I'm giving up.

[GarlicShake]

This is more of a despairing rant than an invitation to reply. Sorry! I feel like I've nowhere else to put it.

I am 61 years old. I'm facing ageism & ableism as well as sexism. I have a corner to fight.

I went on strike for maternity rights, for equal pay, even for the factory to have a women's toilet. I forged a career in a world that was predominantly male, argued for my pay rises and trained younger people up to be non-sexist. I've been blamed and misconstrued, beaten up, raped, and carefully answered the gamut of sexist assumptions. I battled for my pension rights and I threatened the bank with legal action when they refused to take my salary into account on my first mortgage. I am still fighting.

But I just can't hack fighting for younger women any more. They're throwing away all that we, and the two generations before and the one after mine, won for them. I can't even tell whether they don't give a shit or they think all their rights are safe so they needn't bother.

I'm not going to argue the transgender thing any more. I'll stick to supporting the handful of FB friends who get it, but I'm not arguing in my own voice from now. I'm giving up on explaining why "Ms" matters - it's been around for 50 years, for crying out loud! People can figure out why the Nordic model's a better idea for themselves - or, most likely, not. Women can congratulate themselves on being financially dependent on husbands, and figure that out for themselves too.

And I think this country's going to vote itself out of Europe. That'll wake a few people up in short order, I fear, but I shall be needed to stick up for older & disabled people like me as our rights will get shredded. I am tired.

I am very tired and disappointed. Thank you for all the brilliant discussions, MN feminists! Good luck.

I think abuse comes under "fault".

Add to no fault divorce, a bachelor tax in that era, clearly targeted toward female interests (there was no spinster tax) and you have a situation where marriage is risky and easily broken up, and it also sucks to be a bachelor for a man.

So the motivation to succeed and earn is reduced.

The rise of single parent households which have statistically been implicated with increased levels of crime and underachievement. This rise is correlated with the mainstreaming of feminism. I hear conservatives bleating on about it, and the feminist left almost seem to think it's a good thing. They won't say that children need fathers cos that's homophobic, and even saying that a dual parent household is better is seen as somehow putting a shade on women's free choices. These are very much components of matriarchy.

The pejorative level of your discourse.

Ooh, someone swallowed a dictionary have they ? Reddit's users getting a bit more edumacated. Jolly good show

Great knitting links.

Roman marriage is an interesting subject too, though looking at it through the lens of modern society is not very instructive. (And where were those female lawyers, senators and tribunes in Roman society, eh?)

I agree Buffy.

I think I'm trying to find the common theme of all these groups - Everyday Feminism, MRAs, behaviour on Twitter etc.

There's something about the nature of interaction on the Internet that creates an echo chamber and creating links between totally unconnected pieces of information.

Apologies to Garlic and others.

I could make a list if you want, but i'd rather deal with the underlying problems with that argument.

No, I'd rather you just made the list, thanks. The rest of your post was not particularly insightful.

My point is that it is trivial to illustrate the rationale behind, for example, the argument that vastly higher suicide rates in men are a result of living in a modern day patriarchal society.

Loath as I am to encourage you, Very Annoying Kid, there's one thing I feel so important to feminism & sex equality that it must be answered. Though I'm sure others have answered it already!

I in fact argued against the idea that women were historically chattel,

It's hard to see how you'd argue that, since women were legally their husband's property until recently - just about within living memory in our society, and of course still ongoing in very large areas of the world.

The laws of coverture - which gave a husband the right to dispose of property owned by his wife - were amended by a series of Acts, starting in 1870 and mostly in the 20th century. French women obtained the right to work without their husbands' consent in 1965. English women could legally be fired when they got married: I'm reading until 1950, but my mother was 'required to leave' her job when she married in 1954. Women couldn't take out a loan or mortgage in their own name during my adult years, and of course men could legally rape their wives until 1991.

Neither of these overviews are complete, but some visitors might find them interesting:

www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

www.bl.uk/sisterhood/timeline

I apologise to those posters who feel I'm going "fuck you, younger women" ... though relieved to see it's only a couple! Of course I'm not. I'm saying I'm tired of going over the same ground while seeing much (by no means all) equality & independence being merrily thrown to the winds. And I'm at an intersection: sexism won't stop harming me while I'm alive, and now I've got ageism and ableism to deal with too. Ageism is fucking immense.

I find I'm spending quite a bit of time raising awareness about one specific intersection: the WASPI campaign for women born in the 1950s, who've been shafted by the cack-handed transition to equalised pension ages. It turns out many such women have been told they're not entitled to complain about equalisation, so they haven't. The problem isn't the equalisation itself (although there are issues around that, since doing both paid work and unpaid has adverse effects on ageing women.) It's the specific transition, which has left us hundreds of thousands out of pocket in some cases and forced about a million 60-ish women into absolute poverty.

So I need to leave younger women to figure out the pornification, genderisation, safety and financial inequality issues for themselves instead of trying continually to wake 'em up, as it were.

the argument that vastly higher suicide rates in men are a result of living in a modern day patriarchal society

I thought this was a given? Those who leave clues as to their reasons are generally about feelings of failure, particularly in the role of financial provider and/or masculine figurehead.

Buffy, I read something a while back about brewing history. Brewers were mainly women - it grew from the women doing home brewing alongside all the other food & drink preparation, then ale-houses started to develop as travel increased. Some women's ales got good reputations and they started brewing in bigger quantities for export to other towns. Some of them became big business. So the licensing for brewers was changed. Under the new licences, women could only own micro-breweries and all the big ones had to be owned by men. Sorry I'm sketchy on the details, I found it by accident!

