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

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

so whose fault is it that women do most of the housework and childcare? Countless women accept the behaviour and then come on here and moan about it. They need to get much more choosey about who they settle down with instead of turning a blind eye to it when their menfolk want to go off on lads weekends, spend hours in the gym, or gaming all night to shirk their responsibility while the women have to do the adult work. You get the lowest form of behaviour you are prepared to accept.

My grandmother divorced my grandfather in the 1950s. She moved home with her parents. He was not required to support their child (my mum) at all financially. And he didn’t. Granny worked but it was socially very difficult being a divorced woman. One tiny example of the great strides made by feminism. And previous posters have given you so many more. I also think your framing that feminism is about women not working is the major flaw in your argument. It was always about women having choices. Over their bodies, their money, their employment.

I have lost count of the amounts of poster's on here that usually start 'my partner wants to me to stay home and look after the children' type posts, I wonder if their partner needs to think for them too

I can't see that needing to earn a living is some sort of huge imposition. It's much less soul-destroying than being dependent on a partner.

There are certains basics in life parents need to do ie feed, clothe, do school drop off and pick up, and then housework, book appointments etc but there are also things one parent has decided has to be done ie a child must have a massive wardrobe so their child is not judged, one parent has to hoover 7 days a week as they label themselves as ''OCD'' or their child has to take up horse riding 5 days a week because their BFF does it and they dont want their child to miss out

so how much of what both parents need to do is needed and how much is one parent deciding it has to be done?

What year is this that you're comparing current times to unfavourably?

The majority of women have always had to work. There was a period just after the second world war (when women were pushed out of employment to make way for men) when a huge number had children and stayed at home. But many did jobs anyway - just not careers. My grandmother, for instance, ran a shop for a few years, took in washing, and cleaned homes in the evening) it was a blip, and came with an inability to leave abusive husbands.

What changed wasn't that women started working when they couldn't before, what happened was women got to pursue careers that were closed tot hem before. Careers that paid more (especially once equal pay became law). And then men and women used that money to buy houses, then cars, then foreign holidays. - This is what feminism has got us, the ability to be on an equal footing when deciding what to spend the money on instead of having to beg our husbands to consider what we'd like.

The cost of living skyrocketing has made things difficult, but that's not really down to feminism. It's down to the cost of the second world war, a world in which huge populations are gaining the skills and technology to rival us in the things we used to lead the world in, the loss of billions of pounds a year in wealth we used to take from India, and a long term and ongoing failure to build enough housing to meet demand.

This is why generations have very different experiences.

If you didn't have feminism, your wouldn't be able to buy a house on one salary. There still wouldn't be enough housing. So house prices would still have rocketed above average household income. Possibly it would be worse because women would probably have had more children and the population would have grown even faster. We would still have suffered from a deluded aristocratic leadership that siphons money away from the people for the elites, probably even worse as no new ideas to get things moving. China would still have grown and undercut all our manufacturing jobs. Etc. None of this is down to feminism.

So do I. One of my female ancestors was murdered by her second husband because she dared to leave him over DV.

This, and often because they had to deal with the 'broken pay packet'. Call it feminism or just common sense but never let it be forgotten that paying family allowance to the woman dealing with the broken pay packet was resisted.

You and your co-workers seem to have a very shallow view of the world and feminism.

Let's forget about marital rape, child marriage and lack of a vote for now and think about how women were working long before they were allowed their own bank accounts.

This describes my grandparents. Sort of.

On only my grandfather's income they could have 2 children, live in a 3-bed semi, run a motor and take a yearly holiday.

Fewer mod cons, of course - a coal boiler, a small fridge with an ice box, a twin-tub washing machine, and a 3-ring cooker. That was it for technology. No phone or TV until much later, and then both were rented (the TV was black and white with a 9-inch screen).

The nice semi-detached house was rented from the company my grandfather worked for - so if he lost his job, or rocked the boat at all at work, they'd lose their house. The same applied if my grandmother rocked the boat in the local community , the company wouldn't have looked kindly on any scandal. The whole of the back garden was used to grow fruit and veg and keep hens to reduce their food bills - looking after all that, preserving the harvests and cooking were entirely down to my grandmother. As was all cleaning, other housework and house painting.

The motor was a motorbike, not a motorcar. With a sidecar for the children.

The holiday was a week camping in a barn in Suffolk, and shooting rabbits and pigeons to save on shopping. They got fish and chips as a treat on the last night.

Clothes were home made. So were rugs for the bare lino floors. By my grandmother, of course.

There were no clubs to drive the children to. They walked to school.

The reason my grandmother didn't work wasn't because she didn't want to, or because their life was so luxurious she wouldn't know what to do with the money. It was because she was a nurse. And when nurses got married they were immediately and automatically dismissed. She couldn't get an alternative job because my grandfather forbade it - it would make him look bad if he weren't the sole provider.

My grandfather was a decent husband by the standards of the time - not violent, not a drunk, not a spendthrift. He bought my grandmother flowers every Friday. But on Saturday evening he went to the pub, and she couldn't join him for a night out because women weren't allowed in.

That may be your dream life, OP, but it's not mine.

Even the existence of the term family man says it all.

what is the female equivalent - a mother?

men can have a wife and children and yet they don’t necessarily participate - there is a special term for those who value their children and wife and (even a bit)in family life - to be different than a husband and father earn the special badge of family man.

