Is the Child Free movement anti-feminist?

[GothAnneGeddes]

Not sure how to word this, but while I absolutely agree that there is nothing wrong with not wanting children, this whole idea of a movement (with a lot of men in it) that seems to despise mothers and children with a visceral repulsion and also encourage women to remove their reproductive organs is very unsettling.

What do you think?

Go right back to the beginning: no I don't think the childfree worldview is particularly anti-feminist. Contraception and access to it has always been one of the key components of feminsim - women, given the choice, will not generally have as many children as they have childbearing years. Not many women want to spend their lives as breeding animals, having baby after baby - in case some of them die, in case some of them are girls... There are good, valid feminist arguments for choosing to be childfree, andit's even fair to say that some of the exasperated posters on childfrree discussion boards have a bit of a point.

I don't think you can say that only those who rape and kill are experiencing feelings of hate. It is quite possible to 'hate' your oppressors and I don't find it surprising that sometimes individual women express those feelings. But accusing an entire movement of being 'anti-men' is absurd. Ditto the child-free movement re feminism - absolute autonomy with regard to your fertility is a foundation stone of feminism and without it the child-free movement couldn't exist.

Dittany: child-free people aren't oppressed by children. In fact you could say they were quite prejudiced and bigoted against children
I do hope you meant the members of those angry forums, not "child-free people"!

Milly: Once again, I've made the error of letting a generalised statement sppear as if it were aimed at one individual ... I wasn't referring to you specifically.

TA: If there were a childfree movement that highlighted the additional marginalisation of childless women, I'd support it! I hadn't heard of such a thing until I saw the hating forums, though. I'd say anything that denigrates the majority of women (mothers) so viciously is anti-feminist.

Anybody: It's quite hard to read this board without feeling they purvey an anti-men sentiment. Men are rapists, men are violent, men deliberately destroy the planet ... these are bigoted assertions. Leaving out the word "All" doesn't make it better, any more than saying "Black men are criminals" is reasonable assertion if you didn't say "All black men".

Milly: Since I've undertaken to keep things short, this will be an incomplete depiction of 'my real-world frame'.

To me, the primary issue is excessively unequal distribution of power & wealth: on all scales from worldwide to domestic. The secondary issue is the fact that women are excessively deprived in this inequality - whichever way you cut the cards, women land at the bottom of each pile.

Thhese two issues are inextricably linked. If they weren't, feminism would not be political. But they are, and it is.

then you are taking women out of equation garlicbutter, which might as well be a men's movement. You're entitled to do so of course,

but your POV ain'T feminist, let's call it humanist

WOmen are oppressed because of their reproductive capacities; they are designated into a particular caste, in a two-tier caste system called patriarchy, at birth once it is discovered they were born a child who had an XX chromozomal pattern and not XY.

Sexism is the primary model for oppression. All other oppressions are based on this. YOu can never take sex based oppression out of the equation, even if you "add on" other oppressions.

What you are doing is watering down the fact that women are oppressed as a group based on sex, and that all other factors: economic, racial and ethnic are incidental to the primary oppression on earth: sexism.

Racism, economic oppression, NONE Of them are comparable to sex-based oppression i.e misogyny and sexism. A white man cannot rape and IMPREGNATE a black man, the way ALL men do to women OF ALL COLOURS, CLASSES AND ETHNIC BACKGROUNDS around the world every day.

Also, VERY aggravating is this idea of garlicbutter's that women's economic oppression is somehow not connected to sex oppression.

The feminization of poverty (i.e keeping women poor) is structural . SOciety has been specifically designed that way. Any political scientist will tell you that a capitalist and a communist society depends on the cheap and unpaid labour of women.

Capitalist societies are particularly dependant on mothers to produce children who will become consumers, contributing to the GDP. Military states are particularly dependant on mothers to produce soldiers.

Japan knows this. The Japanese government knows that if Japanese women keep refusing to have children like they are doing, then the economy will eventually collapse completely. They have decided to give mothers a lump some of CASH every 4 months, which increases with each additional child.

