Feminism, family dynamics, guilt-tripping, etc

[oursin]

Have been musing since getting involved in rather tangential argument in someone else's lj about whether a strongly-feminist mother who objects to her highly-educated daughter getting married and having a baby instead of a career is a dreadful example of how feminism is not about enabling women to have real choices but just about expecting them to

Comments

[going_not_gone]

Interesting. Like any other ideology (if that's the word I want--I'm using it to mean "a set of ideas about how the world should be), feminism has its zealots who think they have a lock on the True Meaning of Feminism. And when you've fought for something, and maybe given things up or lost them to the fight, it can feel like repudiation when someone says "well, the goals you were fighting for just don't mean as much to me."

Of course the parent/child dynamic makes this even more interesting. Everyone who tries to be a conscientious parent tries to transfer their own values to their children. If your child grows up and embraces different values, that's got to be painful. And the more you identify with a specific set of values, the harder it is. It can tear families apart--look at all the parents who have disowned/rejected their children because they were gay, or married someone of a different race or religion.

And again, the more you draw your personal identity from your membership in a certain group, whether by demographics or values, the easier it is to take any negative statements or attitudes about that group personally, and the more likely you are to attribute personal issues to your membership in the group. It's much easier to tell yourself "I didn't get that promotion because I'm [female/black/gay/white/male/whatever]" than "I didn't get that promotion because I'm underqualified and tend to annoy people."

Personally, I think the people who don't understand that feminism is about having options, rather than having your life choices determined solely by gender, are missing the point. Not unlike the people who think Christianity is about hating people who don't follow Christ, or don't follow Him the way you do--they seem to have gotten the message wrong. Of course, I'm a live-and-let-live type for the most part.

[oursin]

I'm channelling William Blake's 'The Everlasting Gospel' here (it combines prophetic insight with a lurking hint that WB was on the late C18th equivalent of crack):
The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus
Loath’d as a nation’s bitterest curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own mind
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.

[noveldevice]

Laudanum, surely?

(Save me from my homework...why did I want to go to grad school? Was I insane?)

[oursin]

Probably, unless one subscribes to the theory that they were all going around hallucinating from ergot in rye bread.