Is the Child Free movement anti-feminist?

This is a really twisty twirly thread, struggling to understand the implications of the last debaten. GB sees primary oppression as economic and structural...in which women are disproportionately affected negatively. Sakura sees primary oppression as against women against which all other oppressions are subsumed.

What does it matter which came first if we agree that women are disadvantaged, and I can imagine black feminists or feminists from emerging markets disagreeing with the primary oppression being gender based not race based.

..but either way does it impact on how we would approach oppression and structural economic disadvantage?

Also, VERY aggravating is this idea of garlicbutter's that women's economic oppression is somehow not connected to sex oppression.

The feminization of poverty (i.e keeping women poor) is structural . SOciety has been specifically designed that way. Any political scientist will tell you that a capitalist and a communist society depends on the cheap and unpaid labour of women.

Capitalist societies are particularly dependant on mothers to produce children who will become consumers, contributing to the GDP. Military states are particularly dependant on mothers to produce soldiers.

Japan knows this. The Japanese government knows that if Japanese women keep refusing to have children like they are doing, then the economy will eventually collapse completely. They have decided to give mothers a lump some of CASH every 4 months, which increases with each additional child.

Racism, economic oppression, NONE Of them are comparable to sex-based oppression i.e misogyny and sexism. A white man cannot rape and IMPREGNATE a black man, the way ALL men do to women OF ALL COLOURS, CLASSES AND ETHNIC BACKGROUNDS around the world every day.

then you are taking women out of equation garlicbutter, which might as well be a men's movement. You're entitled to do so of course,

but your POV ain'T feminist, let's call it humanist

WOmen are oppressed because of their reproductive capacities; they are designated into a particular caste, in a two-tier caste system called patriarchy, at birth once it is discovered they were born a child who had an XX chromozomal pattern and not XY.

Sexism is the primary model for oppression. All other oppressions are based on this. YOu can never take sex based oppression out of the equation, even if you "add on" other oppressions.

What you are doing is watering down the fact that women are oppressed as a group based on sex, and that all other factors: economic, racial and ethnic are incidental to the primary oppression on earth: sexism.

Milly: Since I've undertaken to keep things short, this will be an incomplete depiction of 'my real-world frame'.

To me, the primary issue is excessively unequal distribution of power & wealth: on all scales from worldwide to domestic. The secondary issue is the fact that women are excessively deprived in this inequality - whichever way you cut the cards, women land at the bottom of each pile.

Thhese two issues are inextricably linked. If they weren't, feminism would not be political. But they are, and it is.

Dittany: child-free people aren't oppressed by children. In fact you could say they were quite prejudiced and bigoted against children
I do hope you meant the members of those angry forums, not "child-free people"!

Milly: Once again, I've made the error of letting a generalised statement sppear as if it were aimed at one individual ... I wasn't referring to you specifically.

TA: If there were a childfree movement that highlighted the additional marginalisation of childless women, I'd support it! I hadn't heard of such a thing until I saw the hating forums, though. I'd say anything that denigrates the majority of women (mothers) so viciously is anti-feminist.

Anybody: It's quite hard to read this board without feeling they purvey an anti-men sentiment. Men are rapists, men are violent, men deliberately destroy the planet ... these are bigoted assertions. Leaving out the word "All" doesn't make it better, any more than saying "Black men are criminals" is reasonable assertion if you didn't say "All black men".

I don't think you can say that only those who rape and kill are experiencing feelings of hate. It is quite possible to 'hate' your oppressors and I don't find it surprising that sometimes individual women express those feelings. But accusing an entire movement of being 'anti-men' is absurd. Ditto the child-free movement re feminism - absolute autonomy with regard to your fertility is a foundation stone of feminism and without it the child-free movement couldn't exist.

Go right back to the beginning: no I don't think the childfree worldview is particularly anti-feminist. Contraception and access to it has always been one of the key components of feminsim - women, given the choice, will not generally have as many children as they have childbearing years. Not many women want to spend their lives as breeding animals, having baby after baby - in case some of them die, in case some of them are girls... There are good, valid feminist arguments for choosing to be childfree, andit's even fair to say that some of the exasperated posters on childfrree discussion boards have a bit of a point.

TA, I think that the childfree movement on the internet is anti-feminist, but women without children that I actually know off the internet are almost always feminists, see their decision as feminist, and still take responsibility for children even though they have none of their own. Certainly many of the people who have had a positive impact on my children's lives have no children of their own.

DH did have a female boss who had a genuine phobia of small children, and we removed the children from the room if she was in the house. But I think that was a very specific issue and nothing to do with the childfree movement!

