to work at the LHC or NASA or whatever.  This doesn't imply that all women must be allowed to go to college in order to 'discover their potential.'  IQ tests by age 18 are perfectly indicative of later performance, and unless these high IQ women are already doing science and math related activities, even if they have high IQ it's obvious they'll just end up lawyers or community activists or something equally useless even if they went to college.

I can imagine a world where 2% of women are in the workforce.  Generally speaking, these top 2% of women end up married but without children or very few children, which is a tragedy.  But it would be an even greater tragedy if we didn't have women artists and scientists providing irreplaceable goods for mankind for which every year without them means legions of people will suffer, die, or miss a chance at beauty that changes their entire life philosophy and overall enjoyment of life.  What I can't fathom is why the remaining 98% of women should get a job when their effort is not needed and not useful.  Either they're working in a field of work that's fraudulent and farcical by its very nature -- like fast food when it would be healthier and cheaper to just buy from the supermarket and then cook the food at home -- or it's a field of work that has 100 qualified people for every applicant, including billions of immigrants who would love to come here and work for the job, like computer programmer or construction worker.

If there were a field of work in which wages were sky-high for, say, ten years, and neither new college graduates nor immigrants could fill the demand for this job, then there would be an argument for allowing women to 'fill in the breach.'  In a country where wages have remained stagnant for 50 years, I just don't see the dire need to pour women into the workforce like Russian reinforcements to Stalingrad.  There is no economic argument for women's workforce participation.

The only thing that remains is the social argument.  Paradoxically, liberals must argue that 40% illegitimacy rates, 50% divorce rates, an average age of first marriage of 30, STD's, ten sexual partners per lifetime, lower happiness ratings in all surveys and polls, drugs, alcohol abuse, 'cutting,' tattoos, abortion, and so on are all social goods, brought about by letting single women stay single and support themselves via employment instead of being good little girls who stay at home and stay faithful and obedient to the man of the house.  Strangely enough, for liberals, the current social picture, where virtue is a non-existent term and women behave like monstrous beasts towards absolutely everyone -- their boyfriends, their husbands, their children, even to themselves -- is the end goal and the purpose of all this.  Women's liberation was for the sake of divorce.  It was so they could have ten lifetime sexual partners.  And so on.  Up is down and left is right in this world.  You can point to the skyrocketting rate of single mothers with children in this country, and they'll say that's a good thing.  Single mothers are courageous.  Single mothers can take care of everything themselves.  The dads were all negative influences on the children anyway.  Marriages stultify the human spirit and disallow our pursuit of happiness.  On and on.  To the liberal, our current social chaos, where love is impossible due to zero contract enforcement of people's oaths, where reproduction is impossible because there is zero financial security and zero promise that you'll actually be able to keep the kids that you pay for, is the desired result and the entire purpose of women going to work instead of staying home.

It's like if you're arguing with the Cheshire cat and tell him that if you ate all the geese, you doubt there would be any eggs left for next year, and his smile were to turn upside down as he said, "that's the idea."

If there is a single good thing that emerges out of abandoning traditional morality, I would like to know of it.  Don't tell me it can stop domestic abuse -- it was never traditional morality to allow domestic abuse in the first place.  There is far less domestic abuse, or women victimized by crime, among married women than among single women.  So no, that just doesn't cut it.  Don't tell me it gives women a more fulfilling sex life -- hedonistic goals like that make just as much sense as having a more fulfilling drug life or a more fulfilling alcoholic life.  Don't tell me it's for the children's sake, children are all better off in married homes.  Don't tell me it was because women were unhappy -- unhappiness is a part of life and it happens even more frequently among single people, no one can expect to be happy all the time over everything.  We take what little we can and concentrate on the good, that's all any of us can do.  We aren't clowns in a circus who always have to laugh uproariously over every second of our lives.  That's just insanity.

There is no argument for women upending the social order that has lasted 100,000 years all across the Earth.  There is no economic argument.  There is no social argument.  There is no moral argument.  There's simply no case that can be made, given the facts that we have, that today's prioritization of women is the correct one.  Yes, the enlightened west is better off than some backwards, patriarchal countries like the Muslim Middle East.  Yes, it's good that we aren't practicing female genital mutilation like they do in Egypt and Somalia.  But to say that our only two choices are burqas or women's liberation is absurd.  We have the 1950's, the 1850's, the 1750's, hell, we even have roman and spartan women as examples of a western attitude and treatment of the fairer sex that is far more balanced and free.  In the west, women's education and literacy was taught for centuries before women were expected to stay single and work for a living.  Men enjoy the company of intelligent women they can converse with, and there's no harm in women enjoying books and friendly dialogues and long letter correspondences with friends while the men are away.  The more reflective and refined women become, the more virtuous and beautiful they become, the better off everyone is.

2% of women should work.  100% of women should be educated.  100% of women should be married before age 20, as virgins, and should never divorce or commit adultery.  98% of women should stay home where their gifts are most suited to improving quality of life for everyone.  There is no need to go full purdah and foot binding on women to bring back the good behavior of women during the Victorian age.  They don't need to wear high heels and corsets, just not being abysmally overweight and allowing their hair to grow would already be sufficient to attract any number of fine suitors.  They don't need to take ecstasy or have lurid affairs to have a good time, a formal dance party or a dinner invitation with tea was perfectly sufficient in the past to keep women's spirits up.

How can anyone read the novels of Jane Austen and not feel envious of the lives women used to lead?  In Charles Dickens, women were treated exceptionally well, just as they acted exceptionally well, whether it was Little Dorritt or the sister in Nicholas Nickleby.  In War and Peace, women had an honored and central place in Russian cultural life.  In Little Women, even in the midst of the Civil War, the four sisters led a meaningful and good life that anyone should be able to empathize with.  George Eliot and George Sand give accounts of exciting, interesting women's lives.  Clairissa and Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, are the longest novels in the English tongue and they're about women.  I don't see why working as a secretary or a cashier would add any deeper meaning or value to your existence than these women had in their lives.

By allowing women to work, we set the conditions for women not marrying and divorcing frivolously.  (Charity work would be fine, the important thing is that women aren't able to support themselves or their children)  Once they were no longer financially dependent on men, they could behave ill-ly towards men without repercussion.  All social problems in the modern day stem from the mistake of allowing women into the workplace.  Once women are dependent on men again, they'll start behaving honestly and honorably towards men again, out of necessity.  Men have always behaved honestly and honorably towards women to begin with, because it is in their nature to love women and love uprightness, and furthermore there is a ton of social pressure on men to treat those 'weaker than them' well, it's noblesse oblige all the way down.  If a man were to mistreat his wife, he would be shunned by society and likely fired from his job.  When a wife mistreats her husband, she's championed in the press as a hero.  When women are given the whip hand over men, disaster ensues, because it goes against nature (women have no inclination to pamper men, unlike men who are inclined to pamper women) and societal norms (men are expected to take care of women and children, but women are not expected to take care of their men).  When men are given the whip hand over women, everything goes smoothly, just like it has for centuries in the enlightened west, and everyone's better off.  As another bonus, enough children are actually born into the world that mankind continues to exist into the future, unlike today's topsy turvy world which is dead set on self annihilation.

Change the marriage laws and, in order to support the marriage laws, change the work laws.  Life doesn't have to be a 'tale of heartbreak and betrayal,' as dramas describe themselves to show how realistic they are.  We've already tried out another and better way.  God knows why we ever abandoned it in the first place.