The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

Women also won World War II in a radically new way. It was an industrial war. U.S. success had to do with production. Sixty-five percent of the U.S. aircraft industry workers were women. Twenty-five percent of married women worked outside the home, and 37 percent of the total workforce during the war was composed of women. In all 350,000 women served in the armed forces. The pilots who flew the bombers from the factory to the combat airfield were women. The United States could not have defeated the Germans and Japanese without women. The Soviet Union and Britain were able to resist and destroy the Germans only because of the equipment the United States gave them. It was the Soviet army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht and made the conquest of France possible. They broke the back of the Wehrmacht only because of the equipment produced by American women. The core of all cultures is the relationship between men and women. For most of human history, the relationship was defined and constrained by biological and demographic reality. For the population to be stable, women needed to give birth to as many children as they could before they died, often in childbirth. Men labored and often had multiple wives in parallel or in sequence. Marriage was about social and personal necessity. Women were essential, and yet the key role they played in human reproduction put them at severe risk. The evolution of modern medicine and sanitation changed all this. Women lived much longer, perh...