This is a really twisty twirly thread, struggling to understand the implications of the last debaten. GB sees primary oppression as economic and structural...in which women are disproportionately affected negatively. Sakura sees primary oppression as against women against which all other oppressions are subsumed.

What does it matter which came first if we agree that women are disadvantaged, and I can imagine black feminists or feminists from emerging markets disagreeing with the primary oppression being gender based not race based.

..but either way does it impact on how we would approach oppression and structural economic disadvantage?

I remember reading Meridian by Alice Walker and at one point she reacts to the white woman's movement saying that 'women are getting angry' by saying that in the experience of black people, white women always have been - always ready to oppress black people as subjects and inferiors. And it made me sad at the time because it seemed to me that there should be an innate understanding and sympathy between movements for liberation of any kind. I still find it quite strange that there isn't.

Maybe that is because the patriarchy has done such a job on me that I can't see my oppression as a woman as any worse than that of black people or the poverty-stricken.

No-one.

But to have to fight only one fight at a time suggests that one has to take primacy.

D: I agree it's pointless fighting one at a time. That's a bit like cutting weeds off without pulling out the roots; they'll just grow back double. (heh, guess what I've been doing today.)

All: As other replies have highlighted - thanks, Ormirian, I love Alice Walker! - there is always an oppressed group in society. Any society. In fact, the more 'under' groups can be designated, the richer the 'over' group becomes. As women, and the most prolific 'under' group, it behoves us to address this unnecessary feature of human societal structures.

You have to address the whole thing, because otherwise it just goes round. Before you decide oppression of women is the only issue, try talking to a black, disabled woman about inequality. Especially if she's over 45.

I've been discovering ageism over the past decade. It's - umm, instructive. It's still a bit of a taboo topic in England, but people my age will discuss it amongst ourselves. And, guess what? The (white) men are just beginning to discover what it's like to be discriminated against. They may have paid equality lip service until now, but they had n-o- i-d-e-a-.

"If you want to fight economic oppression you become a socialist.

If you want to fight race based oppression in the west you join the anti-racism movement.

If you want to fight the oppression of women you become a feminist."

I just can't see how anyone one of those things can be effective on it's own. They are all linked.

"That's a bit like cutting weeds off without pulling out the roots; they'll just grow back double"

I'm glad you mentioned that analogy, garlicbutter, because when you take the focus of any oppressive movement away from sexism, that's exactly what you're doing: cutting off a few branches and leaving the root intact.

the ROOT of all oppression is sex-based oppression. Black women found that out quick sharp when black men sold them out to white men. Black men threw black women under the bus and got the vote,leaving black women to rot.

The Bros against Hos slogan that followed the last US election told you all you needed to know about women's place in the hierarchy.

If a woman fights for racism, or for class without making sexism a priority, then she is a mug.

Russia women found that out quick sharp after the communist revolution. There was no longer a class system, but women were still the underclass, the second class citizens, the second sex.

Sex based oppression is the root .

and wot is this " you have to fight one at a time nonsense"

MEN have created the class system
MEN have created racism

white men, in fact/ In order to serve their needs and maintain their power.

All women are just pawns in this game. ALl women have the same amount of power: i.e the amount that men allow them.

garlicbutter, have you actually studied the communist revolution? Have you looked at how it smashed the class system so all males were equal but then left women behind

But Sakura, haven't many others made the argument that communism was never true communism, precisely because it did not ever get close to any form of equality? And so had never truly broken original oppressions anyway?

This possibly signifies me as not a radical feminist, but it is too sweeping and passive for me to say we all pawns within which we are only allowed to access power given to us from men. It suggests that nothing has changed, which I would dispute....life is simply not that clear cut. If we return to the work example, corporate changes haven't been made because of a new found respect for women, but because of a combination of feminists within the system forcing change through and businesses being convinced of the financial business benefit of women making it within the system. Now many may not like the capitalist take on feminism, but nevertheless this model offers more women a path to financial autonomy and wealth than previously...and more access to power to enact change.

