Lets lay out all of the facts we have covered so far:
Facts:
1) Overall marriage rates have declined over the last 100 years.
2) Overall divorce rates have climbed over the last 100 years.
3) Women in the west have become emancipated for at most 100 years (right to vote in US granted in 1920).
Agreed.
4) Educated women are somewhat resistant to this decline in marriage. Their marriage rates have declined less and they are less likely to get divorced.
I refuted this line of argument. There is insufficient data presented thus far to state this conclusion. This is in an ongoing phenomenon and my (well founded hypothesis is my) X Gen has tried to stall the decline, but I documented that the Millennials are going to obliterate marriage, i.e. we are ostensibly headed towards a cliff as the second wave of feminism+SJW+Marxism hits.
It is tiring to have to repeat myself because you debate disingenuously and non-objectively sometimes.
5) Educated women currently have fewer children then those with less education.
6) Participation in conservative religious groups may buffer against this decline in fertility.
Religion is another way to control the defect/defect that JAD explained is the problem. Because if you otherwise attempt to emancipate women, you get other forces in control of the women, which is a dysfunctional infanticide societal brothel.
Can these changes be tied to the emancipation of women? Yes but not for the reasons listed by the [JAD] blogger above. Modern men and women are simply not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population.
The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.
Because our larger brains have to grow outside the womb (for one reason is that women would die if the head was any larger coming through the birth canal), and thus parents have to invest 18+ years in the development of the offspring. This is why the parents must own the children, otherwise the parents lose incentive to make offspring relative to their other opportunity costs.
Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.
It is not just that they are more happy childless, but also that the State no longer permits them to own their children, so they have much higher opportunity costs than if the State would GTFO.
So what we are dealing with here is a situation where both genders including men are poorly adapted when it comes to choosing our mates in life. We have evolved with the built in expectation that our parents will arrange these things for us but this no longer happens.
Humanity is currently under extreme selective pressure. We are a population maladapted to our current environment. One of the many stressors we face is an entirely new fitness landscape when it comes to reproduction.
The time when parents made our choices for us is gone. The new status quo has only existed for at most a hundred years (realistically much less). There simply has not been time for the population to adapt to what amounts to a huge environmental shift. We can thus expect to see many individual bad outcomes as individual fail in the face of selective pressure.
The clock, however, cannot be turned back. Knowledge has progressed and society is not returning to a conformation with less degrees-of-freedom. A society that enslaves and refuses to educate half of its population is simply uncompetitive over the long run. Women are emancipated and and not returning to slavery voluntary. Given the option between freedom and slavery human nature cries out for freedom. The genie is out of the bottle.
In the long run this will be a good thing as eventually a population will arise where both men and women are free and place proper focus time and effort in choosing a suitable mate and prioritizing child rearing.
Every time those glossy-eye dreamers say, "it is different this time", they always are incorrect.
Nature does not change that fast. Sorry. Cultural can adapt fast, but genetically driven instinct can't adapt that fast, because it is hormonally and brain structure driven.
Sorry but that Stage #4 maladapted SJW, feminist, corporate-fascist, industrial age, Marxist environment will fail and
(Freeman Dyson's) cultural evolution will figure out how to keep humans aligned with our genetic evolution.
See
Stage #5 of your chart as I have edited it, for what is coming to those who believe your ideological nonsense.
Knowledge progressing has nothing to do with it. If males and parents have greater knowledge, they also have the knowledge to protect their children from influences to which the children are maladapted.
You are going to be shocked by the Stage #5 and #6. It isn't going to look anything like the USA does now where everyone goes to same school and the same strip mall.
The cults and militias will proliferate. There will even be hedonistic cults such as virtual reality gamers, etc..