“Feminism has left middle-aged women like me single, childless and depressed”

[MongoFrogman]

Article by Petronella Wyatt, thoughts?:

https://archive.ph/IBlas

@Brefugee
I think my parents were older than your parents.
At least I got to drink the dregs of the port in the morning.

Does she not recognise that making adult choices have consequences for adult life? If she has been detained under the mental health act recently, then perhaps she also needs advice about not exposing her poor choices for the world to see, presumably for money.
It seems an odd thing to do, blame those who gave you choices, for you making poor choices.

Shagging married men then blaming other women because it didn't make you happy? I used to have a house mate like that.

This is regressive, misogynistic twaddle.

It wasn't feminism that pushed no-strings sex: it was the 60s cultural revolution. Second-wave feminism arose in part in reaction to that, to protect women from the consequences. Feminism supports women having choice, whether it's to have many sexual partners, or none.

It's utter crap to suggest that Petronella's friends wouldn't have supported her keeping the baby, if they were feminists. Who do you think fought for women not to be shamed for pregnancy out of wedlock? Who campaigned for the rights of single mothers? I imagine you are right that her mates told her Boris wouldn't be a good dad because that is objectively true, given his habit of abandoning one woman and his kids, as his eye is caught by the next, but fuck knows what that has to do with feminism.

And the destigmatisation of abortion has been a hugely positive thing for women. Of course, there are women who regret that choice but there are many more whose lives, sanity and wellbeing have been saved by it.

@SerafinasGoose "It was only the fairly short-lived radical feminism that rejected the family and marriage as institutions in any case."

Two fundamental errors there. Radical feminism is alive and well. And it has never rejected the family as an institution.

I had no idea who this woman was so had a Google. It's so sad that someone who was clearly born with every advantage in life decided to waste it and is now blaming a supposed ideological position.

What these sort of people need to realise that is that while they're wasting their lives those around them are usually quietly building their careers, relationships, bank balances etc., and that pays off.

And feminism has given me the opportunity to own a house, go to university, be in charge of my own money, have a career and be the master of my own destiny-as it did for Petronella. The fact that she bought into the bullshit and flattery of men who just wanted a shag and wasted her life on that is her fault, feminism had nothing to do with it.

The likes of Boris Johnson never had to play by those rules. He's always had money and influence, was hugely powerful for a time and, God help us, is very charismatic. Men in that strata have long had sexual access to lots of women, usually without much in the way of consequences. His equivalent a couple of centuries ago could've had just as much extramarital sex as Boris has, if he'd wanted.

I grew up in a time where it was a given that a woman’s life was over if she had a baby, that a pregnancy would be met with ‘are you going to keep it?’ with the assumption that you won’t. My own mum was not a feminist, in my opinion, but she was part of a ‘women’s group’ where they would meet up and look at their own cervixes- that sort of thing. The ‘women's group’ was a second-wave feminist phenomenon. Attendees were engaged in feminist activities even if they didn’t really get feminism.
My friends also grew up steeped in feminist phenomena- if not actually understanding the theory behind it. Born of single mums, mums who had lived for a time in women-only squats, etc.

I think growing up among feminist phenomena without really understanding the rationale behind it, means you do just accept that things are the ‘done thing’. So when someone gets pregnant, you suggest she should have an abortion, without giving it much thought.

Although I considered myself a feminist and still do, it wasn’t until I was totally baffled by how profoundly happy getting married and having children made me, that I realised that I had absorbed distorting negative messages about it.

Even on mumsnet, if someone dares say they are profoundly happy about having a family, they’ll get piled on, told they are being smug, that they are insensitive to women who are having a bad time, until their thread gets pulled.

So, the truth is, in my pre-motherhood days, if I was Petronella’s friend and she told me she was pregnant with BJ’s child, I would probably have encouraged her to have an abortion and I would have thought that I had her best interests at heart. I have completely changed my mind on that front now.

You seem really confused about the difference between your personal thoughts/experience and feminism as a movement.

You are doing exactly the same as Petronella - blaming feminism for choices that you might have made (advising a friend to have an abortion), and that you now feel are wrong.

As for abortion, most women who have abortions are already mothers. They are not being lured into unwisely ending pregnancies by evil feminists; they are making a choice about their own bodies, from a position of knowledge.

The whole point of the second wave was that the personal was the political, consciousness-raising by examining how patriarchy had played out in one’s own life, then looking for patterns, it’s not something you are supposed to learn from understanding the ‘movement’.

You clearly know a whole set of faultless feminists, who could never be guilty of applying any peer-pressure though, of course.

Essentially @MissLucyEyelesbarrow you are using the ‘No True Scotsman’ argument in defence of feminism.

