Do you expect other women to agree with you when you talk about the plight of women ?

[amijust]

And what do you think about the ones that just stay silent ? Every time it comes up ?

Just wondering, as I've noticed someone in my life is always entirely silent when these convos come up.

How would you feel about someone like that ?

A couple of examples that have come up :

• mental load being all on the woman a lot.

• housework being a woman's problem a lot to the time.

• at work, taking maternity leave and having kids often hurts a woman's career.

• working from home, isn't good for women as a whole because it means a lot to women pick up even more housework and tend to work from home more to ferry kids around, this in turn hurts their careers etc.

• being the default parent.

• workplaces not being set up for parents in general.

• women's health problems being largely ignored. Women being told to suck up extreme period pain for example.

• when women show emotion, being branded as hysterical etc etc

These are just some conversations that have come up around another woman I know ( no kids yet ). Other women have agreed / disagreed or engaged on the topics. This person stays entirely silent.

If she’s not got children then she can’t relate! And if she’s struggled with infertility it must be very upsetting actually to hear that all the time.

I don’t have kids and there’s only so many times you can say “wow yes that must be annoying” or similar before it gets boring.

Alternatively, she thinks the husbands are useless but doesn’t want to say it.

She might be prefer light hearted chit chat

I don't contribute much to those conversations because my DH does half so a lot of it doesn't apply to me.

I was once at a baby group while on mat leave and sat quietly while the other women (laughingly) complained about how they couldn't even trust their DH's to dress their child properly, or tidy the kitchen while they did bedtime, or look after the baby for half an hour while she has a bath etc "haha aren't men useless, what's he like!"
A dick. A dick is what he's like. But I'm not going to tell you that.

If it was about women's health issues or something, then I'd have more input I guess.

I genuinely only encounter most of those things on here, where so many posters seem to be married to utter pigs. It's why Mn is a depressing revelation to me a lot of the time. I don't think I've given housework more than a passing thought, ever. I'm not the 'default parent' if I'm at work, I'm at work, whether I'm at home or in the office, and woe betide anyone who interrupts unless there's an actual emergency. And 'mental load' comes under the category of 'life admin' to me it seems to be a lot of fuss about dentist visits and remembering people's birthdays.

I wouldn't think anything of it personally. There are a few reasons why someone would stay silent, I'm not about to jump to any conclusions.

Some people find it difficult to discuss things they haven't experienced. Many women don't understand how mothers are treated.

Is this person your mother OP?

Don't get me wrong, there are things that absolutely constitute a 'plight' specific to women -- trafficking, rape and the pathetic prosecution rate, abortion rights in some countries, access to contraception, education etc, extant pay gaps, recent historical abuses like mother and baby homes and the Magdalene laundries, the whole history of sex-based inequality up to and including the erosion of the legal and biological category of 'woman'. But no, I don't think feeling responsible for housework because you married someone who doesn't 'see dirt' is a 'plight'.

She's probably thinking that's why she doesn't want kids but doesn't want to upset you

People aren't obliged to engage on topics unless they want to, including 'the plight of women'. Maybe she doesn't agree with the points raised and wants to avoid awkwardness, or possibly she simply finds the subject uninteresting or has nothing to add.

If you're inferring that she's not sufficiently sympathetic to the Sisterhood or something, what can you even do about it? Best just to stop bringing up these things, unless you enjoy talking to yourself with an audience.

Yes because it’s the women that are privileged in a patriarchal society isn’t it 🙄

Maybe she thinks that women in patriarchal countries would give their hind teeth for a bit of mental load and housework moaning and why you keep ruining a get together by engineering plight out of niggles?

Before having my ds in my 40s, I would have done the same. Since then I've changed my mind over taking maternity leave hurting a woman's career.

