Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress' book is out.

(And apologies for @ ing you twice in a row!)

(In brackets - @Onnabugeisha I was the poster who used the phrase "throwing the baby out with the bath water", and I'd like to clarify that I (obviously) wasn't directing it at you, nor referring to anybody's actual baby! It's an expression (perhaps you're unfamiliar with it), meaning when you accidentally lose something good/necessary in the process of getting rid of something bad/unnecessary.

I was definitely not referring to you leaving your baby to return to work, as you thought. The metaphorical 'baby' in this case was the idea of the mother-infant bond, which I think is special, unique, and should be at the forefront of feminist work.)

"You can put into place equal parental leave, equal pay, and so on but until you change the cultural conditioning from birth, you won’t have free choice. And the sex gap you see isn’t showing an egalitarian society, because the culture hasn’t caught up. Scandinavia has the apparatus in place, but their culture is just as bad as ours in convincing men and women that we are ruled by biological determinism due to our sex."

@Onnabugeisha but this makes no sense. Why would a country make great efforts to produce a level playing field in terms of work for both women and men, if such attitudes and desires didn't already exist in the culture of that country?

Laws reflect culture, they don't create it. Culture comes first, laws come later.

I rather like what Laura Fleshman spoke about in relation to women's sport, just recently. Though I see that as relating to women's 'equality' more generally:

"High on Fleshman’s list for change is dumping the idea that men and women should be treated the same, a concept that upends some central themes in equality debates.

“In the [physical] development years after adolescence female-bodied people in sport are having fundamentally different experiences with their bodies but we have been treating them like they should be like males because that is what ‘equality’ looks like,” she says.

“If basic female body experiences are taboo, erased, or minimized then you aren’t creating an environment that accurately reflects the people in it. You aren’t creating an empowered sports environment for those people and that is a group of people who are going to be victimized and easier prey for bad actors.

“We have to start being courageous to lean into the differences that we have and decide collectively that women deserve to thrive in sport and have sport built around them for their norms. We have to stop comparing them to a male standard, stop expecting them to progress like men do, stop erasing the parts of their body that are feminine. We’re scared of women’s bodies and scared of women’s power.”

Fleshman suggests 1960s and 70s Second Wave feminism addressed many issues that led to positive outcomes but in turn created unforeseen challenges for the 21st century that need revisiting – if not revising.“The liberal feminist movement that peaked in the 70s led to a lot of fundamental changes in women’s lives – no-fault divorce, Title IX in athletics, and women getting their own credit cards,” Fleshman says. “The way we got those things was through appealing to men in power by saying we’re the same as you, so treat us the same. Talking about differences wasn’t a great strategy for feminists to get equal rights so we stopped talking about differences. But it’s been 50 years. To get to that last step in equality we have to lean into our differences and say, hey we need something different.”

Almost sounds as if she's been reading Mary Harrington.

Posh women did not sit on their arses all day - they were expected to do stuff for the poor. In many areas they took charge of medical matters.

Well yes. They too had male expectations to live up to or die trying. A gilded cage is still a cage.

Yes a few elite privileged and lucky women, the 1% had some agency due to indulgent male relatives. But let’s not try and pretend this was the common lived experience of women from 1500-1700. Btw, these “records” were by and large written by MEN. There are few diaries and journals written by elite women as primary sources and even those could obscure reality as their writings were usually subject to male monitoring and scrutiny. There’s a reason why some aristocratic women wrote in secret codes.

Most women didn’t have agency as widows, their father or brother or uncle would simply take them & any children under their guardianship (manage all funds & property on behalf of the actual heir- a boy child naturally) and then generally would marry her off again or in older centuries perhaps pack her off to a convent. If she didn’t want to remarry, the asylum was the choice of the day in later centuries instead of a nunnery.

Brothers and uncles would commonly embezzle as much as possible from her underage eldest son, or have the boy meet with an “accident” and inherit the lot, lock stock and barrel.

“pay women the same as men for the same job”

Was that around 1975 or 1976? And it took until 2021 to settle "equal value" (literally decades) in one long-running dispute.

Employment lawyer Sean Jones explains it (you'll need to scroll down through the first few deleted tweets): archive.is/5A0Cq

The court ruling is here: curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=242024&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=9524499

any woman could possibly have been a proud, economically productive, possibly even happy wife and mother - even in the face of grinding poverty, which was simple reality for many many people. I'm sure they made the best of it, as we all try to do today.

