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

Oh, for goodnesses sake!

What have we actually got from feminism that we don't want? The right to legally be an adult? The right to bodily autonomy?

If you're not happy look at capitalism and culture.

Let’s take the difference between my nan and I.

my nan was born in 1935. She went to school, got married and worked part time. She has a family, and her money was her own. My granddad worked and that income was enough to sustain the family. They were mortgage free by the age of 45. They retired to the coast at age 50, and opened a restaurant (my nan’s lifelong dream!), raising their children by the seaside and making the most of their twilight years. She died at 85, surrounded by family who adored her.

im 26, by which age she had a property in joint names and two children, and had been married for 8 years. I cannot even afford to make rent. I’m working 9-5, 5 days a week, for fuck all. What hope do I have? Maybe I’ll find a guy and manage to buy a house. Maybe I won’t.

I completely agree, I don’t think such a long maternity leave has done women any favours.

Yes, hear hear.

The feminists of the past assumed that the generations of women coming after them would keep on fighting as hard as they did.

I am the mother of a millennial, my daughter is 31.

My personal thoughts haven’t necessarily been structured by feminism, it’s always been there of course, but over and above feminism, I am a human, female.

I am 58 and brought my daughter up as a single parent, working full time, juggled all of the things today’s women have to, as did women generations before me.

Saying that women that preceded me, did not have to go out to work, but that doesn’t mean their lives were better.

I worked long hours in the NHS, doing shifts and weekends. I used a combination of family and nursery for child care and my daughter walked up the road at 10 to go to school on her own because I started work at 8 and school at 9. My mum picked her up and I got back at 6/7. I used to say to her “ what I am doing is wrong”.
Right, that I was independent and supporting us but wrong in the number of hours I spent away from her. There was no other choice. We
got through. She is now a mother of two,
married and launching her own business.

Child care is abysmal now compared to what was available when my daughter was at nursery. There were local authority nurseries then, and they were about £80 per week. Affordable! Child care has now become privatised, so wrong!

Life evolves and changes, we can’t blame it on a lie sold by a feminist ideology. All ideologies are lies if we consider them to be truths rather than tools.

No way in a million years would I go back to the old days. I can afford to pay all of our bills myself. This means I can walk out any time I like. When men know this they behave a lot better. I have so much more freedom than my female ancestors.

All I am thinking right now, if the op is speaking for millennials - females are FUCKED

Every generation has taken the fight on, forever fighting our corner, yet now we have milenials thinking they have been sold a lie - so what are they bringing to the generation behind them ?

As a working class 18 year old I was working on a farm and attending the local agricultural college two days a week where I was one of two girls in a class of about 20 farmer's lads.

After a few years I went to horticultural college where there were slightly more girls, but not many. I then worked in a garden where I was the only woman with about 10 blokes.

It's your limitation not feminism that will be holding back your daughter's earning power.

I agree that women have it hard in the sense that they are expected to financially contribute and do most of the labour at home. Hard disagree that women in the 50-70s had it easier. Domestic violence was rife and was swept under the carpet, including sexual abuse, consent didn't matter in marriage in those days. Women had a much harder time escaping domestic abuse, the support wasn't there and they didnt have the means financially. Not all men spent all their money on their family, many spent it down at the pub.
I do get anoyed about the expectations on women to work like they have no children and parent like they have no job, but I'd take that over the days where Domestic violence and marital rape were acceptable.

When feminism first started getting going properly in the nineteenth century the following things were legal:

men could beat their wives
men could lock their wives up in a room in their house for any or no reason and not feed her
men literally owned their wives - their wife was not considered a legal person
men could have forcible sex with their wife as and when they pleased and her consent was not required.

quite a lot of early feminism wasn’t about working it was about stopping women being physically sexually and mentally abused.

nobody (except maybe Andrew Tate) wants to go back to that.

I think we’re in the same side here. Women are still expected to do more at home and that work is not valued in the same way as traditional “men’s work”. We don’t yet have equality.

What utter bullshit.

I'm not going to read all the replies because I'll start giving you loads of fact-checks, personal anecdotes and references. I've been doing this for a long time already, I want a break.

Check it for yourselves. While you're doing that, you might just possibly give a moment's thought to why my generation - the one that won the rights your generation took so much for granted that you tried to give them away - sometimes calls you 'whining' millennials.

