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?

YABU and simplistic.

If it wasn't for the feminism I would be working in a mill like my great, great, great grandmother and every 8 hours taking 5 minutes off the loom to stick my tit through a hole in the mill wall to breast feed my baby.

It is utterly bonkers to blame feminism when the situation that has led us to where we are is so much more complex. Also, you could have made some different life choices that would have enabled you or your husband to stay home with your child.

When our son came along 9 years ago we chose to downsize so that dh (who is an artist) could give up work and be a stay at home dad when my maternity leave was over. If dh had been earning more than me and been in a secure job I would have stayed at home. We left a perfectly lovely rented flat and rented a smaller/cheaper place in a less salubrious area. We didn't claim any benefits we didn't seek social housing we just lived very frugally for 5 years so that dh could look after ds and eventually get back into the studio and make art. We didn't give a shit about getting on the property ladder or living in a 'fashionable' suburb.

Nine years down the line, dh's art 'career' is bringing in the bucks, we are comfortably on the property ladder and I do the odd bit of contract work to keep my hand in but mostly do the school run and hang out with ds.

Life is what you make it. Don't go blaming feminism for your woes.

Filthydirtyheathen- dead right, the reality for many nursing mothers would have been taking a quick break from the job in the mill. Or having the baby brought out to where they were working in the fields for a quick feed. A lot of the time, babies and young children would be left to their own devices (even tethered to stair posts fgs). In affluent families the baby would probably be fed by a wet nurse anyway. This idea of women having an idyllic life at home with nothing to do but play with their Children all day before preparing a delicious home cooked dinner for father exists only in those old fashioned ladybird books as far as I can tell.

Tbh the generation which probably had it closest to what 'the op describes is my mothers. My parents could afford a house on one income, and my mother stayed at home. Housework was time consuming, but at least she did have a twin tub washer, a fridge and a Hoover, so it wasn't as back breaking as previous times. And you know what? I don't believe it was some idyllic time. I think my mother probably enjoyed staying at home for a while, but I'm sure after a few years she got frustrated and could really have benefited from some more stimulation in life. My dad is a perfectly pleasant man, but as kids our relationship with him was nowhere near as close as the relationship my children have with their dad. Ultimately they had their roles - SAHM -and worker- and both had their restrictions.

I really find it shocking that any intelligent person can believe we would be better off turning back the clock!

if you start looking at animals for examples of how 'humans should live....' last time i saw wild monkeys, what struck me the most, was the large male monkey who punched the smaller female monkey, carrying a baby monkey, in the face to get her food.....

animals rape, murder, inflict pain for fun..... these are natual things, so is death in child birth, many young dying, painful death. death from hunger. mass population death. survival of the fitest. the weak suffer and die.

if you look to the natural world as to 'how humans should live' you are always going to pick and choose what aligns with your argument.

there is no simple answer to 'how humans should live'. freedom to live how you think you should live, without harming anyone else, is about as close as we can get. you cannot have freedom, without equality.

Another morning thought:

In order for me 'to have it all' - I have to exploit other women.

Scenario;

I work full-time on say £30 an hour - I pay my child-minder ( who will undoubtedly be a women ) £5.00 an hour ( going rate in my area )
I pay my cleaner ( again, undoubtedly a women) £7.00 an hour - when my child starts nursery he will be taught my women, when he moves up to primary school he will be taught by women - so despite my 'freedom' from domestic drudgery, my child will be surrounded by other women doing the ( lowly paid ) typical female jobs - I've just swapped places.
His life will be dominated by females until he reaches secondary school at 11.

Childcare, cleaning, teaching assistants - predominantly women on low incomes. I have to use them in order for me to escape.
And when I pick my son up from the child-minder and dash in to Waitrose - it will be a women on the till.

OP, you said that you would like to be a SAHM. I wanted that too and i did it for few years. And i loved it. Thanks to the feminism. My name was still on the deeds, i had my own bank account, i knew all the family's finances, i was speding my days doing what i liked, i had savings in my name, i flew to Spain to see my family whenever easyjet had a good bargain, dh would bath the dcs in the evening and told me to rest. Most importantly i've never felt scared and insecure.

Now if i have been SAHM without the feminism the affortable house you are talking about wouldn't have my name on the deeds. And the law-and society- wouldn't protect me if there was a case of DV and divorce. I wouldn't do the things i mentioned above and i would constantly feel insecure.

