Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress' book is out.

[ArabellaScott]

Looking forward to this one. I know she gets mixed responses; I find her work really interesting.

swiftpress.com/book/feminism-against-progress/

Presumably the implied argument is that women have less of this 'status, respect and power' among their peers today?

That's another assertion that I'd find very hard to assess, even, how do you quantify or compare those things? The standards and context are so different.

Me too. And I think many forget just how bad the misogyny was then. Yes women were “economically productive” but they did not own the income they earned. Their bodies and their labour was owned by their husband or closest male relative. Of course, some women could subversively skim and squirrel away coins here and there but there was risk of a fatal beating or being branded as a whore & tossed in the gutter if found out. In England men could put a rope round their wife or daughter, take her to market and sell her like a cow. Romanticists have said this was the poor man’s means of divorce, or getting a teen girl a job as a servant, and it was all consensual with a lover in the wings or benevolent masters taking on the straying wife or stroppy teen girl….but those little excuses are all written by MEN in retrospect as women quite literally were denied education and no women of that class would be literate and so their voices are not included in this conveniently victim blaming explanation that I find highly improbable.

Many women even pretended madness to escape DV…can you imagine the desperate and powerless state of choosing the hell hole of life imprisonment in an asylum with hard labour picking oakum, laundry, field work and so on vs certain death by repeated beatings?

Women did not have respect or status unless it was among their actual peers- which were other women. They had no respect and no status and no power compared any man or even a boy aged 12 or above.

I am going to guess much of women's time was taken up with being pregnant or nursing, too. And caring for sick babies,, around 4 in 10 of whom would not make it to their first birthday.

Apologies, I think that stat is more like 4 in 10 wouldn't make it to their 5th birthday.

Yes, and forced pregnancy was a common means of male violence and control. After all women could not refuse sex with their husbands. Marital rape was still legal in law when I got married for christs sake! Women were conditioned as well to feel morally obligated to satisfy their husbands “carnal needs”- needs driven by men’s biology and that old chestnut, mother nature.

Romanticists have said this was the poor man’s means of divorce, or getting a teen girl a job as a servant, and it was all consensual with a lover in the wings or benevolent masters taking on the straying wife or stroppy teen girl

That sort of language is no different to the revelations of the police WhatsApp group where police colleagues discussed corrective rape bantered and invited men like Couzens to 'sort out' a mouthy girlfriend.

I feel like a bit of a monomaniac because I keep saying this. But we’re comprised of astonishing minds in monkey bodies

our whole being is one giant compromise. That means no right answers, and certainly no one size fits all

I know many women who have chosen not to have children and their lives are happier for that choice than if societal expectations or lack of birth control had forced them into motherhood

the fact that they generally tend to be doing ‘better’ than me in their careers is not coincidental

would I change places with them? No

I found this problem of ahistoricalness in many feminist analyses of say ancient to historical literature down to feminist perspective studies of famous or aristocratic female ancient and historical figures. The feminist analysis often sweeps away what we do know about the laws, culture and practices of the time and gives women more agency than they actually had.

MH sees a pre-industrial women working in a home cottage industry of say making candles or butter/cheese. But then forgets that whatever she produced & sold, the income was not hers to keep. And often she had no choice about what she did- working over vats of tallow to make candles or milking cows & churning butter & making cheese.

What family business she was “married into” (sold off to), was determined by her father or brother. And contrary to popular belief the lower classes contracted marriages similar to the upper classes only on a smaller scale. A tailor would contract to marry a daughter off to a draper/haberdashery…because then he’d get a family discount on cloth for the clothes he made. A farmer would marry a daughter off to a miller…because then he could would always have a buyer for his grain and perhaps his personal flour milled for free. Brewers would marry off daughters to innkeepers and publicans. Butchers to herdsmen. Lower classes had as much aspirations and desires to improve their family’s economic conditions and their women were sold off to cement business deals by bringing related businesses into one family.

Plus women were barred from joining any craft or merchant guilds and if you don’t have guild licence, you can’t legally sell any goods. We forget too that not only were women barred from professions but also all trades.

