There’s an uncomfortable conversation that keeps surfacing in certain corners of the internet, usually dismissed immediately by one side and embraced too enthusiastically by the other. It goes something like this: feminism dismantled a functional social arrangement, created chaos in its wake, and maybe we should consider reversing course. The dismissive response is predictable: sexist nonsense, turn back the clock, oppression. But the enthusiastic response is equally foolish: yes, let’s return women to traditional roles and restore order.Both responses miss the point entirely. The old arrangement is gone, and it’s not coming back, but not because it would be morally wrong to revive it. It’s not coming back because it’s functionally impossible, and anyone seriously proposing it as a solution hasn’t thought through what it would actually mean for the world we’ve built.The mid-twentieth century social contract was reasonably straightforward. Men worked outside the home, earned wages, and were expected to provide for their families. Women managed households, raised children, and created the social infrastructure that held communities together. This wasn’t just about individual families—it was an entire economic and social system. Schools operated on schedules that assumed a parent was home by three o’clock. Neighborhoods functioned because women were available to watch each other’s children, care for elderly relatives, and maintain social networks. Voluntary organizations, from the PTA to local charities, ran on the unpaid labor of women who had time to contribute.This system had obvious problems, particularly for women who chafed under its restrictions or found themselves trapped in bad situations with limited economic options. But it also provided things that we’ve struggled to replace: accessible childcare through informal networks, elder care within families, community cohesion, and a clear framework for how families should operate. People knew what was expected of them. The script was written.Feminism, along with economic pressures and technological changes, broke that script. Women entered the workforce en masse. Legal and social barriers fell. The two-income household became standard, then necessary. And with those changes came downstream effects that nobody fully anticipated or planned for. Childcare became a commodity you had to purchase rather than something embedded in community life. Elder care shifted to expensive facilities. The invisible work that women had done—managing social relationships, organizing communities, maintaining the fabric of daily life—either disappeared or became another item on an already overwhelming to-do list.Young people today face a landscape their grandparents wouldn’t recognize. Housing costs have exploded partly because two-income households became the norm, allowing prices to rise to match dual earning power. Career advancement often requires exactly the years when people might want to have children. The expectation is that you’ll somehow manage a demanding job, raise children, maintain a home, stay physically fit, nurture your relationship, and keep up with everything else, all without the support structures that once made family life more manageable.So yes, something broke. The old arrangement dissolved, and what replaced it is arguably worse in many ways, particularly for people trying to form families and raise children. But here’s where the traditionalist fantasy falls apart: you cannot put this back together.
The modern economy is built on women’s labor. Women make up nearly half the workforce. They’re not concentrated in easily-eliminated positions—they’re doctors, engineers, teachers, managers, scientists, and everything else. Removing women from the workforce wouldn’t free up jobs for men; it would collapse entire sectors. Who’s going to staff the hospitals when you remove female nurses and doctors? Who’s teaching the children? Who’s managing the businesses?The standard response is that we wouldn’t remove all women, just encourage them to prioritize family, make it economically feasible for families to survive on one income. But this ignores how thoroughly the two-income model is baked into everything. Housing prices, healthcare costs, education expenses—all calibrated to dual incomes. You can’t just cut household earning power in half and expect families to manage. You’d need to restructure the entire economy, and the political will for that doesn’t exist, nor would the transition be anything but catastrophic.
There’s also the problem of selection effects. The women most likely to leave the workforce voluntarily are not a random sample. They’re disproportionately those who find childcare costs higher than their earnings, or who have partners earning enough to make single-income feasible. Meanwhile, female doctors, lawyers, engineers, and executives—the ones whose work the economy particularly depends on—are the least likely to opt out. Any policy that actually succeeded in pushing women out of the workforce would have to be coercive in ways that should trouble anyone who claims to value freedom.
And then there’s the international competition angle. Other developed economies have women in the workforce. If the United States or any Western country decided to sideline half its potential workers, it would be making itself less competitive, less innovative, less capable. China isn’t sending its women home. Neither is Europe. Neither is anywhere else that matters economically. A country that tried would be handicapping itself in a global economy that doesn’t care about your preferred social arrangements.
Perhaps most importantly, the women themselves have changed. Multiple generations have now grown up expecting to work, to have careers, to be economically independent. They’ve been educated alongside men, told they can achieve anything, encouraged to be ambitious. You can’t simply tell them to disregard all that and return to a role their great-grandmothers occupied. The psychological and social infrastructure that made that arrangement function—the expectations, the social pressures, the lack of alternatives—no longer exists.
This doesn’t mean the current situation is good or sustainable. The strain on families is real. The difficulty of raising children while both parents work full-time is real. The loss of community structures is real. The challenge young people face trying to form families is real. These problems deserve serious attention and creative solutions.
But those solutions can’t involve reversing transformations that have fundamentally altered how society operates. We can’t unknow what we know, unlearn what we’ve learned, or rebuild what we’ve dismantled. We can only move forward, trying to build new arrangements that address the genuine problems created by the old system’s collapse.
That might mean rethinking work structures to better accommodate family life. It might mean finding ways to rebuild community support systems. It might mean serious economic reforms to make single-income households viable again for those who want them. It might mean acknowledging that some aspects of the old arrangement were functional even if they were also limiting.
What it can’t mean is trying to force half the population back into roles that no longer fit the world we’ve built. That ship has sailed, and anyone still standing on the dock waving it back hasn’t noticed that the harbor itself has been paved over and turned into something else entirely. The social contract broke, yes. But the pieces can’t be reassembled into their original form, and pretending otherwise just distracts from the harder work of figuring out what comes next.