🟢⚪🟣💥

I mean sold a lie in that in the words of a pp it’s still a man’s world, they’ve just upped our productivity. I think it’s exhausting having to birth children, be a homemaker and have a career. I almost crave having less hats to wear!!

You're making a different point to the original one I was responding to - but, studies have shown regardless of income women end up doing more domestic work than men.

Could not agree more. Open a book, OP, you can read many, many superb women writers who have written fiction and non-fiction about how it was even twenty years ago let alone forty and understand that things were much worse for women then than they are now. Feminism doesn't get everything right but we owe it so much.

As a working class 18 year old, did you have the self assurance and wherewithal to join a class of naughty boys and study bricklaying at the local college? Not sure I’d send my daughter to be honest.

I don’t get this at all. Feminism wasn’t just done and looking back was maybe not so great.

Feminism means equality and choice - the world is still a bit sexist - just a bit less so. If it’s not enough, make it better - marry someone who will share the load, campaign for better parental leave - feminism isn’t done, not everyone is equal and not everyone has choice.

I was a housewife - I didn’t realise how lonely and unhappy I was. How much my husband had no value or respect for what I did - and also how happy he would have been to keep me in that position. Thanks to feminism, I now have a career, some financial stability of my own and I’m getting a divorce.

The thought of being a housewife, in times without feminism - is horrifying - the beatings, the fact that marital rape wasn’t even a thing - it was impossible to rape your wife, she had to consent

How the fuck can any of you think that feminism is bad - do you fancy trotting off to Afghanistan?

Being 'sold a lie' by feminism is a funny way to phrase it. Do those who say this really think the women of generations past who fought for our rights set out to trick you, conspiring with the patriarchy to make your lives even worse?
Or do you allow for the possibility that your challenges exist despite and not because of feminism? That for all the progress women have made for women, a two pronged attack from capitalism and sexism is a pretty powerful force. If you're doing it all, then blame the boss who exploits you at work and the man who exploits you at home. Not the women who try to make it better.

Is it not all cost of living related? Plus the cost of all the things we now consider essential that would have been luxury? Now we replace instead of fix (yes this is due to the horrific disposableness of everything), people do foreign holidays and have a new definition for staycations (ie they cost tons more money!)- we pay for tv, phone, internet, we have houses with more insulation and double and triple glazing etc. I remember my mum just putting a duvet up for more insulation for the windows!!

This!

I’d imagine in the difference between the hourly rates of pay between say an electrician and a childcare professional. Both will have done a couple of years in college to qualify. If one of the couple earns £22 per hour and the other £13, it’s a no brainer who is going to be doing the majority of childcare.

This lacks nuance. Many women want the same as you, but it doesn’t always end up that way for a myriad of reasons. Yes, in some cases, poor partners are selected I feel, but sometimes men change or both the man and woman fall into bad patterns. I’m happy for you that you seem to have a good split, but I feel for those who don’t for whatever reason.

@arcticpandas of course no-one forced me to have kids.

I chose to have kids, just like I chose to have a career also and be financially independent. No argument there. I don’t understand what you mean.

Do you think men who go back to work after 2 weeks of paternity leave are met with questions about why they chose to have kids if they are just going to going back to work?

Of course not.

Thank god for equality laws, the protections for pumping milk, for shared parental leave, and the government support for childcare.

I agree it’s stil a man’s world they just upped our productivity.

Tbh I’m a millennial and I can’t help but think that’s a load of self-indulgent bullshit. My grandmothers and at least one of my great-grandmothers (I don’t know about the others) worked. Working class women working is nothing new, maybe it has changed more for the middle classes, I don’t know. But my grandmothers and great grandmothers didn’t have the same control over how many children they were going to have, didn’t get the opportunity to go to university and get a decent paying job, most likely didn’t feel divorce was an option to them, couldn’t be raped by their husband because their consent didn’t legally matter… I could go on.

Yes it would be much better if life wasn’t so expensive that most families need to both work full time. But that’s not feminism’s fault, it’s inequality, neoliberalism and a failure in the housing market. Yes it’s ridiculous that in this day and age women are still shouldering a disproportionate amount of the unpaid labour in what should be equal partnerships. This is a major theme in feminist writing. If it changes, it’ll be thanks to feminists, not jaded millennials who bemoan the fact their men arent’t able to earn enough to keep them. The answer is to keep pushing for equality, not to throw our hands up and decide we’d all be better off as tradwives.