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

I think you are living in a bit of a bubble.

22% of UK households don’t have a car at all
44% are one car households.

So 2/3 of the population manage without a car each.

Close to half the population live in flats or terrace houses, which are generally cheaper options than a 3 bed semi.

I agree that for women marrying men working in some professions they would have been better off financially, as a family, if wages for those professions had remained higher relative to average. That’s not the same thing at all as women generally being worse off. We have a lot more choice now than we did 50 years ago (& a lot more choice then than prior generations). Things are far from perfect but the idea women generally didn’t work and lived lovely, comfortable lives that were easier isn’t a realistic one. It will be true for some women but for many more they had a much harder time in past generations.

There are still places in the UK where you can buy a house (with a mortgage) on an average single salary and support a family. There are a lot less of those places now than there were 20 years ago but they exist.
As an example this is a 3 bed terrance on sale near my parents in a nice enough area near a town centre for £90k.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/167896361

But you are comparing apples and oranges. People of the past didn’t have two cars and 3 bed houses and holidays. They had lives where all they did was work and take care of kids (and man down the pub). And most family of past generations all helped raise kids together as a larger family or community.

feminism isn’t just about being a SAHM and being comfortable, it’s about choice.

i choose to work because i love contributing and it gives me a sense of financial freedom and ‘power’. I even opt to go to the office everyday because i want to. And because we want a 4 bed house, two cars and a couple of holidays a year, nice things and kids with lots of extra curricular activities (this is what we choose are our priorities so we both work to earn enough to fulfil this).

i have 3 DC. They are happy well rounded and I hope they find careers that they enjoy too.

women have so much more these days and I would never want to go back to being tied to a man for life, when being assaulted (ok not all but frequent power over women was normalised) and when sex in a marriage was expected and taken by men and women had little power.

where we are able to co habit or be single women and not sneered at or found immoral.

where we can get mortgages and vote and have similar (not all there is still far to go) as men.

I am a millennial and feel so lucky to be in a society where women are listened too and respected more (still not there), where we are standing beside each other and objecting to being objects and to bad sex and to doing all the household chores.

if you are with men that don’t wash up, cook, clean, school pickups etc etc then you are with the wrong man.

im currently on my way to the office whilst my husband is vacuuming the upstairs and getting ready to take the kids to their friends for the day.

we split or ‘chores’ equally in the home. He is better at ironing and cooking and putting the bins out and DIY, I am better at cleaning and organising the kids schedules (and organising general life admin).

he works from home and I will come home tonight to a chilli that he is making on his lunch break in the slow cooker (his choice to do so).

i can’t imagine a world where I am as a woman working full time and doing full time child duties and cooking, cleaning etc.

your view is mostly about crap men and the cost of living increasing not about feminism ‘not working’.

I think the question you should really be asking OP is are you prepared to take a massive gamble that the man you became completely dependent upon would treat you well and fairly? That he'd allow you to input into decisions, share his money with you, only make reasonable demands, and never tire of you, cheat on you or otherwise become intolerable to you. Because given a lot of these complaints are from women who can't get their husband's to run the hoover round or put the dinner on, the odds of finding your prince are not that great.

Thing is, if you work it gives you options. So you are far less likely to need to put up with a man who doesn't fairly share things like childcare and housework. I absolutely would.not tolerate it. I've been married twice 😀

Yeah, blame the victim, it's so incredibly feminist 😁

My parents divorced in the 1980s, he paid nothing ( 4 kids from 8 to 16)

I am glad that I live in a world where women can work and be in senior positions of responsibility like MPs, judges, CEOs, hospital consultants etc. I am sorry that you don’t like that OP.

I’m a Boomer and I worked through the child rearing years - without all modern conveniences. 🙄

And, women, working it not, did all the housework etc (generally).

I had very few rights at work and was paid less than men. I had to leave my banking job when I had my first child. I was asked, at most interviews, if I intended to have any more children - they didn’t like employing women of child bearing age.

I couldn’t get a bank loan without my husband co signing.

I couldn’t get the Pill until I was married.

With respect, OP, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got more rights and choices than I ever had. 🤷‍♀️

Read your own post! You've had to increase your working hours because of the rising costs of living. I understand that you're burnt out and I sympathise but I do not understand how you can write a post where you literally say "I have to work more than I can ideally manage because my money doesn't go as far as it did" and then leap to "because of feminism"?

And then read the posts of those of us with experience of earlier times who are telling you that even when the social ideal was that women did not work, many women had to, because of the cost of living, despite having no legal right to the money they earned.

You have that right because of feminism, because of what women fought for and risked everything for, and you want to take it back to the shop because it hasn't enabled you to have everything you want without doing any work.

