Get over it
This is a very stupid observation, presumably by a dull-witted sub-editor who didn’t read the article with attention:
The fruits of the feminist revolution? Sisterhood, empowerment, and eight hours a day in a cubicle.
That’s right. Why? Because lots of jobs involve eight hours a day in a cubicle. Such is life. But the point of the feminist revolution is that women ought not to be debarred from life in the larger world merely because they are women. Women ought to be seen as and treated as people just as men are people, and both sexes ought to have the ability to take their chances in the world as it is. That’s all. ‘The feminist revolution’ did not think or suggest that all women would or should have the ideal perfect paradisal job. Who thought it did? The idea was just that women should be equal, and treated as equal, so neither sheltered nor banished. That’s all. That doesn’t bring with it some kind of gilded promise of Thrilling Jobs Only, does it – all it brings is the ability to try on reasonably equal terms. Life is life, work is work, jobs are jobs; most jobs suck; big news flash. How could ‘the feminist revolution’ have meant anything else? How would it have gone about guaranteeing Wonderful Jobs for all women who wanted jobs? What is the complaint here? That ‘the feminist revolution’ promised all women would be monarchs or globally-famous poets or archaeologist/adventurers? Please. The feminist revolution was never that stupid.
*ahem* I think you will find that for very many of the activists of second-wave feminism, it was very much NOT about giving women the chance to compete in a capitalist environment as individuals on equal terms with men. I think for some at least the concept of ‘revolution’ was somewhat more profound than a marketing slogan. As late as the 1980s there were still some who believed that feminism was anarchism in action.
Notwithstanding that, I thought it was a very good article, too.
Bravo! Well said! I was surprised when Arts and Letters Daily highlighted this article with precisely those words: ‘So what has the feminist revolution really given women? Sisterhood, empowerment, and eight hours a day in a cubicle…’
Who is Sandra Tsing Loh? And why the sour tone of her article? She ends up by pointing out how privileged her life is, while, meanwhile, speaking contemptuously of other women and their jobs. Does she know that, before feminism, before ‘more or less’ equal pay for equal work for women (I know it’s still an ideal some distance away), women who were abused at home had nowhere to go – nowhere at all? Why, because there were no jobs, and the few jobs there were paid half as much as men doing the very same thing, and women were resented and exploited. They were stuck at home for good and all. It really burns we up when women, enjoying all the benefits of feminism, speak snidely of feminism (like, ‘where are the last two? in Buffalo?’). Sandra doesn’t know where her life comes from. She should think again.
>As late as the 1980s there were still some who believed that feminism was anarchism in action.< Can’t quite see how anarchism would help women. -:)
“Who is Sandra Tsing Loh?” See Wiki.
I’d have to agree with Eric here – while the article did have several pointed and trenchant observations, by the end I was left scratching my head as to what message Loh was trying to convey. The way I read it, the article implicitly reinforced the stupid subheading it was given – that feminism has merely reinforced capitalism by giving women the opportunities for the same shit jobs men do, while she gets to sit around in her privileged commentary gig and ponder these things. Is it feminism that’s bad in her view, or capitalism? I couldn’t really tell by the end of her article. In the end it seems that she’s just as guilty of the same sort of condescension toward those with “real” jobs as she accuses Hirshman of being.
Yes, Ophelia, there were quite a few, and I used to think, in the first wave – I’m not sure when the first wave began and ended, but still, it seemed first in my mind – during the early sixties, that a lot of women really didn’t know what awaited them – that there were a shitload of dead end jobs opening up just in time for them. But even then, it seems to me, they had a chance that their sisters didn’t. They may, like JoB, think that they’re jobs stank, perhaps even their lives, but, for many, I think, they were a liberation, capitalism or no.
Sorry about the poor proofreading – ‘they’re’ instead of ‘their’.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally agree with you, OB. It’s just that in the end Loh seemed to come to the conclusion that economic fairness and gender equality were at loggerheads – you could have one, but not the other. In reality (to me at least) structural changes in the global economy have forced both male and female heads of a traditional nuclear family to work in order to maintain what’s conceived as a middle class lifestyle. In other words, nowadays it takes two paychecks to make ends meet rather than one. But Loh appears to accept the view that you can have feminism or economic fairness but not both, and this view basically ignores the economic history of the past 35 years.
And FWIW, to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except all the others that have been tried.
I suppose all I’m really trying to say is that Loh appears to buy into the spurious correlation between broader economic changes and the emergence of feminism as a major social and political force as asserted by one of the authors she’s reviewing.
