This article blew my mind. "America and the world would collapse in 20 seconds if women were showing up for each other instead of being exploited for every form of labor.” - From "Feminism Has Failed Women" by Kim Brooks

wagonwheel_ · 2021-01-04T16:38:04+00:00

A few weeks ago I tried to reason with my mother about the fact that I’m 30, divorced, and have no desire to have children in the foreseeable future. I also have a very prestigious career that I worked hard for and am super proud of.

She suggested that maybe I’m too selfish to have children.

Or maybe the system isn’t set up for me to have children without sacrificing the things that give my life meaning and hitching my wagon to some man, praying he will always be there for me and the kids?

This article was therapy to read. Thanks for sharing.

Samvanderkamp123 · 2021-01-04T16:14:51+00:00

Coronavirus has shone a light on the reality of most marriages: where both partners are working from home, the woman has taken on the burden of childcare and virtual schooling.

Her meetings are interrupted, she is the one working late at night to catch up.

He has carried on as normal, ignoring the requirements of schooling children at home.

The women I know who most successfully combine work and family, rely on their mothers for childcare.

heroic_nincompoop · 2021-01-04T15:29:26+00:00

This is the part I found most fascinating:

Isolating women from larger social communities has historically been a surefire way to disempower them, and Covid-19 has imposed one of the longest periods in modern history of prolonged, social isolation. This is a necessary evil during a pandemic, but all the same, it’s proving to be a perfect social experiment in what happens to women, both single mothers and mothers living in traditional two-parent households, when the drawbridges are raised.

The first coronavirus vaccine has been approved, but the next months will still be dark ones. Of the more than one million workers aged 20 and over who exited the labor force in September, 865,000 were women. Many lost unemployment insurance benefits because they “chose” not to return to work, even if they had no real choice because they had no child care. Of those who remained, one in four were considering reducing hours, looking for less-demanding jobs or planning to leave.

Child care centers are shuttering around the country. According to a report from the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, the child care crisis could cost women $64.5 billion in lost wages per year. One study found that even mothers who have managed to keep their jobs have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Mothers are also more likely than fathers to work part-time, and only 43 percent of part-time workers have access to paid sick leave, 8 percent to paid family leave and 22 percent to health care benefits.

As any woman who’s ever tried to take more than a month or two of maternity leave knows, extended child-related lapses in employment are at best frowned upon and interpreted as a lack of professional dedication and at worst, for part-time or undocumented workers, grounds for termination. Leaving the work force, even under the most dire circumstances, tends to be a one-way street. What’s more, these exits reinforce the notion that mothers, as opposed to fathers, are the only appropriate primary caregivers for children, that there is something natural, universal and inevitable about this arrangement.

As a result, some suggest that a year of Covid-19 may undo decades worth of progress toward gender equity in America, that even after the pandemic is brought under control, a generation of working mothers will never recover what they lost.

It makes you wonder: How meaningful was the progress we’ve made in the last three decades, if it can be undone so quickly and so ferociously?

I feel like it's so completely true. Coronvavirus shone a light on the insane burden women are forced to carry. I wonder how things will change once things finally get back to normal...if they get back to normal. Or will we have to create a new reality, one where things won't fall apart so easily? It's interesting to think about, that's for sure.

WornTheTshirt73 · 2021-01-04T22:23:07+00:00

This is precisely why women are discouraged from organising, gathering, meeting, bonding, sharing and are pitted against each other in the “marriage race” ... women united and awake to their rotten deal in life is a very dangerous thing to the patriarchy ...

circescircus · 2021-01-04T16:20:52+00:00

So many societies and cultures rely on exploiting women to even be semi-functional. They just went so far with exploiting women, that a lot of women would need to clone themselves in order to fulfill all of the roles society expects of them, most of which society expects for free, or at best-- for less pay than a man.

FluffandRainclouds · 2021-01-05T04:14:06+00:00

People sometimes accuse her of misandry, but the project has nothing to do with wanting to “escape men,” she told me. “I just want to live with and raise children with and be neighbors with people I can count on, people who have my back, people who take care of me when I need help and vice versa. In my own experience, that’s been women.”

