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).

A woman who depends on a man for money will never be his equal, and he will never see her as an equal (regardless of what he might say!).

Back in the day (which you appear to think was so idyllic!) working class women did work, but they were paid less than men for doing the same job. Usually, women had no choice but to marry, because they couldn’t earn a living on their own. Once they were married, they couldn’t leave, regardless of how shit or abusive their husband was, because they couldn’t support themselves. Given that almost half of marriages end in divorce, do you really think that it’s a good idea to go back to that?!

@MidnightMeltdown Absolutely this. As a feminist I would never rely on a man financially or expect him to provide for me.

Even the existence of the term family man says it all.

what is the female equivalent - a mother?

men can have a wife and children and yet they don’t necessarily participate - there is a special term for those who value their children and wife and (even a bit)in family life - to be different than a husband and father earn the special badge of family man.

I have never heard of a family woman☺️

This describes my grandparents. Sort of.

On only my grandfather's income they could have 2 children, live in a 3-bed semi, run a motor and take a yearly holiday.

Fewer mod cons, of course - a coal boiler, a small fridge with an ice box, a twin-tub washing machine, and a 3-ring cooker. That was it for technology. No phone or TV until much later, and then both were rented (the TV was black and white with a 9-inch screen).

The nice semi-detached house was rented from the company my grandfather worked for - so if he lost his job, or rocked the boat at all at work, they'd lose their house. The same applied if my grandmother rocked the boat in the local community , the company wouldn't have looked kindly on any scandal. The whole of the back garden was used to grow fruit and veg and keep hens to reduce their food bills - looking after all that, preserving the harvests and cooking were entirely down to my grandmother. As was all cleaning, other housework and house painting.

The motor was a motorbike, not a motorcar. With a sidecar for the children.

The holiday was a week camping in a barn in Suffolk, and shooting rabbits and pigeons to save on shopping. They got fish and chips as a treat on the last night.

Clothes were home made. So were rugs for the bare lino floors. By my grandmother, of course.

There were no clubs to drive the children to. They walked to school.

The reason my grandmother didn't work wasn't because she didn't want to, or because their life was so luxurious she wouldn't know what to do with the money. It was because she was a nurse. And when nurses got married they were immediately and automatically dismissed. She couldn't get an alternative job because my grandfather forbade it - it would make him look bad if he weren't the sole provider.

My grandfather was a decent husband by the standards of the time - not violent, not a drunk, not a spendthrift. He bought my grandmother flowers every Friday. But on Saturday evening he went to the pub, and she couldn't join him for a night out because women weren't allowed in.

That may be your dream life, OP, but it's not mine.

You and your co-workers seem to have a very shallow view of the world and feminism.

Let's forget about marital rape, child marriage and lack of a vote for now and think about how women were working long before they were allowed their own bank accounts.

This, and often because they had to deal with the 'broken pay packet'. Call it feminism or just common sense but never let it be forgotten that paying family allowance to the woman dealing with the broken pay packet was resisted.

So do I. One of my female ancestors was murdered by her second husband because she dared to leave him over DV.

What year is this that you're comparing current times to unfavourably?

The majority of women have always had to work. There was a period just after the second world war (when women were pushed out of employment to make way for men) when a huge number had children and stayed at home. But many did jobs anyway - just not careers. My grandmother, for instance, ran a shop for a few years, took in washing, and cleaned homes in the evening) it was a blip, and came with an inability to leave abusive husbands.

What changed wasn't that women started working when they couldn't before, what happened was women got to pursue careers that were closed tot hem before. Careers that paid more (especially once equal pay became law). And then men and women used that money to buy houses, then cars, then foreign holidays. - This is what feminism has got us, the ability to be on an equal footing when deciding what to spend the money on instead of having to beg our husbands to consider what we'd like.

The cost of living skyrocketing has made things difficult, but that's not really down to feminism. It's down to the cost of the second world war, a world in which huge populations are gaining the skills and technology to rival us in the things we used to lead the world in, the loss of billions of pounds a year in wealth we used to take from India, and a long term and ongoing failure to build enough housing to meet demand.

This is why generations have very different experiences.

