You have just put into words why many people hate, fear, and preach against humanism even more than they do feminism.
Would you please elaborate a bit on that?
I can’t think of any examples to give that you won’t have the same response for. Can you explain how you think people with more choices are more likely to follow biology? I mean, gender roles have changed radically, and they continue to change as women are afforded more equality. To me this is a clear indicator that gender is mainly (not totally) a social construct.
I have been a member of the women’s movement for 37 years now. I call myself a “feminist” because I support equal social, political and economic rights for women and that’s the dictionary definition. Of course, if you support equal rights for women, you support equal rights for both genders.
The feminists that I have known have always worked toward gender equality. Look at the way the Equal Rights Amendment is phrased:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.”
That protects the rights of both men and women. And men have been involved with the discussion since the beginning. Feminism did not fall short there. Some people’s knowledge of the movement has fallen short. Just as there were many white supporters of black civil rights, many men have been feminists too. Did you think only women supported the movement?
Who were these feminists? They certainly weren’t mainstream. You would never find someone such as Gloria Steinem showing disrespect for homemakers and mothers. I’ve never known any feminist who did. All of the feminists that I have known have been supporters have women and men having THE CHOICE to work at home or outside the home and having that work valued! Do you think that women have always gotten Social Security for the work they contributed at home?
People used to ask “Do you work or do you stay home?” – ask if working at home wasn’t real work. It was the feminists who emphasized that homemaking is real work. They also emphasized the change from “housewife” to “homemaker” because it was a better description of the job. It witnessed all of these changes taking place.
I, too, am traditionally feminine. I’m a girly girl. If I had had children, I would have wanted to stay home and care for them. That is my inclination.
But in the family that I was brought up in, my father was the more nurturing person by nature. It’s too bad that my mother was the one who stayed home. She was very destructive. My father understood children. There was nothing feminine in his nature. He was very masculine, but funny, patient and kind. Nurturing is not restricted by gender. We’ve just come to expect it more of women. Fathers who raise children can be wonderful nurturers and should be given equal opportunities in courtrooms!
Utter nonsense! Eat your words. I think WhyNot explained the meaning of the differences quite well. We still have to judge the individuals.
Those of you who talk about women who want to be dominant over men or who don’t have respect for women who work at home should provide cites to show where these women are any part of mainstream feminism. So far in this thread all of the negatives I have read are just so much poppycock.
Talk about real feminists – your average fifty or sixty[five year old woman who worked to get women admitted to medical and law school on an equal basis and who worked to get Ivy League schools and West Point and other service academies open to women. Look at some old films and see how many women were on school boards and juries in the Fifties.
Do you even know what half court basketball is? Ha! No one thought women were strong enough to play full court. That changed since I have been teaching.
I just wish that some of you could see the changes through my eyes.
WhyNot, Free to Be You And Me was so cool when it first came out! Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas had to lead us by our noses to think. Thanks for the reminder.
Sadly, the Equal Rights Amendment has never passed. I blame false rumors such as those circulated in threads such as this one.
But just once I would like to hear men discuss how they manage to balance the responsibilities of careers with their responsibilities as husbands and fathers. Get it?
There’s been all this conservative and fundamentalist bitching and moaning about secular humanism as a crime against God and godly people and has put us on a slippery slope toward a hedonistic, amoral world.
I suspect no one with half a working brain really believes that; it’s all just a smokescreen for what they’re really afraid of, which is a world where every human life has value. It poses too many challenges to the current order of inequality, war, and various flavors of oppression that a lot of folks really do believe are the foundation blocks of civilized society.
Re feminism, if a few women want to be lawyers, CEOs, TV commentators, etc., that’s of comparatively little concern to the folks in question.
Honest question: have you sat through some ‘gender studies’ classes in the last couple of decades? Now, I’m not sure, as I said upthread, how widespread certain positions are… but by the same token, strongly misandrist positions have often been voiced and accepted without debate. That is, at least in the classrooms I was in during my college and graduate school careers. `
Well, for an example:
Hirshman, of course, while perhaps not ‘mainstream’, is certainly a feminist with enough of a strident position to be regularly given time in the mainstream media. Or, as she herself puts it:
Another honest question then, how do we determine who is mainstream, and who isn’t? If it was a religion we could see how many people subscribe to it, but it seems like a trickier dynamic here. What metric would we use?
