Feminism, whats the goal?

[UglyGlassVase]

How can we ever be in a place were we aren't reliant on men?

We have the babies.

We are physically weaker.

How do we get around that? What's the goal?

I'm feeling very despondent, the more I think about it the more bleak it seems.

The goal of feminism is liberation of females from patriarchy.

How? What does that actually look like?

I find it helpful to look back and see what’s been achieved since I was born in 1960.
Got a long way to go, but we’ve also come a long way in 60 years.

Don’t despair, OP. These things go in cycles, and we’re in a bad place right now. But look back 100 years and you see how much progress we have made. I get a lot ofencouragement from solidarity andfriendship with other women.

Hmm to me it looks like the world being safer for women. On a different level equal pay for the same work.

@Cattiwampus

Indeed, but I feel increasingly trapped by biological reality. Every womens issue ultimately comes down to our biology and I feel like we will/have hit a brick wall where nothing else can be done.

I'll start thinking about rape or wage equality and it comes back to the same thing. Men have power over us, and not just because they built and enforce the structures we live in but because they have an innate biological advantage.

When I look at other types of systemic oppression you can usually point to a culture or a time in history where/when it doesn't exist (that isn't to say said culture or time in history doesn't have other problems) but women seem to have been universally oppressed in every society since the dawn of time.

On a different level equal pay for the same work

This is one of the things I can't think of a way to fix, we are at a massive disadvantage because of pregnancy and child care. We can stop having babies but to live in the type society were wage equality is a reasonable goal we need a replacement birth rate. Plus having babies is a biological necessity or whats the point of anything anyway?

OP I know how you feel. The way that modern society is set up means that the ones who give birth and look after children are severely disadvantaged.

The industrial revolution and the separation of work from home has put women on the back foot.

Apart from the logistics of it, I don’t think society or men will ever truly accept women as equals. Anything we gain socially is immediately resented and resisted. History is reframed to suit the cosy rationale of the status quo. The mental gymnastics is astonishing.

I agree. Wage equality is not enough when women take on all the caring responsibilities and that's mostly unpaid. Also, we need systems like political representation to be mother friendly so more mothers can be in government.

But it's not as though giving birth is a weakness. It's an amazing strength!

Some of the Scandinavian countries have got much further than the U.K. on wage equality and reducing the care burden that women generally bear. They’ve achieved this through legislation - use it or lose it shared parental leave. It changes the perception of whose job it is to raise children, and evens up the time taken off work to look after babies.

I feel legislation is the only way, and in the long term it might lead to real cultural change. Men will never give up the advantages they’ve gained through exploiting women for thousands of years - why would they?

Women need to get into positions of power and change the rules from the top down. I think it’s the only way, and always has been - the protests etc aren’t enough on their own, we’ve always needed new rules for the changes to happen.

@RomeoLikedCapuletGirls

OP I know how you feel. The way that modern society is set up means that the ones who give birth and look after children are severely disadvantaged.

The industrial revolution and the separation of work from home has put women on the back foot.

Apart from the logistics of it, I don’t think society or men will ever truly accept women as equals. Anything we gain socially is immediately resented and resisted. History is reframed to suit the cosy rationale of the status quo. The mental gymnastics is astonishing.

Thank you, your reference to pre-industrial revolution "work" is definitely something I had in mind writing this (although my knowledge is limited).

@WinterAndRoughWeather

Some of the Scandinavian countries have got much further than the U.K. on wage equality and reducing the care burden that women generally bear. They’ve achieved this through legislation - use it or lose it shared parental leave. It changes the perception of whose job it is to raise children, and evens up the time taken off work to look after babies.

I feel legislation is the only way, and in the long term it might lead to real cultural change. Men will never give up the advantages they’ve gained through exploiting women for thousands of years - why would they?

Women need to get into positions of power and change the rules from the top down. I think it’s the only way, and always has been - the protests etc aren’t enough on their own, we’ve always needed new rules for the changes to happen.

I have utterly no faith that our current power structures have any interest in meaningful change not matter what biology those sat within them have. I am astonished that anybody would. Sweden is often held up as this great example of equality but they are just generally better across the board. All the same problems still exist, single parents are usually mothers, single mothers have higher rates of poverty, children of single mothers have worse outcomes.

I’m not saying the scandis have nailed it, I’m saying they’re further along.

Of course the current structures have no interest in change - that’s exactly what I said. There’s no easy fix, the only way is for feminists to get into positions of power and not give up, even though it’ll be a depressing, endless slog with many steps backwards along the way.

Yeah, it’s shit.

Everyone is reliant on everyone. Nobody can live without the support of society. Men can't, women can't.

@UglyGlassVase

How can we ever be in a place were we aren't reliant on men?

We have the babies.

We are physically weaker.

How do we get around that? What's the goal?

I'm feeling very despondent, the more I think about it the more bleak it seems.

I found this to be quite a surprising post. I had never considered feminism as having a goal where we could say job done, let's sit back and enjoy.

For me feminism is one of those things like safeguarding, healthcare or even fitness training.

Left unchecked nature fucks us over in many areas of life. If we want to live long and live well, we have to get that lump checked out, we have to take some exercise every day, we have to be wary of CFs.

To me feminism is one of those. The physical reality of having a female body puts us at a disadvantage. Feminism tries to counter it. There is no end, no goal. Just like reaching goal weight doesn't mean you can quit the gym, down the beers and scoff several packets of jaffa cakes wrapped in streaky bacon. Annoying.

