Can you be a feminist and an old romantic?

Me too, Sakura. All that macho shit is unsexy - you just think "yes, you are a man, but the fact that you think if you pick some flowers/know where the spoons are kept/play peekaboo with a baby your manliness will cease! is just offputting."

Will check out that book, HB, it sounds great & I love Jill Tweedie. I learnt a lot about what "family life" could entail for women by reading "Letters of Faint-Hearted Feminist" - only written in the the 80s but shows how little things have changed despite the fact that we're all equal now, ho ho.

"As a bunch of opinionated feminists, we are likely to have selected mates who fulfil our criteria in a partner ie they aren't sexist tossbags." - Excellent, ISNT, your post made me laugh. Does this mean we are doing our bit for evolution?

One of my closest friends is in a relaionship which to my mind is not the healthiest. She is a real "romantic" and just seems to want him to want to marry her - that's it. No real though process about what she wants, it's weird.

There's nothing wrong or unfeminist in being happily in love with someone who loves you back and treats you as a fellow human being - nothing wrong with giving each other little gifts and treats, walking hand in hand etc.
It's just a bad idea to pursue this at the expense of everything else that matters in life.

Yes, thankfully there are some inspirational pioneering midwives there in the US who are trying to make changes to the system. Hopefully Obama's promises for healthcare reform will have an effect.

Yes the situation in the US is shocking - re the total medicalisation of birth, CS rates and everything.

There is certainly a balance to be struck, between good ante-natal care, and access to pain relief and interventions where required, and avoiding over-medicalisation.

I realised that sounded like a mansplanation.
Both of those things are my bugbears: a rich/poor divide and doctors with lots of power over women...

The problem is that midwives were witch-hunted during the twentieth century in the US. They made a complete transition to the technocratic model and midwives were stripped of their power and access to birthing women. Some midwives, especially ones serving the black communities had to work illegaly, instead of receiving proper backing.
Meanwhile a system was created whereby lots of women had no access to this new technocratic model run by doctors. For a healthy pregnancy a hospital birth is actually less safe than a midwife birth (in the US 1/3 of births are by C-section).

But yes, the more access women have to ante-natal care, the better the outcome, although that's not the whole story. That Amnesty article specifically states that one of the problems in the US is that women have no say in their care, a kind of 'doctor knows best' syndrome. Once you have doctors who are demi-gods in obstetrics they are more likely to be invasive and use unecessary procedures.

Sakura I thougt that there was huge inequality in healthcare provision in the US. I understood that the vast amont of money is being spent on/by the wealthier people. And that huge numbers of people were without health insurance, and unable to access anything but basic charity services. So many are receiving no ante-natal care.

I thought that was the reason for the poor results in the US.

What are the stats like in the UK, where ante-natal care etc are more universal?

Sorry dittany, I know you meant that pregnancy always carries a risk and that marriage inevitably leads to pregnancy. It's just a major bugbear of mine is how hospitals are more concerned about controlling women than about saving their lives . It's disgraceful that pregnancy isn't safter thesedays

link

"The USA spends more than any other country on health care, and more on maternal health than any other type of hospital care. Despite this, women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 40 other countries"

"that pregnancy was a serious risk for women then"

Off topic, but..
Even with the onslaught of obstetrics and the invasion of women's bodies by hospitals I don't think the maternal death rate has changed much in the twentieth century. America's maternal death rate ranks at 42 in the world after Kenya.
It's true that now pathology and complications in pregnancy can be helped by modern medicine but in fact complications can also be caused by unecessary interference and meddling in the birthing process, especially unecessary c-sections.

"that pregnancy was a serious risk for women then"

With the onslaught of obstetrics

MY H is a nappy-changing rugby player

Ex was also a 6 foot rugby-playing student nurse...I finished it because he wanted to follow me to uni, settle down, buy a house and support me financially through my course

Yes I think that you can be a feminist and a romantic - but I am breathing a sign of relief that I accidently? chose a fairly feminist type of man for my DH.

I don't like the whole Disney princess/searching for your husband thing - and I know that I was influenced by this.

My DH and I met at university but after than did the long distance thing for 3 years (well ok it was only 80 miles!).

It is only really now that I have stopped feeling sorry for some of my friends who have not got long term partners . I really was totally sold on the romantic ideal - I mean FFS it's so patronising that I would think that their life is not as good/fulfilled as mine. I have stopped womdering whether/if they will "settle down" (bloody awful phrase).