Hee hee hee
Yes see the truth is I read the STL piece a few weeks ago and loved the snotty tone, didn’t knit brow very much over what she was actually arguing, and then dumped it from memory, then glanced at it again this morning, found snotty tone again, like STL in general, hate Caitlin Flanagan, so that was all that was about. It’s possible that I don’t agree with everything she says, but the subhead is stupid stupid stupid.
Beware of editors bearing stupid subheads. Never mind feminism, just get the damn subheads right, and paradise will ensue.
Oh, I loves me the snark.
So if we can take care of the stupid editors and stupid subheads will I get my jet pack?
I’m afraid that is handled by a different department.
Job Capatilism might stink but it pays the mortgage on my house and gives me the oportunity to provide for my family.I agree with O.B most jobs suck femenism just gave women the oportunity to find that out for themselves rather than have their future dictated to them.
I spend half my life with my head in other peoples toilets maybe manism has failed me?
Screw the jet pack. That was never realistic. But I want my flying car, dammit! I made it all the way to the year 2000 and beyond, and no flying cars. WTF?
Richard, my irony failed, again. Sigh! Need vacation.
Claire, G., materialistic, even in your utopia. Bah!
I still think it’s sad that feminism can be reduced to “both sexes ought to have the ability to take their chances in the world as it is. That’s all.” [And that’s you talking, OB]. It’s a tragic absence of consideration of the multitude of forces that make the world ‘as it is’, many of which are amenable [and you may snark as much as you like] to critique through concepts like ‘patriarchy’. [And note, please, patriarchy shits on men, too, it’s an all-purpose system of oppression…]
What women have ‘won’ in the last generation seems mostly to be the right to be treated [just like men] as interchangeable generic cogs in the capitalist machine, rather than interchangeable generic angels in the house. [And I set aside the ‘pornification’ of culture, which says that the ideal woman now needs to be not only a chef in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom, but a whore pretty much everywhere else as well…]
In practice the socioeconomic outcome of what ‘feminism’ has been allowed to ‘win’ amounts to little more than splitting the classic ‘double shift’ – whereas women once worked AND did housework, now the aspiration is to work and pay someone else [a woman, mostly] to do the housework… And the job of work done outside the home is still mostly for The Man….. [Richard, there’s some irony there, but I’ll let you spot it.]
Dave, well, yes – I didn’t mean to endorse the world as it is. I said too much. I just meant to disavow…well, magical thinking, I suppose, along with sneering at the feminist revolution for not performing instant magic.
Dave if women now get the fair rate of pay for working what is wrong with them spending their money on what ever they see fit,if its someone to do the house work thats their choice why sneer at it?
The dream of a better world, Richard, the dream of a better world….
You just want to tell women whats good for them how nice, have you ever wondered if maybe some women dont share your world veiw?
Wow, Richard, that actually is a good point! Keep ’em coming.
A good point… EXCEPT for the part where I didn’t try to tell anyone what to do. Though on that subject it would be a funny old world if no-one was allowed to point out to people the constraints on what they perceived to be ‘free’, ‘individual’ choices.
Dave you sneered at the way a large number of women choose to live their life, my wife would fit the profile you were heaping scorn on and she is a very smart working woman,very independent minded but also is looking for someone to help keep the house that she takes a great deal of pride in. I very much doubt whether she or other women like her would take kindly to your veiw of a perfect world. If femenism means anything it means women get to hoe their own road not conform to what you may think is ideal for them.
a] I did not ‘sneer’ at anyone. What do you think I am, some kind of gold-plated ivory-tower elitist? I suspect I make less in a year than you do. The only reason my wife doesn’t have a job is that she can’t find one that’ll pay enough to justify the outlay on childcare. My neighbours, the parents of my children’s playmates, are plumbers, electricians, builders, a retired gardener. Give me a fucking break from your bloody reverse snobbery.
b] I did not ‘heap scorn’ on individuals, of any disposition, I merely pointed out that the gains in individual autonomy actually achieved in the last 40 years are small beer compared to what had once been hoped for. Were those hopes utopian? Yes; impractical? Probably; did I at any point even SUGGEST that anyone should be forced to conform to them? No I bloody well didn’t.
c]Try, TRY, to understand the difference between pointing out the flaws in something, and insisting someone be forced to behave differently. I know the two are virtually inseparable in public debate, but there is actually a wide realm of discussion and critique out there where it is possible merely to draw people’s attention to things, without holding a gun, rhetorical or actual, to their head.
