what has feminism ever done for us?

[SenoraPostrophe]

right girls, it's timne for a proper debate which isn';t about blardy weaning.

the motion is this:

feminism has not really acheived anything. women got the vote and were accepted in the workplace because of the world wars and not because of reason. Later, we accepted careers, but ended up neither having our cake nor eating it what with all the housework and childcare we were doing. and male hegemony still reigns supreme.

discuss.

And another little note from me so it doesn't disappear off my 'threads I'm on' list.

i'd rather have too many choices than too few...

I think that one thing that feminism did was highlight the tedium of being a SAHM, and consequently that role has actually become less attractive. I have an impression that at one point women were respected for the role they had, but gradually that has been eroded. somehow we're not equal at work, nor are we equals at home.

my mum had a book about the history of sex (meaning m/f not you=know=what), and apparently cavemen didn't realise their role in the reproductive cycle and women were reverred for being able to produce babies. men served tham by producing food. once men realsied the connection between sex & reproduction, they used their physical prowess to subjugate women, and saw them as property to be gained, in order to produce children.

could make a very crass comment about roles in society being decided by the chief cock. so, i agree with people who say that birth control has probably had as much to do with the emancipation of women as any political movement. i also think that for every mysogonist out there, ther's a male feminsit, and i wonder if feminism has achieved anything beyond castigating traditional female roles, to a point where less people wish to do them, and many are embarrassed to admit to them? i know my mum had a kind of apologetic/resentful attitude to her role as a SAHM, and insisted that my sister & i went to uni - something she wanted but was denied, because whe was a girl.

Custy, I dont' know about the UK but years ago, in Ireland a woman with a paid job in the civil service had to give up that job once she got married, even if she had no children. It was feminists who got these laws overturned.
I do attribute all these rights to feminism. What is feminism if it is not women fighting for women's rights?

Actually, I don't either mean to imply that being a SAHM is not work in itself, it's the choice to work in whatever job you want, whether it be at home or outside that I appreciate.
The thing is that feminism gave us the ultimate right, the right to vote.
Without that, we were unheard voices in society and nobody cared what rights we had.

Every time i read this thread title, it reminds me of The Life of Brian

vvvQV great minds think alike!

I revere the early feminists who risked imprisonment and ridicule and it upsets me that young girls today think getting their tits out is a good 'career'.

For me, feminism gave us choice. How depressing to be a SAHM because that's all you were allowed to be, no wonder women turned to the valium. How awful to feel that even when your kids had outgrown your tender bosom, there was no place left for you to go other than your back garden.

Getting your tits out is one thing, but having cosmetic surgery on them just so that they can conform with the requirements of the porn-market place is far more worrying.

Feminism has improved life for women in oh so many ways. Control over our fertility and (more or less) equal opportunities in education are, for me, the most important. Opportunities in the workplace are much more equal than they used to be. Attitudes in medical care are greatly improved, eg women have a say in their maternity care where only a few decades ago all decisions were made by the medics without consulting the mother. Also, complaints such as period pain are taken much more seriously by doctors now that so many more of them are women.

Aren't some of you talking as if 'feminism' were a coherent, and finished, project, that has 'failed'/'succeeded'? Feminism, to me, is a political perspective.

And no, I don't think that we live in a sufficiently feminist society.

Agree with you Elasticwoman regarding doctors taking period pain more seriously but it angers me that if you really suffer there is still no effective pain relief for young girls. I see the advances that have been made with pain relief for Migraine and don't see the same advances for period pain but that's probably because men get migraines too but they don't get period pain ! And in this day and age when we can put people in Space why does childbirth still have to be so bloody ?!

I think femenists have done alot for women in the last 100yrs. I do think nowadays though we have gone to far and were losing the plot abit.

Its funny cause i was having a debate about this recently and someone said that HE thinks the reason the balance is in favour of men is because we are not equal in government. He said if we were and men and women could make equal decisions then it would be more balanced.

Then i stuck my 5 eggs in and said it wouldn't work because men in places like the far east would no way except women as equal and have them in government. It got rather heated!

