to feel short changed by feminism?

[ThroughTheRoundWindow]

So here's the thing. Back in the day the young women of the baby boom generation demanded the choice to work or care for their babies. some of them went out to work, and because their families had two incomes they could afford to spend more on their houses and on filling them with consumer goods.

But more families with more money pushed up the price of houses.

Roll on a generation and it is impossible to afford a mortgage on one moderate income. To pay for a house you both need to work. Well that isn't true, we could have either bought a ex-council house on a dodgy estate, or I could have married a much richer man. (But we couldn't bring ourselves to raise a child on an estate and I fell in love with a council employee).

Had a been born a generation earlier my husband's local government salary would have paid for our modest house in an unfashionable suburb and I could (if I had chosen) have given up work to care full time for our family. Instead I have no choice - I have to return to work and leave my baby in daycare.

Without feminism I could have done what comes most naturally to me and been a homemaker. Feminism stole that option from me. Now I have to leave my baby to be raised by a stranger and go out to work in a job I care nothing for and get nothing (except a salary) from.

Ok, a little maudlin from too much beer, but someone explain to me why I am genuinely unreasonable to feel this way?

Thanks marriedinwhite, you are right about viewing the glass as half full. I do have an awful lot. Glad I am not the only one to feel this way though.

I do accept that feminism has won us many things, but I don't think people recognise that it has lost us quite a lot too. Those of us under about 35 will have been through our whole education being told that men are equal to women and that we have sexual and economic freedom.

But this isn't really true. fastweb you are right that we can no longer be legally raped by our husbands, but it is still the case that most rape cases end in an acquittal. Maternity leave is wonderful but stunts the careers of women who take it (women are massively under represented at the top of every industry). Sexual freedom seems to mean the media can treat women with as little respect as before but with more nakedness.

Brain beginning to hurt, need to go to bed now. Thanks for the responses though.

Do you have a daughter? Do you have dreams and ambitions for her? Would you like her to free to be whatever she wants to be? To have an equal partnership with a man, without him having the legal right to beat and rape her? Would you like her to be doctor, an architect, and engineer or a high court judge without fighting every step of the way to reach her goals? Would you like her to be able to stay home with her children for an entire year after their birth, and still have a job to go back to? Would you like her to able to afford her own home, without having to rely on a man to provide her with one?

YABVVVVU.

Hmm, it's not just the increasing mortgage capacity because of both people going out to earn money that has raised the price of houses, but just for the sake of your argument, let's pretend that that's the only cause.

You shouldn't be blaming feminism for high house prices, you should be blaming men. The fact that their wife went out to work meant that they could work less, therefore they should have lobbied for the right to work part time - at that time unions were quite powerful and society and attitudes were changing rapidly, so they would probably have won that right. Then both parties could have worked 20 hours a week instead of 40, both could have done the housework (instead of most of it being dumped on the woman of the house) and houseprices would have remained pitched at the level of an income of 40 hours a week rather than 80. Instead of working with women to lobby for this change, men en masse took the piss out of the demand for equal pay and the right to work after marriage and opposed every effort at equality. So now a family needs to work 80 hours instead of 40.

(I don't really believe that btw because globalisation and the freeing up of the financial markets have had a big impact on house prices too, but am just arguing the toss. Put the blame where it lies. Feminists don't run the country, don't run the banking system and don't run the world. It's mad to blame people who don't have power, for what is happening economically. If feminists ruled the world, you'd have a point.)

X-post.

Those 'Buts' you list, OP, are exactly why we need feminism to keep going. the world is a far, far better place to be a women than it ever has been before, but we aren't there yet by a long shot.

RoundWindow, all your post about women still having it crap shows is that feminism is still needed.

Op - what you're saying is in the Daily Mail every other other month / although I agree with you re; the sexual liberation of women - it gave men and society in general, the green light to treat women with even less respect.

I don't think it is Feminism that has caused the problem. Captilasim maybe...

My grandmother didn't have feminism. She worked in a bakery by day and a firestation by night. Her mum and aunts helped look after the children as she had to work to survive and help my grandfather, who was in the navy, pay the bills in their two up two down with an outside Lav.

My gran, who is riculously intelligent worked as a nurse and was forced out of employment when she got married and had children. She spent years as a home maker, bitterly resenting her brothers who forged their own careers.

Take off your rose tinted spectacles. The opression of women didn't give them nice houses and time with the children. It restricted their freedom, limited their choices and made them second class citizens.

Thank FUCK for feminism so that I was able to get a good education and make my own choices about my life.

My Grandmother told me so many times of how jealous she was of the choices I have. She'd probably think you were being daft.

"But more families with more money pushed up the price of houses."

I don't get your logic here at all...

