I wonder about this. I sometimes think my social skills would've been more developed had I had pre-school, daycare, etc, like most of my friends throughout school had had. How much of my social late-developing was that they had years of practice on me from the day when I started kindergarten?

> Kids need a lot of attention

I'm not sure that's the case. They demand lots of attention, sure, and it's often hard for adults to say "no" as they leverage their ever-gushing cuteness.

They do need a certain level of focused attention with adults, but overdoing it spoils them. Have friend and relative kids come over; most kids are social and occupy each other, learning social skills in the process. An adult does need to check on them every now and then to make sure they are not lighting the cat on fire again. If they seem too hyper, put them in sports, and rotate the driving with other parents. Boys especially need hard physical activity to milk their wiggles out, or they will light the cat on fire.

There are many boundary conditions and parameters that come into play, but I can envision a scenario in which children are not imprisoned, but women are still able to work.

The major cause for imprisoning toddlers and even young kids these days is the risk posed by vehicles.

My parents' generation grew up in a developing country where the villages did not have paved roads, and 90% of traffic was very slow moving ox pulled carts or motorcycles, and maybe a small portion of small cars. The grandparents' generation all had 4+ children, and women were not staying home to watch the toddlers. The toddlers were supervised by older toddlers, who were in turn supervised by older kids and they all just ran around the village all day until it was time to eat.

Outside of caring for infants, the mothers had many duties such as working in the farms, factories, cooking, and cleaning, similar to men. What they did not have is legal ownership of capital and sufficiently high income streams to go their own way if they wanted.

But none of this is applicable in modern US society.

That is why I specified what kind of freedom was achieved. There are always tradeoffs, but those can be mitigated in other ways. If the argument is that adding women to the workforce harmed the working class because it doubled the supply of labor, then we could easily have legislation that halves the number of work hours in a week before overtime rates kick in.

Perhaps for the women at the bottom of the pay scales, but an average or above average earning woman should be able to downgrade quality of life and still "cut loose".

Progress for some portion of society can be a regression for others.

There is no question that I would rather live in a world where my daughter had just as much opportunity as my son to be a doctor or start her own business or whatever she wants to do. The possible cost of this reality is that the variance of family life across society will increase, with those at the bottom experiencing a quality of life worse than they would have had if society did not offer women the freedom to pair up with similarly advantaged men and compound their benefits.

Domestic violence rates went down significantly by all estimates. Also, they in fact go up and down with female employment - when women loose work they go up, when they get it they go down.

> Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one

This is simply not true. People break up a lot. Real world people sometimes stay with bad partners for money reasons, but employed ones significantly less so. The "I can't leave because I have no job" is a thing tho.