The rest,

• don't do more than half the house work, ignore it.
• mental load - hardly an issue for 1 dc
• wfa - get a different job
• being the default parent - it was what I expected
• workplaces are set up by the company for the company. not a surprise
• I've never been branded hysterical
• I've never had my health problems ignored

My ex proved useless so I dumped him, reorganised my & ds life, and got on with it. I'm happy with that. Life is much easier without a man in tow. I don't waste time analysing it. It's dealt with.

I wouldn't automatically expect other women to be supportive of women's rights or sympathetic to women's issues. Internalised misogyny is very strong. On this site the other day there was a thread that turned into a whole bunfight about why feminists were unreasonable.

That's a different thing from your particular complaint OP, because - as a fully paid-up feminist - I don't even think I agree with you about half your points, and I certainly don't think they're the most pressing issues for feminists in 2024. You're very focused on the domestic sphere but you're mistaken if you think those are issues that affect all women.

I'm a lazy slattern who avoids chores where possible so that's one way to solve mental load and housework problems.

I would argue that WFH is extremely good for women (certainly it has been for this woman). Flexible working is certainly beneficial to parents, and for women in male-dominated industries, WFH means we're judged more on our actual output than the bro-bonding that can take place in offices.

I'm child-free so, sorry not sorry, I truly don't care about default parent stuff.

The thing is all this domestic stuff can only be fixed by the individual. If you want to do less housework than... do less housework. No one is going to step in and sort out the mental load for you. There's no point starting campaigns or setting up activist groups for middle-class women stressing over the hoovering. I've gone on demos and marches to support refugee women at the sharp end of this country's hostile environment and incarcerated in Yarl's Wood. In my career I've shaped messaging and communications to get away from toxic gender stereotypes. But if someone started complaining about the mental load to me I would just shrug.

Any conversation where there is an expectation that you will agree rather than a genuine conversation would be met with silence from me.

How do you respond to the women who disagree? Maybe the one who doesn’t comment can’t be arsed with the hassle of disagreeing and being told she’s wrong.

When friends or groups of female acquaintances I have list the faults of their male partners around parenting or housework it can occasionally turn into an “all men x u z” discussion and I tend to stay silent as it helps no one to voice that my husband is a brilliant equal partner and a wonderful dad. You’d be accused of being insensitive or smug. Who needs that.

Same. I can't stand that weird female bonding thing where everyone's expected to slag off their husband. Often goes hand in hand with the weird female bonding thing over "naughty" disordered eating and calorie obsession.

It's just a discussion isn't it, I find it weird that someone would stay entirely silent every time it comes up.

Some people talk about their experiences if they differ, others join in. It's not an issue to disagree although most women in real life would absolutely not disagree that these things suck and a lot of women are in these situations unfortunately.

It's not weird if she didn't stay silent about martyrism once and learned her lesson

She doesn’t agree with you or isn’t interested but doesn’t want to argue with you.

So staying silent politely until you move on.

It's not an issue to disagree although .....

There you go. You have just shown it is indeed an issue to disagree. No wonder she is staying silent (and probably internally eye rolling every time you bleat on).

There are some things I just can't be arsed engaging with the whole gender thing for instance is one, if someone brings it up no matter what their view on it is in relation to mine I stay quiet. Im just fed up of it. Id presume that she was the same, can predict how the conversation is going to go and just can't be bothered. I'm a laid back, possibly verging on lazy person, I save my energy for things that excite me.

Maybe it doesn't apply to her? Very little of your list applies to me so unless you wanted me to say things such as ''The mental load isn't all on me'', I'd probably just keep quiet too.

But you could share that. It would be good to share that. Some of the group talk about that.

What a depressing response to OP’s question.

Well, there you have it, two pages of MN saying women are fine and there is no need to discuss the ‘plight’ of women, nor, God forbid, care about it or have any opinion on it. You must be boring is the only answer 🙄

Yanbu op. Women stay silent because either they don’t care (rare), don’t know or don’t have the debating skills, or they do know and are too scared to admit it.