Well maybe if your reading comprehension was slightly better and you spent less time on witty quips, you would have actually read what I wrote
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…later half of the 19th-century social reformers and progressive had ensured that women mostly (but not totally) left the factories (which makes post 1970’s feminist/progressive protestations about women being kept in the home, deliciously ironic
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Note it is progressives in the 19th century and feminist/progressive in the 20th. The 19th century progressive movement was not much concerned with feminism (there were some feminists who were progressives) and indeed some of its members were hostile (if not downright misogynistic). This contrasts with the 20th century when progressive and feminists were essentially on the same page.
:rolleyes:
Oh really? Tell me why its wrong, rather than making bare assertions backed up by zero facts.
She never would have been in this position, if she had not married him, that much is true. The correct retort to that is pointing out lots of male politicians have also used their name to get into politics, amongst US Presidents, both Bushes, JFK, FDR come to mind. And how good/bad as Presidents they seems to not have any relation to whether they had a political name or not.
Surely you can have criticisms of female politicians and analysis of their backgrounds without being misogynistic.
I’ve already told you: because 19th-century reform efforts on behalf of working-class female laborers don’t make it in any way “ironic” for mid-20th-century middle-class feminists to complain about deflecting women from the middle-class workforce.
Do you have any better explanation to offer about why you’re claiming it is ironic? Because just going on what you wrote, your argument is incoherent and/or just plain dumb.
I think it may be a bit unclear exactly what you mean by “equality of opportunity”. If you mean that in most developed western countries there are no longer any legal prohibitions on women’s pursuing careers in the same way and to the same level as men, we can probably all agree that that’s true.
If, on the other hand, what you mean is that there no longer exist in developed western countries any patriarchal prejudices and cultural assumptions about male domination hindering women’s advancement in any effectual way, I doubt we’re all going to agree with you on that.
I would need a cite that the complaints made in the mid 20th century were about lack of access to Middle Class jobs? Because, everything I have read says otherwise. Their middle class stauses were often brought up by their opponents.
Its ironic that the same movement responsible for getting women out of the workforce was 100 years later instrumental in getting them back in. Its ironic that the feminist movement of the 1970’s allied with a movement that had traditionally been farily indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst, to the feminist movement.
Except that, as I noted, it wasn’t really either the same movement or the same women. Working-class women went on mostly working for wages even after factory/sweatshop reforms in the late 19th century. Middle-class women were mostly not working for wages, either in the 19th century or in the early days of second-wave feminism in the 20th century.
And the early Progressive movement that supported factory reforms was not the same as the 1960s liberalism that catalyzed Women’s Lib. (As you yourself pointed out, “you cannot compare the 19th century with the 20th century”.)
So no, it’s not really “ironic” at all, much less “deliciously ironic”, that one group of 19th-century liberals opposed industrial exploitation of working-class women and several decades later a different group of 20th-century liberals advocated for the career independence of middle-class women.
Not very persuasive: there can be a lot of individual success without necessarily implying that there’s no longer any systemic prejudice or discrimination.
For instance, besides iiandyiiii’s example above, we could point to large numbers of gay people who’ve made it to the top of their professions. Would we be right to infer from that that homophobia is “no longer an issue” working against gay people in our society? I doubt it.
“egalitarian” as on end of a spectrum, the other end of which is “sexual inequality”.
A “division of labor by gender” is simply orthogonal to whether a society is “egalitarian” or not. What matters, is social or political power in actual decision-making among humans. In “egalitarian” societies, this power tends to be spread more equally between the sexes; in “patriarchal” societies, this power is concentrated in the hands of men.
HGs tend to be more “egalitarian” in this sense then tribal peoples, who in turn tend to be more egalitarian than state-level societies. As societies increase in social stratification, they also increase in sexual inequality.
Here’s an article about some recent research (published last year) into the HG end of this:
Title: “Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands”
Abstract:
[Emphasis added]
As can be seen, actual research does not tend to support the crude “just-so” story that sexual inequality derives from the fact that men are bigger and more aggressive, and that this tradition descends from the earliest patterns of human society - on the contrary: the earliest patterns of human society were more egalitarian.
