One in four Americans believe a woman's place is in the home

[Knife]

Sorry, Knife - while you are technically correct that health care is higher up the Maslow Pyramid, it is NOT a social need.
Indeed, the Maslow pyramid lists "health" on the second step of the pyramid (safety).
There is also no step on the pyramid labeled "social", rather you have various social needs on every step but the first and last one.

Food, water and shelter are clearly more important than health care, for the simple reason that they are permanent, immediate needs.
However, health care is still essential and a very fundamental need.

My point wasn't to remove Health care from any sort of need/greed list; rather, to say it is pointless to say that Health care is a Need if people don't have food and shelter. People only start worrying about higher needs when they have a reasonable expectation of lower ones being met regularly.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I'm renting a room not an entire apartment for myself.

So what you're saying is this was a lie:

Before we continue anything, I just want to inform of before any assumptions. I live on my own, have no heatlh insurance live in NYC on 550-650 a month, so I'm not exactly new to frugality.

Renting a room is not living on your own. I live in a communal situation in a college town with five people in an apartment. I have a total of one room to myself, I guess I should consider that 'living on my own'.

[Alphawolf55]

I don't talk to them, I don't know their names, and if they all move out I don't have to leave.

Also yeah if you're totally self-sufficient, you live on your own.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Okay then, so what you're saying is that you're an idiot who won't accept basic facts. In that case someone who can't comprehend that a communal shared-rent situation is not living alone, and point-black refuses to accept that when it's pointed out to them is someone who cannot be debated with in any productive manner.

[Alphawolf55]

Living ON your own and living alone are not the same fucking things, most people would consider that if you you're not accepting money from your parents you live on your own. Hundreds of books exist on how when you live on your own, want to know one of the most common subjects are? Finding roommates and how to deal with them.

And also whats your fucking point? You accused me of lying for saying I survive on 650 a month, you then say it doesn't count because other people live with me, I point out that our rent is completely seperate that if I don't pay my rent it has no effect on them.

[Simon_Jester]

There's still a catch. Are you only paying the utilities for your own room? That shared apartment presumably has its own bathroom; I imagine it might well have its own kitchen, too. There are costs to maintaining the whole apartment that your landlord needs to have taken care of, independent of whether any one room is being rented.

If all the other tenants left, whoever is charging you rent would probably increase it to cover for that. As it stands, the rent is divided among several people, so the utilities and such are likewise divided. Depending on how you guys handle stuff like food, those expenses may be divided more efficiently too: five people can share grocery money, buy big packages wholesale, and eat them before they spoil. One person can't do that, not as easily.

So yes, your living expenses might well go up quite a bit if you were truly living alone. Though I, for one, would not say you weren't living on your own; to me that would depend on details about your situation that I don't know.

[Alphawolf55]

Actually there was a period of time for about 3-4 months in which there was no one else renting a room and so I had the entire place to myself, during that point my rent never increased.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I certainly hate the proscription of the woman's life and familial role so tightly and primitively within what seem to be archaic, patriarchial, probably Judeo-Christian authoritarian principles. However, on the other hand, I sometimes think there has been a liberal-progressive excitement toward the great employment of women in the last 30-40 years. It is what I think is actually a net decline in the quality of life and freedom of choice for women: whereas before the theoretical choice between keeping a home and maintain a career in various balances was left to preference, socio-economic regression has mandated that women not only split the traditional man's role as breadwinner with him, but also predominantly have to maintain a household. Especially among the working-to-middle-middle class, it has simply be required for survival and to care for a family. The housewife is, frequently, yet another luxury of the upper middle to wealthy classes.

Poor women have ALWAYS worked while raising a family - the difference is that in the past this was acknowledged as less than ideal for the children, and that being able to have one spouse stay at home, even if that was not always done, was a far preferable state than being forced to have both spouses work like dogs just to scrape by.

I know, one of the greatest (and most legitimate) criticisms of second-wave feminism was it was a kind of storeowners' wives' issue; a luxury of psychological and cultural liberation which skipped over the great mass of women in the working classes who had been working and sharing mens' working class issues since the Lowell Mill Girls of the 1840s (who, bravely and lucidly as women at that time disenfranchised entirely due to their sex, posited independently of European socialism the self-evident maxim: "Those who work the mills ought to own them"). But since the Carter-Reagan declaration of class war on the middle-to-working class, this has become much more the province of the middle and middle middle classes. The conditions of dependency and economic coercion previously particular to the working class creeps upward into the middle and even upper middle classes.

[paladin]

So approximately 25% of the U.S. population is backwards and conservative? Never would have expected that.

So, why does conservative equal backwards?

[Patrick Degan]

So approximately 25% of the U.S. population is backwards and conservative? Never would have expected that.

So, why does conservative equal backwards?

Their programme is based entirely upon fear of the future and of change and promulgates as justification a vision of a golden past age which was ruined by liberals and progressives and which has to be recovered. That spells "backwards". For reference, look to that great conservative experiment known as the Confederate States of America as example.