It’s no surprise that progressives at the turn of the twentieth century supported minimum wages and restrictions on working hours and conditions. Isn’t this what it means to be a progressive? Indeed, but what is more surprising is why the progressives advocated these laws. A first clue is that many advocated labor legislation “for women and for women only.”
Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.
I always wonder, “couldn’t the people back then have foreseen the bad results of their policies?” and frequently I found out that, yes, they did understand it and what we now consider a “bad” result was the intention.
SCOTLAND’S demographic time-bomb will explode in three years, when the number of pensioners north of the Border overtakes the number of children in school, the Executive has been warned.
Seems like you could fix this by revoking the pensions.
The adult sex ratio (ASR) is a key parameter of the demography of human and other animal populations, yet the causes of variation in ASR, how individuals respond to this variation, and how their response feeds back into population dynamics remain poorly understood. A prevalent hypothesis is that ASR is regulated by intrasexual competition, which would cause more mortality or emigration in the sex of increasing frequency. Our experimental manipulation of populations of the common lizard (Lacerta vivipara) shows the opposite effect. Male mortality and emigration are not higher under male-biased ASR. Rather, an excess of adult males begets aggression toward adult females, whose survival and fecundity drop, along with their emigration rate. The ensuing prediction that adult male skew should be amplified and total population size should decline is supported by long-term data. Numerical projections show that this amplifying effect causes a major risk of population extinction. In general, such an “evolutionary trap” toward extinction threatens populations in which there is a substantial mating cost for females, and environmental changes or management practices skew the ASR toward males.
Of course, one can’t always extrapolate the behavior of humans from other vertebrates, but I do think this indicates that a shortage of women doesn’t necessarily mean improved conditions for women.