How rascally! Push women into the workforce, push women into the arms of alpha men and away from the tepid hugs of ol’ beta reliables. You give a lady an inch (or nine) of romance and she takes a mile of Harlequin entitlement.

The causality arrow is up for debate. The Straw is saying that the necessity of working women during the war years (and the unforeseen *ahem* side benefits that accrued to women), plus the rise of anonymous, atomized urbanization, precipitated the feminist devolution.

Or, the feminism propaganda blitz and government/cultural incentives to get women into the workforce en masse came first, which undermined K-selected America and germinated r-selected America. The foul source in this analysis was the fulfillment of two wishes: The wish of the elite for mo’ money and less social cohesion among the majority culture, and the subconscious wish of women for greater fulfillment of their primal (read: not careerist) desires.

(Just as salient, perhaps, the drive to get all women out of the home and into the working world could be viewed as the temper tantrum of a whinority of butt ugly women who never had a shot at domestic tranquility and therefore felt it necessary to agitate for a sea change in how working women were perceived.)

Female hypergamy was with us long before the working girl devolution, but social shaming (and social extolling) campaigns can have a significant impact in how forcefully and frequently that hypergamy is expressed.