Is choosing to be a SAHM a feminist decision?

[user1471506568]

Ok so I'm a SAHM and would also strongly identify as a radical feminist although admittedly I still am learning about all of this. I understand that liberal feminism is more about the individual as opposed to the class movement so under that philosophy being a SAHM is an acceptable feminist decision but I'm confused about the rad fem stance.

I can see how from a financial perspective being a SAHM is a bit of a backward step for feminism, but this is such a narrow view and I don't think money is the only measure of worth . In fact it strikes me as an extremely patriarchal measure where the balance will always be tipped to men earning more due to women having children.

I would be really interested in people's views on this. Can I be a radical feminist and a SAHM or am I letting down the class movement?

NB: Please don't take this as negative judgement of any working mothers as I respect everyone's decision to do what's best for them.

Jobs that are valued by men currently attract the biggest financial awards. Jobs that are valued by women are either badly paid or expected for free

You cannot gender stereotype like that. It's so wrong. On so many levels. There are so many proffessional high paid women out there, you do each and every one a disservice. The world moved on. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, business owners, board members, the list is endless, women value these careers and are in them now.

Women structurally earn less for many reasons;

At school - less girls in STEM subjects, socialised to be less pushy, speak up less etc

At university - choosing subjects / careers that allow flexibility later on because they expect to be taking on the majority of the childcare responsibilities (eg GP instead of surgeon, teacher instead of accountant).

In love - choosing a man with a "good job" who can provide for you and a family / men not choosing women who are their career or intellectual equals / men choosing younger women / women choosing older men

At work - not pushing for that pay rise. Pushing for it anyway and being seen as aggressive. Being passed over for promotion because you might have babies soon. Choosing a less male dominated profession because let's face it the environment is pretty grim even if the pay is better.

After kids - taking a year off work, or more,. Being sidelined and given an "equivalent" job with no prospects for progression. Being stuck at the same pay or lower for years while your husband gets raise after raise.

Etc bloody etc

No wonder women give up on this shit. It's exhausting. We need proper policy intervention.

Disclaimer- yes I'm generalising. That's kind of the point.

Ergo, as a radical feminist you can only accept a job that:

Does not prop up the status quo and have a negative effect on other women.

Doesn’t disadvantage other women, by paying them a low wage with no prospects, to clean and manage your household and children.

Attracts a salary stratospheric enough to accomplish this while allowing you the headspace to ensure the future generation are woke and you can fight the good fight on Twitter.

Being a SAHM looks like the the most radfem option given the current state of the employment market!

You can be rad from a position of being a victim of the current set up.

@Bluntness100 yes women are in these professions- I'm one of them. We are still the minority in these professions.

Why do you feel obliged to define yourself as a ‘radical’ feminist, rather than simply as a feminist?

Radical means wanting to get rid of the whole current system of capital-formation, social structuring, division of roles by gender. It also implies being active in pursuing these goals — so having some number of free hours a week in which to campaign, lobby, write or teach (if attempting to persuade by rhetoric), or else to work outside the home modelling this kind of society. So, no, you can’t be a radical feminist and a SAHM, if both terms are taken in the normal sense. It would be possible in one sense if you had private income (eg you had inherited money in your own right), but radical feminism wouldn’t be consistent with living off interest on capital without attempting to redistribute it, so I don’t think that would work either.

Maybe you just want to say that you are a committed feminist and SAHM? I see no issue with that whatsoever.

"You can be rad from a position of being a victim of the current set up."

I agree, but you need to recognise that the set up exists.

Yes aGrumpy, government subs etc. @Bella, what she said.

Cat I don't know, but I don't think it would be complicated to come up with a way of discerning it. Were I not on maternity leave right now it's the sort of thing I could probably give a crack at; working out a reasonable wage based on the pay scales of other roles with similar responsibility and value profiles. I'm not doing it for fun though!

aGrumpy ah yes, the social conditioning of women to want what women want... I used to manage a sales team years ago and every female I took on aspired to be the bloody office manager who sat on the front desk! I kid you not, I had to almost beg them to believe they could want to be the boss, and that their minds were not their own!

