All women I know are in my situation

[growli]

Pretty useless DH. They're left to look after the kids. Called nags if they complain.

It mostly falls on them. The marriages are pretty rubbish.

I've posted here so many times about my issues with my H and my lifestyle with small kids.

I always get told I need to divorce. I get told that there are other men out there who aren't as useless with their children.

In real life, every woman I know, faces something similar. Mainly responsible for everything to do with kids and house, works full time most of the time too.

Husband works hard, but doesn't contribute to looking after the kids or household. Complains of not enough sex.

The women I know are highly educated and in successful careers. We all feel stitched up. We were told if we study hard and are in successful careers, we wouldn't end up being slaves to our husbands and children.

What happened to the men our parents raised ? For them to expect women to still be like their mothers ? Doing everything for kids and family.

Mothers and mothers in law in general ( even though they raised us to be successful career women with choices ) don't have a whole lot of sympathy as it seems a raise to the bottom and ' how much harder ' it was for them.

I realise I'm generalising

The majority of people I know, the man works full time, the mum is either a full time SAHM or works part time. The man does at least 50% or more of home/kid stuff when he is not at work (I say more because if the mum is tired after being with them all day, the dad often does the majority when he gets home from work, which is the correct thing to do to support his wife/girlfriend). Yes I do know some lazy scumbag dads, but it is a minority. I am sorry those seem to be the men that you know.

But that is still picking up the slack. Most of the work is extra practical and mental load stuff around the kids not the husband.

I know. I think by the time it resorts to that, the anger and resentment is so much that the marriage is probably over anyway.

It really isn't. The research and statistics are clear on this. In all countries, women do more than men. How much more varies from country to country, but women always do more.

Its unusual enough for men to do their equal share that a UK newspaper journalist recently did an article bragging about her Doesband ( who just gets on and does stuff for the kids and house). If that were the majority experience, that would not have been an article.

'Have it all' feminism is a bit of a con if you ask me.

Starting in the 1980s women were told that we could have the career, the kids, a slim body, never-aging face...but put all the onus on us to make it happen.

No one ever mentioned to men that the mass entry of women into the middleclas/professional workplace would mean that they would have to step up domestic chores. That is because the male-owned corporations who pushed this 'have it all' fantasy didn't fancy themselves as part time house husbands.

It's impossible to give 100% to a career and 100% to motherhood at the same time. We were sold a lie. No wonder women are disappointed.

In the words of Johnny rotten "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

These are actually the worst types of posts. By claiming all men are these useless partners all you’re doing is convincing women to stay in shit relationships, raising kids with shit fathers and forever picking up the slack.
Plenty of men do 50/50. They make lunchboxes, they cook they do the food shop. They are on the school whatsapp. They take their kids out alone. They hoover. They do all the basic shit that needs to be done because they are functioning adults, capable of holding down a big man job and therefore more than capable of taking an afternoon off to bring their child to the GP.

Seriously raise your standards and expand your social circle if the idea of a father making a cheese sandwich blows your mind so much.

What a depressing life.

Absolutely spot on. It’s not a bit of a con, it’s a massive one.

I agree.

How many times do those with husbands who aren't useless have to say it before they are believed or don't get asked gotcha questions like aha! they might bath the baby but I bet they don't think to buy baby shampoo?

Spot on.

But who on earth came up with this message? I don't recall any corporations advertising this. And why did so many women believe the (quite obvious) nonsense? I didn't and I'm dumfounded by the naivety to be honest. But then I've lived my life quite impervious to a lot of media BS and have just ploughed my own furrow.

Usually if something looks too good to be true then it most likely is.

It reminds me a bit of when other women try to bond with me over diets and "naughty" food and guilty eating. I love food (but they presumably don't think it to look at me) and have no time for that tedious nonsense so I've been on the receiving end of some strange comments and behaviour when I don't play along.

I find women bonding over how useless their partners are just as tedious. It feels like disordered eating/hating food and disordered relationships/hating their partners are two neuroses that women are expected to maintain in a self-flagellating kind of way.

Bollocks to that. Enjoy the food you need to live and enjoy the partner you choose to accompany you in life. It doesn't have to be shit.

Not everyone is as intellectual, free thinking and independently minded as you are.

You are also an outlier. Study after study have shown that people of all levels, including the highly educated and top IQ percentiles, are heavily influenced by societal norms as they are imposed on us by mass media (they used to be imposed on us by the village customs and the Church, but in the last hundred years or so, mass media has taken the place of these institutions, which has had an atomising effect on society).

