Letters to the Editor
-
Women do ask for raises
and they get turned down and labelled 'feminists." See Brescoll's research on women who ask versus women who don't: women who don't ask make more money than women who do!!!
-
Turn it around
I would turn the argument around. Is it not true that bringing a huge number of women into the workforce over several decades has alleviated chronic skilled labor shortages and diluted the power of organized labor to negotiate reasonable working conditions and enabled employers to make unreasonable demands.
My own workplace has more women than men in employment and the situation with mandatory overtime is such that the 16-hour work day/night is becoming more the standard than the exception. In that respect we are regressing towards the horrors of the early Industrial Revolution.
In the early days of large scale assembly line production, Henry Ford had the novel idea (if the propaganda can be trusted) of paying his production workers enough that they would be able to afford to buy the product manufactured (a personal automobile).
While I am not sure that I see how this business model could really flourish unless other workers were also well paid, my point is that such thinking would be unthinkable today.
"No New Taxes" politicians keep a lid firmly on public sector pay and benefits, with a great many "good" jobs now farmed out to day-work contractors so as to avoid paying pensions, sick leave etc. Good jobs in manufacturing have largely been converted to low-pay jobs in China.
Salon, dare I say it, seems to employ mostly glorified bloggers rather than real journalists (but with some exceptions), and no doubt this is what is needed for economic survival in the marketplace.
No, women workers are the victims, not the perpetrators.
-
OMG! Women are victims! YET AGAIN!
Sweet Jesus. Are all feminists as insipid as the ones who inhabit Broadsheet?
It's the same, exhausted formulas EVERY FREAKIN' time with you people.
-
In the remake of "The Stepford Wives"
There is a brilliant line: "When women were becoming men, men were becoming Gods."
-
Blame Republicans
The prioritization of profits as the ultimate good coupled with the disempowering of unions has allowed corporate American to demand more and more from workers while paying less and less to all but upper management. This is the legacy of the sainted Ronald Reagan.
-
Is journalism a REAL profession?
I wanted to study journalism in college and my father, who was paying my tuition, told me to "get a REAL profession". So, I ended up in accounting and later got a law degree. For many years I resented him for that, but I now find myself wondering if he was right. I mean, seriously, how do these articles - barely worthy for a highschool newspaper - get published in some of the most prestegious newspapers in the country (I am also thinking of Charlotte Allen's recent piece). They are not particularly well-written or entertaining, nor do they involve careful thought. Are there any journalistic standards at all? Can almost anything, no matter how inane, get printed? Does it take any talent? Or maybe just the ability to contrive superficially provocative ideas?
-
oh right
Because the happy land of OFFSHORE has NOTHING to do with it ....
-
No, actually it wouldn't.
Like it or not, the male is held responsible for the physical wellbeing of the family. So we're not likely to start demanding things at work that will piss management off and get us fired/laid off. Society won't say: "Great job working to get a more human and humane workplace." It will say: "Why aren't you putting a roof over your family's head and food on the table?"
-
Family Values
"We were supposed to see if America would put its money where its mouth is: that family matters."
Bailing out the Savings and Loans, Long Term Capital and now Beare Stearns, stoking the military industrial complex, feeding the health care and pharaceutical complex are what matters in this country. That's where your tax dollars go. For countries that acually use tax money to support families, try scandinavia.
-
Dear Catherine
You're right. THANK YOU FOR BLAMING MEN.
Please do so again in the future - they are the root of all evil in the world.
And women are full of peaceful rainbows.
-
Giving feminists a bad name
This little article ditty manages to sock it to women on two counts. First, it repeats the insipid nonsense in the original article (i.e. feminists blew it when they entered the workforce). Second, through the lazy logic of the Broadsheet 'rebuttal', accepts the parameters of the original as worthy of engagement.
BernieO summed it up succinctly with:
"Blame Republicans
The prioritization of profits as the ultimate good coupled with the disempowering of unions has allowed corporate American to demand more and more from workers while paying less and less to all but upper management. This is the legacy of the sainted Ronald Reagan."
But I would disagree with pointing the finger solely at Republicans. Blame it also on a society that bought into the corporate model of success, that deifies corporate scions as the ultimate in achievement, that refuses nationalized health care, higher taxes and investment in infrastructure while supporting entire lifestyles and communities on credit.
You wanted that McMansion, huge flat screen, newish car and private schools for your kids while not pissing off the powers that be? Well, you got it. And we are all to blame - Reps, Dems, ladies and gentlemen.
-
Working and being a mom
I didn't ask for a raise, but I asked to have my hours changed to 32 hours a week, I asked for all the days off I need to attend track meets and basketball games, I asked to work from home 2 days a week, and I asked to be paid full time and the answer was yes! And I am happy! I am so damn happy. I love working but I love my kids and being at home and doing things with them and for them! I even love my husband and he helps at home too! I am lucky and happy. Just ask for what you want and you just might get it.
-
Oh, and Catherine
You're also right about women being weak and infantile. They have no agency, they are like small, brain-damaged children thrust into a lion's den.
They have no free will, they do not make choices: circumstances are imposed upon them by men.
In fact, you yourself may be a victim of The Patriarchy. You're somewhat slow, and you have a "job", in a sense, writing for Broadsheet, but this was probably at the behest of your domineering, oppressive boyfriend.
Or perhaps you were forced to work at Salon because your masculinized lesbian lover forced you to.
Either way, you are passively swept through life like a stick in the stream. I pray for your victimhood to end, and the victimhood ending of all passive, weak, oppressed American college-educated women (particularly those in the Bay Area)who remain crushed under the jackboot of male domination.