@TheGrumpySquirrel

I think that's got to be right. So if a woman received a fair wage for taking care of her own children, then she could be a radical feminist?

If the answer is 'yes', I guess my next questions is this... why can't we view a woman as receiving a fair wage for looking after her own children by sharing in the earnings of her partner? Or does that argument not hold water because we view her as being entitled to half those earnings anyway?

A women can no more receive money for taking care of her own children any more than a man or woman can receive a wage for cleaning their own home, installing their own kitchen or repairing their own car. It's pie in the sky.

A women can no more receive money for taking care of her own children any more than a man or woman can receive a wage for cleaning their own home, installing their own kitchen or repairing their own car.

Honestly, you'd be unlikely to even get money for installing someone else's kitchen if you're not a professional kitchen fitter.

Bluntness
I can stereotype like that because the research backs me up.

Doctors, lawyers, bankers, business owners, board members

While there is parity between the sexes in terms of entry to the law and medical profession, the numbers of women who become consultants or judges are still ‘mystifyingly’ low.

The disparity in income between male and female bankers, board members and business owners is worse than other sectors - you couldn’t have picked shittier examples of the world moving on if you tried.

As for doing high earning, working mothers a disservice, I am one of them. I know how hard it is and how many barriers I still have to hurdle. It’s exhausting and enraging.

I’m in my mid forties and it’s unequivocally getting harder now for younger women. especially those from a WC background like mine.

The world has changed but it doesn’t feel like it’s going in the right direction.

Liberal feminists would say you could call yourself a rad fem. Radical feminism would say you can't be rad fem.

You can believe want you want to believe imo, but I'm a wishy washy liberal.

Not quite sure what your point is Ratrolypoly. My point was the SAHP is taking care of their own children. If they were taking care of somebody else's then they could be paid as a childminder. Nobody is paid for doing their own house repairs or own decorating. But other people can be. Why is taking care of your own children any different from any other performed task.

I was just adding to your point Vivienne. Noone will get paid for looking after their own children, primarily because as you say they are their own children. But in addition because doing something in a non-professional capacity with no qualifications or certification does not usually command much money, if any. That's all.

Someone responded to me pages back that they don’t want to work outside the home because they want to raise their kids thenselves. I think I’m raising my kids but please define raising - if it means me spending 24x7 with them then I guess I am not raising them myself.

Isn’t it the case that until the 1950s most women/mothers DID work, apart from the very wealthy who outsourced to nannies and governesses anyway.

Every boss I’ve ever had has been a white man with a SAH wife. He has never had to juggle domestic and children related issues with work, and has been able to devote long hours ( face time) to the job. It is very hard to compete with that when you are a hands on working parent (though obviously not actually raising your own children). The model of SAHM in middle class families (where affordabikity of childcare is not the issue) is not helpful to women in the workplace. And women not being represented in leadership roles in public/private sector and politics affects us all in thbthe long term. Men are making the decisions on how we all live.
Children are wonderful and we all love them above everything else, but sometimes I think women sacrifice themselves and their life choices for their children and I’m not entirely convinced it’s all a good thing. Disclaimer - I would not like to be a SAHM, it is one of the hardest jobs there is and yet it is pretty thankless and totally relentless, and I have huge respect for people who can stick it out.

why can't we view a woman as receiving a fair wage for looking after her own children by sharing in the earnings of her partner? Or does that argument not hold water because we view her as being entitled to half those earnings anyway?

Surely the problematic aspect would be the inherent imbalance of power rather than the question of default entitlement. It's basically a set-up in which the independently earning partner controls the financially dependent one's access to what's due to them.

In general, of course you can be a SAHM and a feminist. I don't personally regard it as a feminist choice as such due to the aforementioned problem of it introducing a power imbalance into a relationship. I'm also doubtful about attempts to 'reclaim' a role that women have long been forcibly reduced to.

The main issue is really that it's a very one sided affair which isn't helped much by someone's individual husband being completely on board with shared housework, money, etc. It's still, at the end of the day, a decision that husband gets to make and could change his mind about. If he did, he wouldn't be anywhere near as badly affected by the consequences as the wife would be. She, on the other hand, can't freely make unilateral decisions of the same magnitude without self-sabotaging.

