Women were by the end of WW2 heavily involved in the workforce due to the wartime economy.
Again the idea of a man as the sole breadwinner was dead by 1945. It lingered into the 60's, but by the 70's it was fully buried. 2 Income families also gave rise to huge standard of living increases (and inflation).
Only became the majoritarian norm for mothers of infants in mid '80s.
I don't think dual income parents are a bad thing, that is is required is a bad thing however.
But it's a Catch-22 in the inflation game, that if you end up with a high family income, that it's going to get nibbled at, and make single income families next to impossible.
If the not-bad thing implies the bad thing, isn't it also a bad thing? Unless you've got a solution to decouple one from the other.
At any rate though, women have never been entirely outside the workforce. Whether it was as the gatherer part of hunter-gatherer, as butter churners, as tailors, as caregivers, as schoolteachers, they've always contributed to their larger community by taking on important tasks. So I don't think the notion of male sole breadwinner is particularly useful. It'd be better described as primary breadwinner.
That is a societal/parental issue - if we as an adult society set realistic bars for things, then everyone wouldn't be out trying to keep up (and their kids up) with the Jones's.
I think you are overly creative in the above - Western Values only recently allowed women to vote, and outlawed slavery...
So I think we need to agree that the definitions of freedom and dignity and who they relate to have been changing, and still are.
And yet it is the West that ended slavery, globally, and continues to fight it to this day as it is practiced mostly in non-Western countries.
I don't think it's useful to think of suffrage as an essential component of human dignity. Men only received universal suffrage 33 years earlier than women in Canada. It would be somewhat conceited to claim that Christianity provided humanity no good until we stumbled upon universal suffrage, or that women were particularly aggrieved by these three short decades. Lest we forget, only about a third of women were in favour of universal suffrage.
I think you started strong but end up jumping the shark -- Canada was always referred to as a mixed salad in terms of immigration and the lack of assimilation to a "Canadian" culture - it started with the French, when the English didn't extinguish the French Canadian culture. While down here, America has always prided itself as a Melting Pot where immigrants merge and become Americans with a slight flavor of their ancestors.
Canada and the US are particular cases, yes. Both jumped on the DEI bandwagon as a way to try and solve their respective minority problem (Blacks and Frogs). Nonetheless, the current state of affairs cannot be associated with the word "always" as you do. Here's some data:
Early immigration: fellow Europeans who carried similar cultural and social norms and practices, including the aforementioned civilizational heritage.
New immigration: globalized, not of Christian heritage, and too high to allow assimilation that would alleviate the impact of those differences.
The American West was literally built by German and English frontiersmen. Whereas the Irish stayed in the cities to try and get jobs, which caused more resentment. Same as the new-wave global immigrants, without the Irish advantage of being Europeans who would be easily assimilated.
Here in Quebec, the PQ is vehemently opposed to mass migration, except when it comes to... you guessed it, Mexicans who work the fields. History repeats itself.
I've mentioned this before but if you look at those graphs, the about-face that American youth is performing on the Israel-Palestine question is not surprising, but a predictable consequence of post-globalization immigration policy. Expect more of
this.
Point being, North American contemporary immigration policy is not the same as it "always" was, and this is a rhetorical trick performed to convince people of a degree of inevitability in the policy choices that are made today, when it isn't so.
I would stipulate that Diversity, Inclusiveness, Equality is not a bad thing, as long as it is not done at the expense of other's rights.
But it always is and should be banned in the public sector. It is simply ridiculous for a country like Canada, on track for Whites to become a minority, to have a constitutional provision that states discrimination is illegal except against White people.
I'd like to offer one point from a very small sample size of my immediate neighborhood. We have 6 homes in our little area, each sit on about 2 acres.
H1: Dual Income 2.5 kids (my eldest son lives in Calgary with his GF, and is from Training Wife, so I only counted him as .5
)
H2: Single Income 3 kids (mother was a teacher who now stays home with the children, and also takes care of Brothers kids -> H3)
H3: Dual Income 3 kids
H4: Dual Income 3 kids (Wife on maternity leave due to #3)
H5: Dual Income 5 kids (blended family 2+2 and 1 together)
H6: Dual Income 1 Child
Medium Family income is in the mid 6 figures.
So 400-600k? That tracks with the data. The kids-to-wealth graph is U-shaped.