@shauna highly recommend Melinda Cooper's Family Values. demonstrates how the dismantling of social welfare went hand in hand with the retrenchment of social conservatism around the family, including interactions with race and sexuality, and how this was rooted in the racial and gendered limitations of the New Deal/Fordist family wage model https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408345/family-values

@shauna Are you across the carework and social reproduction literature? I assume you know Silvia Federici.

@shauna Might be some things in here that will provide leads: https://manzokuan.blogspot.com/p/information-for-future-envirohealers.html

@shauna
A little tangential maybe, but you could read Stephanie Coontz's book on the history of marriage. One of the things she demonstrates is that the modern western understanding of marriage (romantic, nuclear) is very unusual, and also extremely recent. The traditional family, beloved of conservatives, never existed. And also by going through the historical and anthropological evidence, she shows how varied the various forms of human kinship are (and how all of them are deeply problematic in some sense - modern forms included).

Incidentally, 2 income families have been the norm for most of human history in some shape or form (or at least both parents working).

@shauna the overwhelming nature of work above else is built into the bedrock of the country by the puritans who established the Massachusetts bay colony.

Rooted in Calvinism, Puritans believed in the "calling"—the idea that God placed individuals on Earth to work hard, serve the community, and glorify Him. Idleness was viewed as a direct rejection of God's will. The phrase “idle hands are the devil's workshop“ was a saying they followed, believing staying busy was a spiritual defense mechanism.

Much of this modern capitalist system has been birthed with this early puritanical belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

@shauna maybe Anne Helen Petersen, Cass Sunstein?

https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2019/its-not-just-you/

https://harihareswara.net/posts/2019/expectations-toil-and-sludge-discovery-and-a-lot-of-handwaving/

@shauna You might want to follow @steviesyerda, who's written a lot of good articles recently. Henry Fudge on Substack also wrote an excellent article in May, which I only read yesterday. He's good at talking about the extreme ends of the economic spectrum, but he doesn't mention the vast majority of us who, if we are lucky, are just scraping by.

https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-symptom

@shauna

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Private_Property_and_the_State

@shauna

Have you read Juliet Schor? I've read and enjoyed her earlier stuff, like The Overspent American, but she also has some newer work, like After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back.