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

With respect, if you're a millennial woman, you can't possibly know what is was like 'back then'. I'm gen X and ever thankful that my millennial DD doesn't have to deal with some of the issues women of my generation did and that I didn't have to deal with those faced by my mother and grandmother. And that thanks to feminism each generation acquires a little more protection under law from the worst of it.
Your ideas of the lives of men and women in generations past might apply to some middle class privileged women with kind husbands, but WC women have always worked and not all men are kind. Harking back with rose tinted glasses to a time when men held even more power, and the quality of women's lives lay even more firmly in their gift is naive to say the least.

I think you underestimate the importance of women having financial independence from men, because the world in which they didn’t (and suffered as a result) existed before your lifetime really (as mine).

I think the massive problem for today’s young women is that they’ve been brought up to expect equality, are expected to work full time and have parity in bringing in money to the household…

… but there has been less movement in getting men to share the domestic load. And many households seem to end up looking very uneven in terms of domestic burden once children arrive.

This means women are ‘doing it all’, a double shift of work and home - while men largely seem to think as they’re doing a bit more than their dads, things are very equal.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say every woman I know seems to be in this situation, and pretty resentful about it.

Yes, I’ve been a SAHM for 7 years. His salary covers all of our mortgage, bills, everything. We run 1 car & share it, other can walk everywhere when it’s not their day. We meal plan & cook from scratch. We live in an expensive part of the country.

Women will be fine so long as they stop having children.

Having and caring for children is unpaid labour and women need to stop all labour that is not properly compensated.

The most equal relationships are those where both partners work and there are no kids. Unsurprisingly, more women are working this out for themselves.

Women now have to work but now

There isn't the same expectation to have a family
They cab choose to have a family with someone that does an equal share. Not all women have to take on more than their share of childcare and chores
They should be able to earn as much as men

No I don't think things are perfect. But we should also expect better for ourselves. Men do see mess, men can look after babies as well as women, men do hear children crying in the night, men can multi task, men can support their partners careers after children. But so often on here there are women who post as if it's fact that the above is not the case, and if they want children they will be accepting inequality in everything else. Men need to step up,yes, but we also need to expect better

They didn’t have the choice.

i’m working class.

every woman in my family going back 4 generations has worked. They couldn’t afford housing otherwise.

if you think about the legal framework in the 1950s, a married man could legally keep all his own income and give none whatsoever to his wife. She’d literally have to go out to work to get food for her and any kids.

there’s many such stories in memoirs of the 1950s - along the lines of my dad was unemployed/drank all the wages and my mum worked cleaning jobs so we didn’t starve.

that’s not a bloody choice.

My friend did that with her husband, in Manchester and 2 daughters (10 years ago) on £32k a year.

So feminism is having it all? Choices that men don't have themselves? Why should women have an entitlement to chose to work or be a sahm whilst still expecting men to continue to work hard and see all their money go to the family?

Women usually do the lion share of the work at home because they are more likely to work fewer hours so it balances out.

Women now have many choices if they want equality. They can opt for a career and marry a man happy to be a sahf. They are men who are fantastic with children and domestic duties. Or she can work like her husband and make it clear how the duties will be shared at home before going ahead and have children. They can up and leave if the husband don't hold up to the agreement.

Women have more choices than ever. The problem is when they don't want choices but to have it all. Very few, be there women or men get the option to have it all.

This isn't new though OP. I had this conversation in the early 90s when I started work and was getting married/having babies. In fact I had to go back to work too but the difference between you and me is that I only got 5 months off work before I had to to go back. And for me there was no option of part time work.

But actually most women I knew in the 80s had to work. My mum in the 70s had to work. (My MIL had to work). I don't know where this utopia is of women staying at home while the Husband's salary alone paid for a lovely house and standard of living. This wasn't my reality growing up.

We can't have it all if you base "it all" on houses and jobs. But I'd still rather be where I am in terms of marital rape, property ownership, sex discrimination, maternity leave .

Are you a 9 yr old?!

Women have always had to work. Not doing so was only ever a minority bourgeoisie option.

at least now you work and have mat leave and have a washing machine etc etc

Yes this - my mother worked for the DSS, my grandmother worked in a shop, my great grandmother was in service.

OP obviously comes from a very wealthy background if none of the women in her family have ever had to work before!

I disagree. Partly, to be fair, because I'm child free and aside from incels and weirdo religious nuts, nobody has a problem with that these days whereas before, being child free wasn't a thing. I sometimes wonder why women are so keen to start families even when they are pretty sure their men won't be much use. Is motherhood really so fulfilling, or do they think that they must be a mother or they're not a proper person?

Were they doing all those things on one regular working class income in the past though? I don’t believe they were.

I think the issue is that while most women have now stepped up to develop careers and contribute equally to household finances, men our age haven’t yet fully accepted the commitment to taking on 50% of the dc and home duties. They will mostly have had fathers who didn’t do much in the way of babies and expected dinner on the table when they got home from the pub on a Friday etc. DH is the one who cooks for us all every night in our family but I will often get a comment from mil or one of his friends about it as if this is unusual. Hopefully it’s being bred out.

Not with 2 cars, holidays, heating, washing ,machines, air fryers, mobile phones. You're wearing rose coloured glasses, having not lived through it.

You don't know what it's like to be paid less than a man for the same job, you don't know what it's like to have to stop working when you got married, you don't know what it's like to not have control over your own money, you've been alive for ten minutes and think you know everything.

My DH does, on £45K per year. It can definitely be achieved.

Absolutely.

This ridiculous rose-tinted middle class view of history is ridiculous, non-factual and dangerous. It only serves men who don't like women having rights.

Here's a crazy idea for any women who may be of the same opinion as the OP; how about we raise our boys to actually share the load, instead of declaring women can't have equal rights because they'll still have to do all the housework?

Those women don’t even have to be with those men in the first place. Not sure what that has to do with feminism!

I think at the end there OP meant to say "It's NOT all to do with feminism, there are other factors..."

Take a look at nurseries. They’re full of babies and I am sure if given the choice a lot of parents would not be using them.

Working class women have always worked and most had to hand over their wages to their husbands. Women, until relatively recently, couldn't access contraception unless they were married, couldn't open a bank account. FFS coffee shops could refuse to serve unaccompanied women after dark up until 1980 something!

There is still a very long way to go and yes, more families are forced into two incomes now and women are still, often, paid less than men. But we're not forced to stay in abusive marriages. We can leave, it will be uncomfortable, we may be in shit accommodation but we can access benefits and a roof over our heads.

Women today are not at all worse off than ever before. We have more choices now than we've ever had.

I agree with you op. There is a growing trend of men looking for financial partners rather than just partners which is down to a lot of factors but often the ‘you wanted equality’ is thrown in your face when you question the 50/50 guys. There is a thread right now where op’s bf has her splitting coffees and lunch down the middle.

I had this conversation with my husband, having a moan before another 12 hour shift about how feminism failed women and I want it to be like the olden days where I could stay home. He gave me some bombastic side eye and said "you'd prefer it if I essentially owned you and you had absolutely no say about anything in your life?"

...and I went to work because he's right. Ok being forced into the choice of work or be skint kind of sucks, but at least I do actually have a choice, unlike my female ancestors.