What i'm trying to say is that the reason being SAHM is desirable today (for those that it is) its because of feminism.

And another thought.... Those women may well be doing those jobs because they have CHOSEN them for the specific advantages at that point in their life.

For example: my childminder earned, per child', far less than I earned in my professional job. However, she chose to be a childminder at that point in her life because she wanted to be able to earn while looking after her own 'pre school child. With the two children she childminder, plus the fact she had no childcare costs to pay in order to earn, plus the fact that she had no commute... Suffice to say, she probably had more take-home pay than me for a few years. She certainly didn't feel exploited. She was grateful working mums like 'me, enabled her to have that choice.

Likewise, many of those women behind the till will be choosing a low paid job because supermarket shifts often fit around school hours, or women can take on an evening shift for when dad gets home.

The difference between a woman shop worker now and a woman shop worker from 40 years ago is that nowadays women have equal access to education, training, university and professions- so working in a low status job is more likely to be a choice made at a particular time of life to suit the families needs, rather than the only job available because the woman hasn't had the opportunity to do more

I really relate to This article by Deborah Orr - it touches on a few points raised in this thread so is kinda relevant.

( It's a few years old but could have been written yesterday )

The problem with your argument, dancer, is the assumption that all women actually want to stay at home and look after their children all day. I'd rather chew my own arm off. And many men resent the huge burden of being the sole provider and would rather spend more time with their children. Your argument that we are naturally inclined towards towards SAHP or WOHP by gender is hugely flawed.

LRD Simone de Beauvoir, back in the 1920s, addressed the whole comparison of species argument, and utterly refuted it. I am now on chapter 2, where she picks apart the idea that we're psychologically wired to be a certain way.

I have read only the OP, so apologies if I am repeating others' responses here or if the thread has gone off at a tangent, but really felt I had to respond to the huge, and in my opinion erroneous, assumption on the part of the OP.

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

I can see where that is coming from, but you're assuming that the only factor in house prices was demand. In a cash transaction it is certainly the main factor, but buying a house almost always involves borrowing the majority of the purchase price from a lender, secured against the property (a mortgage).

House prices shot up mainly through the deregulation of the mortgage market in the 1980s. Prior to deregulation, you HAD to have a substantial deposit (minimum 10% of purchase price, usually) and could only borrow about two and a half times joint salary, or three times main plus one times second salary. There were fewer lenders in the market, predominantly building societies and to a lesser extent the high street banks. The mortgage market was conservative with a small 'c'. This restriction on how much you could borrow largely suppressed house prices, as they could only sell for what a buyer could raise. Price it above that level and it could not sell. There were exceptions of course, but few enough to have little impact on the overall market.

Post-deregulation, the need to have a deposit faded and the multiples increased. 100% mortgages, and sometimes 110% and 125% (to allow you to buy and improve in one fell swoop) were available. 100% and five times salary were widely available.

This is the true source of the increased demand, not the two-income household. With money so easy to borrow, more people were able to buy than had done before. They were positively encouraged to stop renting and start buying (the sell-off of council housing.) More buyers = more competition for each house being sold = higher prices.

I am a little concerned at your laying the blame of your predicament at the feet of feminism rather than where it should lie, capitalism. If you're going to start pointing fingers, you really should make sure they're pointing in the right direction.

YABU

If you want to be a SAHM that's for you and your DH to decide. But don't blame feminism for the fact that life is expensive. Blame capitalism, which relies entirely on prices rising, particularly (in the UK) house prices.

I'd like to go to university full time, but as I'm the sole wage earner I study part time instead. Feminism has allowed me to leave an abusive husband, own my own home, get an education and have control over my own finances. It does not mean that women get to have their every wish granted.

But house prices all over the world including Saudi Arabia and the middle east as well as most African cities have rocketed in the last few decades or so . It has nothing to do with feminism but due to the way global financial markets have been restructured.

YABU and your logic is deeply flawed.

I've had a chance to read over the thread now, barring the bunfight which was largely 'deleted by Mumsnet' and so thankfully incomprehensible anyway.