OH god, I don't think we've got nearly far enough! Women still earn less than men. You only have to read a few MN threads to realise that women still do far more of the domestic work than men. Women - not just mothers, women without children too - aren't taken as seriously as men, in and out of the workplace. We're still judged on what we look like, how much we weigh, and how much body hair we have.

Although talking with some of the women on this other site i go on, i actually established from everyone that woman actually just want to find the right man who is gonna treat her right and have a family. I also discovered that even though it is said that women who 'have sex like a man' ie go with different men as one night stands etc is supposed to be empowering to women and a step up for them, most of them said that now they regret it and feel used and wish they hadn't given their body away like that.

This then got me wondering why women fight so hard so they can sleep with who they like without getting a 'name' for themselves. When really all want is love and respect. does any of this make sense?

Well said, KKS. MI - I agree that there's still a way to go and I'm intrigued by very young women who think feminism is a dirty word
and are willing to have surgery to conform to some physical ideal. It seems that the more women have advanced the greater the demands made on them to look a certain way - blonde, tanned, big-boobed, thin-nosed, white-toothed etc etc

the thing that really gets me is the whole maternity leave / part time work thing.

you have kids, take leave so that costs the company. then when you come back, in most situations where the job is high-powered, you simply can't work the long hours you used to. so women with babies are the most discriminated against. don't see a way around it tbh. there's NO WAY i could go back to my old job. my boss even admitted it. unless i accept that i will not be there for my children and i'm not prepared to do that.

i want there to be as much status in staying at home and raising kids as there is in the work place.

i feel i've become invisible because i've chosen to be a sahm. i've still got valid opinions and can hold my own in a political debate, but people assume your brain has gone to mush and all you can talk about are babies. pah!

We still need feminism - once the debate changes to 'Stay at home Dads' versus those who go out to work then perhaps we might get near to equality.

idlemum, that won't necessarily help. we're still the ones who get pregnant and breast feed. it's simply not practical to expect dads to stay at home from the word go and us to be madly expressing all day at work sending milk home. how could it work?? so we're back in the cycle of taking maternity leave, going back to work briefly before having no. 2 etc. and companies are wary of this sort of thing. they're effectively without an employee for possibly years, but having to pay salaries etc. it's too costly.

I agree Warthog - it is very complicated and there will always be the need for some type of maternity leave but it is still too widely assumed that it is the mother who has to be the one to take on the role of principal carer and it does not HAVE to be this way. Whilst I don't wish to upset the breastfeeding lobby, we do not HAVE to breastfeed - bottles are an alternative which would allow mums to go back to work and dads to stay at home. We are nowhere near equality when it is women who are the ones made to feel guilty whether they stay at home or go out to work and men can just blithely carry on with their careers and have families too - they are the ones who get to 'have it all'.The big problem is the pay gap of course.

A lot of women have very equal relatinoships, both work and men do as much as women at home. Amongst many people I know that seems to be the norm and although some of you might for some reason marry male chauvanist pigs I don't think most women are so silly. No one should do all childcare and home stuff and work. If it's going to be like that you're better off being a full time mother.

Some women just don't have the skills to ensure they have a fair time about things. Others love to moan but never take action in which case they've only themselves to blame.

how on earth can you say feminism has gone too far?

and really, Xenia: women only do more childcare/earn less because they don't have the skills? Utter rubbish. For one thing, you have to ask why they don't have the skills. It's not that long ago that women were taught to cook and type and that was it. But even where they have been trained, women still lag behind in pay and promotion: most teachers are women, yet most head teachers are men. why is that?

My mum wasn't taught to do cooking at school because as a grammar school girl, it was assumed she would never have to. My mum was a SAHM, by the way.

did you know they used to rig the 11 plus in favour of boys? more girls used to pass, but it was assumed that the boys would catch up.

Yes, and they used to catch up by GCSE/O level and then it was by A level but now girls are head even then and more of those going to univesrity are female than male although the reasons aren't so clear - some of the exams are more girl orientated now. Some schools have changed boys doing English GCSE to boy type books and got better results.