Do you expect other women to agree with you when you talk about the plight of women ?

There are a lot of women who don't consider themselves feminists and therefore care little about many of these issues.

One of the school mums proudly declares herself not a feminist. She considers her husband head of the household and that it's right and proper that:
He pays for all the bills and date nights (she works PT but her money is just to treat herself).
She has zero interest in learning to drive. It's a husband's job to drive his wife around and deal with all car related stuff.

Thinks that mothers should stay home with their children until they go to school and then only work around school hours. Career women are weird and pitiable.
Wives and children should take the husband's name as the wife is the secondary adult and she should be proud that he chose her.
Husbands should not be troubled after work or at weekends with domestic duties, childcare or other mundane stuff.

(Ironically this has meant some very inconvenient disconnects. So her husband will not drive his children to parties and activities at the weekend as it's his leisure time, but as she won't learn to drive, she is constantly begging lifts ... from other mums!)

Like others have said, in my experience it usually turns into a discussion about useless DH's which just doesn't apply to me. If I don't stay quiet, I'm called ''lucky'' for having a DH that isn't useless.

Staying quiet is the better option.

Man, I mean, at the risk of betraying women, I'm quite fond of the 'mental load'. I like running things and making things nice for the people I love. I bet that would go down like a bucket of sick in your group, op.

You can't expect anyone to agree with you about anything. If you want agreement, you should expect to argue your case.

Before you started your list I thought you meant full on feminist ranting and she was maybe a bit bored/didn't see it as relevant/found it extreme. But your list is entirely reasonable. Maybe she's a trad wife type.

What a depressing response to OP’s question.

Well, there you have it, two pages of MN saying women are fine and there is no need to discuss the ‘plight’ of women, nor, God forbid, care about it or have any opinion on it. You must be boring is the only answer 🙄

Yanbu op. Women stay silent because either they don’t care (rare), don’t know or don’t have the debating skills, or they do know and are too scared to admit it.

Maybe it doesn't apply to her? Very little of your list applies to me so unless you wanted me to say things such as ''The mental load isn't all on me'', I'd probably just keep quiet too.

There are some things I just can't be arsed engaging with the whole gender thing for instance is one, if someone brings it up no matter what their view on it is in relation to mine I stay quiet. Im just fed up of it. Id presume that she was the same, can predict how the conversation is going to go and just can't be bothered. I'm a laid back, possibly verging on lazy person, I save my energy for things that excite me.

It's not an issue to disagree although .....

There you go. You have just shown it is indeed an issue to disagree. No wonder she is staying silent (and probably internally eye rolling every time you bleat on).

She doesn’t agree with you or isn’t interested but doesn’t want to argue with you.

So staying silent politely until you move on.

It's not weird if she didn't stay silent about martyrism once and learned her lesson

Same. I can't stand that weird female bonding thing where everyone's expected to slag off their husband. Often goes hand in hand with the weird female bonding thing over "naughty" disordered eating and calorie obsession.

How do you respond to the women who disagree? Maybe the one who doesn’t comment can’t be arsed with the hassle of disagreeing and being told she’s wrong.

When friends or groups of female acquaintances I have list the faults of their male partners around parenting or housework it can occasionally turn into an “all men x u z” discussion and I tend to stay silent as it helps no one to voice that my husband is a brilliant equal partner and a wonderful dad. You’d be accused of being insensitive or smug. Who needs that.

Any conversation where there is an expectation that you will agree rather than a genuine conversation would be met with silence from me.

I wouldn't automatically expect other women to be supportive of women's rights or sympathetic to women's issues. Internalised misogyny is very strong. On this site the other day there was a thread that turned into a whole bunfight about why feminists were unreasonable.

That's a different thing from your particular complaint OP, because - as a fully paid-up feminist - I don't even think I agree with you about half your points, and I certainly don't think they're the most pressing issues for feminists in 2024. You're very focused on the domestic sphere but you're mistaken if you think those are issues that affect all women.

I'm a lazy slattern who avoids chores where possible so that's one way to solve mental load and housework problems.

I would argue that WFH is extremely good for women (certainly it has been for this woman). Flexible working is certainly beneficial to parents, and for women in male-dominated industries, WFH means we're judged more on our actual output than the bro-bonding that can take place in offices.

I'm child-free so, sorry not sorry, I truly don't care about default parent stuff.

The thing is all this domestic stuff can only be fixed by the individual. If you want to do less housework than... do less housework. No one is going to step in and sort out the mental load for you. There's no point starting campaigns or setting up activist groups for middle-class women stressing over the hoovering. I've gone on demos and marches to support refugee women at the sharp end of this country's hostile environment and incarcerated in Yarl's Wood. In my career I've shaped messaging and communications to get away from toxic gender stereotypes. But if someone started complaining about the mental load to me I would just shrug.

Before having my ds in my 40s, I would have done the same. Since then I've changed my mind over taking maternity leave hurting a woman's career.

The rest,

• don't do more than half the house work, ignore it.
• mental load - hardly an issue for 1 dc
• wfa - get a different job
• being the default parent - it was what I expected
• workplaces are set up by the company for the company. not a surprise
• I've never been branded hysterical
• I've never had my health problems ignored

My ex proved useless so I dumped him, reorganised my & ds life, and got on with it. I'm happy with that. Life is much easier without a man in tow. I don't waste time analysing it. It's dealt with.

Maybe she thinks that women in patriarchal countries would give their hind teeth for a bit of mental load and housework moaning and why you keep ruining a get together by engineering plight out of niggles?

Yes because it’s the women that are privileged in a patriarchal society isn’t it 🙄

People aren't obliged to engage on topics unless they want to, including 'the plight of women'. Maybe she doesn't agree with the points raised and wants to avoid awkwardness, or possibly she simply finds the subject uninteresting or has nothing to add.

If you're inferring that she's not sufficiently sympathetic to the Sisterhood or something, what can you even do about it? Best just to stop bringing up these things, unless you enjoy talking to yourself with an audience.

She's probably thinking that's why she doesn't want kids but doesn't want to upset you

Don't get me wrong, there are things that absolutely constitute a 'plight' specific to women -- trafficking, rape and the pathetic prosecution rate, abortion rights in some countries, access to contraception, education etc, extant pay gaps, recent historical abuses like mother and baby homes and the Magdalene laundries, the whole history of sex-based inequality up to and including the erosion of the legal and biological category of 'woman'. But no, I don't think feeling responsible for housework because you married someone who doesn't 'see dirt' is a 'plight'.

Is this person your mother OP?

Some people find it difficult to discuss things they haven't experienced. Many women don't understand how mothers are treated.