Posted on 05/22/2026 8:23:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The warning signs have been there for decades.
Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK, Australia and Canada.
The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970; today it’s just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book Get Married, the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.
Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable — that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggest she was right.
What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with — and could not have foreseen in 1983 — was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus:
They are the most miserable, anxious and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
They’ve gone full throttle Left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in the New Statesman last month that many young women don’t like men.
A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men. This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36% hold a positive view of men, compared with 61% of working-class women.
The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently criticises what she calls the “femosphere” — the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.
“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”
Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems, particularly in girls and young women.
“Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.
Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 202-–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness, hopelessness and depression of any female generation at the same age.
Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects.
The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. … The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship — but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.
Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.
So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?
The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on. The obvious explanation — the one staring out of every data table — is intentionally ignored.
Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been — Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper, ‘The Declining Labour Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men, which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.
Remove the marriage and you remove the responsibility. The data have been telling us this for decades.
But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men — though it has. It’s that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. Half of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.
What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy?
Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation — that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it.
The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead.
As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
etty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
Lessing publication dates 1950 to 1963 publication of seminal The Golden Notebook.
And more.
The communist French left bank had influence on postwar women especially college educated ones. Grenwich village and the modern art world were expressions of this influence. Women’s consciousness raising sessions were held in my affluent educated childhood suburb in mid 60s. Universities were biificated. Husband hunting grounds and career women power bases.
Look at the difference between the lives of Caroline Graglia and Ruth Ginsberg. Both same class at Harvard Law.
Marriage rates in the wake of WWII were at an all-time high. They obviously could not remain as high as the few years after the war, but still remained rather high through the 50s and 60s. Who says that? The data says that. I notice the part where you try to skip over the fact that marriage rates stayed high in the 50s and 60s. Here is another answer from Gemini:
"Marriage rates in the U.S. did not decline much in the 1950s. Instead, the decade was an anomaly characterized by high marriage rates, early median marriage ages, and a massive societal push toward traditional family formation. The specific trends during this time include:
Stable and High Rates: The marriage rate at the start of the decade was very high—about 90.2 marriages per 1,000 people in 1950. While it dipped moderately to 73.5 by 1960, the proportion of the population that was married actually grew.
Record Marital Proportions: In 1950, approximately 62% to 65% of Americans were married, and the 1960 Census recorded a peak of 67.4% of people (14 and older) as married.
Young First Marriages: The median age for first marriage hit historic lows. By 1950, it was roughly 20 for women and 23 for men.
The continuous, significant decline in U.S. marriage rates did not begin until the 1970s.
it probably declined after 1946 because it was at an all time high in the years immediately after the war. It really couldn't have gotten much higher or even stayed at that level.
Marriage rates were historically high in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 1950s?? Women were entering the corporate world in the 1950s? Are you sure?
So true! Mud huts is what we would be living in if there were no men.
Nearly everything I touch was invented by a man.
To be clear, men started opting out in the 1950s.
We know from the data that marriage rates were still quite high and sustained in the 50s and 60s
No, it dropped from 16% in 1946 to half that by 1958. That's not steady.
So the terms of marriage must not have changed much in the 1950s.
So men were opting out and the marriage rate dropped 50%, but for no reason you can point out yet that implicates women.
It had its roots in WWII, when women entered the workplace. It took 20 years from there to be acceptable to the culture.
Most cultural movements have thirty year roots. Society doesn’t change on a dime. When societies change, you can trace the roots to a previous generation.
But the average American woman in the 1950s was not living in Greenwich Village or in museums of modern art. The average American women knew Betty Crocker and Marilyn Monroe, and was singing, "To Know Him is to Love Him along with the Teddy Bears. So what was the average American woman doing in the 1950s to make men not want to marry them anymore?
So your stance is that the author is just wrong, and men were just as committed to marriage in the 1950s and 1960s as they have always been, and nothing changed until the 1970s?
Reading Cosmo, Sex and the Single Girl, and The Moon is Blue.
So your stance is that women entering the workplace is the root cause of the trouble? If women all just stayed home, everything would be fine?
U.S. marriage rates have dropped roughly 54% since 1900, hitting historic lows. While rates peaked at 16.4 marriages per 1,000 people in 1946 (following World War II), they have steadily declined since the 1970s and remain near all-time lows. Today, more adults are delaying marriage or remaining single entirely.
1900–1929: Early Stability & The 1920 Peak Early Century: In 1900, the rate hovered around 9.3 marriages per 1,000 people.The 1920 Spike: Following World War I, the marriage rate spiked dramatically, hitting an all-time peak of 92.3 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women in 1920 (or roughly 12 marriages per 1,000 people overall).