Dave,
On c), fair enough but the flaws you’re seeing need not be seen as flaws by the others. The question really is why it’s the case, according to you, that having (wo)men do the housework in order to be able to do out-of-house work is such an issue?
Would it be really an issue if some (wo)men preferred housework whilst others – of both sexes – preferred not to do it?
Even if the end result is such that we end up with more women than men doing housework, is that necessarily a bad thing? It clearly is a bad thing if it is the result of (social) coercion to do this but assuming that a difference remains withou (social) coercion, why would it be a bad thing?
‘Doing the housework’ is just the tip of a very complicated iceberg. One could point out, for example, that 100 years ago it was quite the norm, for everyone who could afford it, to pay women [and girls] a pittance to do one’s housework. This is by the by.
I am saddened – that was the word I used, ‘sad’, that almost everyone these days seems to be content for their aspirations to be reduced to the possibility of [amongst other similar objectives] earning enough to pay someone else to clean up after them. There was a time when the limits of potential human happiness were cast wider than that. That’s all.
The only reason that [to go back to OB’s original point] “Life is life, work is work, jobs are jobs; most jobs suck; big news flash” is that the poverty of our collective imagination makes that seem true. And feminism used to be about exploring alternatives to the whole, crummy, shebang.
Well might one argue that such ambitions were ‘against human nature’, or some such. Who knows, perhaps they indeed are. But I decline to enjoy that state, and I would rather we kept alive some vision of the possibility of changing ‘human nature’ so that rather more of us could be happy, safe, well, unthreatened, unoppressed, fulfilled, and equal in dignity and rights.
Dave,
There you have it: “There was a time..” & so on so forth. On the one hand you’d want us to want more – but on the other you think we already had more once upon a time.
News flash: go back in time & there you find an increasingly low percentage of people (you don’t have to go back far to reach 0% for women) that had any time to do anything else than survive. That’s progress: the percentage goes up (& although the percentage for women is still trailing the average, it goes up a whole lot faster than that average). Doesn’t that suffice? Is it really also necessary to put the demand there that people do something ‘useful’ with that time? Knowing that your ‘useful’ may well be somebody else’s ‘boring’.
Next you’re going to tell me that youth these days is lost because they spend all of their time on the PS3 instead of working for the third world. After that it is off to the Catholic Youth Days ;-)
Sorry, if you think that makes sense as a reply to my point, I can’t help you.
Fair point on c I probably did engage in that Dave,But I have to agree with Job why see it as a flaw, femenism was always unrealistic in that it thought women would behave like men,they dont, my wife dropped 10 grand a year in salary so she could work localy for less hours so she could spend more time on family type stuff. This was entirely her decision but kind of demonstrates that men and women see the world in different ways,I would be devestated if my income dropped I would feel that I was failling in my role as a provider and that probably makes me a typical male?
Well, Richard – I would then ask you, yet again, to slow down, read more carefully, and then respond more carefully. Don’t just let fly with the baseless insults. All that does is derail the discussion, however temporarily, and cause pointless irritation.
Haven’t you noticed that discussions here are on the whole pretty decent? Not rude or abusive or flamey? I like it that way. I think other people like it that way.
I got involved in a discussion on a blog last week that was not like that. I’d been invited to read the post (and thus presumably to comment) by the author, but when I did comment, I found myself in a flood of ludicrously personal (and sexist) abuse (by total strangers). I wouldn’t let that happen here. It would be nice if you would make more of an effort not to say the first hostile thing that pops into your head.
I saw that “discussion” on that blog last week and how quickly it degenerated from what was supposed to be a bit of light, rueful we men are a bit hard done by playfulness into vile insults and misogyny.
I’ve seen that before, normally on right wing sites. The thread goes something like this:-
Statement:- XX says there are a lot of misogynistic bloggers.
Replies:- Well, XX is a dumb clueless bitch who must be having her period/is in need of a good shag/is a post menopausal witch/needs a good manly cuddle to think there are a lot of misogynistic bloggers.
Dave, indeed, not very helpful!
KB – just so. It was a bit shocking on that particular blog, and since most of the comments were allowed to stand and the misogynist piling on only very feebly rebuked, I’ve been forced to conclude that that blog is now a slum. In short, I don’t go there no mo.
I take that back. I got the impression from somewhere that some (the worst) of the comments had been deleted, but I’ve just looked again and I don’t think any have been deleted; certainly all the really ripe ones are still there, along with more smug self-congratulation and sniggering from the blogger. It’s taking all the self-control I have not to name and shame him.