I consider myself a feminist...and a housewife.

Surely you can only "choose" to be a sahm if you happen to have children with a man who earns enough to enable this to happen. I'm not sure where the feminisim is in this personally.

I have a dream that one day my daughters will be entitled to a 5 year career break to have children and to look after them. Or choose this opton for their partners. Then return to work at previous level. If I could gave had this I could be brow beating all the SAHM's right now.

My 'choice' to stay at home (dd3 is 10 months) wasn't based on ideology, but on practicalities.I never gad laid maternity leave, j worked 6 month vontracts, reduced to a daily rate. Being a SAHM Is an imperfect choice for me as i rely on DP financially and we are up shit creek if he has an accident.

And be afraid of xenia, be very afraid. Her logic is relentless. It's terrifying.

actualy an experiment where a mixed group were left to wait in a waiting room (believing they were waiting to be experimented on) found the men talked more than the women, on average. 'women talk more' has always seemed to me to be bollocks.

darcymum... oh yes.

What's wrong with being a libertarian? Well as long as you are happy to permit everything. To have no provisos or restrictions on behaviour. To see the freedom of the invidual as the main goal of society. But I don't think most of us do. I would suggest that most of us are happy to accept that our actions have an impact on others and to care about that. I will happily put my hand up to being a liberal but not a libertarian.

Thinking about it, I'd probably add something to imagine's list along the lines of "adults who are as happy with their individual situation/share as possible". I think that's probably implicit, but maybe helps to make some of the choice element in the feminist thing explicit.

On imagine's good point about assessing household needs (money, childcare, housekeeping) and then working out privately between you and DP how to achieve this - I absolutely agree that this is the right approach.

However, I think you need to think longer term about the issue, and this is where Lenin's points about pension, divorce etc come in. It's particularly relevant on the money side.

This household needs

• Money now, and the ability to earn money in the future, and an income in retirement, and some kind of insurance / plan B capability in case one of the adults falls under a bus/leaves
• Childcare, quality of care, enough stability for children, ability to cope with childhood illness etc
• Housekeeping - erm, and long-term maintenance? (this bit more dodgy, ok!)

I think as a feminist, you need to take responsibility for the choices you are making now and for the future, as well as fight to change how the system penalises short-term choices to stay at home with long-term impacts.

sorry, that all sounded a bit cross, didn't it? not meant to be.

however, at least I'm disproving the widely held belief that men are direct while women are polite

FioFio, I don't think so, I would probably say I'm both. I believe that people should be free to make whatever choices suit them as individuals (therefore I would say I'm a libertarian). I would also say that I believe that men and women should have equal rights and choices (therefore I would say I'm a feminist). I don't think these two things are mutually exclusive. I happen to think that women have fewer real choices than men.

DeidreB

Yes, it's outdated. And wrong.

It may be that, on average, women are slightly better at some things than men, and on average, men are slightly better at some things than women.

However, firstly, the average difference is really pretty small. Secondly, and most importantly, these differences are average. They are generalisations. That means they do not apply to many, many individual women and men.

(Oh yes and thirdly a lot of these differences are down to different upbringing rather than inherent. But that's a different topic).

The moment people start to say eg "men are more mathematically minded than women" or "women are more caring than men", they make it that much harder for the women who ARE good at maths and want to be mathematicians... or the men who ARE good at caring and want to be social workers.

So please, don't say "women chat, men say what needs to be said". Say "In my experience, more women chat, and more men answer the question". (My own experience, as it happens, is different.)

deidre, I think everyone behaves in different ways, we're all individuals after all, it doesn't always come down to being a man or a woman.

I wonder how many of these traits are learnt and how many we believe exist because we've been told they do.

I remember when I first met my future PIL. DH warned me beforehand that MIL "likes to have a good chat." He gave the impression that once she started, she never stopped.

The minute I got in the home though, MIL said hello, exchanged pleasantries etc, while FIL started really chatting. An hour later, MIL had barely got a word out edgeways, while FIL had gone through a whole list of conversational topics (local attractions, places to visit, local history, every pet the family had ever owned and so on). DH just said, "that's odd, he never usually talks like that."

Having got to know them since, FIL is perfectly capable of talking for England, but MIL has the reputation, because she's a woman.

I want my daughter to have the freedom, without prejudice, belittlement or barriers, to make any choices she wishes. However, is it really "outdated to say that women and men are inherently good at different things"?

I have become more convinced than I was in my early 20's that women and men are different, approach life in different ways and have different things to offer.

Obviously there are huge ranges in behaviour, skills etc but men say what needs to be said, women chat, men answer the question that has been asked, women ask questions to start a discussion so that they can form reasoned opinions, men focus on the task at hand, women see the wider consequences more readily.

A balanced society would recognise, accept and exploit these differences, rather than expecting everyone to behave in the same way.

Like Fennel, I am unhappy with the term.

Also I think that:

(a) housework and children are different things. The problem, often, is how much they are conflated.

(b) the whole 'mothers are not respected enough' cliche is a bit, well, dodgy. Women are not respected enough. (Actually children aren't either, but that is a separate issue.) I don't, as it happens, want to be worshipped for my reproductive capacities, not least because that assumes all sorts of things about Good Motherhood and Duty that I really do not wish to have anything to do with.

happysmiley and imaginewittyname - agree completely.

the point is that two parents ought to be able to divvy up the roles between them according to what suits them (and their child) best as individuals

not according to (a) outdated notions of women and men being inherently good at different things (though of course this may be true in particular cases)

or (b) government incentives towards a particular division of roles, for example the current maternity/ paternity leave imbalance

another excellent point happysmiley!

Imagine: you have written exactly what I was going to - we need income, childcare, housekeeping, and we divvy that up between us. It so happens that DH is older than me and didn't stay in education quite so ridiculously long, so he was well-established on the career ladder well before me, so it makes sense for him to be out there sorting the income while I do the childcare (and neither of us really does housework beyind the bare essentials). I see it as his job being earning, mine being kids and food, I am here more than him so tend to do the vacuuming and what have you, but at the end of the day when we are both home then the jobs get shared and we both get a bit of time off. I don't feel oppressed.

Re taking time off, I know quite a few people who have taken a year off in their 20s to go travelling. That seems much more acceptable to employers than taking a year off to look after a baby.