Feminism sold a lie - Women, today, are worse off than ever

[ConservativeC2]

Listening to the women I work with, it's been interesting to hear their views about feminism and they are not happy. We are all millennial age so not too young, not too old and I keep hearing that it's the millennial generation of women that have absolutely lost out the most.

I think feminism initially promoted some idea of independence, equality and choice. Phrases like 'men hold all the money and power' at the time were very emotive whilst not entirely true. The correct statement then (and still now) is some men hold all the money and power. Most men back in the 50s-70s worked very long hours and spent pretty much all their money on their family. It was hard for everyone, but I think women were more empowered then than now.

In contrast to today, most of the women my age have to work. Whilst feminism promotes choice, most of them do not actually have a choice today. Most men today do not earn enough to run a household which means most women have to work. The worst part is they still do a larger share of the domestic work and childcare. So I think women now have it worse than ever - it's not just me, my female colleagues feel the same way. They've come to point in life where they want to start a family but they know they will have to come back to work.

Now it's all to do with feminism. There are other factors which has driven up the cost of living (inflation, property prices, profit extraction from multinational corporates etc).

Haven’t read whole thread and someone’s probably already said this, but your OP reads very middle class background. Every woman in my working class family going back generations has had to work whilst raising kids.

This is not a new millennial thing for us. My life is better and I have more opportunities than all the women in my family before me.

Do they though? Do women REALLY have a choice these days???

Whilst women had little choice years ago and couldn't work/didn't work, and now they're allowed, many women now HAVE to work because they don't have the choice to NOT work. Some women would much rather stay at home with the children, and be a homemaker.

Yes, yes, yes.... I know, some of you will say you 'couldn't think of anything WORSE' 🙄 but some women would rather not HAVE to go out to work, along with STILL doing most of the wifework/domestic drudgery/childcare. And they do.

Don't anyone pull the 'husband/partner does 50% of everything' card, because the majority of men do not. And they still expect the wife/the mother of their children to go out to work though (as well as picking up most of the domestic work!)

Feminism has fucked over many women, because just like our mother/grandmothers/great grandmothers and so on, many of us STILL have no choice. The difference is many women today have no choice but to WORK. As well as taking on all the domestic duties, childcare, and gruntwork.

Yeah, are women REALLY better off? 🙄I agree with the OP - feminism has sold women a LIE, a bit fat LIE. Some women are buying it too.

Sad.

Oh, and in my family, the majority of women in past generations (pre 1970s) did not work, (once they were married,) and they were working class. So it's nonsense that all working class married women have always worked. They did (part time) when the kids had left home, for a bit of money of their own, but many did not work until they were 45-50+. I know it doesn't suit some people to hear that, but it's true. It's nonsense that ONLY middle class and upper class married women stayed at home!!!

Well I was talking about the “choosing not to have kids “ part.

As for the other part, I dunno , women in my family always worked. The unlucky lot on the fields, now that definitely wasn’t fun after being awake at 4 to do housework, bake break, tend to the animals and kids, then 10 hours in the field in the scorching sun, back home, cook, kids, animals, crash and repeat. No retirement. The end is death.
The lucky ones , jobs in the city, nurse, factories , office etc. Some worked harder than others. Not a lot of mothering went on though.

I didn’t do everything even when I was a SAHM. Why? Not because OH is some amazing unicorn(he can be and was at times a twat in fact). It was because I didn’t want to, so I didn’t. I haven’t cooked for him in years for example. No one has died. The sky didn’t fall over.

This is a lovely gracious taking of an alternative viewpoint

If you want to stay at home, you have the choice to marry someone rich, or make do and mend like a pp on this thread.

For the rest of it, the solution is to make men better. Not to whinge because the work of feminism isn't yet done.

I'm 57. I've always worked. My mother always worked - even when we were little, she worked two nights a week in a teacher training college, teaching the teachers of the future. Later on she went back to full time teaching in a secondary school.

And my grandmother on my father's science was a research chemist - she and my grandfather both worked.

While it's true that I didn't have a choice about working because my husband wasn't a high earner, I wanted to work. It would have been nice to have had the flexible options that are around these days, but at least they are there for the women of today.

Absolutely. My working class grandmothers and great-grandmothers worked AND had children to raise. They just weren’t allowed to make much money compared to men doing the same job.

Well by that token they had no choice beforehand, but were forced to stay home. I bet there are more SAHMs now than there were breadwinning women before.

Again, I don't believe feminism is about "choice". Feminism is about rights and opportunities. We are (more!) equal in that sense now, but it comes with more responsibility: like financially supporting ourselves/our families.

And yes, of course some couples decide it is more beneficial to split the income earning and the house/children-caring into two distinct roles, and that is fine. But that fact that you can pick with overwhelming success which sex does which indicates to me that we still need feminism!

Yup. I was a SAHM until DD started reception for various reasons. We didn’t have a 3 bed house, two cars or a foreign holiday every year. I didn’t marry rich.Then I started looking for a job because I wanted to, again for various reasons. There was no pressure or expectation to, OH never threw in my face that I’m not contributing financially. I could’ve kept being a SAHM because we managed, I just didn’t want to.

