I'm not convinced that feminism has helped the women it should have?

[soapona]

I think on these discussion boards and on my Facebook I see women. They don't insist on marriage so they partner remains married to the ex for years and year, they live together and I wonder what will happen should the man die. I also see women with no security living with men with no intentions of marrying and having children. Women moving in with men too soon. In the days gone by women would and could have insisted on commitment. So now the position for women is worse hanging round waiting for a proposal.

I know they don't have to I'm fairly wealthy and a single parent so have choices and always have. I don't have a lot to gain from marriage.

I'm not sure things have got better for women we are expected to do a lot now two incomes are the usual for a mortgage instead of one in the olden days . So it's a given women work, do the most childcare do we honestly think these thing will change when the power imbalance is there from the beginning?

Also the women marrying "beneath themselves", that's not the correct term but a man earning less and not likely to come into a decent inheritance. What is the point in getting married there if you're a women? Perhaps if the woman is wealthy to avoid inheritance tax for her children but other than that I don't know?

So would woman not be happier marrying the same or above and insisting on marriage early on, like it was a given in days gone by?

Surely Women are now in very risky positions due to this living together in a man's property. I see much more domestic abuse these days. I believe the stats are much higher with non married couples. Surely living together unmarried has been caused by equality and feminism and the very people feminists has been trying to help they've hindered.

I think many people, male and female, feminist and not, look down on SAHMs.

I agree and am not one of those people.

I wonder if it's less the actual role and more the aspiration to fulfil it that people look down on (not that that's much less judgemental).

Could it be because some people think that having children is not an aspiration which requires much qualification to achieve (even if it requires a lot of capability to do it well)? I certainly sense that women who just take time out and 'have' children may be viewed differently from those who aspire to be housewife/homemaker from the get go.

Could you give us a concrete example of how biology affects how live as women? And an example of femaleness?

I can try, but I feel like I might be misunderstanding your question.

Being female is about being a member of the sex class which produces ova rather than sperm, and all the things that come out of that for humans. So, having a womb, menstruation, carrying a baby, breastfeeding, all the female secondary sexual characteristics, all the effects of them (can't run as fast.) There are also likely some behaviour ones. Social roles which of course depend a lot on when and where you live, women are going to have a different role living in the artic 1000 years ago than the UK in 2019 because of the dictates of female biology in those environments.
Those are the kinds of things that make us female persons rather than male persons, although all of them don't typically affect each woman.

@MaryLennoxsScowl

the pill was designed to free women from the burden of having a baby every year until they variously died in childbirth, gained so many children they couldn’t support them, or the

Someone posted a bit back Hugh Hefner helped fund the pill. Your line is the line told. The truth is i consider this one of the worse thing to happen to women. It encouraged sexual liberation and pressure on women to start having the non committed types of relationships which has benefitted men more.

certainly sense that women who just take time out and 'have' children may be viewed differently from those who aspire to be housewife/homemaker from the get go

I think your sense is off

No one who asks what you do cares if you wanted to be a sahm from a child, whether you intend going back in a few years or indeed ever

The judgement is made when the words stay at home mum come out of your mouth.

Not that they ever came out of my mouth

Sakura, if you believe that women are essentially better than men, then you shouldn't have a problem with men who think women are inferior. You might not agree, but you'd be okay with them having that opinion, would you?

Loads of them do have that opinion. This opinion of theirs has been enshrined into law, world over, into religion, into medicine, into "science" albeit bad science. What's your point?

My point is that they are idiots. Dickheads. Fools. Stupid. Dumb. It is reductive, dangerous and foolhardy to hold an opinion that applies in a blanket fashion to 50 per cent of the human race. Would you agree?

Someone posted a bit back Hugh Hefner helped fund the pill.

I'd be interested to know if that's true before I started quoting it.
Google brings up nothing.

Could you give us a concrete example of how biology affects how live as women? And an example of femaleness?

I’m not sure I understand this either? How can you ask that on a feminism board? Our biology is what makes us women. Quite clearly, our lives are very different from men. Our bodies make different levels of hormones, this affects different aspects of our lives. The increased oxytocin enables women to form close connections, to bond quickly or in a different way. The ability to get pregnant means we have different decisions around our sex lives even, men can be a lot more carefree knowing they cannot get pregnant and either have a child or make different choices which affect us both physically and mentally. Our menstrual cycle can, not always, but can impact our energy levels, can cause pain, can limit activity if we have complications, sanitary products cost money and we have different hygiene needs to males. When we come to menopause, the impacts on us physically and emotionally can greatly impact our day-to-day lives. Many women will have much lower energy levels, swinging moods, depression, muscle pain, joint pain, hot flushes, anxiety, hair loss, vaginal dryness, decreased libido, increased UTI risk, brain fog, increase in anger due to oxytocin drop, and insomnia to name just a few.
And I haven’t even got to the impact of pregnancy, risks of childbirth, demands of breastfeeding....

Our biology is what makes us women. It isn’t the sum total of who we are as human beings, of course we are more than our bodies and their functions. Our personality is what makes us unique and interesting. But our biology is what makes us male or female and our lives are very different based on our sex. Materially different.

My point is that they are idiots. Dickheads. Fools. Stupid. Dumb. It is reductive, dangerous and foolhardy to hold an opinion that applies in a blanket fashion to 50 per cent of the human race. Would you agree?

I don't know. I just know that male certainty of their superiority over women, and of women's innate inferiority, has been near on universal. It is reflected in their literature, their religions, their laws, their medicine and it spans time and geography. For all I know the ones who say they don't regard women as inferior might be lying to get what they want and need out of women.