I find it difficult to form a romantic view of the times of widespread ill-health and early mortality for women (recall that improved mortality rates for women are a comparatively recent phenomenon in historical terms and that the rate of improvement for mortality is currently slowing down for women). The 1901 Rowntree Report and others like it remarkable are remarkable in their detail and explains why, for so many, wartime rations were a substantial improvement over their usual fare.

There is a point where grinding poverty and the fight for survival obliterates so much that there is no 'making the best of it'. I have relatives across several generations who were teachers and known for never using corporal punishment when it was pretty much accepted as a teaching method. They all said the same thing, "You never know what hell those children are living through at home, I'm never going to add to it."

Some women did have agency in the early modern period (from 1500-1750). Wealthy women had considerably more than any man in a lower class to her. And, not all women chose to marry, and neither were they ruled by their fathers or brothers. No, not all women would choose that - but some ACTIVELY chose single-parenthood, much to the shock of those researching at the time. Records indicate that they were perfectly content and had no intention of getting married.

Many women also had a fair amount of agency once their husbands died.

It's complex, and depended on several factors. There were massive differences from one town/village/country to another.

Posh women did not sit on their arses all day - they were expected to do stuff for the poor. In many areas they took charge of medical matters.

I can see why MH would see some good from 'the old days' because certain aspects were undoubtedly better for SOME women.

Yes, I agree. 2nd wave feminism made phenomenal progress advancing us towards equality. We are in a position now, imho, wherein the laws have far outstripped our culture and belief systems. The hard work isn’t getting a law passed saying “let women get degrees” or “pay women the same as men for the same job” or “don’t rape women and girls” or “replace maternity leave with shared parental leave so there is real choice”….the hard part is actually progressing our culture and beliefs towards de facto equality. And I think that’s a paradigm shift because much of feminism today is still focussed on change this law, get that law passed…when that is only the first step on a long journey to actually getting whatever the law promises or prohibits to happen IRL.

But second wave feminism has won a lot of things that have made my life so far, with all its compromises pretty good actually

1. I was able to go to university

2. establish myself in a professional career
   take a year out to care for my babies

3. go back to work part time until they finished infant school

and my earnings are still enough to have a comfortable life

only item 3 felt like a compromise really

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things in 1823, and probably not in 1923 either

Exactly right. Androcentric bias abounds wherein the voices of women are silenced or forgotten.

I found this problem of ahistoricalness in many feminist analyses of say ancient to historical literature down to feminist perspective studies of famous or aristocratic female ancient and historical figures. The feminist analysis often sweeps away what we do know about the laws, culture and practices of the time and gives women more agency than they actually had.

MH sees a pre-industrial women working in a home cottage industry of say making candles or butter/cheese. But then forgets that whatever she produced & sold, the income was not hers to keep. And often she had no choice about what she did- working over vats of tallow to make candles or milking cows & churning butter & making cheese.

What family business she was “married into” (sold off to), was determined by her father or brother. And contrary to popular belief the lower classes contracted marriages similar to the upper classes only on a smaller scale. A tailor would contract to marry a daughter off to a draper/haberdashery…because then he’d get a family discount on cloth for the clothes he made. A farmer would marry a daughter off to a miller…because then he could would always have a buyer for his grain and perhaps his personal flour milled for free. Brewers would marry off daughters to innkeepers and publicans. Butchers to herdsmen. Lower classes had as much aspirations and desires to improve their family’s economic conditions and their women were sold off to cement business deals by bringing related businesses into one family.

Plus women were barred from joining any craft or merchant guilds and if you don’t have guild licence, you can’t legally sell any goods. We forget too that not only were women barred from professions but also all trades.

I feel like a bit of a monomaniac because I keep saying this. But we’re comprised of astonishing minds in monkey bodies

our whole being is one giant compromise. That means no right answers, and certainly no one size fits all

I know many women who have chosen not to have children and their lives are happier for that choice than if societal expectations or lack of birth control had forced them into motherhood

the fact that they generally tend to be doing ‘better’ than me in their careers is not coincidental

would I change places with them? No

Romanticists have said this was the poor man’s means of divorce, or getting a teen girl a job as a servant, and it was all consensual with a lover in the wings or benevolent masters taking on the straying wife or stroppy teen girl

That sort of language is no different to the revelations of the police WhatsApp group where police colleagues discussed corrective rape bantered and invited men like Couzens to 'sort out' a mouthy girlfriend.