Maybe it's because I'm an old git (48) and so my comparison of today to the past stretches a little further, but it does seem to me that some posters have a very rose-tinted and downright inaccurate view of 'before'. My mother always worked (thread mill and shopwork). My grandmothers always worked (cleaning and factory work). The idea of a husband earning enough to buy a house and the wife being a SAHM raising children seems to come straight out of a Doris Day movie. Or an Agatha Christie book. It really just wasn't like that for most people.

Also, women didn't 'not work' because it was financially viable to live off one wage, they were often obliged to resign when they got married. Yes, that was legal pre-1971. Most working-class women worked and kept a home, the only difference to today being that the wages were completely shit then because those running society told themselves that women only worked for 'pin money'. It was perfectly legal to pay a woman far less than a man would lift for the same job. My grandmother could have given you chapter and verse on that.

Oh, and Dancergirl -
"Many women who WANT to stay at home with their babies are forced to work just to survive. " I think you'll find it was ever thus. It was only ever a small number of middle-class women (think bank manager's wife) who could afford to do this. I blame Penelope Keith as Margot in The Good Life for making people think that this was somehow a norm.

"In nature, most males and females of a species have clearly defined roles, eg male hunter and gatherer, females look after the young. Think birds, fish, other mammals. And it WORKS." The mind boggles at this level of ignorance. In hunter-gatherer societies, I believe the males only hunted and the females gathered. Which actually made the females the mainstay, because hunting was not always successful. Birds tend to share pretty evenly. Fish really don't do childcare at all, they just sort of spawn and then leave them to get on on their own, on the whole.

YABU the problem is your own materialism, not feminism. Go live in a smaller house if being a SAHM is so important to you.

Let us consider the lion and the polar bear, where males kill and eat the young of rival males so they can rape the female and make her bear his offspring instead. Indeed, we should live as 'nature intended'.

Dancergirl and LRD

Most societal animals are matriarchal. The alpha female(s) dictate pack membership, roles, status, breeding rights etc,while the male is kept largely for his DNA, and to keep other males away(gorillas, lions)

Animals with a more complex social structure,where a clan has several males(wolves, meercats, chimpanzees, hyenas) often have an 'alpha' M/F pair, but the female still dictates clan structure and territory. Often species thought to be patriarchal are, in fact matrilinear (baboons)

True societal animals (social insects) have reduced the male role further. Drones are used to impregnate the queen, then dragged out of the (entirely female) hive to die.

As for clearly defined male/female roles in non-societal animals; for those where both parents rear the young, there is little or no gender division. Nest-building, hunting, incubation, teaching, feeding young are shared equally.

As with all rules, there are exceptions, and I'm sure someone will be along shortly to argue the toss...

Is that so? Thank you verylittlegravitas, that's interesting reading and I stand corrected. I suppose I'm remembering David Attenborough's voice talking about 'the male' and 'the female' (of a particular species) quite specifically.

re David Attenborough et al view the gender roles of animals, this is an interesting read.....

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110318112022.htm

I'm not sure what feminism & capitalism has to do with animals tbh - maybe I need to take a closer look at what's going on in my garden,

The way I see it is - feminism has done more good than harm but it does suffer from an image problem.
Women still do most of the childcare and all the domestic boring stuff ( even if they're getting paid for it ) so gender stereotypes are still firmly in place.
Women are more insecure about their looks than ever ( check out the rise in plastic surgery ) and these insecurities are happening younger and younger.

And my overall assessment is that true equality between the sexes can only take place in a communist state.

kickass - yes, that's why I responded to it as an incidental point.

But carmingoesprimal, that's exactly my point: 'women do most of the boring domestic stuff'. We need to think about that differently. Running a home is a hugely important job, we shouldn't look at the jobs it entails as boring.

ALL jobs have boring elements to them but the end result is what's important. Women shouldn't be made to feel like drudges if they do most domestic chores but see it as an opportunity to create something fantastic. Yes I'm being a little idealistic but we need to get away from this idea that running a home is in any way less important than having a career.

Dancergirl - I agree with you. bringing up children and running a home is the most important job there is - feminists do recognise this though ( loads of them are Sahm )

oh no not the 'ardest job in world line.that really lame.no being a housewife isnt the hardest job going and its tosh to try elevate it to some serious level of importance.its a private individual act

so housewife looks after own kids
make dinner
do school run
...do you want a medal?