Well, as I asked above, how are we to define “mainstream?” And, while I’m at it, does Gertrude Stein count for “women who want to be dominant?” She had a sizeable following, would you say that was mainstream? She was the person, after all, who said Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so..
This makes more sense to me if we use the term Traditionalist, as you suggested.
Well - it seems to me that if we’re to end misogyny, that is a portion which is ‘about men’. A bit nit-picky of me, perhaps.
Zoe you remind me of a friend of my mom’s, a reporter who was a real juggernaut with the Movement back then. (that is a compliment).
Yes, I remember those days, also. I remind my daughters that y’all paved the way for many others.
Just as we have seen with the Civil Rights movement, we’ve seen factions spring up in the Womens’ Movement which are tangential - split off from the mainstream - yet somehow gaining a louder voice and bigger presence in society’s field of vision. Those are the ones which WhyNot ran into. Also feminism itself has grown and changed. It’s not the same feminism of my mother, and won’t be the same as mine once my daughters pick up the torch. I’d be hard pressed to actually define it - seems to me that it’s a moving target.
I sit in a gender theory class now and I don’t hear misandry. If anything, our professor has us consider the implications that misogyny has for men, as well - misogyny devalues us all.
I suppose then we have dueling anecdotes.
Well, not really dueling. As I said, I’m simply not sure, and certainly making no definitive claims, about how widespread such views are. I would, however, say that since I’ve been them voiced and accepted without question in some academic settings, that even ‘fringe’ views are not, necessarily, shunned.
I still remember when I was back in college and was adding the “with honors” designation to my B.A. The Senior Thesis class I was in was taught by a disciple of Derrida, a body-building (she wrote on the syllabus that anybody who disrupted her class would be “bench pressed” by her), strident feminist who definitely had an agenda to push. Of the books she made us read that semester, Dennis Rodman’s autobiography was on the list. When we got to the end of that piece of garbage, she pointed out a line about how people try to devalue poor innocent Rodman by calling him “angry”.
She looked at the class and asked “And who else is devalued by people pretending that they’re angry?” Knowing nods met her question and several students, almost simultaneously, answered “feminists.” Because I was young and stupid then, and didn’t know enough to keep my head down (I still don’t always remember that lesson) I piped up and said “Well, no, not all feminists are angry. But I’m sure you have to admit, some certainly are.”
Her response? “If you keep that up, you’re sure going to see an angry feminist!”
I’m not even going to get into how she had us read her autobiograpy as part of the required reading; her autobiography was a book that included a fairly graphic description of her getting fucked from behind by a gym coach of hers. Then she proudly told us about a review of her book that said something like “more than a woman, the author is an angry Goddess”. And, of course, she told us “that reviewer really got it right!”. She wanted us to, as a class, then give her feedback on her book while she filmed us. Not particularly wanting to discuss her description of being done doggy style, I was ‘sick’ that day.
So, I suppose, the point I’m making is that I really have no idea whether this is “mainstream” or not. But I do know that some (to me at least) really unpalatable factions of feminism are perfectly well received in an academic setting.
P.S. My academic career includes places as diverse as California, London, the NE United States and Texas. This sort of stuff has happened in all of those places. At first rate universities. For whatever that’s worth.
I see what you are saying, FinnAgain, and I think **NinetyWt **really hits the nail on the head on this one. Feminism as a philosophy has long since ceased to center around its old battle-cry of “solidarity” and has become increasingly splintered over the past few decades. Feminism has become a lot of battle between feminists, with scholars taking one another to task over minute points of semantics, or what have you, rather than focusing on practical activism. The squeaky wheel gets the grease - or rather, the noisy feminist gets the most press, both negative and positive. The perception of the public toward feminism seems to me to be mostly negative – as if every feminist is a carbon copy of Andrea Dworkin or Monique Wittig.