Yes, and forced pregnancy was a common means of male violence and control. After all women could not refuse sex with their husbands. Marital rape was still legal in law when I got married for christs sake! Women were conditioned as well to feel morally obligated to satisfy their husbands “carnal needs”- needs driven by men’s biology and that old chestnut, mother nature.

Me too. And I think many forget just how bad the misogyny was then. Yes women were “economically productive” but they did not own the income they earned. Their bodies and their labour was owned by their husband or closest male relative. Of course, some women could subversively skim and squirrel away coins here and there but there was risk of a fatal beating or being branded as a whore & tossed in the gutter if found out. In England men could put a rope round their wife or daughter, take her to market and sell her like a cow. Romanticists have said this was the poor man’s means of divorce, or getting a teen girl a job as a servant, and it was all consensual with a lover in the wings or benevolent masters taking on the straying wife or stroppy teen girl….but those little excuses are all written by MEN in retrospect as women quite literally were denied education and no women of that class would be literate and so their voices are not included in this conveniently victim blaming explanation that I find highly improbable.

Many women even pretended madness to escape DV…can you imagine the desperate and powerless state of choosing the hell hole of life imprisonment in an asylum with hard labour picking oakum, laundry, field work and so on vs certain death by repeated beatings?

Women did not have respect or status unless it was among their actual peers- which were other women. They had no respect and no status and no power compared any man or even a boy aged 12 or above.

Thats my point actually. You can put into place equal parental leave, equal pay, and so on but until you change the cultural conditioning from birth, you won’t have free choice. And the sex gap you see isn’t showing an egalitarian society, because the culture hasn’t caught up. Scandinavia has the apparatus in place, but their culture is just as bad as ours in convincing men and women that we are ruled by biological determinism due to our sex.

It’s no different from pointing out that while rape is illegal and carries prison terms, less than 1% of rapists are actually convicted, meaning that culturally rape still de facto legal.

So laws about equal pay, and equal shared parental leave by themselves don’t change culture or society. They only create opportunity or a path for change- the rest is up to men and women to actually change our belief systems.

No one is pretending all men and all women have identical desires. I’m saying that it is a fallacy to think that the vast majority of women really want to be home with babies while the vast majority of men really want to be out at work when it comes to raising their children. Especially in a world where boys and girls are conditioned literally from birth to believe these are the roles they are destined for as a matter of faith in “nature”, “instinct” and “biology” due to their sex.

I am saying that while some women want to be home, some do not. And while some men want to be at work, some do not. Right now we have the technology and the opportunity to change this. It is there for the taking, but few are actually choosing this path. Until we sweep away the patriarchy conditioning us from birth on these dictated sex roles, we won’t know what the split would be in an equal society that views men and women equally suited to and capable of being SAHPs. I know it won’t be an exact 50/50 as that’s only attained by social engineering.

I can say hands down, though that it won’t be the current 99% mother vs 1% father that we have now. That’s not driven by biology or even actual desires of individuals, that’s the kind of split you get from brainwashing from birth which is hard to even recognise or admit as an adult.

And this has fuck all to do with capitalism. That’s simply yet another bit of propaganda telling women that having their own economic power and independence is a conspiracy by capitalist pigs to profit from their labour and will be of no benefit to the women themselves. The exact same argument was used 200yrs ago to convince women they didn’t really want to go out to work in a paid job…that it would be “bad” for them as individuals and that employers were merely being exploitative because women were cheaper labour than men. It was also argued, women going out to work was bad for children and families because women would be neglecting their babies and taking away jobs from men with families to support. The aftershocks of this is still deeply entrenched in modern society- reference the poster that said I was “throwing away” my baby by going back to work when they were only a few months old.

I guess we'll all have to wait patiently for MH's book to arrive, in which she expounds this thesis (women being responsible for cottage industries and generating family income within their own households); I very much doubt she would stake her reputation on an erroneous claim without proper footnotes and source material to back her points up.

You think I'm romanticising the past. I think the opposite danger also exists: to judge history - and particularly women's history - by our culturally/socially constructed standards today, making it impossible to believe that any woman could possibly have been a proud, economically productive, possibly even happy wife and mother - even in the face of grinding poverty, which was simple reality for many many people. I'm sure they made the best of it, as we all try to do today.