I'm sorry but I think you are not thinking this through. Its all about CHOISE. You can chose not to work, or to work, to marry, not to marry, to have kids or to have an abortion. You can chose to be a single mum or to be childless. Our grand-grand mothers had nothing like this. They had zero choice. They had to marry, to have kids, to stay at home and be nice pretty housewives. They were not allowed to have "men's jobs" and were look down as being less intelligent then men.

There is nothing wrong in not wanting to achieve much professionally and be a housewife. Each to their own, but I dont particularly want to be SAHM, have 3 kids and be totally depended on my OH. Thanks fuck I have a choice to do as I please.

That’s so sad! I don’t really know what to say!

Jesus no, god no.

I'm a single parent with one DD. I earn well, own my own house which I paid for myself with no man's help, have several foreign holidays per year, buy myself whatever I want (don't mean yachts obv), support my daughter and myself comfortably. No man out of choice, no need to bicker, compromise, nag, adjust to anyone's needs/wants, it's my way or the high way. Have a fuckboy for sex and companionship when the need arises. Can have one night stands should I choose to.

What would I be in the 50s? A downtrodden housewife with a lord and master, and no say? A crazy 'spinster' cat lady? A 'village bike' or what's that charming expression? A woman who everyone pities with 'awwwww.... can't get and keep a man poor dear..'?

Hell no, thanks. Life couldn't be better.

Being a homemaker 70 years ago was hard physical work. Washing by hand, making clothes, rabbits/chickens in the back garden for meat and eggs, loads of cooking, ironing with a coal filled iron, no central heating, no showers, etc
It was fun for the rich - much like today. Housewifes from less affluent background did backbreaking hard work every day. they didn’t spend much time with their children.

You can stay at home today quite easily if you are ok with the lifestyle of a not-rich family in the 50s. for luxuries (shop bought clothes, shop bought food etc), you have to have money.
What you can’t have is all modern luxuries and no work if you didn’t marry rich.

@ScrollingLeaves The SAHM mums I know:
One married to someone working for the church.
The other to a primary school teacher.

How old are they? I think it may be a bit easier for people older than me as house prices were not so bad 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Not that I would ever receive this offer, but if a woman offered to be a SAHM, I would have to decline on financial reasons alone. I imagine that most men would be in the same boat.

The point was men could afford to run a household a long time ago and now then can't. This means women have to work to work to ensure all those costs are met. This was my point, they had the choice before and it's pretty much that they don't have the choice.

Yes, that is nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with economics and politics. The poorer you are, the less choices you have.

@Hohumdedum But I know multiple people whose husbands don't earn megabucks who have managed to be a sahm until their kids started school.

I don't think being a SAHM for 5 years is really being a SAHM. To me, that's just a career break for the purposes of raising children. A SAHM is someone who is a SAHM for a long period of time (decades).

All over the western world, Europe and even Russia women gained a lot in the 20th century.

No, come let’s not be petty here! We are having a grown up debate.

That’s the way things were. We got through! Is my life worse for it? No! So many speak about luck on MN. Well let’s add choices, as you have stated, choices you have made. Keep making good choices because only you hold your destiny in your hands.

I do believe in hard work. When my DD tells
me how hard it is and I see how hard she is working to gain the life that she wants and is capable of achieving, I gently remind her that she is still young and no one of her age has what she wants yet and in many cases has what she has.

We, gen Xs, and the generations that preceded us, have worked very hard to provide for, support and maintain families. There is still much to do.

We did it on less 40k in the South East

You're insane if you think women have it worse now than in previous generations. Our lives have become incrementally better with each generation, and you only have to go back a few generations before you get to a point where our lives now are immeasurably better than they were then.

You're also insane if you think women didn't work in previous generations. The vast majority of them did and it was usually very hard work indeed.

I think it was great when it still felt like there was a choice. But with more and more women working, two incomes meant more money - and more money allowed house prices to go up and up.

Now most women are back to not having a choice again but it's a shame we couldn't keen the middle ground - where women could choose to work, or be SAHM's and still afford to live.

I feel very lucky that I got to be a SAHM and sad that it is so poorly valued and becoming less and less of an option. It certainly was a huge positive for autistic DS who benefitted hugely from having me at home.

Define an insane opinion , to quote @VoodooQualities. I was born in the 1960s and women definitely had it worse then. MiL couldn’t even get divorced from an abusive husband, or work after marriage, children or not. Actually it’s quite a regressive view, and based on no understanding of history.

Agreed. My gran had to spend most of her life married to an abusive man, she had no education or career. Only his death in early sixties freed her. Her sister had no kids, which she was heartbroken about,no fertility treatment or IVF in their day.

Its not an failure its us recognising that your challenges aren't unique their just a variation of what we and our mothers and grandmothers went through only you have more rights and legal protections than we had because we fought for them and many of us continue that fight.
The real problem is your generation dont realise how bad it really was for us

That part. There were always many women with various means or married into riches who in fact were given a chance to invent, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, converse, earn and spend from modest to big money, all the way down to Rome, Ancient Egypt, Israel etc. Read some history, Cleopatra, does it ring a bell??