Most average people don’t really know or care what is going on in the Academy, whether it regards feminism* or any social theory, until it’s pushed into the limelight. Most of the feminist battles in academia - the essentialists vs. the social constructionists, the separatist radical lesbians vs. well, everyone else - their arguments don’t really have any bearing on what happens to the average person out there in the world. More people read John Grisham than Simone de Bouvier. Only the most outrageous theories are revealed to the public, as a sort of spectacle, “let’s point and laugh at the ivory tower angry dyke set”. This is how it seems to me, anyways. All I know is that the young men in my class haven’t been chased off yet.
As far as agendas – some people have them, others don’t. I don’t think I have an agenda, per se – but I definitely have an axe to grind, and I’d say all feminists do. However I am planning to take my battle out of the classroom and into the courtroom. I can tell you that it is academically and intellectually dishonest to film students’ reactions to a graphic section of an autobiography (and I’d say irresponsible not to mention that explicit material would be used in the class, if that was the case). Your former professor sounds like a terrible person, and I’m unsurprised that an experience like that would shape your perception of feminism in such a fashion. I cannot imagine what would happen if something like that were to occur at my university.
A few years ago, when my professor asked if anyone in our class considered themselves a feminist, no-one in the class raised their hand, including myself. Times change, perceptions change, and I got a little older and stopped giving a shit what people thought of me. I had a change last summer that made it for me. I raise my hand high now. I go in a few weeks to ask my professor to help me understand the things I need to know to proceed with grinding the particular axe I’m out for, to be effective at what I consider to be my task in this world. I don’t know anyone better to help me.
*I’m speaking of big-F academic feminism, not the sort of feminism to which I have previously been accustomed and which I was raised in: learning to change the oil in the car as well as changing the diaper on a baby was the sort of upbringing I had. I decorated my room with floral motifs and pictures of jet planes; unicorns and motorcycles, and sported a Smurfette “I can do anything!” tshirt when I was 6. I was raised to believe I could do whatever I wanted, and going out into the workforce came as a shock to me when I discovered it still is in a lot of ways the “old boys’ club”.
The personal experiences were just that: self-labeled feminists in college who first recoiled and then shunned me when they found out that “all” I wanted to do was get married, have babies and be a housewife, and that I was only in school to get an education to support myself and my future children should my future husband not be able to support us.
As for the media portion, I found articles throughout the mid to late 80s and 90s written on the topic of “find what you love and then find a way to get paid for it!” overwhelmingly insulting to housewives and SAHMs. Suddenly being a great mother wasn’t “enough”, every woman was pressured to be a millionaire Mrs. Fields as well. That whole fashion of “journalism” screwed me up but good, in more ways than one, and I’m just now at 33 healed enough to take responsibility for myself, and go back to school for what I really want: nursing. (And still, every time I see a male nurse, I breathe an almost unconscious sigh of relief that it’s not “just women’s work” anymore, 'cause that makes it okay for me to want to do it.)
So yes, thank you (and thank both my mothers, groundbreaking bra-burning 70’s feminists) for your work and all that you and your sisters and mothers (and brothers and fathers!) did. But what you did also had some unforeseen consequences, and some of your daughters, while very grateful for the opportunities you opened up for us, also feel like you slammed some doors shut for a while there, as well - completely unintentionally, I get that. I think that’s being fixed now.
Well, what Der Trihs was saying, I think, is that people will gravitate towards what is natural for them, in the absence of other influences, and that biology is natural. I believe this is true, to a certain extent, and actually strongly disagree that gender is mainly a social construct. I think that the way that gender roles in society adapts over time, but that generally speaking, our identity as a specific gender is biological in nature, and that gender dynamics (that is, how we relate to those of our own sex, vs. those of the opposite sex) tend to be driven by how we evolved as a species.
I think, Zoe, that you have a fine view of what feminism should be, but I also think that many, many women have felt scorn when they reveal that they are not particularly intesreted in a career, or that wife and motherhood is what ultimately fulfills them. It may not be a “doctrine” of feminist thought, but it is out there, in the eye rolling and the dismissiveness of women who believe that these roles demean their gender.
I have the opposite inclination. I love my children very much, and being their mother delights me. But, I am not very interested in the domestic arts, and being at home all the time depresses me, so I have stuck to my career. However, I’m going to quote the end of your post now, because it is relevant here…
I appreciate what you are saying here, but this is where I think that innate gender roles are biological in nature. I think the biological urges…whether they are hormonal in nature, part of our brain structure, or what, I’m not sure…are stronger for women to be with their children (generally speaking, of course). I believe it is this inner drive to raise children that derails womens’ careers more than anything else. Now, mind you, I’m talking about now, in the year 2008, where womens opportunities have opened up just about as wide as they are for men. Obviously, this hasn’t always been so.
