I wrote this article when I was at the University of Tasmania, for the student magazine Togatus. They had a "Women's Issue" and I was inspired to write something about a matter I am passionate about. Reading over this has reminded me that I really do want to get back into writing "proper" articles and submitting them to "proper publications", not just writing quick and often informal blog posts. I hope you enjoy this article.
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During my first year at university, a lecturer told us that if we believed in education for women we were feminists. Since we were all at university, we were all feminists.
With similar logic, some argue that if you agree with employment being open to women or you disagree with domestic violence “you must be a feminist”.
Yet you can hold all those things in common with feminists, as I do, and still have problems with calling yourself a feminist.
One of my problems with feminist thought, historically as well as in the present, is the tendency to devalue working at home in comparison to paid employment. A couple of quotes from icons of feminist thought should demonstrate this.
Betty Frieden wrote in The Feminist Mystique that housewives are mindless, thing-hungry, and not people.
“[Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps,” she said.
Gloria Steinham said in “What It Would Be Like If Women Win” (Time, August 31, 1970) that housewives were parasites.
“[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children,” she said.
I find this bias offensive. My mother, a high school teacher, did little paid work for over twenty years while she raised her four children. She pursued many interests at home. She was hardly a mindless parasite. I would be happy to copy her choices.
It is not odd that some women prefer to be at home to care for their children. Women can have young children and a career if they want to. Yet it is nonsense to say they have the same experiences.
I respect the efforts of feminists to open career paths for women. I support feminist advocacy of better child-care, flexible working hours, and improved maternity leave provisions. Removing obstacles for women who want to be in the workforce is good.
What I do not respect is valuing these women’s contributions over those of women who make another choice.
Women who do choose paid employment are still dependent. They are dependent upon their employers to pay them. If they are mothers, they depend upon child-care centres, schools, or family.
Being at home with your children is no more mindless drudgery than most other jobs. Whether you work as an office assistant, a manager, a child-care worker, a sales person, or an accountant, it quickly becomes mundane. It can be more so than being at home. It often gives less scope for pursuing your own interests.
Added to this, most employed women still do most of the care for their home and children. As the Sunday Tasmanian noted on 1 April 2005, “Being a mother, holding down a career and doing the housework can be an exhausting combination”.
So much so that experts have diagnosed a condition called Harried Woman Syndrome. Chronic stress from juggling work and family life causes it. The symptoms can lead to clinical depression or a more serious illness.
How liberating.
To be fair to feminists, they do want men to do more housework and childcare. Some men now do more as a result. Yet most women are still left with the majority of it.
The Sunday Tasmanian (8 May 2005) reported that 40 per cent of men in Spain do no housework. Attempting to change this, Spain has passed a law that men must share the housework.
Dr Carole Ferrier, director of the University of Queensland’s Centre for Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change, stated the obvious. The law probably will not work. It is impossible to police.
The idea that liberated women must be in paid employment has caused women more drudgery, not less. It is not liberating to be expected to earn the bread and butter as well as care for the kids and keep the house liveable.
Many feminists will protest that the aim of the feminist movement is to facilitate choice, not to privilege one choice over another.
If that is the case, they should disown Simone de Beauvoir and her advocacy of removing women’s choice.
“No woman should be authorised to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one,” she said in the Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.
Modern feminists do not state this so bluntly. Yet many of them also see paid employment as more worthwhile.
On October 10, the CBS news 60 minutes program reported that many successful women are leaving their jobs to take care of their children, at least for a few years.
Linda Hirshman is researching this, and it worries her. Women who could have jobs that run the world are instead choosing to opt out of the workforce for a time.
“As Mark Twain said ‘A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read,’” she said.
“They are choosing lives in which they do not use their capacity to deal with very powerful other adults in the world, which takes a lot of skill. I think there are better lives and worse lives.”
Gretchen Ritter, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies director at the University of Texas-Austin, also displays feminist bias.
Ritter wrote an article in the Austin American-Statesman (July 6, 2004) to rebut the idea that choosing to stay home with children is a valid option.
“The stay-at-home mother movement is bad for society,” she said.
Ritter argued that everyone should be expected to give their talents to the broader community.
While feminists continue to express such bias, their claims to advocate choice are not believable. Only when they protest about mothers feeling forced to work, just as they have about women feeling forced to stay home, will they truly advocate choice.
Feminist activists have claimed to speak for women, but in crucial areas they do not speak for me. Rather, as I once told a woman politician who advocated abortion availability, they often make me feel ashamed to be a woman.
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