A while back, Little Nemo posted all the western countries and how they are dominated by men. Yet, most if not all those countries allow women to vote and probably, like our country, have a majority of women. So it seems that women don’t like women running them. You’ve got the vote, you’ve got the numbers, so don’t blame men if we are in charge. Even with the upcoming election, the male candidate may be the worst in recent history, and if the woman wins, it looks like it may be by the skin of her teeth.
I disagree. Separate is never equal, just ask any Civil Rights activist.
And you think this can co-exist with division of labour? How so? The “actual decision making” on hunting is done by the men, and the “actual decision making” on gathering is made by the women. Fine, and you’d be right, this would be kind of egalitarian IF both spheres are accorded equal social weight.
But they’re not. At least in the HGs I have familiarity with, meat and the proceeds of hunting have much higher social status. So women have no say in their society’s highest status decision-making and no access to the highest-status occupation. Tell me how that’s egalitarian.
Agreed. How is this compatible with division of labour, though?
I disagree, based on my personal experience with HGs (San) and tribal cultures (various Bantu) - they’re about equally patriarchal.
As far as I can tell, that article is talking about sexual equality qua sex itself. Fine and dandy, but that doesn’t say anything about overall social equality. While Congo Basin H-Gs are not socially stratified, groups like the Mbendjele do still have sex-based division of labour, and other decidedly non-egalitarian behaviours like their menstruation ekila taboos.
There’s no evidence given for this, certainly not by any cite of a modern HG group’s practices. I wouldn’t trust any anthropologist who tried to tell me that what Congo Basin H-Gs are like today are the same as the earliest patterns of human societies were.
I’m not going to argue with your personal impressions or experiences.
I will merely say you challenged me to provide a cite to support that the point I was making was based on current research in anthropological science - and I did.
You also challenged me as to how I was using “egalitarian”. Which I also provided. While sexual division of labor may translate into inequality of decision-making, it isn’t necessarily so (the notion that sexual division of labor in HGs has anything to do with modern “separate but equal” slogans is, of course, a risible rhetorical flourish). Apparently, not all anthropologists share your certainty that they are one and the same - as evidenced by the cite that you asked for.
While the research paper itself is behind a paywall (sadly), the article clearly is using “sexual equality” in the way I describe. See the news articles reporting on the paper, which include this quote from the lead researcher (cited upthread):
Now, you may distrust the science - that’s fine, nothing should be accepted uncritically.
However, the point of this particular research isn’t to claim ancestral HGs were “the same”, bur a rather subtler one: that the model of HG societies they were working on is consistent with present-day observations.
Are you saying that men and women have equal opportunities to run governments? That men and women are competing on a level playing field and the significantly greater success enjoyed by men is just an indication that they’re generally better than women?
Actually, that is exactly what I would predict as well. HG societies, to the extent they are more egalitarian, have to be because of resource constraints. That patriarchal dominance is more expressed in agricultural society makes perfect logical sense to me - witness it also allows men to more thoroughly dominate other men. The accumulation of excess resources allows for ( though need not predicate ) authoritarianism.
I fear I’m not expressing myself very well. I’m not generally trying to make the argument that naked force always rules a la larger female Spotted Hyenas dominating smaller males. We’re too complex and big-brained for that. Rather that in terms of gender dynamics an imbalance in physical strength and aggression has had a more subtle and insidious effect in pre- and early modern societies. If you are almost always the smaller, weaker sex in an era where there had important implications in a social species like humans, I simply can’t envisage where that would not have a systematic impact. It’s not as simple as “Og rules, because Og is strongest!” It’s that this permanent disadvantage looms huge in the background.
But what’s the per capita election success rate% for women? If fewer women run for office than men, then fewer women would get elected than men. Are women substantially more likely to be defeated when running for office vs. a man than vice versa?
We’re getting away from the subject of the thread: why has male domination worked for humanity? Arguments about discrimination right now are irrelevant.