1930s–1950s: The Great Depression & Post-WWII Boom Great Depression: Economic hardship caused marriage rates to plummet to a low of 7.9 per 1,000 people in 1932.WWII Peak: As the economy recovered and the war ended, marriages surged, hitting a record 16.4 marriages per 1,000 people in 1946.
1960s–1980s: The Golden Age of Marriage & The Start of Decline The Peak Share: 1960 marked the highest share of married American women in history, with about 65% in legal marriages. The 1970s Shift: After a brief increase peaking at 10.9 per 1,000 in 1972, a long, steady downward trend began as women entered the workforce in greater numbers and the average age for first marriage started climbing. 1990s–Present: Modern Lows & Stabilization Steady Descent: Rates fell from 9.8 per 1,000 people in the early 1990s to historically low levels under 7.0 per 1,000 by 2018.
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+marriage+rates+from+1900+to+present&sca_esv=fa453ea549eb9796&biw=1211&bih=540&sxsrf=ANbL-n5jYZwMRsSJEnbH0Gs68AnlyKfdIw%3A1779552693450&ei=tdERarKZG4fSp84P29S78A4&oq=us+marriage+rates+from+1900+&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiHHVzIG1hcnJpYWdlIHJhdGVzIGZyb20gMTkwMCAqAggAMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKsCMgUQIRifBTIFECEYnwUyBRAhGJ8FSN8wUKYEWKckcAF4AZABAJgBmwGgAecYqgEEOS4xObgBAcgBAPgBAZgCHaAC-RrCAgoQABhHGNYEGLADwgIXEC4Y3AYYuAYY2gYY2AIYyAMYsAPYAQHCAgoQABiABBiKBRhDwgILEAAYgAQYigUYkQLCAgoQLhiABBiKBRhDwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAg4QLhiABBixAxjHARjRA8ICFhAuGIAEGIoFGEMYsQMYgwEYxwEY0QPCAhEQLhiABBixAxiDARjHARjRA8ICEBAuGEMYgwEYsQMYgAQYigXCAgUQABiABMICCBAuGIAEGLEDwgINEAAYgAQYigUYQxixA8ICBBAAGAPCAgsQABiABBiKBRiGA8ICBRAAGO8FwgIIEAAYiQUYogTCAgYQABgWGB7CAggQABiABBiiBJgDAIgGAZAGC7oGBAgBGBmSBwQ3LjIyoAfprwGyBwQ2LjIyuAfxGsIHCTAuMy4xMi4xNMgHzwGACAE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
So men were opting out and the marriage rate dropped 50%, but for no reason you can point out yet that implicates women.
So you want to try to draw a baseline starting with the single highest year ever recorded. Rather disingenuous of you wouldn't you say? All the data shows marriage rates and the percentage of the population remained steadily high until the 1970s. I don't know how many times you need to read that but you seem determined to deny it.
My stance is the author said it STARTED in the 1950s - not that marriage terms or marriage rates had declined significantly in the 1950s. The significant declines in the marriage rates did not occur until the 1970s when they really started declining. Several sources have said that.
First, it’s not just women responsible. Men are responsible as well for letting it happen.
Second, regardless of your opinion of my position, the reality is that having children at the end of the fertility life is going to result in no children in the long-term, or much reduced.
No children means society dies and is replaced by another society, who respects the life cycle in fertility in women.
In Western society, that means Islam. Christianity gave way is being replaced by Islam. Islam will not brook women’s rights. So, the desire for women to not respect their life cycles is going to result in an Islamic world.
“ Why?”
Because they got what they want.
“ Says who?”
Millions of men. Been there. Done that. Got the t shirt.
“ You have a source for that?”
Yep. Just check the interwebs for the hordes of woman proudly proclaiming they no longer **** their husbands. I’m pretty sure you’re one of them.
Assuming, of course, you have a husband. Although it wouldn’t surprise me to learn you don’t.
L
These are the beginnings that blossomed in the 70s and have overtaken the culture.
No, actually, if the numbers show that the author is wrong and men did not start opting out until the 1970s, I can accept that. I mean, I do have people on here telling me that it did indeed start out in the 1950s because women started entering the workforce in greater numbers during and after WWII, but in the end it doesn't matter if it started in the 50s or 70s if everyone agrees that the root cause is the same: women working.
Honestly? That's all I wanted. For someone on FR to admit that.
In Western society, that means Islam. Christianity gave way is being replaced by Islam. Islam will not brook women’s rights. So, the desire for women to not respect their life cycles is going to result in an Islamic world.
Actually, the same thing is happening in a lot of the Islamic world. Turkey, Iran, India, Oman, Tunisia, UAE... all recording record drops in fertility. Not fast enough, though, I have to say.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.