Oh, I absolutely agree with that, and I think that all discussions of generalities break down when you are talking about individuals.
I can, to a degree, because my mother is an old-school feminist. She was the only girl in her HS class to go to college, in the days when college often meant an MRS degree, and she had a career before she got married and had children. She continuned her education, has her PhD, and has had a very rewarding career. She taught me, as I mentioned, about the strength of women and that I was as good as any man. She taught her sons how to respect all the work a woman does…whether in the home or outside the home. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the women who broke the glass ceiling.
Fun story…my paternal grandmother was also an independent type…went to college back in…yikes, maybe around 1920? She became a teacher. When the Principal’s job needed to be filled, they offered it to her, but she turned it down because the salary was going to be lower than was paid to the man who held the job previously. Go Grandma! 
This record was very popular when I was a small gradeschooler, and I agree that society learned a lot from such efforts.
I’m not sure what you mean here by “false rumors.” If people are reporting what they have seen and heard, or personally experienced, then it is not false, and it is not a rumor. It may not fit with what you personally believe feminism to be, but that’s the point of such a thread, to discuss ideas. I think it’s unfair to claim that someone else’s experience is “false.”
Men who want to stay home and raise kids instead of developing a career are also scorned–even men who want a low-stress, lower paying job in order to have more time with their kids are scorned as not being ambitious or driven. It’s the housework and the child-rearing that are seen as demeaning, not the fact that a woman would chose to do them.
True, but I think that a large part of the reason it’s seen as demeaning is because it’s traditionally women’s work…which is one of the hot spots for me in regards to why I consider myself a feminist. I believe that this work at home is as important (if not more so), as anything one might choose to do outside the home, and I think that women (or men, as you say) should not have to feel as though their time is wasted if that is what they choose to do. I think that anyone who calls herself a feminist, yet demeans this type of work, is counter-productive to the feminist movement.
Would you also say that misandry is real?
Equal rights have already happened. Don’t believe me? Cite one right that men have and women don’t.
The opportunity is equal. The only fight left is legislated equality of outcome - and I don’t see that as a good idea.
How? Did you go to gender studies classes and rallies and marches, or did you go to engineering school or law school or medical school or business school and start climbing up the ladder?
Often to the point that they are not considered to be suitable mates at all. Men will still consider marrying a woman whose goal is to be a SAHM. Not too many women are lining up to marry men who want to be SAHF.
My parents are starting to deal with the fact that I might end up with a guy who is less educated and makes less money than me. This bothers them because their idea of men is that they should be ambitious, driven, and constantly climbing up the ladder and that any man who makes less than I do is a lazy bum.
That I am one of the top salaried people in my own office is starting to change their minds.
Absolutely agreed. I do see some perceptual patterns that can pop up by focusing on only one group out of a whole society (see below), but I think that mostly you’re right on.
And the situation you describe is part of why I have trouble without certain too-pat definitions of feminism. Speaking of feminism as if it’s one unified philosophy is false to facts, unfortunately. And while I certainly wouldn’t say that every, or even many feminists are copies of man-hating female chauvinist sows, I do and probably always would find it disturbing that in the Academy, some of those views are accepted as legitimate scholarship. If one were to take the same views, however, and replace “man” with “woman”, folks would likely be guilty of violating many universities’ speech codes.
I do find it interesting, however, that increasingly now, women are not describing themselves as feminists, even if they believe in equal rights. I do believe that’s important, but I’m not totally sure as to what to make of it, tbh. I’m sure some women are like you, and might later decide that the label fits. And yet, increasingly, others are seeing feminism either as a non-issue or as, simply, something that happened in the past. The generation gap, in that respect, seems to be much more evident between older and younger women than older and younger men.