Part of the reason by DH appears to be so Feminist is sharing chores/childcare is actually I think not equality lead but he just has this inbuilt sense of responsibility and he is is much cleaner and tidier than me!

Anyway he has taken DS out for the day and on to his parents (hence the Saturday MNing..)

To answer the OP, DH and I are extraodrinarily soppy

I have found an interesting theme on these threads

Thinking about tortoise's DH baking, and about marrying feminist men. My DH has never said he is a feminist, I think he would look a bit if he were asked. But he bakes too , he loves looking after the children and his shift pattern means that he is home a lot. He does nappies, crafts, baking, you name it. He is generous and kind and loving, to all of us. That's what I expect TBH.

Also on anotehr thread, it turned out that quite a lot of us were married to massive rugby player types

And it occurs to me to wonder whether men who are very comfortable in tehir masculinity (due to their physical appearance) are more open the idea/more likely to be involved with doing things which are perceived as traditionally "female"?

Also it is true that as a bunch of opinionated feminists, we are likely to have selected mates who fulfil our criteria in a partner ie they aren't sexist tossbags.

Anyway just a few thoughts there.

I agree BTW that romantic love is "sold" to women as the be-all and end-all. I know people who have had the "dream wedding" to people they don't love - or indeed like very much - as they want their partner, their "big day", all of that. Then afterwards they realise they've stuck themselves with an arse, and once teh honeymoon period os over, it's not much fun.

I think you have more chance of romance if you are a feminist, unless wuthering heights is your idea of romance.

Surely if your self esteem is not tied up with the idea of a man completing you, you will be more likely to expect to be treated well. The portrayal of what constitutes romance by the media has not moved on since Mr Darcy ( whom I privately suspect of just being prone to sulking and not the silent, dark hansome stranger reguritated in so many other romances).

Feminism and romantic love go hand in hand, IMO.

I think one of the best books I ever read on this subject was Jill Tweedie's "In the Name of Love". It analyses how the concept of romantic love is sold to women to make them lose their sense of self - that is what I think is the big danger of the way romance is sold to us, the expectation that women are sitting there passively waiting for a strong handsome man to come along and sweep them off their feet and make them whole and everything that has happened in their lives up to that point, is null and void and meaningless.

So they are expected to overlook men's faults, blind themselves to dodgy behaviour - the flowers, the chocolates, the shmoozings, the sheer bliss of it all, means that the fact that he spends his days selling arms to repressive regimes/ thinking up new ways of getting a new generation of children hooked on smoking/ being an estate agent ) is irrelevant, he's larvely to me. And similarly, the odd disrespectful sexist remark, the attitudes which give away that he doesn't respect women, the odd racist remark - all of them are somehow supposed to be irrelevant, because he buys roses and enables orgasms. And women feel they're somehow "spoiling" the romance of it all, if they allow their true selves to come to the surface and notice things that aren't right - they're encouraged to shut up about it, because after all, you've got this dream come true of romance, so wtf more do you want?

Yes, dittany, I totally agree that romance is sold to women. I mean, if women have economic independence, how else are men going to convince us to settle down???!!!

I believe in passionate, overwhelming love, but that does dampen down eventually, and although men feel that love equally it's sold as being something that's mainly good for women, the knight in shining armour etc. I think that's a con.

I've been a feminist all my life - as was my mother before me, etc. etc. etc. - but still manage to enjoy Georgette Heyer. Although her heroines are women of independent minds.

Romance IRL is about two people who love each other being nice to each other, isn't it? Nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. The type of 'romance' that's sold to us on Valentine's Day in order to make money for Thorntons or Hollywood or whatever is pants, mind.

In all honesty, I probably wouldn't even think about it, if it wasn't something that was generally talked about or campaigned about. If it was just a vague anachronism that nobody thought much about, then I wouldn't have worried.

I'm pretty sure my father didn't marry my mother in order to rape her The fact that the law gave him that right would not have been something which either of them assumd would have any relevance to their marriage, nor, I would assume, for the vast majority of people.

In law, parents have the right to smack their children. Is having a child taking on a contract to hit them?

For a lot of women for a lot of history, there has been no romance in marriage, even as a pretence in the run-up to it - in writers like Jane Austen, the romance is unexpected by the women because they don't actually exect to marry a man they fall in love with, so the outcome is a wonderful surprise. They expect a practical contract, ot romance.