Brian #fundie

Brian #fundie thelastpsychiatrist.com

Feminism was born when lesbians, who didn't have a husband to provide for them, were frustrated by not being able to find a good paying job. Eventually heterosexual women were duped into believing that they too were disenfranchised in not having the same job opportunities as men.

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old comment by John_in_Oz

@ Mudak
I have formed the opinion, from widespread reading, that women were in the forefront of opposing women in the workforce at the time, immediately after the second world war. Strange though it sounds, they saw it as being in their self interest.
In those days, most adult women were both married and mothers.
Condoms were illegal in many countries and rare in all of them. The pill had not been invented. Marriage meant almost immediate pregnancy, both as a barely avoidable outcome and as a social expectation.
'Men's jobs' were often life-threatening and required brute strength.
Men were paid higher wages in the expectation that they had a family to support or were saving to support a family. That expectation was not always fulfilled, but it was a social role, and was mostly fulfilled. Female roles have changed immeasurably in the decades since then. Electricity, refrigeration, clothes washers, cars, vacuum cleaners, free childhood education, stainless steel, plastics, cleaning chemicals, childcare and higher incomes have antiquated much of the role of mother as viewed at the time. Most of what being a mother was is as obsolete as the horse-care part of driving a taxi is now.

old comment by John_in_Oz

(Continued)
That role at the time meant that it was possible for women to be parents and to hold down part time jobs as domestic labour, (up to 30% of females at one stage) but not to be parents and also work the ten to twelve hour work-days of the men.
This pragmatic separation of the gender roles meant that unmarried women were viewed by other women in much the same way as cheap foreign labour is viewed today by the working class. They were seen as unfair economic competition that put the family income at risk. It wasn't that Rosie the Riveter could do the job, it was that women were saying 'but she couldn't do it as well as men'.
Yes there were misogynists saying the same thing, but the (mostly male) employers of the time had an economic incentive to hire cheap female labour. It was the women who won the day. As they are again doing today.
Of course, the improvements of a group are not improvements for every member of the group, hence the 'down with superwoman' backlash of the 1990's.

Brian #fundie thelastpsychiatrist.com

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