Women need to feel less guilty when their baby cries and the husband has to get up in the night.

Sorry for the derail... I agree with most of what you said in your post, but I've always found this aspect of childrearing in Western cultures a bit odd. I guess it is due to significant cultural differences. I don't have children, but I come from South Asian culture where the mother-child bond is considered to be very important. The mother tends to be the primary, if not exclusive, caregiver in the early years of a child's life. Babies always sleep with the mother i.e. usually in a cot right next to the bed that the couple shares so she can breastfeed as often as required, or the man might sleep in the main bedroom and the woman sleeps with the baby in another room. This arrangement can carry on for several years until the child is maybe 4 or 5, usually sleeping between parents as the child gets older. Eventually children move into their own beds or rooms, but the idea is that it is perfectly normal and natural for mothers and their children to have a very close physical relationship in the early years.

In theory if I were to have a baby, I would have deep reservations about the notion that this close mother-child bond should be superseded in an effort to force some sort of 'equality' between the sexes. If mums are feeling a lot of guilt when their baby cries and they are refraining from responding, surely this is because they are enforcing what seems to me to be an 'unnatural' state i.e. not engaging in what is a very instinctive process of mother-child closeness in terms of feeding and caring?

That doesn't mean a man should not help with childrearing. In fact, the need for mothers to be the primary caregiver means other members of the family, including the partner, should be doing other household tasks like cooking, cleaning, laundry, looking after any other children etc because most of her attention and focus is on the baby.

I think you can have equality between women and men, without forcing each side to behave in exactly the same manner or to engage in exactly the same activities. I feel there are genuine evolutionary and biological differences between the sexes that are most apparent in the mother and father roles during the early years of a child's life. They don't seem interchangeable to me.

It would be interesting to hear other women's perspectives, especially mothers, as I've read posts here before from some about how much they preferred to be at home with their baby rather than rush back to work (which seems like a perfectly unsurprising and natural response to me). But maybe that's best left for a different thread rather than derailing the conversations in this one. Anyway just felt like I had to comment on that point as I thought the cultural differences in the role of motherhood were interesting.

Liberation.

@NonnyMouse1337 in your long discourse on the merits of a certain type of child rearing I found the key item to be I don't have children.

It's fine of course to have an opinion, but you may be embarrassed further down the line when biological reality kicks in and you are living with the source of your oppression.

I agree that the goal of feminism is to free women from the oppression of the patriarchy.

Continued economic independence from men is a key part of this and should be considered at each life stage in my opinion.

It wasn't always this way though. From what I've read about pre-history, in more primitive, pre-patriarchial societies, matriarchies were common and gods were often female. We were actually revered for our ability to birth life, not oppressed for it. As I understand it this shifted when we turned to farming, and abandoned hunter gathering, where women's contribution to the family diet, foraging for nuts, berries, etc, was equally as important as hunting.

That said, I've no idea how society might return to that kind of equality without an apocalypse that destroys civilisation. And even then women would still be worse off than men.

Even your op is framing things from a patriarchal perspective.
Men are also reliant on us. To give them children and to ensure humanity Carrie's on.
Humans are reliant on each other. We can't survive alone.
My aim is for women to be respected and treated equally to men (that's what liberation from patriarchy means to us). Yes,,men will always be physically stronger than women and so more able to rape and murder us. In an equal society though, this would be totally unacceptable. As opposed to what we have now, where its acceptable as long as the man can suggest the woman wanted it.

I think on a historical scale it's not so long since we got contraception. As women start to choose not to have children, or get married, thatcould drive changes in mens behaviour in the longer term.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/stories-45201725

Of course, first we have to get through the current backlash where contraception just means women are expected to have porn-star sex at the drop of a hat.

OhamIreally Yes, which is why I mentioned that I didn't have children and was open to hearing what other women thought, especially those who do have children.

Every form of child rearing has its pros and cons. As I've gotten older, I've learned to appreciate that there are merits in the sort of methods I described and, crucially, there are women do want or wish to be the primary caregiver in the early years of their children's lives and this is also the norm in several other cultures. The desire to maintain a close mother-child bond seems perfectly understandable to me. While some women seem happy to share the childrearing, others don't wish to. I don't think women should be made to feel guilty for not wanting to delegate such things to their partners.

If you're lucky enough to have a supportive partner and extended family to enable you to pursue this, it is a great position to be in. The downside, as you mention, is that women can find themselves financially dependent and hence more susceptible to control and coercion if a male partner isn't supportive or is even abusive.

Maintaining financial independence is important, but I also wonder how feminism might be able to help those women who prefer more traditional roles in family life, especially around motherhood.

It always comes back to bodily autonomy for me. At the most basic level i want all women to chose who they sleep with, when and if they reproduce. In order for those chouces to be 'free' i need education, economic freedom, good maternity laws, no sexual violence etc.

nonnymouse I'm a mother of 3 and I agree with you. I don't think mothers should have to choose between money, social connection and time with their children when the children are very young. We should get all three! It's always framed as if you CHOOSE to have children and CHOOSE to spend time with them you can't complain about dying in poverty and being excluded from all power structures. But giving birth is important. It's not a frivolous lifestyle choice, so I don't know why it's like that.