Great article highlighting women's strengths amidst a pandemic and. Unfair social circumstances. But, can we talk about this passage for a second? Here this woman (as described by the author) has to defend herself from accusations of "misandry" because she wants to live with other women. So many articles, reports, and other media describe acts of misogyny (including femicide!), and somehow fail to mention misogyny as a factor. But women who simply choose not to live with men have to feign concern about accusations of "misandry." 🙄 It feels so disingenuous seeing women pre-emptively guard themselves against trolls because they expressed an anodyne opinion.

mme-gautier · 2021-01-05T01:31:22+00:00

Bringing an outsider perspective:

What is nearly unbelievable for me is how a rich country like U.S. does not have mandatory parental leave. I mean, I am Brazilian, I live in a poor country and even considering that social security pays leaves for all women. Women have at minimum 120 days, receiving the entire amount of the remuneration, while fathers have 5 days. Here it is not even a question.

Brazil is one of the most violent countries for women ans has a lot of problems, but seeing posts at this sub I noticed that maybe USA culture really is biased against mothers. For instance, here I don't see a lot of hatred for single mothers. In fact they are celebrated - the problem pointed by local feminists is that single motherhood is romanticized, erasing men's responsibilities etc.

But outright hate for single mothers is very difficult to see here.

nointerestsbutsleep · 2021-01-04T22:45:55+00:00

Shhhhh hope I don’t get in trouble.

A few weeks ago, or maybe it was a few months ago, I decided to watch my two favorite ’80s movies about working mothers: “Baby Boom,” a rom-com starring Diane Keaton as an advertising executive turned work-from-home applesauce mogul; and “Aliens,” James Cameron’s thriller centered around a woman’s struggle to defeat a race of genocidal aliens. Both mother-protagonists struggle with what has come to be known as “work-life balance.”

In “Aliens,” Sigourney Weaver plays Ellen Ripley, a former warrant officer who protects a girl after missing out on her own daughter’s life because she was locked in cryogen sleep for 57 years and lost in space. In “Baby Boom,” Ms. Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a career woman who brags about her lack of a biological clock, then inherits an orphan toddler. Before motherhood, J.C.’s boss offered her a chance to make partner at her firm. But first he lays things out plainly. “A man can be a success and still have a personal life,” he tells her. “My wife is there for me whenever I need her. I mean, she raises the kids. … What I’m saying is, I’m lucky. I can have it all.”

It’s not the ’80s anymore, but one thing hasn’t changed: You still have to be Diane Keaton or an alien-slayer to make it as a working mother in America.

Unless you’re affluent enough to pay for the labor of less privileged women, you’re stuck with a patchwork of poorly funded and regulated and prohibitively expensive schools, child care centers and after-school programs. And yet it’s taboo for working mothers to talk too much about the costs, contradictions and compromises they face, often for fear such conversations will be used as fodder against us. Social conservatives are always eager to prove we were better off barefoot behind our white picket fences. The present feels unsustainable, but most women don’t want to go back, and so we charge forward, every mother for herself, each of us laser-focused on our own career and our own nuclear family’s security. Feminism meant cheering on women trying to gain status in this broken system. There was no way out, but if you worked hard enough, you could try to move up.

That was the thinking before Covid-19. That was the atmosphere in which I became a mother. This year it all came undone.

It was around the middle of May that I began to realize how disastrous the pandemic was going to be for mothers. I felt it myself and I saw it all around me, the mounting fear, the feeling of helplessness and isolation as we realized that the institutions we depended on were failing women and children, and that there was no backup system in place. Mothers themselves were the backup system.

Isolating women from larger social communities has historically been a surefire way to disempower them, and Covid-19 has imposed one of the longest periods in modern history of prolonged, social isolation. This is a necessary evil during a pandemic, but all the same, it’s proving to be a perfect social experiment in what happens to women, both single mothers and mothers living in traditional two-parent households, when the drawbridges are raised.

The first coronavirus vaccine has been approved, but the next months will still be dark ones. Of the more than one million workers aged 20 and over who exited the labor force in September, 865,000 were women. Many lost unemployment insurance benefits because they “chose” not to return to work, even if they had no real choice because they had no child care. Of those who remained, one in four were considering reducing hours, looking for less-demanding jobs or planning to leave.