Exactly right. Androcentric bias abounds wherein the voices of women are silenced or forgotten.

But second wave feminism has won a lot of things that have made my life so far, with all its compromises pretty good actually

1. I was able to go to university

2. establish myself in a professional career
   take a year out to care for my babies

3. go back to work part time until they finished infant school

and my earnings are still enough to have a comfortable life

only item 3 felt like a compromise really

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things in 1823, and probably not in 1923 either

Yes, I agree. 2nd wave feminism made phenomenal progress advancing us towards equality. We are in a position now, imho, wherein the laws have far outstripped our culture and belief systems. The hard work isn’t getting a law passed saying “let women get degrees” or “pay women the same as men for the same job” or “don’t rape women and girls” or “replace maternity leave with shared parental leave so there is real choice”….the hard part is actually progressing our culture and beliefs towards de facto equality. And I think that’s a paradigm shift because much of feminism today is still focussed on change this law, get that law passed…when that is only the first step on a long journey to actually getting whatever the law promises or prohibits to happen IRL.

Some women did have agency in the early modern period (from 1500-1750). Wealthy women had considerably more than any man in a lower class to her. And, not all women chose to marry, and neither were they ruled by their fathers or brothers. No, not all women would choose that - but some ACTIVELY chose single-parenthood, much to the shock of those researching at the time. Records indicate that they were perfectly content and had no intention of getting married.

Many women also had a fair amount of agency once their husbands died.

It's complex, and depended on several factors. There were massive differences from one town/village/country to another.

Posh women did not sit on their arses all day - they were expected to do stuff for the poor. In many areas they took charge of medical matters.

I can see why MH would see some good from 'the old days' because certain aspects were undoubtedly better for SOME women.

any woman could possibly have been a proud, economically productive, possibly even happy wife and mother - even in the face of grinding poverty, which was simple reality for many many people. I'm sure they made the best of it, as we all try to do today.

I find it difficult to form a romantic view of the times of widespread ill-health and early mortality for women (recall that improved mortality rates for women are a comparatively recent phenomenon in historical terms and that the rate of improvement for mortality is currently slowing down for women). The 1901 Rowntree Report and others like it remarkable are remarkable in their detail and explains why, for so many, wartime rations were a substantial improvement over their usual fare.

There is a point where grinding poverty and the fight for survival obliterates so much that there is no 'making the best of it'. I have relatives across several generations who were teachers and known for never using corporal punishment when it was pretty much accepted as a teaching method. They all said the same thing, "You never know what hell those children are living through at home, I'm never going to add to it."

“pay women the same as men for the same job”

Was that around 1975 or 1976? And it took until 2021 to settle "equal value" (literally decades) in one long-running dispute.

Employment lawyer Sean Jones explains it (you'll need to scroll down through the first few deleted tweets): archive.is/5A0Cq

The court ruling is here: curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=242024&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=9524499

Yes a few elite privileged and lucky women, the 1% had some agency due to indulgent male relatives. But let’s not try and pretend this was the common lived experience of women from 1500-1700. Btw, these “records” were by and large written by MEN. There are few diaries and journals written by elite women as primary sources and even those could obscure reality as their writings were usually subject to male monitoring and scrutiny. There’s a reason why some aristocratic women wrote in secret codes.

Most women didn’t have agency as widows, their father or brother or uncle would simply take them & any children under their guardianship (manage all funds & property on behalf of the actual heir- a boy child naturally) and then generally would marry her off again or in older centuries perhaps pack her off to a convent. If she didn’t want to remarry, the asylum was the choice of the day in later centuries instead of a nunnery.

Brothers and uncles would commonly embezzle as much as possible from her underage eldest son, or have the boy meet with an “accident” and inherit the lot, lock stock and barrel.

Posh women did not sit on their arses all day - they were expected to do stuff for the poor. In many areas they took charge of medical matters.

Well yes. They too had male expectations to live up to or die trying. A gilded cage is still a cage.

I rather like what Laura Fleshman spoke about in relation to women's sport, just recently. Though I see that as relating to women's 'equality' more generally:

"High on Fleshman’s list for change is dumping the idea that men and women should be treated the same, a concept that upends some central themes in equality debates.

