is there a new cognitive dissonance thread?

[kickassangel]

if so, please link, i can't find it.

if not, i'd like to add some things

using personal experience to prove a point is not a great argument. we have to start with the bigger picture, then see personal experiences as a case study which exemplifies, but does not prove a point.

i'm not even sure that i view myself as a feminist. i view myself as someone who believes in equality (not just on male/female issues). the generalisations about feminism being a religion i find offensive, as they both ignore the patriarchal society we live in (and this assertion can be backed up by endless statistics & experiences), and assume that one particular viewpoint is religious.

is marxism a religion? what about other schools of thought?

feminism is a broad range of thought, and there will be changes and shifts within the arguments, just as there are in other sociological concepts. and there will be women who abuse, just as there are men who do so.

however, look at the structure of society, and it is impossible to say that it isn't patriarchal. just look at the possession of wealth, the media representation of people, the male/female ration in positions of power.

if it was as simple as some women 'not bothering' to push themselves forward, there would still be enough women to fill 50% of all key positions in society, and to hold 50% of the wealth, but that isn't what happens. so, it sin't due to a lack of women exerting themselves, it is due to the inherent sexism within society.

Thank you, Kickass and Mathanxiety. After reading through this thread I was a bit wary of going to the original one. However, I shall be selective and look for the key posts you mention.

Thanks mathanxiety. Your makes perfect sense to me and sums things up eloquently, and ROFL at "the cure for unhappiness is lobotomy" - that's going to make me smile for days.

Having just read the original thread up until it got hijacked by Mr. "My penis is longer than yours", I would just like to say it was most illuminating in helping me to understand things that I have thought and been somehow unable to explain coherently.
Thank you all.

We'll be selling the special windscreen wipers soon Cati, don't worry :)

math - great post WRT education.

It's scary reading for me because I plan to have kids at some point - when my female friends talk about it we get pretty annoyed when we realise we only have a few more years to "make" our careers before the inevitable childbearing-related apocalypse. I'm sure neither DP nor any of my male friends view their careers as divided into pre-DC, post-DC. And judging by this thread, they're right not to.

This sounds like a stupid question, but why do so many people do part-time work after DC? Does it really save that much money?

There's the saving money aspect, because childcare is expensive and the burden of finding it and the guilt you feel, and the judgement of society about using it, falls disproportionately on mothers. There's the sanity saving aspect too -- a lot of women would like to be able to/need to combine an income plus time with their own children plus all the wifework, but there's only so much of each woman to go around and part time work fits the bill. The holy grail of part time work is work that coincides with school hours and holidays.

Once you have more than two children it becomes more and more difficult to find affordable childcare for the sort of income you can generate with a part time job; your options are restricted more and more when you have 3+ young children. As they grow older, you might rely on the older ones for babysitting, especially when the oldest become teens, but it's still going to put a huge strain on the family to do anything other than full time with decent income that covers childcare/ child supervision with some money left over, or part time work that can be done either at night or during school hours.

There's also the hope that at least part-time work looks better on a CV than what is considered by potential employers to be 'no work' (i.e. the huge amount of work that sahps do day after day, year after year managing the home and raising the children). Part time work is valued more by a lot of women for the 'keeping your hand in' aspect than the financial rewards in the here and now. It's an investment for their own and their family's financial future.

thanks sprogger and math, really interesting perspectives - sorry I should have been clearer, I really meant "rather than full time work". From a childless perspective (and having had working parents) it seems the obvious choice to go back to work after ML. But so so many women don't, and esp given the "part time money for full time work" problem, I was wondering why part time seemed like a good option.

Is it:

• because you miss your DC too much if you're at work full time?

• you feel like you're not giving them the best start by using childcare?

• you want to "be there when they get home from school" (not sure why exactly if there are other options)

• working part time is more cost-effective than working full time and using childcare for the extra days

Sorry if this is a hijack, I'm finding these threads so informative (barring BSB) but I keep wondering why the "well one of us has to give up work/go part time" is a foregone conclusion for many.

"the cure for unhappiness is lobotomy" - that's going to make me smile for days.

How come a so called oppressed group is happy to mock another oppressed group, the mentally ill, by joking about removing the front lobe of their brains?

I do not notice such a tolerance for close-to-the-bone jokes when it concerns women.

It's a good question Elephants. I have no answer, but I think that Mathanxiety offers many good hypotheses.

In my own case (2 dc 11 months and 2ys 9 months)DH and I came up with the following agreement. Both of work FT but have flexible timetables because we work in academia. Before having children we both worked 10am-8/9pm.

I started from the premise that if I wanted children, I wanted to spend more than my weekends with them. DH (who was still doing his PHD at the time -I'd finished mine)wanted FT childcare.

So; I work 8-4; I do my contractual 40 hours and no more. Both children are in nursery 8-2. During classes, my DH picks them up at 2 and looks after them until I get back. He then returns to work until at least 10pm. The rest of the time we alternate working in an afternoon.

At the mo I am drowning in the last stages of a project. So on a Saturday I work a normal 8-4 day and DH stays with them. While DH was finishing his Phd last year, he worked weekends.

It works for us. I am happy; I think DH is happy. I know my children are happy.