I have never heard of a family woman☺️

@MidnightMeltdown Absolutely this. As a feminist I would never rely on a man financially or expect him to provide for me.

A woman who depends on a man for money will never be his equal, and he will never see her as an equal (regardless of what he might say!).

Back in the day (which you appear to think was so idyllic!) working class women did work, but they were paid less than men for doing the same job. Usually, women had no choice but to marry, because they couldn’t earn a living on their own. Once they were married, they couldn’t leave, regardless of how shit or abusive their husband was, because they couldn’t support themselves. Given that almost half of marriages end in divorce, do you really think that it’s a good idea to go back to that?!

YABU

Indeed, I come from a family of working women who also then had to keep a home including the washing, cooking etc.

@ConservativeC2 I do think you are being unreasonable. We arent in this place because of feminism, it is because society still doesnt treat women equally.

I would argue that we need feminism more than ever.

I am not a millennial and I am concerned that younger generations of women are blaming feminists for the patriarchal society that still impacts the quality of our lives.

I really dont want to offend you but I have picked up a bit of a tradwives vibe?

Women have shown time and again that we are equal to men but it is the the patriarchal society that still exists that let’s women down.

Feminism is about women being seen as equally important to men and having the same rights, the same choices, the same freedoms and the same opportunities. It is also about men properly sharing the family load. There are plenty of households where this is happening and working well. I was born in the late 1960s. My grandmothers worked. My mum worked. My friends’ mothers worked. My dad was an involved dad and family man as were my friends’ dads.

I really despair at the ignorance of people who don’t get that feminism is about equality of women and the appalling tradwife, woman-crushing bullshit that’s being pedalled by certain posters on this site.

OP - you can make whatever decision you want for yourself (one of the joys of feminism) but respect other women’s rights to make different decisions for themselves.

My husband does an equal share of both childcare and housework - as has always been the expectation. Just as it has always been the expectation that we both work.
Non-negotiables.

But feminism has been here for nearly a century yet they still don't do that 😂

They definitely managed to sell women a very convenient lie about rights and equality 😂

I actually think the “sold a lie” rhetoric is the early stage of feminist awakening before actual feminism takes a hold.

its what happens to the majority of working, otherwise intelligent women when they move in with a standard unreconstructed bloke. Or for the “luckier”/ slightly more discerning ones at the point kids come along.

There follows about 5 years of feeling really, really cross that you are doing everything and him not that much, whilst your career nosedives.

You might flirt with idea of being a perfect SAHM and wondering why you can’t.

And then something snaps and you realise there is just too much to do in running a house, having very young children, and having two working parents. But also, crucially, that you’re held to far higher standards and are generally working much harder than your partner.

There isn’t an easy way to come back from that unless your partner decides to also go part time and become a nurturing dad who also does the shopping and loads the dishwasher.

Luckily I know a fair few men now who have absolutely embraced that role.

That is what I feel really cross about - that I missed the boat!

Had I been born 15 years later maybe I might have met a man like that.

I really hope feminism raises the bar for males’ behaviour.

I agree with all of this.

OP you're not wrong - but if men did equal housework it'd be fine as both partners work full time & both contribute equally at home.

Feminism wasn't sold a lie. It's just that the capitalist, patriarchal establishment used new ways to exploit where things were going to keep a strangle hold on all of us.

In a just world, the dawn of feminism should have meant women worked equally but men also worked less. So maybe working weeks for everyone went down to 25-30 hours so childcare could be distributed fairer.

What we have instead is that mortgages and rents are now based on 2x full time salaries instead of a single salary and stagnating wages. We should have all had so much more disposable income and time, but its just been eaten up so the 0.1% at the top can overstuff already heaving wallets and that's why there's more billionaires than ever.

Our labour has been massively stolen and we should be incredulous about it!

Look at the bigger picture.

Feminism has resulted over the last 150 or so years in huge benefits.

Married women no longer lost all rights to their property when they married.

Women got the right to vote.

Women could wear way more variety in clothing than men, pretty much still applies in everyday life.

Here, women can go out without a male supervisor, wearing what they like, faces out, drive cars, which are impossible in so many cultures, where feminism has had less effect.

Women can no longer be made to resign on marrying.

Businesses can't pay women less than men for the same job on the grounds of their sex.

Women can have bank accounts to put their wages in.

And can get themselves a mortgage without a man.

And can no longer be raped consequence-free by their husbands.

Feminism and the women who pioneered it means we live our lives on their shoulders.

Don't blame feminism for the economic climate.

Oh and people might be interested to know that the reason the term "mother's ruin" became associated with gin is that women were making money making gin at home, and the men in charge did not like this class of women having more options than begging, prostitution, sewing, washing etc. It was giving women far too much independence and they were earning too much.

So they campaigned to make people believe that women were turning into drunkards who abused their children, and took the gin making enterprise away from them.

medium.com/lucid-nightmare/ a-brief-history-of-gin-feminism-and-despair-a47155e45168 (you have to open a free account to read this but it gives good info)

None of this has anything to do with feminism.

@Bedheadbeachbum your mistake is thinking feminism only applies to females. Feminism also applies to males. In fact, that is surely the whole point??
The answer is males doing more of the child rearing and domestic drudgery, and women doing more of the self-interested socialising, career development and not-domestic-stuff.

It’s really that simple to me. And luckily also for my kids who are the next generation.