Letters to the Editor
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Other complex reasons for the "back to the kitchen" movement
The religious right and the upper middle class men and women have influenced each other to stay home with the kids because it was "best" for the kids and the family also. I believe this was coincidental with 9-11 because it had already begun before that fateful day, not the main cause.
Feminism has certainly been altered since the 60's when we so bravely and stupidly thought we could have it all with no sacrifice. Ha! Many of us did go out and do that but there was plenty of sacrifice to go around for us and our families, since the workplace wasn't ready or adapted to Mothers trying to build careers.
I'm glad it has been easier in some ways for the next generations of women to have meaningful careers and sometimes puzzled to see young women opting out. Then I remember that they might have been raised by women like me who struggled to raise kids and work with little support from spouse, the workplace and the culture and didn't want to do that to their kids. Nothing is simple.
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EVERYONE was “oppressed” throughout history: Part I
Faludi and the Shrill Sisterhood base much of their poisonous scribbling on two ideas: (1) Women suffered throughout history and (2) Men caused that suffering. The corollaries are that any suffering CAUSED by women was due, again, to being oppressed by men; and that any suffering by men was do to men, too. Patriarchy, to feminists, is the perfect bogeyman. It explains everything, like doctors who dismissed all female medical concerns as being caused by “the vapors.”
Like vampires, feminists can’t stand light, especially of truth. So let’s expose them to some.
Let’s, for example, change “Patriarchy” to “The Way Men and Women Agreed To Live.” Suddenly feminism is eviscerated. (No wonder feminists want to blame everything on men!).
Now we can examine history to see how and why men and women TOGETHER determined how society functioned.
For example, were there reason to keep women on farms while men worked in factories? Was it oppressive? I suspect both husband and wife agreed the man should go to work “in the city” to try to pay farm costs. I also suspect, pre-trains-cars-planes it was less risky for men to fend for themselves in cities and wiser to let nursing moms tend to babies.
Women, of course, lived in cities and girls/women worked in factories. I’m just trying to show how something that could “look” like males dictating to women could actually be a mutual decision (and/or one where the man took the greater risk).
Someone demonized Hugh Hefner for suggesting men might like the “Playboy” lifestyle. Was Hef anti-female?
In the 1950s men were recently back from a hellacious war. Everyone, male and female, wanted stability: tract houses with white picket fences, children (embodiments of goodness and hope) and a steady job:. That is, ANYTHING but chaos and suffering in war. Men soon found that The Organization replaced the Army. Companies knew married men had obligations and were not free to job-hop. Movies like “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” showed the stultifying constraints put on men who, wanting peace-not-war, nevertheless wanted to be fully human. Into the bland, bleak, rote world of work came Hefner promising, at least visually, excitement for men. He was the mirror image of those who published bodice-ripping romance novels to women. Hef wrote his Playboy Philosophy in a round bed surrounded by manuscripts, drinking cases of Pepsi. He suggested working stiff guys could learn about chic cars, hot women, and cutting edge artists. This was exciting to guys in soul-killing offices and factories. How did that “oppress” women? Housewives with non-air-brushed, kid-birthed bodies might feel inadequate…but so might balding, paunchy husbands compared to Viking lovers in romance novels. Bunnies made a lot of money. Were they more oppressed than guys bound by endless rules on assembly lines?
So-called “oppressed” women like Betty Friedan wrote anti-male books while married to successful man who may, on occasion, buy a Playboy magazine. Whose life was less fulfilling?
Both men and women had good and bad things in their lives. Domestic violence, for example. Friedan accused her divorced (how much money did she get?) husband of abusing her. Only later did she admit she started half the fights.
I suspect this is true of DV across the board. The problem is, feminists gave only one, edited side of the tragedy. They didn’t admit that social pressure kept men from reporting abuse and that much of the abuse of children and the elderly happens out of site. Even today, a woman can kill her husband, admit she picked up the gun, then heard a “boom!,” assert she had no idea what happened… and not only walk away free, but seek custody of her children. Meanwhile a woman can call the cops, just CLAIM her husband is abusive, and he will be arrested. From there she gets the kids, house, support orders, the works. All that in a land where, supposedly, women have no rights or power.
Faludism assures that the world hears about unfulfilled housewives. It spawns endless anti-male books bought by “housebound” women who, somehow, have time and money to buy/read them. Meanwhile men complaining about their strictures get mocked, lose jobs, or are punished by withdrawn sex. Ergo, the daily lives of most men are not examined. Their emotions don’t appear on the radar. The lives of American women, especially white women (the most pampered beings on earth and in history!) trump those of tribal women living in third-world mud-huts.
We learn about what men did, not how they felt doing it. A male peasant is forced to fight for his Queen. He has no choice. He faces off against a foe he doesn’t know, who’s never done him harm. Both men fight using axes, trying to chop each other down like trees. Where is the talk of their fear? Loneliness? Where the descriptions of having a leg cut off with no antibiotics or pain-killers? What’s it like to march for miles in rain, then have to sleep all night amidst snoring men, only to awaken and face death?
Do feminists care about such men? No. Why care about a guy butchered alive like a dog? There are grave things to consider…like a modern woman being called “honey” in the office.
Feminism loses its power when we look at men’s lives equally. For every women “forced” to stay at home there is a man “forced” to leave home/family to work at a dangerous, unfulfilling job. For every women kept from corporations there is a man kept from his children. The fact that feminists laugh at men who reveal their pain does not diminish that pain. It only shames feminists who revel in sexism.