Fascinating article.
I do agree with parts of it, but I cannot help, but pffft in disdain along the way. Having lived through the "burn your bra" era, I am quite disillusioned with today's feminism - in fact, equal rights for women are dead.
The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!
Why is that even part of a discussion on feminism? It is a "financial" class distinction, no more, no less. Isn't it true, that all women through history who could afford to do so, have "offloaded" by engaging a cook, a nanny, a housekeeper or at the very least someone who came by once or twice a week to help out with household activities?
It does support my stance that true feminism is dead, we have forgotten and possibly never even embraced and understood the concept that, unless we stand united there will be no progress.
N.F.: Today, the feminist critique of the family wage has assumed an altogether different cast. Its overwhelming thrust is now to validate the new, more “modern” household ideal of the “two earner family,” which requires women’s employment and squeezes out time for unpaid carework.
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So we bring home the bacon and cook it too - or let cook, as the case may be. In today's world it is expected, even mandatory for a woman to work, because those sneaky capitalists have found a way to profit from feminism?:)
Where is the revelation in that?
So, I am forced to agree with N. F. that, "yes, it is indeed ironic that this development has been given a feminist gloss:)"
This capitalism has conscripted women into the paid work force on a massive scale, while also exporting manufacturing to the global south, weakening trade unions, and proliferating low-paid, precarious McJobs. What this has meant, of course, is declining real wages, a sharp rise in the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family, and a desperate scramble to transfer carework to others in order to free up more time for paid work.
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My observation is different. I fear that this generation of women has for the most part accepted their lot, but that it is actually the men who have taken up the good fight for things like maternity leave, because now they have a dog in this fight.
Male couples adopt children and one of them wants to be the caretaker and husbands finally find themselves in a social climate that will accept their staying home with the baby and all the many variations that women now find themselves benefitting from.
The reality is that women have resigned themselves to the fact that they can't have it all. It is simply not possible to drop out of the workforce for a year or two if you are on a career path to break through the glass ceiling. For the shall we say blue collar ladies, it is often no longer an option at all to quit work.
The trouble often lies in the cost and availability of a babysitter - funny, how we pay hundreds to strangers who only tend to the basics, whereas we often do not value the time and care given by the mothers or fathers themselves.
Once men appeared on the scene as caretakers the laws quickly changed. What does that tell us?:)
