Can you be a feminist and an old romantic?

[Jazzicatz]

I have just watched Bright Star the film about Fanny Brawne and John Keats, it is truly beautiful and very romantic. But I know as a feminist, the notion of romantic love is viewed rather negatively. Therefore I ask the question can you be a romantic and a feminist?

Sorry dittany, I know you meant that pregnancy always carries a risk and that marriage inevitably leads to pregnancy. It's just a major bugbear of mine is how hospitals are more concerned about controlling women than about saving their lives . It's disgraceful that pregnancy isn't safter thesedays

Sakura I thougt that there was huge inequality in healthcare provision in the US. I understood that the vast amont of money is being spent on/by the wealthier people. And that huge numbers of people were without health insurance, and unable to access anything but basic charity services. So many are receiving no ante-natal care.

I thought that was the reason for the poor results in the US.

What are the stats like in the UK, where ante-natal care etc are more universal?

The problem is that midwives were witch-hunted during the twentieth century in the US. They made a complete transition to the technocratic model and midwives were stripped of their power and access to birthing women. Some midwives, especially ones serving the black communities had to work illegaly, instead of receiving proper backing.
Meanwhile a system was created whereby lots of women had no access to this new technocratic model run by doctors. For a healthy pregnancy a hospital birth is actually less safe than a midwife birth (in the US 1/3 of births are by C-section).

But yes, the more access women have to ante-natal care, the better the outcome, although that's not the whole story. That Amnesty article specifically states that one of the problems in the US is that women have no say in their care, a kind of 'doctor knows best' syndrome. Once you have doctors who are demi-gods in obstetrics they are more likely to be invasive and use unecessary procedures.

I realised that sounded like a mansplanation.
Both of those things are my bugbears: a rich/poor divide and doctors with lots of power over women...

Yes the situation in the US is shocking - re the total medicalisation of birth, CS rates and everything.

There is certainly a balance to be struck, between good ante-natal care, and access to pain relief and interventions where required, and avoiding over-medicalisation.

Yes, thankfully there are some inspirational pioneering midwives there in the US who are trying to make changes to the system. Hopefully Obama's promises for healthcare reform will have an effect.

There's nothing wrong or unfeminist in being happily in love with someone who loves you back and treats you as a fellow human being - nothing wrong with giving each other little gifts and treats, walking hand in hand etc.
It's just a bad idea to pursue this at the expense of everything else that matters in life.

Me too, Sakura. All that macho shit is unsexy - you just think "yes, you are a man, but the fact that you think if you pick some flowers/know where the spoons are kept/play peekaboo with a baby your manliness will cease! is just offputting."

Will check out that book, HB, it sounds great & I love Jill Tweedie. I learnt a lot about what "family life" could entail for women by reading "Letters of Faint-Hearted Feminist" - only written in the the 80s but shows how little things have changed despite the fact that we're all equal now, ho ho.

"As a bunch of opinionated feminists, we are likely to have selected mates who fulfil our criteria in a partner ie they aren't sexist tossbags." - Excellent, ISNT, your post made me laugh. Does this mean we are doing our bit for evolution?

One of my closest friends is in a relaionship which to my mind is not the healthiest. She is a real "romantic" and just seems to want him to want to marry her - that's it. No real though process about what she wants, it's weird.