My God this thread is depressing

Its your fault only that you let him get away with it, and dont do anything about it when it happens Its your fault that you put up with it.

You dont have to.

I’d love to know how you manage a middle class lifestyle as a stay-at-home mum with kids with your DH on a £45k salary alone! I can only assume that your mortgage costs are low because you have significant equity in your house, and are generally very frugal in your living expenses.

While I share your concerns about the above, this is the work of a niche, but bizarrely effective, men's rights movement, and is no way connected with feminism as i understand it.
I also don't think its true, or fair to the women who went snd suffered before us to suggest this is the first time we have been dehumanised, stripped of our dignity, disenfranchised. We have literally been chattels with no vote, no voice, no property and no rights. We have been beaten, raped and burned alive sanctioned by church and state. Due to feminism, even before we had a word for it, women have fought to progress our rights, and have improved the world for each generation.
The issues you list are a backward step but (due again to the work of feminists) the tide is turning. This is a thread by a woman blaming feminism for her life being worse than that of previous generations. If it weren't for feminism, the lives of women as a sex class would be worse in every way, and the issues you raise would have continued unchecked.
If this movement had to gain support, I'm thankful it happened now when we have more power to challenge it than in the 50s or 70s when we had so much less.

I am now in my late 50s. I had a much better life than the generation prior. I have had a good professional career and real opportunities. I have endured enormous and sometimes very aggressive sexism along the way, but trust me it is much better today than it was. In the street I grow up in many women were locked into marriages with no escape route and their only option was wife and mother. Domestic violence was rife. I would express surprise that things have not moved faster and that in 2025 we still have massive gender pay gaps and that society reinforces expectations that caring (children and parents), is a job for women. To make further progress, we need to make sure that the role of men is clearer. In Sweden for example, paternity leave is more generous, but has to be shared. So that from the time a child is born, there is a clear expectation that both parents play as far as possible an equal role in childcare. We need more of this mindset.

JFC. Feminism is the liberation of women and girls from Patriarchy. It’s the equality of the sexes. And in case you haven’t noticed there are many countries around the world where this hasn’t even been remotely achieved.

Taxation and policy on things like shared parental leave are the way forward to address the existing inequality of the emotional labour of rearing children.

I have been a lone parent for 15 years, I am a high earner and very grateful for all the rights women of history have fought for.

When I started in my male dominated industry I was like the rare animal in the zoo. Thankfully that has changed and it now reflects society.

Women in the west are more financially, politically and socially better off. Let’s not take our eye off the ball and start giving away our rights through a lack of resilience.

I don't agree with this.

I agree that women can't have it all at the same time. Everyone I know with kids outsources either childcare (by using a nursery), housework (by getting a cleaner) or work (by giving up or going part-time).

But I know multiple people whose husbands don't earn megabucks who have managed to be a sahm until their kids started school. One vicar, one youth worker, one warehouse worker. They live very frugally. Saved up before having kids. It depends what lifestyle you want.

Also, childcare is so expensive that it wasn't worth me working in the preschool years. I feel like that must be true for many people.

Well, some of my ancestor perished in concentration camps but you probably wouldn't consider it "bad". I was merely interested why your DH forced you to work by saying that the alternative would be being "owned" and dictated what to do. In reality, it wasn't necessarily so. And I don't see what you described as a feminist achievement, to me it looks like patriarchal threats, intimidation and exploitation "you better go and work 12 hours shift or else!" 🤷‍♀️

I am interested by this. So you think feminism is the reason for your life not working out as planned - it’s women’s fault for wanting equal rights?

You actually seem to want to be a SAHM, but you can’t afford to maintain the lifestyle you want on one income. You want to have a richer husband.

Or do you really not want to vote, not be able to go to university, not be able to buy a house, not be able to have a credit card in your name? Do you want your daughters to grow up in a world where men earn more than them, are better educated, have more rights, can harass and abuse them with no repercussions?

or are you just a bit stressed and tired and wish your husband did more around the house?

The point was men could afford to run a household a long time ago and now then can't. This means women have to work to work to ensure all those costs are met. This was my point, they had the choice before and it's pretty much that they don't have the choice.

