Are you a feminist?

[spacedonkey]

I was born in 1968, so I'm one generation on from the 1960s/1970s women's rights movement generation. Growing up I was more focused on hating Thatch than women's issues - it seemed the battle for equality had been won. But it hasn't. And increasingly I find myself reaching for the dungarees, so annoyed do I get about the continuing inequalities women experience (still paid less than men, getting sacked for being pregnant, still doing most of the unpaid work in the home, not to mention the tyranny of "beauty" etc).

Where is feminism these days?

Ah MI - in our house the bag packing, kit sorting and loading the car in the morning with the right combination of it all is DH's job!

And - he is indeed very good at it

However, he blew it all by cleaning the kitchen and saying 'well that's all done for you'!

Cue blind rage of fury!!!!

Seriously, I would love to be hopeless on remembering things in the house. It would be very nice to have the social licence to do so, while still garnering Good Parent brownie points for, er, just being there.

I remember asking my mum what a feminist was when I was about 12 and she didn't know whether it was 'someone very feminine or someone quite butch dear, shall we look it up?' and . I generally think labels are quite important but I suppose discussions about the word feminist could be considered a red herring and maybe starting to use words like 'gender equality' instead maybe we'd (I mean women and the cause of equality) get a better response, i.e. not of the 'oh no, I'm not a feminist' type responses. It still makes me sigh though, I can't understand any woman NOT being a feminist.

I believe a woman's place is in the home

and in the pub

and on a beach of course

Oh yes, my DH does that "I did the insert mundane household chore for you" thing too.

As if I own all the household chores. Silly boy. He did it for himself.

thinking about it I actually live a kind of 50's life but with a DH who believes I'm his equal (or even more equal than him) in many ways

I suppose true equality would only be acheived if I didn't have this opportunity to give up my extremely challenging career to be a full time SAHM (and I was the higher earner) .. or if DH had exactly the same opportunity .. and whilst I believe he does I think that's where the fight lies because many SAHMs don't truly accept the bloke in the playgroup .. I've seen Dads being mollycoddled, ignored or praised but rarely totally accepted as equals etc

WWW - it is sad, but I think for many women they just can't see it as being relevant to their lives. How will being a feminist help when they are not in a position to change the power base in their relationship?

You can only exercise choices if those around you are willing to accomodate them. If I decide not to cook dinner any more and feed the kids, who will do it?

If DPs storm out of the house because they don't have ironed shirts I'll just take the least painful route and iron the shirt.

You only need to read the posts on here to see how disempowered many women actually are

But Twiglett, I thought a woman's place was on mumsnet.

Absolutely I am a feminist. The feminism of old achieved, at least close to, equality of opportunities in the workplace, government, and equality at home in that men do participate more in bringing up children these days. However, the biological fact is that women, not men, have children. Feminism for me these days is campaigning for a society where, should I want to go to work after having children I can expect 1) to find good quality and affordable childcare 2) flexible hours to enable me to be a mother as well as have a job 3) not to be discriminated for having a family in interviews and career progression and 4) to be paid fairly for the work I do. In this respect we still have a long, long way to go!

I used to have a City job - and discovered in 2002 that my less qualified, less experienced male colleague doing the exact same job was being paid 2.5 times more than me. I left.

I really hated anything to do with the term "feminism" for years because when I was little, my stepmother was obsessed with it & went to all these meetings & had slogans & posters on the walls -- "Husbands are not bosses. Children are not jobs". I think she may have even burned her bra! It seemed to define her personality & she became quite aggressive. I do believe in equal pay & the right to maternity leave, amongst many other issues...

but saying you believe in equality is really rather vanilla isn't it? like motherhood and apple pie, I mean who could really disagree that equality is a Good Thing.
it all falls apart when you get to the detail. if equality means that men and women get to be equally tied to the workplace, that women and men doing "domestic" work and in particular is equally undervalued, or to have an equal say in electing a very narrow choice of political parties representing a very limited range of policies, then I say no thanks to that. We need to think more radically.
one of the missed opportunities of the first waves of feminism was the failure to address the needs of children and the needs of the heart.

Er...which first wave are you referring to, HC? You can go back an awful long way...can't remember what Mizz Wollstonecraft says about children, I do admit.

I would argue that that's at least in part because women have been (and in many ways continue to be) defined in terms of children and/or their reproductive capacities, so the really radical move was pointing out that we have other aspects as well.

Soapbox, I agree, many women here and irl are disempowered. And this sort of follows on fromn the thread the other day about 'whose fault is it if men don't pull their weight' doesn't it? I do know though that while women are still paid less for work of the same value and while only 18% of MPS are women then feminism still has work to do and that work imo is relevant to Ms Average: if the law says that she has to be paid the same as a man/is able to access education/is allowed to vote/is able to prosecute if her husband hits her then it can affect her daily choices and her life.

I did say first waveS actually MI... I don't disagree that there was a lot of ground to cover. getting the vote, equal pay, etc. but I think it is a mistake to concentrate on achieving equality with men because - IMHO - just because men have it doesn't mean I want it, and I don;t think success should be defined by what men believe to be desirable, necessarily.
am not a great one for preserving the status quo

And let us all not forget free contraception for all, not just married women with their husband's permission. Without control of reprodution all the rest would just be pie in the sky.

but I don't think that women treat men equally

(ooo subversive)

I think the relationships between the sexes are completely skewed but do think that is because fundamentally men hold the economic and social power.

While that may well be true, there is a world of a difference in the imact the women's unfairness has on men compared to the other way around, since men still have more financial power over women. Sexual discrimination happens bith ways, but since most bosses are still men, women are affected more often to a greater degree

Thank you MI, much more pithily put!

So what do we all think still needs to happen then? What should be feminism's goals?

not in our household for a very long time

and the fact that I can say in all honesty that I had more economic power means that something is going right

or is that just an I'm alright jack kind of attitude .. because I honestly have no personal experience of inequality really as I grew up in School, Uni and Career I have seen no great sexism other than on a social level.. and those who did appear sexist were laughed out of court in my happy utopian world ..