If you didn't have feminism, your wouldn't be able to buy a house on one salary. There still wouldn't be enough housing. So house prices would still have rocketed above average household income. Possibly it would be worse because women would probably have had more children and the population would have grown even faster. We would still have suffered from a deluded aristocratic leadership that siphons money away from the people for the elites, probably even worse as no new ideas to get things moving. China would still have grown and undercut all our manufacturing jobs. Etc. None of this is down to feminism.

There are certains basics in life parents need to do ie feed, clothe, do school drop off and pick up, and then housework, book appointments etc but there are also things one parent has decided has to be done ie a child must have a massive wardrobe so their child is not judged, one parent has to hoover 7 days a week as they label themselves as ''OCD'' or their child has to take up horse riding 5 days a week because their BFF does it and they dont want their child to miss out

so how much of what both parents need to do is needed and how much is one parent deciding it has to be done?

I can't see that needing to earn a living is some sort of huge imposition. It's much less soul-destroying than being dependent on a partner.

I have lost count of the amounts of poster's on here that usually start 'my partner wants to me to stay home and look after the children' type posts, I wonder if their partner needs to think for them too

My grandmother divorced my grandfather in the 1950s. She moved home with her parents. He was not required to support their child (my mum) at all financially. And he didn’t. Granny worked but it was socially very difficult being a divorced woman. One tiny example of the great strides made by feminism. And previous posters have given you so many more. I also think your framing that feminism is about women not working is the major flaw in your argument. It was always about women having choices. Over their bodies, their money, their employment.

The worst part is they still do a larger share of the domestic work and childcare.

so whose fault is it that women do most of the housework and childcare? Countless women accept the behaviour and then come on here and moan about it. They need to get much more choosey about who they settle down with instead of turning a blind eye to it when their menfolk want to go off on lads weekends, spend hours in the gym, or gaming all night to shirk their responsibility while the women have to do the adult work. You get the lowest form of behaviour you are prepared to accept.

If women get more choosy about men, the human race will probably die out.

Most men have most power most of the time. Their complaints confirms this. There are various levels and types of power. The lack of mechanisms to support women with children is itself an issue of power differences and a hallmark of capitalism which itself is driven by corporations largely l owned and managed by men. A woman having to do the bulk of work at home compared to her male partner is an issue of domestic power. The issue of a man working too hard to have work life balance is an issue of power and the core of capitalism. So may be it's more complex but that doesn't mean women had it better when they had more limited choices on whether to work or not, what jobs they could take up, hardly any maternity leave, where it was more often than not considered ok to beat a woman and to always blame them for being sexually attacked than now. Anyone who thinks so can always move to Afghanistan where women do live under those conditions. We can have a swapping system. One in one out

Indeed. It amazes me how people get to have such a poor and one dimensional "understanding " of feminism. As I have said in my post, if they think women's rights ans their empowerment is so terrible they can move to Afghanistan. The poison of the tiktok tradwife runs deep

What is this op drivelling on about? Women have always worked both my grandmothers did and one was born in 1909. At least we get paid properly for our work now thanks to feminists..

Or would you prefer to experience what my great grandmother did - one of the first women to go to university one of the best in her year. Only she wasn’t actually given a degree just a permit to teach 🙄. You want to go back to that?! You fool.

It’s not feminism you’re angry with but capitalism.

There are two answers to the mental load - find a partner who you can equally share your life with or outsource. Both afforded by being a feminist.

So does mine! There's no point complaining about the failure of feminism if you had a free choice of partner and you picked a bloke who doesn't pull his weight and facilitated him in doing so.

No, I don’t think it sold a lie.

Women foolishly believed men might grow up and share the responsibility of the domestic labour. And foolishly believed absent fathers would be forced to pay what is fair for the cost of bringing up a child.

This didn’t happen.

But we can choose to not have children and we can choose to not become carers.

This is precisely why the birth rate will continue to drop off a cliff. The younger women are not buying into any of it. It’s utterly thankless.

This BS is what you get from people who have no effing clue about how life was back in the day.

About time

The first one yes except most women do go in assuming they will be treated as an equal often they discover that’s not the case once they are pregnant/have children. And because the cost of living is so high they can’t afford to leave.
The second one is only relevant to those who can afford it.

Where do you live?