“In the [physical] development years after adolescence female-bodied people in sport are having fundamentally different experiences with their bodies but we have been treating them like they should be like males because that is what ‘equality’ looks like,” she says.

“If basic female body experiences are taboo, erased, or minimized then you aren’t creating an environment that accurately reflects the people in it. You aren’t creating an empowered sports environment for those people and that is a group of people who are going to be victimized and easier prey for bad actors.

“We have to start being courageous to lean into the differences that we have and decide collectively that women deserve to thrive in sport and have sport built around them for their norms. We have to stop comparing them to a male standard, stop expecting them to progress like men do, stop erasing the parts of their body that are feminine. We’re scared of women’s bodies and scared of women’s power.”

Fleshman suggests 1960s and 70s Second Wave feminism addressed many issues that led to positive outcomes but in turn created unforeseen challenges for the 21st century that need revisiting – if not revising.“The liberal feminist movement that peaked in the 70s led to a lot of fundamental changes in women’s lives – no-fault divorce, Title IX in athletics, and women getting their own credit cards,” Fleshman says. “The way we got those things was through appealing to men in power by saying we’re the same as you, so treat us the same. Talking about differences wasn’t a great strategy for feminists to get equal rights so we stopped talking about differences. But it’s been 50 years. To get to that last step in equality we have to lean into our differences and say, hey we need something different.”

Almost sounds as if she's been reading Mary Harrington.

"You can put into place equal parental leave, equal pay, and so on but until you change the cultural conditioning from birth, you won’t have free choice. And the sex gap you see isn’t showing an egalitarian society, because the culture hasn’t caught up. Scandinavia has the apparatus in place, but their culture is just as bad as ours in convincing men and women that we are ruled by biological determinism due to our sex."

@Onnabugeisha but this makes no sense. Why would a country make great efforts to produce a level playing field in terms of work for both women and men, if such attitudes and desires didn't already exist in the culture of that country?

Laws reflect culture, they don't create it. Culture comes first, laws come later.

(In brackets - @Onnabugeisha I was the poster who used the phrase "throwing the baby out with the bath water", and I'd like to clarify that I (obviously) wasn't directing it at you, nor referring to anybody's actual baby! It's an expression (perhaps you're unfamiliar with it), meaning when you accidentally lose something good/necessary in the process of getting rid of something bad/unnecessary.

I was definitely not referring to you leaving your baby to return to work, as you thought. The metaphorical 'baby' in this case was the idea of the mother-infant bond, which I think is special, unique, and should be at the forefront of feminist work.)

One aspect of women's lives that was markedly changed was by (male) technological intervention - midwifery being pushed aside by the 'scientific' advances of male surgeons. Reading about howdies and how they were discredited (sometimes no doubt with grounds) and usurped by men with complicated instruments and great theories is fascinating, if also sometimes quite horrifying.

(And apologies for @ ing you twice in a row!)

Howdie is a Scots term, sorry, I should have said. It might not have the same meaning or any meaning outwith Scotland.

www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/howdie

True, and the advent of the man-midwife usurping what had been elder women assisting younger women in childbirth…often unpaid is an example of how traditional “women’s work” is not valued by society until men starting doing it.

Of course, given the times when men began shoving their way in, they couldn’t give it status or respect without also driving female midwives out and rebranding themselves as doctors of obstetrics. And they did this by discrediting midwives and abusing the legal system to make their work literally a crime.

I think you sort of are though, because do you not believe that this special mother baby bond requires the mother to stay home for months/years after birth and, at any time during babyhood through childhood, if the partnership breaks down, do more than 50% of care in order for this bond to exist?

Why else would you say that 50/50 care (or working FT from infant hood) results in losing something good if you did not think that would be a consequence?

Why do you believe this special mother-baby bond requires so much more sacrifice than the special father-baby bond? And to be fair, I agree that a parent-child bond is a special and unique kind of love, but I don’t agree that women need to sacrifice so much more than men to achieve it because of biology.

I've read a horrible treatise by a male obstetrician who decided women's unsavoury hysteria was best treated by cliterodectomies.