Child care centers are shuttering around the country. According to a report from the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, the child care crisis could cost women $64.5 billion in lost wages per year. One study found that even mothers who have managed to keep their jobs have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Mothers are also more likely than fathers to work part-time, and only 43 percent of part-time workers have access to paid sick leave, 8 percent to paid family leave and 22 percent to health care benefits.

As any woman who’s ever tried to take more than a month or two of maternity leave knows, extended child-related lapses in employment are at best frowned upon and interpreted as a lack of professional dedication and at worst, for part-time or undocumented workers, grounds for termination. Leaving the work force, even under the most dire circumstances, tends to be a one-way street. What’s more, these exits reinforce the notion that mothers, as opposed to fathers, are the only appropriate primary caregivers for children, that there is something natural, universal and inevitable about this arrangement.

As a result, some suggest that a year of Covid-19 may undo decades worth of progress toward gender equity in America, that even after the pandemic is brought under control, a generation of working mothers will never recover what they lost.

It makes you wonder: How meaningful was the progress we’ve made in the last three decades, if it can be undone so quickly and so ferociously?

Pandemics make visible what’s been hidden; they illuminate the connections between us, the dependencies we’d rather not acknowledge. I thought of this word, “dependencies,” when, a few months ago, I stumbled upon another startling statistic related to family life under Covid-19. It turns out that in the United States, the survival rate of infants, the most dependent age group of all, has gone way up during the pandemic. There are reports that premature births, one leading cause of infant mortality, fell significantly in the early months of lockdowns, when women in their final trimester of pregnancy were able to do something many of them cannot afford to do in normal times: Stay home from work.

Additionally, some suggest there have been protective benefits to infants of more attentive, home-based child care, with less exposure to the viruses and infections that circulate in institutional settings.

This highlights what many mothers and child specialists have long sensed but aren’t supposed to say: that whether the primary care taker is a mother, a father, an extended family member or a close friend, newborns and infants do better in homes. We don’t talk about this, we barely acknowledge it, because if we did, we’d have a moral obligation to provide financial support to make it possible for all babies. We would have to acknowledge the social value of infant care and child rearing and empower parents to provide that care in the way they think is best for their children.

We might even have to reconsider our idealization of the nuclear family, which we’ve now seen cannot really function without the support of broken institutions, to make way for the notion that raising children is a communal obligation, of benefit not just to an individual woman or couple trying “to have it all,” but to society at large.

I’m not optimistic about these changes. They would require a new feminism, one that understands that the politics of motherhood are inherently intersectional for the simple reason that while not all women have or want children, those who do come from every race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic background. It would be a feminism grounded in solidarity as opposed to “success.”

Rather than a frantic return to normalcy when the pandemic ends, we would need to embrace more sustainable, inclusive models of women’s empowerment, buttressed by truly progressive policies like health care for all, paid leave for anyone caring for a baby and a universal basic income for anyone raising children in the home.

A friend of mine who has been un-schooling her daughter for years (un-schooling is a form of home-schooling that involves teaching children based on their interests rather than a set curriculum) pointed out that some of the people least psychologically affected by the pandemic are those who “don’t expect the systems to work or to protect them, and have gained other survival strategies and ways or organizing and thinking about existence: home-schoolers, for instance, but also people living in communal housing situations or with extended family, people who have figured out how to live without working the way a lot of us feel we have to work.”

Perhaps, she suggested, rather than hurrying back to normal life, “we should see what we can learn from those who have successfully resisted it.”

Another friend, a single mother who runs a gardening nursery and lives in a tiny house with her daughter, told me she wouldn’t have been able to survive this year without the support of her best friend. She lives nearby, is also a single mother, and the two of them instantly formed their own small bubble.

For her, the pandemic has crystallized her long-brewing feelings about the unworkability of the status quo. She has taken this year to further develop her plans for a woman-centered communal living project. She imagines a place where women in different ages and stages of life might come to live and share the work of child-rearing and care taking.

throwmefaraway85 · 2021-01-04T16:11:56+00:00

Is there a way to read it without subscribing?

ClockWorkOstrich · 2021-01-04T18:20:11+00:00

It says the pandemic showed children do better in their own homes, or a home environment (like grandmas house) but we're not supposed to say that or admit it because women best get their butts out of the home and contribute to some capitalism!!!!

Comments