The rise of ‘raunch culture’, for instance, fascinates me to no end (even though I’m too old and settled down to enjoy it in anything but an academic context :smack: ) I’ve seen more than one discussion where a younger woman says that she has no need for feminism and doesn’t consider it important, and some older woman, who fought for equal rights, responds that there wouldn’t be all those opportunities that are being taken for granted if not for feminism. The response, often, is something along the lines of ‘yeah, it was important then, but it’s over. I’m going clubbing now.’
Well… you get the point.
This is actually something that fascinates me, and I suspect, this dynamic will one day lead to a ‘paradigm shift’.
I’d wager that 50 years down the line, it may not even be necessary to tell young girls that they can accomplish anything they set their minds to and that their gender wouldn’t hold them back… because they’d never consider anything other than that. I’m not sure what situation feminism would be in then, or how, say, 60-70 year old women will perceive or relate to that time/generation.
I think that’s tricky, actually. The view I get, which I will freely admit is unsupported by statistical confirmation and thus, totally open to retraction… is that men who are “house-husbands” are looked down on not because they’re necessarily doing “woman’s work” (although that could play a part), but because they’re bucking the gender role that men are supposed to have. Which is kind of my point about the myopic focus of feminism vs the expansive focus of humanism… the whole fact that men are made to feel like “less of a man” or a failure as a man if they’re not ambitious go-getters bringing home the bacon speaks to a problem, especially since as a society and in the Academy, most folks simply don’t care.
The fact that, for instance, Zoe had never even heard of the fact that men often complain about being unable to do the ‘manly’ thing of bringing home a good salary, and watch their kids grow up at the same time? It certainly doesn’t show any personal failing on he part, merely how, as the discussion has long focused on only a one-group-at-a-time philosophy, gender constructs that afflict men are often simply unknown to some. Heck, I’m reasonably sure that now that she knows about it, Zoe would be one of the first to agree that if a husband and wife decided the wife could earn more money and the husband liked taking care of the kids, that he shouldn’t be looked down on for wanting to be there to watch his children grow up. And that’s my whole point about feminism vs humanism ; looking at all people’s rights to indivudal roles regardless of gender roles might have made clear that men face the same challenges as women. Focusing on women only, however, tends to leave one in the dark about the other 49% of the species, on some issues at least.
P.S. no offense Zoe, you know I love ya . 
Thank you. It’s a damn shame that the voice or image of feminism which springs to mind with most people is that of the ‘lunatic fringe’.
Exactly. Now, here’s the rub - one day the ‘old school’ needs to go to the museum. Little Sally isn’t ‘taking for granted’, she’s living in the ways which ‘old school’ brought to fruition. The difficult part is feeling happy about that, instead of feeling bitter that ‘they’ve forgotten!’. But we should be happy, very happy, if such things never cross our grandchildrens’ minds.
I can’t find any fault with that, Ninety.
Brings to mind a story… while I was teaching at a New England private school, I taught another teacher’s sixth grade class for a couple weeks. IIRC, the book we were discussing was King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. There was a scene where a character said that all women really want was to manipulate and control men. Wanting to get some of the girls in the class emotionally involved in the book, I asked them how that comment made them feel.
“Awesome!” “Girls rule!” and “Boys are dumb” were some of the immediate responses I got. For a moment, I was shocked. Here was the next generation, future leaders and women of means and education… and not only weren’t they upset, they actually saw it as somehow empowering women.
The Head of School happened to be sitting in on my lesson that day and she said, in a discussion with me after class, something like:“they just don’t understand the struggle that went on or what comments like that used to mean.” The more I think about it now, that may very well be a good thing.
Yes, of course it is. It isn’t really the purview of feminism however.
As I already said, in the west women have achieved equality under that law, for the most part. But feminism is a global movement. I know you wouldn’t say women all over the world have equal rights to men. And in America there is a lot of societal change being worked towards.
Why can’t feminists do both? Does the presence of English teachers in universities mean there are no novels being written? Do you hold any other subject being studied to this standard?
That’s wonderful, but you should know feminists do (and always have) stood behind you in this. I think feminists, who believe nurturing and the ability to raise children are not gender specific attributes, have been the earliest champions of the ideas of SAHF, and that men shouldn’t be responsible for being the breadwinner.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard feminists say “The patriarchy hurts men too.” It’s well known and understood. The idea that feminists are blind to this aspect is simply false.