GB, I don't see what point you are making. I don't see how your concepts are interlinked or what your real world frame is. I also haven't made reams of academic references. I haven't mentioned anything that you can't read in a newspaper aimed at a general audience.

To bring it back on to feminism, I think one of the issues with getting people to deal with the problems of food and the environment is that there is a psychological issue with getting people to deal with insurmountable problems. When faced with something that seems very difficult to deal with, people find non-solutions because they don't want to face the problem. One of the non-solutions is to become more confrontational to out-groups.

I wonder if that can be applied to feminism. The reason many people feel troubled by feminism might be that they don't want the problems pointed out to them, because the problems are really big. It is easier to try and point out a group of women that the person isn't a member of (single mothers, women with no children, women who don't work, women who do, poor women) and make them the out-group, and hold them responsible.

I'm just referring back to the question in the title, trying to re-rail the discussion maybe. :)

Question: Is the Child Free movement anti-feminist?

My answer: I say no, but some of the people within it certainly are, and those people seem to be very good at making themslves noticed.

An analogy: Is the feminist movement anti-men? No, but some people within it are (although a much smaller minority, perhaps because it is a more evolved, established, mature movement).

I don't disagree. I'm trying to put a range of interlinked concepts into a real-world frame, without reams of academic references and/or polemic. There's always more than one way :)

GB
Um, not really sure how looking at the international problem of localised food insecurity due to inadequate food distribution networks within nation states is more tunnelled than your friend's backpacking experiences in China.

When people subsist on a single crop, it is usually a consequence of being part of a wider food distribution network, as it is hard to sustainably manage one crop in the long term. There is rarely a specific political solution that will cure all food production and management issues, or even one issue in different ecological areas. The solution has to be based on the spatial and temporal context. Sometimes the best solution is a capitalist one, and sometimes it is one of a range of other solutions. (Of interest to feminists, a woman recently won the nobel prize for Economics for pointing this out - albeit in a somewhat more complex way than I have done here. Women winning the nobel prize for Economics doesn't happen very often).

As for TA's slogan, I think 'my body, my choice' is the traditional one.

Brewerys are lovely, not vile at all! (assuming typo)

Yes, the extreme anti-whatever it is that we are not position seems to have been taken up more extremely (or more visibly/loudly) in the Child Free movement, but I still think that it's a perfectly legitimate movement in essence, and that its name is no worse than the word feminism.

That's the trouble with snappy titles. Realistic titles just don't scan nicely.

Feminism doesn't want to promote women and subjugate men and produce what ever the opposite of the patriarchy is (at least not to my understanding).

The Child Free movement probably doesn't want to gather followers and make everyone be child free.

If you go off the beaten track in China - which you can only do by getting lost, and I only know about thanks to my intrepidly travelling friends - you'll find many single-crop regions. The distribution mechanisms don't work, so the local people eat nothing but the single crop. As a result, they are fed but suffer from long-term malnutrition. That's just one example of Things Not Many People Realise and I've totally failed to stick to topic or a single line! Knocking this off now, though.

You're not wrong, Milly, but your view's a bit tunneled ... imo, of course, what else?

SGM, you speaketh wisely, but what does this say about the Child Free Movement?

Can we start a movement for "Children if you choose, or not if you'd rather not" campaigning for everyone to shut the fuck up and let people make their own minds up about whether they want children and how many and when? :o

GB, you can't disconnect what is at the top of the triangle from what is at the bottom. They are interconnected. A lot of things at the bottom only get accomplished because needs at the top have been met and allow people to see out specific infrastructures in society as a consequence - this then meets the basic needs of the next generation. Many people will also choose a specific way of meeting a basic need rather than another way because it allows them to meet higher needs at the same time. This is particularly the case with food distribution - one of the issues you mentioned. Most food producers would rather work their own land for less money than someone else's land for more, because it meets higher needs to work their own land. You cannot separate choices people make about basic needs from choices people make about higher needs.

I also dispute that it is a lack of capitalism that causes food structures to break down. You only have to look at an international food map to see that all of the countries where there is chronic food insecurity (despite no actual shortage of food) are capitalist nations. There are serious issues to do with civil rights in non-capitalist countries, but I see no evidence that the infrastructure is any worse than it would be with capitalism.

As for the issue of it being contemporary capitalism that is the issue? When was it working well? During the British Empire? The Slave Trade? The Highland Clearances? The Irish Potato Famine?

Wow, SGM!
Why didn't I just write a one-liner and stop there?