You’re right, (chuckle), there hasn’t been a feminist backlash against the President’s statements. Nor will there be. Not a loud one anyway.
Like you, I’ve gone back through the documents, watched documentaries about the start of feminism (and even then, Susan B. Anthony disdained Elizabeth Cady Stanton for continuing to have children rather than fight the fight. Even then there was misunderstanding about the value and place of children and family and the role of both in the fight for equality, vs. simply fighting, fighting, fighting.), and read books about and documents from the influential people in the movement, through the 20th century. When you read what it actually is, comments that indicate that it’s simply about letting women make choices fall flat. There are still prominent Feminists today arguing that women shouldn’t *HAVE* the choice to stay home, because of the fear that “too many (ignorant, it is implied) women would make that choice.”
Here are a few similar quotes, lest you think I’m pulling things out of context:
“A parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism…the [housewife’s] labor does not even tend toward the creation of anything durable…. [W]oman’s work within the home [is] not directly useful to society, produces nothing. [The housewife] is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. It is for their common welfare that the situation must be altered by prohibiting marriage as a ‘career’ for woman.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
“[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry…not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self…. [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife.” ~ Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
“[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.” ~ Gloria Steinem, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” Time, August 31, 1970.
“[The husband’s work] provides for greater challenges and opportunities for growth than are available to his wife, [whose] horizons are inevitably limited by her relegation to domestic duties. [This] programs her for mediocrity and dulls her brain…. [Motherhood] can only be a temporary detour.” ~ Nena O’Neill and George O’Neill, Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples, 1972.
“Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession… The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.” ~ Vivian Gornick, University of Illinois, “The Daily Illini,” April 25, 1981.
“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.
And then of course we have President Obama’s comments which (even when put generously in a larger context and *HOPING* it was an off-script gaffe rather than a purposeful jab) reflect a societal disdain for certain choices over others. Underlying his comments are the idea that wage-earners are better than not, even with young children, and that the better thing would be for mothers to ship their wee ones off to “high-quality” preschools (which used to be called daycares but now in this culture of education worship have gotten a facelift so that preschool is no longer truly a preK with 5 year olds, or advanced 4s, but rather, 2 year olds get taken by mommy to “school”… but I digress. He and others believe that we would all be better off if there were more, and more oft-used, “preschools”– which, let’s all be honest here, means that there is a ranking of choices.
To not admit that is to be dishonest about the culture we’re living in.
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Though it’s a bit more partisan than I typically like to link to, I appreciated a couple comments in this article: “Choices We Don’t Want Women To Make”
Here’s my favorite part of the article:
Many commentators have given the president the benefit of the doubt and assumed that what he meant was that mothers shouldn’t be obliged to choose between staying home with their children and earning higher wages. Let’s assume that’s right; it’s still a nonsense statement. What will the government do — mandate that employers offer women who took perhaps years off to care for children the same pay and promotions they would have earned had they remained in the workforce? How would that be remotely possible?
You’d have to assume that the woman in question would have remained for all those years at the same firm, and would have been a good employee. You’d also have to assume that the employer remains in business and that the kind of work the mom did is still needed and hasn’t been superseded by technological or other changes. And what would become of the employee, male or female, who was doing the mom’s work while she stayed home with the kids? Besides, if firms were required to pay above the market value to returning mothers, wouldn’t that discourage hiring?
Liberals like Obama don’t think in those terms. They apply the “wave the magic wand” school of policy analysis, as in, “If I could wave a magic wand, there would be no trade-offs in life. Childcare would be plentiful, staffed by Ivy League graduates, convenient to everyone’s homes and dirt-cheap. Moms would be able to work while their kids were young and never feel a tug of regret. Or, they could choose to stay at home for a few years and return to the workforce without missing a step or a paycheck.”
This is the sort of talk that liberals and progressives have been feeding eager audiences for decades. It glides past economic realities without so much as a backward glance. How, for example, are you going to get those highly educated college grads to work in daycare centers when they expect large returns for their very expensive educations? Is the pay going to start at $100,000? Where will the money come from?
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Actual feminism rarely gets put on display, but its fruits & beliefs are evident in statements like this.
Thanks for stopping by & chiming in, Obliterated.