To think woman don't have it better now?

We absolutely have it better.

But things aren’t perfect and we are still not seen as equal as we are to men.

Many women are also expected to work (which I fully support) but also still be the default parent and homemaker, which is where I think women have really got the shitty end of the stick.

I agree with previous posters

I have looked at my family tree

One of my relatives had 10+ children, some of whom died during child birth

Women have many more choices today

I definitely have a better life & more freedom than my parents & grand parents on both sides

Choice to have been university educated & Access to further education if preferred
Choice of career, with better working conditions, terms & conditions & benefits
Choice to own property & vehicles in my sole name
Private pensions
Savings in my sole name
Ability to vote
Access to travel locally & internationally
Access to information & knowledge via Internet
Access to labour saving devices
Access to contraception
Choice of religion
Choice of when to retire
There are also more freedoms associated with gender, sensuality, transgender, gay marriage than during the 1980s & 90s eg laws related to male homosexuality was 21, no gay marriage, no respect at work etc

I have travelled to lots of other countries & I am well aware that women in some other countries do not have the same freedoms that I have enjoyed & we have discussed this fact together.

I am fully independent, solvent

How many females could have said this 100 years ago ?

Two things can be true - women in the U.K. are in a much better position than for pretty much all of history* AND there can be a long way to go.

*even if there was some time in distant when women had rights and power, we’d be too busy dying of childbirth, or mourning the babies that didn’t make it, to take much notice of it.

Also I’ve been doing my family tree and all their lives were miserable, but for the women even more so. (Prison for stealing coal. Babies dying. Widowed and destitute. Divorced and destitute. Leaving school because your father has died. Illegitimate children. Girls being sent to a reform school. Asylums. And that’s just what you can see on paper).

Things are definitely better now. Take off your rose tinted glasses and step out in the real world for a bit. Rape convictions are low yes, but women can earn their own money, own their own houses, get at least 50% in a divorce settlement.

My grandmother had babies that died because it was pre NHS and she couldn't afford a doctor. She wasn't allowed to vote until the law was changed when she was in her 20s.

My mum had to leave school at 14 to earn money. She had to leave her job when she got married. She gave birth to full term stillborn children because there were no scans. She worked in menial jobs although she was intelligent because she'd never had the chance to get any qualifications.

I consider myself very fortunate as a woman today.

The whole your word against his and no one believes a woman thing is questionable if it's just on word. Our legal system says innocent until proven guilty, so if we're only going on word and no solid evidence then yes, we can't convict anyone. I can't accuse you of beating your children without proof etc imagine how crazy our law system would be if that were the case.

As for Roe V Wade all that did is let the individual states decide their own laws based on voting. You speak about the bodily autonomy of the woman but not the millions of babies aborted over the 2nd trimester in the US. What about their bodily autonomy? I can sympathise with someone's outcry for bodily autonomy when that includes killing another innocent human life. The bodily autonomy for the woman stops at sex and contraception, in the US 98% of abortions are from consensual sex with over half of them not even using contraception. I think we should take a step back on this topic and really look at the facts.

Im sure this comment will be deleted!

Sorry OP as this will sound harsh but your first post really irritated me. Yes, there are still things that need to be improved but overall we (women) live in a world that our ancestors could only dream of and that they fought for. I am talking about women living in the western world and not about the countless women in other countries who still live in the same oppressive societies of old. I think blanket statements such as “it’s not better at all” cause a lot of damage because they will irritate the ones who we need on our side to make further changes: men.

In most ways life is much better than it was when I was a child 50 years ago.

However - as a teen in the 80s I did not have to deal with the crap from social media, especially influenced by teen boys’ use of porn. That seems to be a huge problem now, and very damaging.

I was a teen under Thatcher’s government - and whatever our views were on her policies, none of us doubted that a woman could run the government. I actually think that in some respects there is more sexism around now - more pressure to look a certain way, have sex in certain ways - to please men, and I worry for young women.

But now the expectations on women seem to much.
I mean expected to work full time whilst still doing the majority of house work and childcare ( because most women do let’s be honest)
Seen so many posts on here from women who are just burnt out from constant demands on them from every day life.

I certainly feel that I have more choices available to me then my Grandmother or generations before her.

However, she was happy with a small life- she barely liked leaving her home and her family unit were everything to her. However she also had to work as her husband died and she was working class.

I am always taken aback by posts appearing saying "I want a girl' or "gutted to discover I'm having a boy".

I always think, why on earth would you want your child to be born at an immediate disadvantage in life. You should want them to be born male for their sake. I'd love to have been born Male, my life would be so so different (in a positive way).

It did get
Better but the internet is now making it worse for us.

I think your husband was saying life was better than it was for women historically and for some reason you are arguing it's harder than (for men/than it could be)? You are using a different comparison group for "better."

Do you really think rape convictions were ever high, that women felt they could report sexual assault easily in the past? Look how many famous men married teenagers and were cheered on to do so, gross.

I do actually agree that the 90s was a brief period where girls were not as sexualised, in the UK at least. Lots of female fronted bands with the women holding guitars rather than twerking. It still wasn't great for things like domestic violence and part time work.

Men are to be blamed for their behaviour, and so are women, and if a man is so useless so why on earth have multiple children with them?

Women are not all saints

This is a good point. It's an awful reality they're navigating.

LOL.

I became an adult in the 1990s and really, no.

I was still a teenager in the early 1990’s and have teenagers now.

I don’t disagree on the WFH comments and that technology has brought improvements. However, the flip side of the technology is the pornified /incel world my poor teenage daughters inhabit today, and this aspect is in my opinion much much worse.

We can choose to live without a man and still pay bills and have a bank account. Where I live, abortion is a choice we can make.

It's not perfect, of course not. But it beats relying on some dude. YABU.

I think that some aspects of life have definitely improved for the vast majority of women (although, I agree with the person who said the 1990s were best).

I think the bigger problem is that the attitude of men generally towards women generally has seriously regressed and for many women that is the issue.

Its how we've ended up with a dismantling of women's rights and shockingly low to non existent rape convictions despite more women in professional roles etc.

I'm not sure you do know what threads I'm talking about. I'm not talking about threads where women are trapped in abusive relationships & marriages. I do think we all have a responsibility to not put up with certain male behaviours though, and to bring up our daughters & sons to find them unacceptable.Thats not woman blaming. I believe in women's capacity to have some agency in this debate.

I also think things are better now. Women have much more flexibility than even the 90s. Better maternity pay, better protection at many work places for parents.
I actually think we felt more hopeful in the past though despite it not being better then. Nowadays people are quite doom and gloom.

Women really do have it better (in the west) but of course there's still a long way to go.
With regards to rape cases - it's not about "Who would believe a woman eh?". It's about having enough proof to convict a man without any doubt. I was actually in the jury for a rape case. It's not that we didn't believe the woman - we simply couldn't convict him with the evidence we had.

The 1990s were not any better for women than presently. What makes you say that?

Things have been steadily improving since roughly the 1910s, but there have been periods of accelerated progress and periods of backlash where significant ground is lost. I would say we are in a period of extreme backlash right now, since around 2012 or so - probably the worst we've seen so far on a social level, although dismantling of the legal framework supporting equality hasn't quite kept pace with the rise of extremist misogyny on a social, cultural, and political level. But that's also a sign that significant (read: threatening to the status quo) progress was happening. It's absolutely possible for the ground lost in the last twelve years to be regained and forward progress to be resumed, but it will take a concerted effort.