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

I should also point out in my story about my great aunt, that her husband, my uncle Albert, was what would have been considered a 'good man'.
He had a responsible job at the pit. He tipped up his wages. He wasn't much of a drinker. He didn't chase women. His wife and children were well fed and clothed and their home was comfortable.
He just ran a 'tight ship'. Which basically meant his word was law to his children and his wife, and should they step out of line, he would punish them with his belt or his hands.
There may have been some soft disapproval of hitting my aunt, but as long as he didn't go 'too far' (kill or hospitalise her) that was generally considered between husband and wife, and a man's own business.
My point, the stories of abused women from that generation we know of are likely the tip of the iceberg. Within a context where a man's word was law and women had few rights of their own, and chastising your wife was part of keeping your house in order, the actual numbers of women living like my aunt in private can only be guessed at.

And soon these women's stories will pass out of living memory and if women like the OP perpetuate their myths overwritten by a fantasy generation of cosseted wealthy 'boomers' who hogged all the resources and didn't know how good they had it.

Yep it's disgusting, selfish and weirdly infantile. Basically women who wish they'd married richer men and this is somehow the fault of feminism. Ok.

Yes agree - in life we have to play with the hand we’re dealt.

(some of) the boomers have been fortunate economically but they had parents who were traumatised by war. Or didn’t have a parent because they had died. Rationing in their youth and some grinding poverty. My mum as a child had to try and help her gran with her grandad who had turned to drink after being in the trenches in ww1.

you cant just cherry pick the good bits from the past and ignore the bad bits. Life has never been perfect

Well it's good to blame boomers because we fought for equality and it gives some the opportunity to sneer at other women. Nasty thread.

That's so sad but I remember those times, I think people don't realise what life was like. The woman I knew who had 12 children in 12 years. Doctor repeatedly said she had to stop or she'd die. Eventually in an emergency they removed her womb. He left her, no infertile woman for him. She brought those kids up in a two bed house with the older kids sleeping in the loft, no I don't mean an attic a loft that they claimed a ladder to get into and shared beds some of them are retired now others still working. This isn't ancient history. I feel like crying and how we fought for equality and now told we harmed women. Makes me sick.

When considering the rises in house prices, a good deal of the problem is caused by 'investment' buying.

This wasn't a feature of home ownership so much in the 50s, 60s and 70s. If you were able to buy a home, you bought it to live in, not do up and sell on (unless you were a landlord).

'Carpet bagging' (buying houses to sell on) really came to the fore in the 80s, and massively manipulated the market.

It's a trend that never really left us, to the point of endless TV shows telling us how to make money out of doing up and selling on. Making houses into 'investment opportunities' as opposed to 'homes' artificially inflates the market today, just as it did in the 80s, but more sustained/long term so we aren't seeing the huge peaks and troughs, just a steady climb ever upwards.

Couple that with banks making it harder to get on the ladder, and you've got the current housing market. I'm not sure where in all that feminism sits.

Oh no!

If it weren’t for those pesky feminists I’d be Margo Ledbetter.

Well, that's a disappointment. You came into an argument with strangers on the internet. That's what this is. I'm not "coming at you" and I have responded to other posters on here as well as you. I've engaged with several things that you've said here on their merits, such as they are. I haven't been an arse to you - it's you who's cracked open the personal insults. I've just not let you off the intellectual hook that you've put yourself on. I've taken issue with what you've said because it's a serious thing for women to say that feminism is to blame for all their problems. You've not responded to any of my other comments, and your response to me saying I haven't understood what you've said on this thread is to imply that I must be thick and then to accuse me of being an arse to you. It's not that you don't want to engage, it's that over this thread it's become clear that your argument doesn't stand up and instead of just owning that you're calling me names. What a proud moment this must be for you.

With respect, you sound like a total arse. I can’t be bothered to engage with you. Plenty of others on this thread have taken a similar position to me and yet you’re coming at me. I’m not starting an argument with a stranger on the internet. Cya

Although thinking about it - let the machines go their own way and have a human subculture independent of the money making machines

@Suz145 - Inconsequential, but I remember a horrible sense of doom when 'Personnel' was renamed 'Human Resources'. It's so blatant! Personnel may already have been heading this way, but at least the name pointed towards the people staffing the business. Now we're a resource that happens to be human.

