Feminism sold a lie - Women, today, are worse off than ever

I'm out of patience with women like the OP, where I can't work out if she's being goady or dim or both. People will blame anything and everything before they name neoliberal capitalism as the reason they find life hard. But no, the fact that you can't afford a house must be because of those pesky feminists campaigning for your freedom for the past century. Give me strength.

The worst part is they still do a larger share of the domestic work and childcare.

For the millionth time YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS. As a woman in 2025 you can choose not to have children; you can select a husband who will share the domestic load; you can go out to work and pay for someone else to do it. The reason you have those choices is because of feminism.

Shocking examples @GarlicHound ! I think too many people have a rose-tinted view of the past and don't get me started on the so-called 'tradwives' influencers who are basically monetising this misguided nostalgia through a weird cosplay fetish.

there were absolutely women who couldn't/didn't work and were therefore stuck in abusive marriages

Employers routinely asked married women if their husbands agreed to their working. It was acceptable for them to confirm this with the husband.

All in all, society exerted tremendous pressure on women to get married, stay married and know their place. Divorced women were shamed for not being "able to keep a husband". They were socially shunned and sometimes, as with my neighbour, assaulted just for bringing "shame" on the community by being a mother without a man.

My mum had 5 kids and a domineering, violent husband who worked rotating shifts. She had no time to herself. He wouldn't let her learn to drive. She'd had to give up teaching when she got pregnant the first time. When she looked into returning after the youngest started school, Dad went ballistic as he'd be shamed for "not being able to support his family". There were no refuges, no support for mothers who left their husbands.

A woman I know left her husband after he put her in intensive care. She had one child. She got a council house due to her documented injuries. When she walked her child to and from the bus stop for school, people threw stones at her.

When I started working full time, it was normal to be interrogated about my personal life and plans to have children. If they thought you were a pregnancy risk, you wouldn't get the job.

If you queried why a male colleague got a promotion when you, as well or better qualified, hadn't been invited to apply, you were told he had a family to support so deserved more money.

The sexual harassment was open and off the scale, as others have described.

No, I don't think it was better for women!

I'm not saying this was all women. I'm saying there were absolutely women who couldn't/didn't work and were therefore stuck in abusive marriages without the means to leave. I know because my great aunt was one of those women.
And exactly as you say, if they left they could have lost custody of their kids.
Things might still be hard now but we have so many more freedoms and choices today than women had in days gone by.

But it’s not true that women weren’t working and running the house and doing the childcare in the past. And they couldn’t leave without possibly losing custody of their kids!

I get the sentiment that now we have to work while also running a home and doing childcare, but in terms of we have it less good now, tell that to the women who couldn't work and were stuck in abusive marriages because they didn't have their own means to leave.

Did you have to put 50p in it when you wanted to watch it? Those were different days!!

I do think a lot of younger people don't really get what life was like for most in those days.

If they are SAHP after m/paternity leave then they are a SAHP.
I dont think there is a time limit on it (edit to add) until they stop being a SAHP by going back to work.

I am a millennial sometimes depending on the cut off and I think what you actually want is to be wealthy enough you don’t have to work. Which with feminism it is easier to do without a man as you can own your own money, investments and properties and have a well paying career.

I cannot believe my contemporaries fancy going back to the days when women weren’t allowed to do anything because they think it would be less stressful. Even a gilded cage is still a cage and you’re far more likely to have been scrubbing toilets for pence than entertaining dowager ladies in the drawing room if you think about the past.

Honestly look around at the men you know - would you really want to be 100% reliant on their largesse to survive and for your children’s survival?

And white good (fridges etc) and TVs were so much more expensive too, we had a tv from Radio Rentals in our first flat

Its not unhelpful. If people believe it is feminism that has caused the hardships of today, we will see our rights rolled back to make things better in a way that didnt exist if they think women were not working at all and everyone had a mortgage on one salary.

I think this idea of choice is misleading too

its not that you can choose to do whatever you want but that you have the ability to make your own decisions

so men have ‘choice?’ - not most of them but they’ve always had the ability to make certain decisions. And when a woman talks about working or sahm it’s implicit that the man will just go along with what she chooses

Yeah, but I wanted to comment about how unhelpful that is to do.

My Grandma had three children from the age of 19. She barely worked but had a good lifestyle and lived very comfortably in retirement.

My Mum raised two children from the age of 25 and worked part-time for the rest of working life in what would be considered a low skilled minimum wage job. She had a comfortable life and is well off in retirement thanks to my Dad’s pension.

I went to uni and have worked full time most of my life in professional jobs. Mid 50s now with no children. We have a much smaller house than my parents and grandparents. I think life would have been pretty difficult with kids and I definitely would have needed to work full time. I’m not sure my retirement will be as rosy as my Mum or Grandma’s.

In my case, I’m worse off.

But this thread is about comparing now to the past - literally.

OP is saying life is worse now because of feminism

Next I expect to hear that life is harder for women in Britain than in Afghanistan.

I don't think so, it's been replaced in the world of work by CAD.

Back in the day, my grandmother was actually the main breadwinner for her family, doing a job which she had initially only managed to secure by persuading her father to apply for it in his name but on her behalf. So my great-grandfather was officially the postholder but he never went near the workplace, my grandmother did all of the work and kept all of the money. That is to say, she handed all of the money over to my grandfather, because she wasn't permitted to have her own bank account. He worked too, but didn't bring in as much money.

While managing her job, my grandmother was also responsible for raising 4 kids, caring for her disabled mother and doing all of the housework without much help at all, except during the war years, when she benefitted greatly from hosting an older teenage evacuee who provided some much-needed assistance. There was no formal childcare available to her. The house had an outdoor toilet and no running water. Food was rationed for many years. Her DH occasionally hit her, and this was widely considered to be normal male behaviour at the time.

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the suggestion that life is harder for modern women.

@Ubertomusic He does have a disability and his work have been great at making reasonable adjustments for him. If he was unable to work due to this (and there may come a time that this is so) he would then of course qualify for certain benefits.
But it is definitely reassuring for him that I also work hard to pay a big chunk of the rent and bills so that it is not all just on him, especially during his "bad" periods.

Agreed, I suppose it just makes me feel weary that it hasn't changed fundamentally. We seem to be utterly brainwashed still, yet we live and die for human contact and often because of it.

Forgive me, I am suffering an acute attack of the morbs brought on by reflection of relationships I have had. My ex husband was definitely a war situation, masked by his manipulation. My late DP was the love of my life and as close to a feminist in male form I've yet encountered, but even then he'd sometimes revert to Northern Victorian Dad mode, and we had some brutal arguments. Not many, to be fair, but the same old tropes could come out. Usually it was down to external pressures that definitely highlighted sex based inequalities such as caring for his Mother when she developed dementia, which of course fell largely to me.

It's just so very sad that the struggle continues.....

How do you feel feminism and economics intersect? Do you feel feminism has exacerbated these economic issues? And do you feel they would be less impactful in a world where feminism didn't exist?

It doesn't matter. The point stands either way that it is possible to raise a family without two salaries or marrying a man in the top 1% of earners however you want to define sahm. It may not be easy, or offer a lifestyle you are happy with, but it's possible as I've seen it done.

I feel we are comparing apples to oranges on this thread. I don’t think comparing women today to women in the 1950s/60s/70s etc is at all helpful. There’s such a thing as generational cohort differences. The struggles of women in the past were unique to that time, as are the struggles of women today. AI replacing a lot of jobs is a threat of today as an example.

This happened to me. I did technical drawing as
a CSE but was not allowed to do it at O level. I wanted to be an architect also!

Is technical drawing even on the curriculum now?