OTOH, I completely agree with the points made about the value of women's work and the need to generally divorce the value question from that of earning power etc.

"Shift the expectation that the cost is the women's responsibility and that if it's more than her salary she needs to stay home"

But surely that's just semantics? It costs us the same amount of our money regardless of whether you class it as coming out of my salary, or half out of mine and half out of his. What matters is the total amount of income and expenditure for our family. If expenditure on childcare is more than one person's salary then it's cheaper if that person stays at home.

A basic income has made a significant difference for women in areas where it has been implemented.

I'm going to write it again for the last time. I said she could be a radical feminist but not on certain issues, such as equal parenting, equal rights for mothers in thr work place etc etc.

I did not say she could not be a radical feminist on other issues

Does this mean only exited women can talk about the dangers of prostitution? Or that only FGM survivors can promote information on the sickening genital violence inflicted on women around the world?

You’re talking shit mate 😂

Oh Jesus. Can't we just respect and support each other? Who needs men to oppress us when women can be utterly shitty and sneery towards each other?

Viviennemary

The trouble is women are not thinking about the years to come. Especially if they haven't married their partner. Now with the retirement age higher there will be women forced to take jobs well into their sixties because they have no pension or very little pension. And state financial provision for single people under retirement age without dependants is quite poor. And their high earning partner will enjoy the benefits of a good pension. Being a SAHP has consequences

In agreement with virtually all Vivienne has said. I’m a lib fem so I’m very much in favour of women choosing to be SAHP. But it puts you in a vulnerable position.
Is it still 1/3 of all marriages that end in divorce?

I’m a SAHM, I am radical, and guess what? I know my situation is not a ‘feminist’ situation. But my unique financial situation allows me to be with minimal risk, and I’m at peace with it. I would not be recommending it though, or promoting it as something feminist.

I will however continue to (loudly) voice my opinions on assault in the workplace/women in STEM/ the sex pay gap and so on, especially if it gets certain posters backs up

I don't understand why the radfem position is to privilege paid work over unpaid unless the unpaid work is undertaken through lack of choice. Why is it that choosing not to do paid work when you could in favour of other unpaid work you prefer cannot be radfem unless it's done by a man (presumably if a man chooses to be a sahp when he doesn't have to that is radfem?). How is insisting that women do paid work rather than be a sahp radically altering gender roles? Isn't that just playing into the patriarchal view that being a sahp is demeaning? Wouldn't it be more radical to make all paid and unpaid care work into something as important as brain surgery or building rockets?

Every boss I’ve ever had has been a white man with a SAH wife. He has never had to juggle domestic and children related issues with work, and has been able to devote long hours ( face time) to the job. It is very hard to compete with that when you are a hands on working parent (though obviously not actually raising your own children). The model of SAHM in middle class families (where affordabikity of childcare is not the issue) is not helpful to women in the workplace

But why blame and put all the responsibility upon the SAHM in this equation? If working practices were more family friendly in the first place there would be less of a need for one parent to stay at home in order to rear children. There would be no competition regarding having to 'juggle' because working practices would be truly flexible and fit in with family life. No one would be a penalised for a working style that fitted in with caring for children.

allthat it’s not ‘you can’t be a radical feminist if...’

Because if it was dogmatic, no one would be radical. We all have times where we are confirming to patriarchy, whether that be shaving, or putting a bit of make up on, or being a stay at home parent. The difference between radical and liberal feminism is radicals get to the root of WHY women make those decisions- they’re not made in a vacuum.

The SAHM thing is complicated but it’s nog necessarily that you SHOULD be in paid work, it’s that in this world ultimately women can only rely on themselves and if things go down the pan, women having their own money and their own way to get on without being dragged through the mud financially should divorce happen is a good thing. Also, the fact that women are underrepresented in various fields (STEM), the sex pay gap, ratio of Male/female CEOs, etc. The radical question is WHY; and if women are choosing life at home instead of persuing those careers (despite girls consistent outperforming boys at school then onto university), just WHY?!