With thousands of jobs lost every month to robotics, the human 'resources' will soon be a sparse, annoying but necessary add-on to uncomplaining machinery. Probably too few to merit a department - they can outsource it to an algorithm named 'flesh units' or something 😕It must be Feminism's fault!

It's not my fault or feminism's fault that you've taken a position you can't defend.

Then don’t target me.

I remember as a child going to visit my great aunt with my nan. We walked through the back into the kitchen, no sign of her.
My nan opened the door of the 'good front room' and my aunt was there. She jumped up and said "Don't tell Albert you've caught me sitting in here or I'll feel the back of his hand"
I remember thinking my aunt looked really tiny and old. And wondering why she'd have to touch my uncle's hand if she sat in the front room.
She was dead soon after, of something that had to be whispered, so I assume a woman's cancer. She'd only have been 57. I'm close to that now, and the difference in our lives 50 years apart is beyond belief.

You are describing an upper middle class life that was rare in the 60s and 70s. Maybe some professional men could afford to support a family like that, but most could not.
The average working class or lower middle class man supported a wife at home for a short time until the children were in school, then the mother went back to work part time (which is how it is for many families today). Or she worked full time right after maternity leave and family members provided childcare.

The house was most often a council house, not owned on a mortgage.

There was one car, if they were lucky. Otherwise people used buses. Many women took the children on the bus to go shopping, and could only buy what they could carry back. Children walked to and from school from a young age.

The holiday may have been a week at a British seaside resort, but many families did not have a holiday, or not every year.

New clothes were rare.
Most houses did not have freezers.
And so on.

Overall, I am not sure if it is correct to blame feminism for the pressure on women today, or whether to blame capitalism. Maybe a deadly combination of both.
The solution is for men to step up and truly do 50/50 of all household tasks and childcare. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

I don't need you to explain anything to me, thanks, because it's not me who has spent the thread insisting that feminism is responsible for the effects of the patriarchal capitalism that it struggles against.

I think some of the problem here is that personal attitudes have changed and government policies have been updated but the corporate/capitalist world has not. If anything I see the world today as more capitalist than 40 years ago..
Whether male or female a company looks upon an employee as an asset and wants to squeeze as much productivity/profit out of the asset as possible. This is why so many companies want full time employees, quick returns from maternity leave, limited annual leave etc.

I think we would see such an improvement in quality of life for women if more companies were more open to part time roles, flexible working, enhanced maternity packages etc.

I am lucky to have a very flexible employer but when browsing vacancies I never come across a part time role in my area. I have heard so many women say that they had to find a new job after having children because their old job was too much travel/overtime/irregular shifts. There is so much that employers could offer to make life for working parents a lot easier and they don't do it because it will effect their profit margins. And the government won't write it in to law because they don't want to anger the big businesses and see them move elsewhere.

Most small family businesses that treated their employees like one of the family seem to be long absorbed in to larger corporations and those that have survived have to fight for every penny of profit. We need a world that out employee welfare above gross profit

It's making me laugh but it wasn't really funny, women, well many women had a bloody awful life.

😂I was just about to Google why was a wash house called a treehouse!

No there wasn’t. There was pressure to marry and stay married . Other than that? Cheating, abuse , wasted money , drunkenness etc.? All the woman’s fault. She had to carry the burden of being married to him AND his shame.

Gotta love autocorrect, should have been brewhouse not treehouse.

If you lived in a back to back you not only shared a toilet you also shared the "treehouse" where you did your washing. There was a rota so you knew when your day was. Started of with lighting a fire under the water tank, then hand washing, rinsing and then putting everything through the mangle to get things to as dry as possible before pegging them out. After drying and ironing there was the sewing session to replace the buttons that got broken in the mangle.

The pressure was on them to be seen to be doing the right thing. It didn't matter what they actually did, as long as nobody saw it.

What exactly do you need explaining to you then?