Women as enablers

[TheFowlAndThePussycat]

Right, I'm thinking on the hoof at bit here, so bear with me.

I was listening to Roald Dahl's biography on r4 on Thurs. It described the period in his life when he divorced Patricia O'Neil, who he had nursed back to health after a stroke & married a woman with whom he had been having an affair for 10 years. Basically it ascribed his great burst of creativity & productivity towards the end of his life (bfg, witches etc) to getting out of his unhappy marriage & to the 'peaceful' and 'comfortable' environmen created for him by his second wife.

Now, I don't have a problem with this per se & I don't want to make this about RD himself, he didn't write this book & he might have disagreed strongly. O course we all work better when we are happy than when we are unhappy.

However, it seemed to me to be a perfect example of this prevailing attitude in society that women are there primarily to enable the comfort/acievement of other people. I.e. It's the wife who looks after the home/child care so that the man can get on with achieving stuff. It's the mother who feeds & cleans & does homework so the child can acheive at school. It's the grown up daughter who cares for the elderly parent because her brothers couldn't be expected to. I know that lots of men do all those things but the expectation of society is that women do them.

So my question is, is the idea that women are caring enablers actually completely poisonous & oppressive?

DH and I pondered about the bit about not outsourcing housework too.

I wondered if the reason was that it would typically be women who would do that as paid work, and that potentially this served to trap them in typically low-paid low-prospects female-biased employment?

I think it's perfectly reasonable to outsource the house stuff as it stands now because otherwise if you are a woman then the likelihood is you'll end up doing it all yourself. The way I read the article is that if you could 't outsource it & the world was more equal then part time work would be better paid because everyone would be doing a bit of work outside the home, a bit of work inside it & a bit of childcare & hopefully some leisure too. She says it's a utopia but I for one wouldn't mind if my life was a bit closer to that model.

And I think it is trying to promote the idea of depending on others, just making the dependence a bit more equally spread.

the problem is bonsoir, that a lot of powerful jobs, such as those in business and politics are specifically set up and designed in such a way that it is impossible to do them without a wife, or somebody looking after the children.
This working culture has to change in order for women to receive any kind of equality. Debates in parliament beginning at the arbitrary time of 2 pm, for example and going on well into the evening. It is inimical to mothers. NO mothers would choose it. And that is entirely the point The way "powerful" work has been structured , the working culture, is what keeps the power in male hands. It has nothing to do with competence, ability or intelligence of the people doing the job (obviously- look at George BUsh)

I agree that cleaning is not a degrading job. I have done and enjoyed being in my own world. Putting up with drunken idiots at the end of the night in a pizza shop was more degrading.
But the problem with hiring a cleaner, like other low-end service industry jobs, is not that the employer is exploiting the woman, but that the system is. THat's why the majority of cleaners are women, and the majority of CEOs are men. That's capitalism for you.

Sakura - and it is perfectly possible to find someone to look after the house and children.

What will never, ever happen is a working culture in business and politics that adapts to people who want several part-time hats rather than one full-time one. The very nature of power is single-mindedness!

I was talking to a woman at school on FRiday, she and her husband work a lot, never have a day off together and help run a family business. She said her house was dirty, needing hoovering and dusting. I asked how much her boys did, she has four, two of which are at secondary school. She replied "Oh no I couldn't ask them." I said would she feel the same with girls..she said " no, boys are different they wouldn't do it well" .....

Well obviously not with that attitude.

I am astounded that people actually think like that.

As a woman I think there's less choice. To be a very successful person you can't be side tracked and most of us wouldn't like someone else caring fro our very small children full time(very very full time including late meetings and business trips), except our spouses and in most couple dynamics where both are chasing careers I think a woman is more likely to want/expect to be at home with babies if not toddlers.

[don't tell the feminist section] but isn't single mindedness associated with maleness? Is that nature or nurture?

I'm not sure single-mindedness is at the heart of power.

Surely a truly good leader's main skill is in delegation. The further up the ladder of power one gets, the more departments one has to deal with.

The desire for power may be single-minded I guess, but the ability to use it well is not.

That's a very interesting article. I am assessing my motives as a 'housewife' as I type.

This discussion of power has me intrigued it would be a 'utopia' if such power could be shared amongst everyone but in reality this would unlikely come to pass. Obtaining power does require a measure of single mindedness. Also you will find once you have that power you have a whole lot of decisions that will have impact on many people. In that sense it is difficult to see such high powered positions ever being considered part time things.

I think it is exactly the myth that power requires 'single-mindedness' and 'dedication' and long-hours which oppresses women. Particularly in this country. We are one of the least productive economies in Europe with some of the longest working hours. There was a report recently which claimed that only 44% of people's time in the office was spent productively! Men working long hours is just another method of showing that they are the biggest beast in the jungle. My experience of working in an engineering environment was that most long hours were worked because project management was shit & no-one had a realistic idea of how long things really take to do.

And anyway, many women are capable of being single-minded, it's just that they can't be because for some reason it's their job to organize child care, housekeeping, leisure, transport etc.

I honestly think that none of this will change until there are more women in powerful positions, but the system is designed to stop that happening, and so often those women who achieve within the system are unsympathetic to those who choose to opt out of it. (Mrs Thatcher).