What is the pedestal theory as it pertains to the womens liberatoin movement?

[gitfiddle]

What is the pedestal theory as it pertains to the womens liberatoin movement? I heard someone talking about it today and had never heard it before, but I didn’t want to but in and ask. Does anyone know?

[gitfiddle]

I know it’s “liberation.” Sorry.

[brianmelendez]

From Jo Freeman, The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Origin, Structures and Ideals (1970):

For women, sexism describes the specificity of female oppression. Starting from the traditional belief of the difference between the sexes, sexism embodies two core concepts.

The first is that men are more important than women. Not necessarily superior – we are far too sophisticated these days than to use those tainted terms – but more important, more significant, more valuable, more worthwhile. This value justifies the idea that it is more important for a man, the “breadwinner”, to have a job or a promotion, than a women, more important for a man to be paid well, more important for a man to have an education and in general to have preference over a women. It is the basis of the feeling by men that if women enter a particular occupation they will degrade it and that men must leave or be themselves degraded, and the feeling by women that they can raise the prestige of their professions by recruiting men, which they can only do by giving them the better jobs. From this value comes the attitude that a husband must earn more than his wife or suffer a loss of personal status and a wife must subsume her interests to his or be socially castigated. From this value comes the practice of rewarding men for serving in the armed forces and punishing women for having children. The first core concept of sexist thought is that men do the important work in the world and the work done by men is what is important.

The second core concept is that women are here for the pleasure and assistance of men. This is what is meant when women are told that their role is complementary to that of men; that they should fulfill their natural “feminine” functions; that they are “different” from men and should not compete with them. From this concept comes the attitude that women are and should be dependent on men; for everything but especially their identities, the social definition of who they are. It defines the few roles for which women are socially rewarded – wife, mother and mistress – all of which are pleasing or beneficial to men, and leads directly to the “pedestal” theory which extols women who stay in their place as good helpmates to men.

[j.c]

Back in the day, Steve Martin believed that women should be kept on pedestals… so we can look up their skirts.

Seriously, the idea is basically that women are too pure and dainty for this world, and should be kept up on a pedestal so men can admire their morals and tatting skills when they need inspiration. Once notices, looking through medical records and what have you, that during these times of women being kept on pedestals, that other women were allowed to do back-breaking labor around the old homestead so the lady of the house was unsullied, and that women of all classes suffrered from a variety of STDs and seemed to come up preggers now and then.

(FYI - tatting is the art of making lace.)