In fact all of us will approach feminism through our own filters...be it race, economic, environment, sex and reproduction..etc. I really think this is a strength not a weakness....we need feminist activists and advocates, those which fight for the importance of motherhood, those who invoke the right to be childless, those go for power in business and politics, academics etc....

garlicbutter, have you actually studied the communist revolution?

I AM NOT HAVING A GO AT ANYONE IN PARTICULAR, Sakura, but this sort of question can be very alienating. I've just picked out your comment because it's recent. If we're discussing our understanding of social constructs and lessons to be drawn from history, then I hope my posts demonstrate a sufficient grasp of the topics in hand for the discussion. Not just mine, btw: many other provocative contributions are informed by experience, intelligence & curiosity.

But why would you need to know if I've studied it? Is this an exam? I wish more people here would comprehend that it's possible to get the facts, and have enough brains to work things out, without chapter-and-verse reference and/or tedious demonstrations of academic superiority.

snowmama, it's true that it ended up not looking anything like communism because after they killed off the original upper class and bourgoisie, it was just replaced by a new upper class, who were originally peasants.

But my point is that women never got a look in in any of that. THat's what I mean when I say women who prioritize any other movement over the feminist movement are mugs.

So dispersing women's (limited) energies into other movements such as race and class and trans and blah blah ultimately is fruitless for women.
It's very fucking useful for men however, who get to yoke our "secretarial" and "administrative" skills to organize their revolution.

Egypt is a case in point. They used the women to bring on the revolution and within weeks it was 'get back in the kitchen where you belong' and women ended up being assasinated by the very men they were fighting with just because they had the audacity to demand the rights they were promised.

Men do it every single time. They did it with the Iranian revolution too. Black men threw black women under the bus as soon as they'd got the right to vote. They did nothing to help black women get the right to vote and in fact pretty much didn't want them to get it.

But I think that men have done a very good job of convincing women that feminism is irrelevant compared to all the other Important Political Movements. Irrelevant to them, yes, or perhaps even threatening to them. But to women, the liberation movement is all that counts.

sorry rephrase.

They did it with the Iranian revolution too. THe women took to the streets against the imperialist Shah to fight for their culture and as soon as the revolution was over in the 1970s they were forced to submit to an extreme version of Islamic fundamentalism.

Black men threw .....

Sakura, I don't disagree with those examples, though would comment that the black UK experience is not completely the same historically...however, I think my conclusions are different. It reminds me of when I was little in the early 80s and watching my mum verbally anialating those who said she should choose between feminism and black anti racism movements. They went as far as saying that she should choose between being a woman and being black. Which unsurprisingly she took issue with.

My reading would be we need a substantial feminist engagement with/in all those movements..otherwise it remains that we remain the admin assistants to other movements which is indeed insane. Engagement with other political movements needs to be at grassroots and leadership levels. Otherwise we remain on the outside getting screwed....I just don't see it as choice or prioritisation between movements, they are fundamentally interlinked...

I very much agree with you here Sakura;

""That's a bit like cutting weeds off without pulling out the roots; they'll just grow back double"

I'm glad you mentioned that analogy, garlicbutter, because when you take the focus of any oppressive movement away from sexism, that's exactly what you're doing: cutting off a few branches and leaving the root intact.

the ROOT of all oppression is sex-based oppression. Black women found that out quick sharp when black men sold them out to white men. Black men threw black women under the bus and got the vote,leaving black women to rot.

The Bros against Hos slogan that followed the last US election told you all you needed to know about women's place in the hierarchy.

If a woman fights for racism, or for class without making sexism a priority, then she is a mug.

Russia women found that out quick sharp after the communist revolution. There was no longer a class system, but women were still the underclass, the second class citizens, the second sex.

Sex based oppression is the root ."