As for the housework, it is a job and we pay someone to do it for us. In between visits from the cleander, both of us do the bare minimum during the afternoon so that the children's mess does not become a health hazard.

This agreement took much negotiation, and Dh had to go from a position of "I'm ready to help out", (ie seeing childcare primarily as my responsability) to one of "collective collaboration," . Along the way I have had to have the same conversation many many times with him to keep it all going.

Catitainahatia - did you find that your employers were happy to give you both that flexibility? I always think that the academic world is a good one to juggle childcare in, due to the innate flexibility, but then I hear a lot about how that isn't the case...

"At least fifty thousand people, including ?the mentally ill,? ?delinquent? young adolescents and unhappy housewives were lobotomized by various techniques through the early 1960s. Some were severely disabled by the procedures."

[[http://www.moodletter.com/EvolutionMentalHealth.html

"Watts became unhappy with Freeman and that he must "stop doing brain surgery as an office procedure". Freeman traveled around the country in a van, which he called his "lobotomobile", demonstrating transorbital lobotomy in hospitals. He performed in hotel rooms, lobotomizing children as young as thirteen for delinquent behavior and housewives who had lost their domestic abilities."

www.photadyta.com/main_site/lobe.html

Hence relevance.

Oh come on Larry, lots of perfectly healthy people were lobotomised back in the day. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel with your objection.

How about this for disccussion:
"The cure for unhappiness is valium" (aka 'mother's little helper' as it was prescribed to women in their thousands about 40 years ago, probably as cognitive dissonance caught up with them.)

Alice: my employer asks that I work 40 hours a week (8 hours a day). As part of that work I teach during term-time and supervise dissertations all year round. I am supposed to to admin work and investigation too. They don't complain if I do all that is asked.

Admin and research are very flexible. Classes are not. However, by negotiation it has been possible to organise my classes so they all are in the 8-4 window. Dh negotiates to have no classes between 1-5.

It helps that I live in a country where the working day is 8 am to 8 pm (Mexico) and where I have a free nursery place thanks to the social security payments my employers make. I imagine it is more difficult for UK academics as the working day is shorter, childcare is expensive and most do not have the advantage of having a DP who is also able to be flexible.

oh and ... the doing "all I'm asked" is crucial. Hence at the mo I am working Saturdays; ie nonpaid overtime, to do this. Once this storm passes I shall abandon Saturday working.

Cat -- effectively, with a flexible spouse, you have what a lot of men have, a 'wife'.

Exactly. I am aware that I am all too fortunate. It is the key. Flexibility for both partners is the only way to ensure that children do not mean the end of a women's career.

i found that working ft & being a mum was just exhausting me. when dd was in nursery, at least she got dropped off (by dh) & could stay there til the end of the day. when she started school, i NEVER had the chance to meet other parents, the teacher, other pupils etc. dd was 4 yrs & 2 weeks when she started school. i'm not the kind of parent who hovers, but it seemed ridiculous to me that at such a young age i was completely pushed out of her life. as a teacher myself, i couldn't take any time off to visit the school without losing pay.

so, i reduced my hours slightly - to 84% of ft. however, i did seem to end up working almost as many hours for less pay, and bugger all chance of a promotion.

it would never have occurred to dh to do the same, and, even if he had, i would still have been excluded from dd's school life.

so, yes, more flexibility would have meant i could remain ft, but that just isn't always possible.

capitalism doesn't always benefit the individuals within a society. due to the close link between capitalism & patriarchy, it means that women's careers suffer.

I was lucky in that when I had ds dp worked p-t so he became primary carer for the first couple of years, and by the time he went f-t ds was at school so things were easier (once you get the childcare sorted). However, I still felt guilty that I didn't do the whole mother thing but I think, for me, that was societal pressure and not me. I didn't miss ds when I went away (used to spend a week out of every four away). I have since done the whole school run thing (was unemployed for 8 months) and frankly hated it. All the one-upmanship and comparisons, and 'Little Johnny is reading Tolstoy in the original Russian' AAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh. But I suspect that is my inferiority complex. I now work f-t again, and the only reason I don't want to is because my job is so booooooooring and not because I want to be at the school gates....

But thats me, guess you have to make it work for you....

All the one-upmanship and comparisons, and 'Little Johnny is reading Tolstoy in the original Russian' AAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh. But I suspect that is my inferiority complex.

I dont think that is an inferioirty complex.. that is just a low tolerance for braggerts.

"This sounds like a stupid question, but why do so many people do part-time work after DC? Does it really save that much money"

Elephants I think women want to be with their babies, personally.
It's a huge discussion, but the fact we now live under a capitalist and class system means the only way they can do that is by taking on the shit jobs or by becoming a SAHM. The entire working culture needs to change. There is no need for the set-up to be like it is at the moment; I believe it's not a coincidence that the best jobs i.e the most well-paid are inimical to mothers. Anti-feminists may well argue that women should sacrifice motherhood to compete with the big boys, but I argue that a parliament is not legitimate if it is 80% dominated by one group of people, for example.

IN other words, if women aren't legitimately represented, they shouldn't have to pay tax

Reading that lobotomy extract, about housewives and children being lobotomized..it made me realize that patriarchy really hates mothers doesn't it. It attacks children to get to mothers, I think. To prove its power over mothers. Patriarchy has an obvious womb-envy-complex going on