Criticising some characteristics and unintended consequences of a movement, isn’t saying that the movement shouldn’t have happened/be happening.

Although as someone previously suggested, the ‘sexual revolution’ can be blamed for men (who don’t need the social privilege of BJ) being sexually promiscuous and irresponsible, the sexual revolution is tied into feminism.

If the pill had been invented in a world where there was no feminism, there would have been no sexual revolution, just married couples having fewer kids.

Obviously there is an interplay between feminism and patriarchy going on. Of all the aspects of feminism, the one that suited men the best was destigmatising female sexual promiscuity, abortion and single mothers. Provision of 24 hour free child care, equal pay, etc, not so much.

That's precisely what radical feminism did. CF. Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Fairbairns, some of the other editors of Spare Rib. I.e. altering the picture from the root, and dismantling the current patriarchal structure.

Not all the second wave was radical, and vice versa.

feminism gave her choices. now she's complaining she made the wrong choices and looking for something to blame. maybe she should watch 'anatomy of a fall'.

I don't think it is as simple as that.

An new way of framing how people think doesn't always work in a straightforward way.

Reliable birth control, the availability of antibiotics, and feminism combined to create an illusion that women could behave in the same way men do, both in terms of career, and reproductive choices.

Sure, it would say women should be empowered to reject lame men and find ones who want the same things they do (which could be kids.)

But that does not mean that all the women who grew up within the new framing are unaffected by the other implications. Often without really realizing that they were making important decisions on that basis.

I suspect it's not a big part of human nature to sit down and plan things like this out. In 10,000 years of evolution, it's never been necessary. If you had sex almost certainly you would become a mother, so most fertile women did in their late teens or early 20s at the latest.

Once we were properly humans and established enough to give up some of our reproductive capacities, there has sometimes been an option of celibacy and a differernt life focus, but that hasn't been chosen by most even when it was an option - most people don't want to be celibate, at least not enough to be vigilant about it which is what it requires.

People have not had to sit down and say, well, lets make plans to continue the species. Babies came and societies developed social norms to make sure they, and their mothers, were cared for.

Young people now probably aren't much more naturally inclined to make plans for all of that. If social prompts don't encourage it, some may find they get caught up in other things.

I don't know, what's good for the goose?

If he was upfront that this was not a relationship that was meant to involve children or real commitment, how is he at fault?

We are supposed to accept this kind of choice by women, in the name of feminism, how can men be arses if that is what they want?

I'm not sure he was totally wrong to have doubts about her family. It's not so much that they were not nice people, but their lack of discipline or whatever you want to call it was always going to be a risk. That in those days could put a lot of obligations on a rich, sensible relative.

This is very "No True Scotsman".

You really don't think that there would have been plenty of career oriented feminist women who would have told her that even if she was having doubts, she should not have the baby because it would potentially screw up her career? Who might feel that giving up empowerment for domesticity would be an unfeminist thing to do?

Man many women who were not reading the kinds of feminist arguments you are talking about still thought of themselves as, and were influenced by, feminism. And I really don't think you can totally divorce the 60s sex positive movement from feminism either.

Feminism as a historical movement is denominational, there are all kinds of instantiations and ways it affected. It's not all academic feminism, or grass roots community stuff, there was als Ms magazine, or even Cosmo saw itself as feminist.

It's misrepresented all the time, in many different ways, whatever suits the situation that it's being talked about.

At no point have I said that no one who is a feminist would have advised Petronella to get an abortion, so I have not made a 'no true Scotsman' argument.

What I have challenged is the wild assertion, based on no evidence whatsoever (even Petronella does not say so), that she probably decided to have an abortion because feminist friends urged her to do so. Where is the evidence for that? It's just made up.

This just popped up - from Ursula Le Guin, who had an unwanted pregnancy in 1950. Anyone who thinks that men dutifully stepped up to be providers, or that women were happy with their lot, before feminism corrupted us, needs to read this. And, as she acknowledges, ULG had it comparatively easy, because her parents supported her. Many women would have been thrown out of the family home. Irish women would have found themselves in a Magdalene laundry. But, sure, it's feminists who are responsible for wrong-think about pregnancy 🙄

@TempestTost
"If he was upfront that this was not a relationship that was meant to involve children or real commitment, how is he at fault?"

He had sex without using proper contraception.

I was just about to say pretty much the same thing. I wonder why she thinks feminists don't have children?

And it's hardly unusual for the experience of pregnancy and motherhood to make a woman feminist/more so.

No, That it isn't feminisms fault that I'm single and child free. I wanted to be single and child free and financially independent. Feminism helped me achieve that.