Have Families Gotten Smaller Because of Feminism?

This post is a reply/rebuttal to Alena's Brar post titled "Is Anne Taintor Right?"

I can see where many people have been lead to believe that because of feminism, the size and quality of families have diminished. Many people believe that the decline of families all started with the feminist movement and our eagerness to have a career of our own.

There are however many falsehoods to these thoughts and many other reasons of why there has been a decline of the nuclear family and maybe not as big of a decline after all;

Throughout the 20th century, there were many advances taking place, such as substantially large technological and medical advancements. Furthermore wars and global conflicts were constantly under siege. Whether it was a world war, a depression or a race to space, the conflict and suffering was very prevalent. 

The decline of the nuclear family could be due to the wars. Men were always gone and the supplies and ability to care of the children was not readily available.

With the technology advances, so came the need for more education and learning. Both men and women needed to gain further education to qualify for jobs like never before. This could have very easily brought about less income and made the couple not equipt financially or time-wise for children. In addition, you could say that technology has made us more selfish and more glued to the mouse and TV, then anything else. It could be from the distractions that have increased over the last century. 

Lastly, what about the "baby boom" has no one accounted for this? This was a large expansion of our population during the 1940's to 1960's. There were plenty of people having many children and now we have many of them to thank for the many innovations and inventions that have been brought about by that generation. Therefore it has not been a steady decline of nuclear families since the feminist movement.

There are more reasons to consider why the nuclear family has declined and I would love to hear more if you have some. Simply stated, there is many more variables to the equation then feminism.