I thought this was a given?

You would think.

Out of interest, since you seem to be fairly active, what kind of actions do you actually take in regards to your various causes? I find it's too easy to simply lament obvious inequality but then draw a blank when it comes to think of something productive to do about it.

Annoyingkid doesn't understand the definition of matriarchy. As the man said when asked directions "well, I wouldn't start from here".

If the poster doesn't understand what a matriarchy is then we are all wasting our time. It's like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

crazy, my marching days are over. I have disabilities. What I do is write - to MPs, Ministers, Lords; on social media; on blogs; sometimes to newspapers and broadcasters. I make memes (not 'witty' ones, they're more like infographics) and post them where I know they will be shared. That stuff - stuff I can do in my own, erratic time. I'm an online campaigner now. I even put 'keyboard warrior' on my LinkedIn profile

Annoyingkid

I have a legal responsibility to protect and care for my DC and much of what we all do as adults is geared towards carring for and protecting children. Do we live in a society that treats children as equal to adults? Do we let them vote, drink, drive, have a mortgage? Of course not. In significant periods of our past, women were treated as children. The lawmakers and intellectuals saw women as infantilised and hopefully submissive adults the husband could, amongst other things, have sex with in the same way that you take kids out on fun day trips whether they want to go or not. How fucked-up is that?

I'm sure there were women who did well and occasionally they even landed positions of power. But this was always despite the system, not because of the system. Any equality was down to against-the-odds determination. And don't cite rare exceptions to a rule as evidence that the rule doesn't apply. That's poor logic, because their very infrequency shows that the rule is the norm. If women were regarded as equal to men in history, how come the history books are not full of them? Or did feminism erase hundreds of successful women leaders, writers, artists, composers, philosophers and scientists from history just to further the concept of the Patriarchy? "Someone had to look after the kids" I hear you cry. Perhaps, but you do know that a huge proportion of history's most famous men came from wealthy backgrounds where the history makers had sisters who didn't have to look after their kids either? Many of the poor artists and writers didn't have jobs, which was a choice any hopeful woman artist or writer had open to her if she had been allowed to take it and had been given the required education.

As for single parents? Statistics show that the absence of a father figure post-divorce is linked to a host of social ills. As far as I'm aware feminism does not encourage men to abandon their kids. In fact, I'm pretty sure it encourages men to play as active a role in their children's lives as possible, whether mum and dad are together or not. You don't blame feminism for men not loving their children, do you? Or do you blame feminists for disempowering men and stopping them from being loving dads? Hint: co-parenting, loving dads generally do not lose equitable custody of their kids post-seperation.

As a man, I personally would like to thank feminism for encouraging and enabling me to form the kind of deeply emotional relationship with my DC that would not have been possible 50 years ago. The same goes for the great relationship I have with my mum, and the valued friendships I have with women. I see all the women in my life as my equal, and I hope they see me as their equal.

From my perspective, feminism is important because it looks at the patriarchy from outside. This is something that's impossible to do if you're a man. Hopefully one day we won't need feminism any more, but we're certainly not there yet. It's my thought that some women think they have equality with men because they don't actually know what it's like being a man. If they did, they'd realise what they were missing out on. Or they'd realise what men don't have to put up with, which may be more relevant these days.

Wonderful post, process.

This is a picture of a Scold's bridle. In the market town where I live - which was also unusually fond of drowning noisy women via 'ducking' - the bridle had spikes on the tongue piece, so the victim would suffer pain (and subsequent infection) if she as much as nearly spoke. Wikipedia doesn't clarify that these punishments were imposed for speaking too loudly in a husband's opinion, or making unfavourable comments.

We drowned a woman here after she'd gone a bit loopy and kept shouting.
It was widely accepted that her husband was a vicious, drunken abuser.

Oh, this is the picture

I'm sentencing myself to ducking, on the charge of giving short measure in my posts.

English women could legally be fired when they got married: I'm reading until 1950, but my mother was 'required to leave' her job when she married in 1954.

I think the Civil Service marriage bar was the last to go, in 1973, though I suspect in practice it was mostly ignored by then anyway.

Just wanted to say that my dd, 32, has recently become a feminist. I've never been an activist, to my shame, but my mother was a feminist and I have always identified as such. My dd always listened to me, but never expressed much interest in my political views, but since she became a mother, she is really indignant about the treatment of women.

And I have to say, the idea that anyone would think that women should be called non-men is totally shocking. Like the term unmarried mother of my youth, makes it sound like something is missing.

Garlic it is because of reading these boards and women like you that I have woken up regarding feminism and how it is just as important today as it was when our Grannies were fighting for the vote and the right to work.
I see inequality everywhere (and I used to believe we were equal). I see trans rights being given more oxygen that actual womens' rights. Age has also given me the confidence to actually start calling men out when confronted with blatant sexism.
Don't give up the fight

It's my thought that some women think they have equality with men because they don't actually know what it's like being a man. If they did, they'd realise what they were missing out on.

Process, I too would like to know what you mean by this.

Excellent post Process. I agree with the sentiment re some women probably believing they have equality because they haven't experienced what life is like for men. The flip side is that I can't easily quantify that as I haven't experienced what life is like for women.