What an incredibly naive and privileged perspective. Poor women have always worked outside the home, and working class families have always struggled to make ends meet.
My GM is 90. She worked (cleaning, picking fruit, shop work) whilst raising 4 kids and looking after her elderly Mother who had Dementia, all of them squahed into a 2 bed terraced house. My GF was a Miner and worked evenings in a pub but GM still had to work. They never went hungry but there was absolutely no money for luxuries. They also had none of the modern conveniences or time saving devices we have now, so she had to wash all clothes for a household of 7 by hand for example. There was also, in those days, absolutely no expectation that Father's would do any parenting or domestic tasks whatsoever. Literally none. You honestly, truly think you are "worse off" than my Grandmother was?
Her own Mother was in service by the way, and her sister worked in a factory. This idea that women being expected to work is a recent thing is utter nonsense.

Do you really hanker after the days when women were the property of their Husbands? Or had no say whatsoever in whether they wanted children, or how many, since they couldn't access contraception and abstinence may not even be an option since it was perfectly legal for a man to rape his wife?
What about the fact that a woman could not get a divorce, but her DH could cast her aside on a whim and she would have no rights whatsoever since women could not legally own property or even open a bank account, and any wealth they did have pre-marraige became their DH's as soon as they married? I suppose you also think it was much better in the days when women had no say in who they married at all, as their Fathers would choose their Husband for them? And they just had to hope and pray that the man they were ordered to marry wouldn't beat them, since that was his right to do so if he felt like it.

You need to get a grip.

Well said

What abject nonsense. Who are these ‘most men don’t earn enough to cover household costs’ - you need to broaden your horizons. Certain social demographics in the UK are heavily benefits reliant, and there is a claimant mindset. Am I surprised modern women don’t fancy having kids with this lifestyle/man in mind? No. Does it concern me? No. Likely it’s for the best not to have kids, if you and your partner can’t see a way to cover the exorbitant costs. If you are degree educated, or just someone good a building friendships outside your network, you will find better dating opportunities within these pools. Women have more choice, although we still don’t have equal pay and the gender gap (particularly in c suite roles) suggests many women are still opting out of the boardroom.

My god, have you seen what happens in other countries in the world where they haven’t had feminism and women don’t have equality? Do you really think here would be any different? Absolutely deluded if you think men in the UK wouldn’t in general treat us all like slaves if they could get away with it again.

But yeah, feminism is why you’re stressed and finding it hard to live in 2025.

This makes me sad OP as you are dead right that I don’t think women have it easy now (I’m also a millennial). But it’s not because of feminism. The fact that it is perceived as possible for a woman to work full time, do all the household work and admin and spend the amount of time with her kids that’s deemed right is exactly what feminism should be looking at, as it’s a lie. To me that’s all about no one valuing women’s work.

But for generations women never had the option of anything but drudgery - I think there was a brief period in the mid century onwards where there were options to work outside the house and look after kids and have a good standard of living - ie my Mum’s generation. However her Mum had to leave school at 14 to look after brothers and sisters, then got married post war with no inside toilet, washing clothes for her kids by hand. Then had an autistic child with zero support in terms of schools or therapy and no community support or understanding really. That isn’t better.

Also I am currently a SAHM so I really do believe it’s a stressful lie that women can do everything - but that is not feminism’s fault!

Oh fantastic, pack up everyone! We can cancel feminism, nothing bad ever happened to any of @Ubertomusic's ancestors, we're not needed anymore! No one else's lived experience or history matters, the centre of the universe has declared it so!

It’s never a waste leading your own family and community.

I doubt your grandmother ‘sat at home all day.’ Raising children, caring for grandchildren, caring for your spouse, caring for your own parents/ILs/any relative who needs practical or emotional help and contributing your time to your wider community is an incredible contribution to society. The fact that so many elderly people are sat alone with no visitors is a national disgrace.

Unfortunately, we undervalue this and are so impressed by women flying off into space or being footballers, rather than doing the essential care work which actually matters to society.

I’m also a millennial and completely agree with you op and have been saying the same as you for many years.

My friends who are also millennials are equally as burnt out and have had enough as me. 3 of us have really suffered with our mental health as we are simply trying to manage far too much.

All 3 have been forced to increase our working days from 3 to 5 days over the last couple of years too thanks to the cost of living crisis, and we were already struggling with managing everything then, but in hindsight our mental health was better than now and we had more time available for our children, Husbands and ourselves when we worked part time

2 out of the 3 of the marriages have really suffered too in this time as tempers are frayed and stress levels are high as everyone is knackered and as the houses are constant pigsties as no one has the time or inclination to clean and tidy properly so we can’t relax and enjoy our homes properly when we have any spare time.

2 nights running I have put a film on to watch with my family in the early evening during half term and have fallen asleep and started snoring very loudly apparently after around 30 minutes and have remained asleep on the sofa like this until the morning as I am simply so exhausted.

Feminism is supposed to involve choice, and I, like my friends have zero chance of choosing to not go to work, or to even do part time work anymore.