Do you understand how economics works? I don't have a great grasp myself, but how does people with more money push up the price of houses? [confuse]

Does people with more money push up the price of TVs? Of swimming pools? Of, I dunno, shoes...?!

There is zero logic in the one state of affairs (people having more money) to the next state of affairs (house prices going up). The two are not connected, or at least one is not a consequence of the other, or else you could apply that logic across the board. More families with more money means the price of everything just goes up and up and up.

The UK is just one country. It is a small island with a very big population. Here is a huge demand on housing, from both indigenous people, as well as the many different nationalities that go to live there (of which I was one myself when I lived there). This is what drives the cost of housing up.

You're really, really stretching it to blame feminism for this!! In summary, YABVU.

YANBU sort of. There are of course other economical factors but I do think feminism was the start in some ways and I also feel that feminism is an easy target, the issue runs far deeper. That said feminists have done a huge amount for women's rights and I am not sure if i would want to go back to a lot of the little woman ways.

Come to think of it, even if you'd been rich you probably wouldn't have got to spend that much time with your kids in the past - you'd have been expected to leave them to be looked after by servants while you managed your house/supported your husband in whatever way was deemed appropriate.

Feckin ell.

Yabu. You don't have to own your own home. You've chosen to have children and you have to do what you have to do to fund your chosen lifestyle.

TillyIpswich I think the OP's logic is this:

In 1973 (let's say) a bank would lend a man 3 times his income to buy a house. (it would lend a woman 3 x her's, if her father or brother guaranteed it.)

Then women started to go out to work and they lobbied the banks to recognise their income. So then, banks started to lend 2.5x the joint income of both parties.

This meant that couples had more money to spend on housnig. There was in fact a mini hous price boom in the early or mid seventies, I remember a friend of mine telling me, because the fact that married working couples were willing to pay over the odds, meant people could ask more for their houses.

That I think is the thought process.

It falls down though, when you consider that in the last couple fo years, banks have suddenly tightened their lending criteria to a level where it really hasn't been for about 20 years. If you believe that the only thing that influences house prices, is the amount that banks are willing to lend, then we should have had an almighty house price crash by now. And we haven't. Which suggests that other factors are more important.

What has feminism 'lost' us?

Home owners today make up far, far more of society than they ever did at any time before the last century. There may be a small blip in numbers of home owners now as compared with ten years ago, but still far, far more of us can afford to own our own homes than people did in previous centuries.

The marriage bar which meant women who got married lost their jobs was still going in the 60s and in the case of the foreign office, the 70s

We're not talking about grandparents here. If you were born a generation earlier, depending on your job, you might have been forced to give up work. Not when you had kids, but when you got married

You're an U idiot.

Capitalism and feminism are equally to blame. Back in the 60s (or about then), families had a "bright" idea. The woman would go out to work and then they'd be able to afford a bigger house etc. But there was a problem; everyone else was having the same idea. So what happened? The cost of everything rose of course, especially property, meaning that it was now necessary rather than advantageous for the woman to have a job. Meanwhile, a generation of kids were being raised without Mum or Dad at home. Now we're in a situation where many women are working full-time who'd love to be at home raising a family, while many men are out of work and even some of those in work are increasingly confused as to their "role" in life and society.
Feminism has done society a lot of harm, but the great irony is that women have suffered the most as a result of it. The smarter women now realise this, too late unfortunately!

"the vote

husbands not being carte blanche to rape or batter us

far further along the road towards equal access to educational and work opportunities

paid maternity leave

little stuff like that"

But not the moon on a stick. Sorry about that OP.

Btw, re. raising babies ... people at times further back in the past had to make horrific choices. People took small children and babies to work with them if there was nowhere to leave them. Or they'd leave a baby alone, hoping it wouldn't smother and would survive not being fed for the length of a shift - maybe 8 hours. Or - and they didn't have formula - they'd leave the baby with someone else, who could not breastfeed it, and they'd hope whatever it was given, and the lack of sterilization, wouldn't kill it.

If you read study what happened to babies before the mid-20th century - as a matter of routine, what happened - you will probably feel like crying. Huge numbers of babies and small children - and mothers in labour - died or were maimed. People didn't get to 'raise' all their children.

moon, it's been necessary (not advantageous) for women to work for most of history. Generations of children have grown up (or died) in homes where both parents worked outside.

Nothing about men's choices in your piss-poor analysis moonferret.

TillyIpswitch said, "Do you understand how economics works? I don't have a great grasp myself, but how does people with more money push up the price of houses?"

So do you think that if everyone was given £100,000 tomorrow, the cost of property would stay the same? People often buy as much as they can borrow, and this is based on their earnings!!

You have practically no ecomomic understanding, TillyIpswitch

HereBeBollox fails to provide a counter argument at all...sounds like a piss poor intellect to me, no surprise there!