In one Harvard study, participants who insisted defensively that they were intellectuals and impervious to mass advertising, actually turned out to be the quickest to recognise certain advertising slogans and jingles even though they said they had never seen the adverts in question. My point being, everyone is influenced by what the dominant discourse is telling us.

Beginning in the 80s, a few things happened in the West. Debt became cheaper, inflation accelerated, blue collar jobs became devalued as manufacturing and skilled labour went to Asia. At the same time the mass media began pumping this idea of the shoulder padded career woman who could have it all and still be beautiful and desirable. We see examples in the films, books and advertisements of the time (plenty of examples but cba to go thru them - you're clearly highly intelligent so you'll know what I mean, or, since you are impervious to mass media, you can perhaps read about them in books). At the same time, childbirth and mothering AS CRUCIAL FULL TIME JOBS IN THEMSELVES began to be subtly devalued. The housewife, the housefrau, the plump little woman indoors. Who wants that?

So this meant that women were forced to enter the workforce because the menfolk's jobs no longer paid enough to support the family. At the same time, mass media made working desirable - as long as women looked sexy and thin whilst doing it, and also flawlessly managed the household (domestic service having disappeared as a skilled trade some 30 years earlier).

It was a confluence of economic and global forces, enthusiastically embraced by mass media whose corporate sponsors saw a great opportunity to flog more stuff to women who were desperately trying to do and have it all. No single person came up with the idea. Forces of history.

It’s tedious isn’t it?!

I married a functioning adult who doesn’t expect to be babied and who can clean his own home and parent his own children without guidance or cajoling. That’s it really and I feel a bit shit that I have to justify that he isn’t useless just because some other men are.

But who on earth came up with this message?

It was a basic tenet of second generation feminism.

Why do you think women "believed the nonsense" and were not just trying to have an interesting life and a good job? All the women in my family always worked, it wasn't a case of belief in some kind of ideology. I never considered any other path from my teens in the 1990s than making the most of education and getting a good job paying a good salary, that was just what you did. What would the alternative message be, don't bother with any of that girls and hope you marry someone rich?

Choose partner or husband

Choose to have children (not including those with medical issues)

Choose employment

There are options

Nobody is perfect

I am happy with my choices

If you are unhappy, make some changes

So this meant that women were forced to enter the workforce because the menfolk's jobs no longer paid enough to support the family.

Working class women were always in the workforce. Working class men's jobs rarely paid enough to support the family.

My mum worked evenings to make ends meet and my dad did everything for us four kids while she was out. My mum always says he was better at it than her!

Exactly. The capitalist version of feminism whereby parenting and caring and spending time with family aren't considered important is a huge part of it (and seems far more rife on Mumsnet than anywhere I've seen).

The feminism I grew up with was about creating a better society focused on sustainability, community and cooperation, and on men being carers and parents as much as women are.

Working class cultures are better known for community, cooperation and a sense of valuing social cohesion and support, too.

It's impossible to give 100% to a career and 100% to motherhood at the same time. We were sold a lie. No wonder women are disappointed.

It's not necessary either. A woman on another thread claims to spend 1 to 2 hours a day researching on the internet for the first few years of her child's life!

Wtf!

In the UK, historically lots changed for women after WW1 & WW2

Women's votes
Women's equal pay
Women's equal rights
Contraception
Better health & education & employment
More opportunities
More choices

Researching what?

And there was me thinking that feminism was about female agency. Go figure.

You don't need to be a free thinking intellectual and I'm certainly none of those things.

So I'm an outlier. How sad is that and what it says about everyday folk. Like lemmings.

Depends how you define working class. If you're talking about post industrial revolution then yes. But the IR and everything that came after is still only a tiny blip in human history and we are still getting our heads around the implications. The IR disrupted millennia of human society and we're yet to find a way to make peace with it and get a functioning relationship with it as a species.

Prior to that, there was no clear demarcation between home and work. If you were a peasant or small yeoman farmer's wife, you and your husband and your extended fmaily all lived and worked the same land. You as the woman would do the child rearing with the support of the other women in your family. You would do some farm work and also the very important work of food preparation (including rendering the food safe to eat), sewing, textile work etc. In fact this state of affairs persisted in the rest of the world until WW2, including the part of the world I am from. And still persists in so-called 'developing nations'.

The effects of the IR on the perceievd role of women in society is massive and needs a full thread to itself. Anyway my previous post was intended to refer mainly to middle class and white collar women, guess I didn't make that clear.

Coming from a working class background, education and getting a well-paid job were the way to a better life, so I didn't have to do back breaking manual work as well as bringing up children and be dead in my 40s.