They can think what they want about women's inferiority. I honestly don't care what they think and I have no interest in changing their opinion of me. Im also entitled to think what I want.

@Myriade

I wouldn't have gone for a masters degree if my grand plan was to look after babies, which I agreed was shitwork. But then I had my baby and was shocked that i didn't want to be parted from it. Then I realized we'd been sold a line. That we lost a lot when they stole our land during the witchcraze, and we lost control over birth and healing and pottery and all the other things we did while at the same time minding the children . The industrial revolution played its part in creating a division of labour. I know some but I would like to know more about how the division of labour has become more and more deeply entrenched as time has gone on

the pill was designed to free women from the burden of having a baby every year until they variously died in childbirth

Because heaven forbid we request that men stop sticking their dicks in, in order to stop killing women.

Someone posted a bit back Hugh Hefner helped fund the pill

I don't know about that, but the Catholic Church did.

I just know that male certainty of their superiority over women, and of women's innate inferiority, has been near on universal. It is reflected in their literature, their religions, their laws, their medicine and it spans time and geography

Possibly, but remember that nearly the entire world has been colonised for long periods of time by Europeans, and colonised people have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome response where they believe in the superiority of the culture of the "mother country".

The misogyny of the Romans and Greeks spread throughout Europe. According to Terry Jones' documentary, the Romans thought any culture that valued women was ipso facto savage. www.dailymotion.com/video/x429tzi

And, unfortunately, museums often tell us more about the people who set up the exhibits than about the people who are supposed to be reflected in them. We have a modern museum here in Mexico City dedicated to Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs, where women do not feature at all.

Well yes i am specifically talking about European/American literature, laws, science and so on.
I always laugh reading scientist Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender where she details the sheer lengths men went to, using bad science, to prove women's inferiority.

Someone posted a bit back Hugh Hefner helped fund the pill. Your line is the line told. The truth is i consider this one of the worse thing to happen to women. It encouraged sexual liberation and pressure on women to start having the non committed types of relationships which has benefitted men more.
The pill was funded by a feminist Katherine McKormick and developed by Gregory Pincus. It was said to be for treating menstrual problems to allow development without condemnation of Pope.
It's one of the huge steps forward for women's freedom, self determination and health. You try bringing up 10 children on a pittance in cramped conditions, not to mention burying some of them.

It's weird that the invention of the pill has been mentioned, because I was just thinking about that yesterday. The pill has been excellent for women's liberation in many ways - I'm not denying that at all. However, it's also had some downsides. Women as a cohort tend to want children earlier than men do, because they have a limited time in which to do so. In my experience, women are also likelier to want a second or third child than men are.

In the past, if a man wanted to have sex without a condom, he had to accept that it may result in pregnancy. Nowadays, there are women who agree to pump their body with hormones to prevent a pregnancy that THEY want but their partner doesn't. (And yes, I'm aware that some women who get around this by faking contraception failure, but that's very ethically dubious and puts the whole relationship at risk. The dilemma wouldn't even exist in the first place if not for female-only contraceptives.)

I'm glad that the pill exists, but it's a shame that it's had this side-effect.

Imnobody4 Thank you for mentioning her. I hadn't heard of her. Maybe that's just my ignorance, but if not she deserves to be better known.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_McCormick?wprov=sfla1

I'm finding a lot of this thread rather bizarre.

Most women around the world don’t use the pill and don’t have ten kids. There’s a lot more going on in the creation of large families than a lack of contraception.

Ok the average number of children in Victorian England. My mother was one of 10 children.
Effective contraception to allow planned families has been a game changer for women.

Most women around the world don’t use the pill and don’t have ten kids

Well I think nowadays nearly all of them do. But historically speaking, nomadic people generally avoided having large families. So there were methods as I doubt that they were all being sexually abstemious.

It encouraged sexual liberation and pressure on women to start having the non committed types of relationships which has benefitted men more.

You’re conveniently forgetting again that some women want non-committed relationships, or do you view sex outside of a relationship as something a man enjoys but a woman only endures?

I think the thing I find most concerning about the pill is the sense where we have really severed, in our minds, sex and reproduction. Not that people don't realise where babies come from, but there is a sense that its' almost like an accidental feature, secondary.

It almost reminds me a bit of the way supermarkets have separated people from the source of their food. Of course they know the chops come from a pig, but they don't really know pigs, what they are like, how they live and what their needs are, there is no intuitive sense of how much energy or time or land is represented by that chop, or what it gave back to the land.

I think if we didn't have reliable contraception, there is no way you'd have people now claiming that being a woman is about some kind of inner feeling, and if they did people would not believe it. Because they would know, experientially from their own lives or those of people close to them, that it isn't so, no matter what kind of crackpot theory you used to justify it all.

I also think that it's tended to solidify our sense that we can use technology to get ourselves out of the environmental crises without changing our consumption, but that's a different discussion maybe and not just about the effects on women.

So there were methods as I doubt that they were all being sexually abstemious.

Infanticide was common in a lot of societies. But abstention wasn't unheard of. Huron women by custom abstained for two years after giving birth in order to give their infants the best chance to survive.

You’re conveniently forgetting again that some women want non-committed relationships, or do you view sex outside of a relationship as something a man enjoys but a woman only endures?

Some men prefer non-committal relationships as well, but it doesn't mean they are a good idea on the level of an entire society, even if we can mitigate certain bad effects. People want a lot of things.

A quick google tells me the average number of children pre 1965 globally was 5, and has since declined.

Haven’t RTFT in entirety, but “an example of how biology affects how we live as woman?” Is that question for real, or a parody??