Reply #73: Go to the UN website and look at literacy rates for women in the third world. [View All]

[wickerwoman]

It's pretty bleak.

In traditional families, the women and girls cook, clean, garden, tend small livestock, raise babies, etc. so that the men can work and the boys can go to school. That's where the whole "bread-winner" concept comes from. In a lot of very traditional families, it's still frowned on for women to work outside the home because that's the "man's job". You can't possibly be unfamiliar with this arrangement. It's been pervasive in most human societies until the 1960s.

Both of my parents came from families of six. In my dad's family, the oldest girl basically raised the other five because her mother had mental health issues and was in and out of hospitals. They did OK education and jobwise, *but* they were not homeschooled. And most of the girls still became teachers or nurses, not engineers or CEOs.

My mother's mother *hated* kids but grew up on a farm, got no real education and had no job options besides getting married. She had six kids because she was Catholic, wasn't allowed to use birth control and "that's what you did". And she beat the everliving shit out of her kids many of whom never spoke to her again as soon as they could move out. Women need a real education and they need options- not just for their own sake but for the sake of their kids.

I've watched the show and those kids are not getting a real education. They spend most of their school time learning Bible passages and taking online classes from a quack religious school. They aren't taught about evolution. There was one episode that showed one of the middle boys, about 12 or so, writing a letter to his mother in the hospital and the writing looked like a 5 year old- *huge* letters and all wobbly like he was just learning how to hold a pencil.

Their oldest three girls are all college-aged yet none of them are in college.