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

[shiv5468]

Being only a woman I cannot know, but I wonder whether male groups have this same pressures about making the same choices - are men less invested in each other / need less validation, or is the pressure to confirm to the male norm so strong that no one breaks away from it.

My impression is that it's acceptable for a man to be unmarried / not want or like children, but presumably they have other issues that are more relevant to male identity that male groups might nt be so accepting of.

[em_h]

A man who chooses to prioritize family over career (as my partner has) can have quite a difficult time.

Of course the pressures men face from their fathers over "appropriate" career choices are more or less legendary.

[shiv5468]

There was a piece on the BBC website where people were asked about their work colleagues and a majority seemed to identify anyone who prioritised life / family over work as lazy, whilst I think it's just sensible. I can see that there would be greater pressure on men there though.

Are they? I suppose all my immediate circle have made the appropriate career choices because they're all lawyers and accountants. You don't see many people getting into trouble for taking that route and not becoming starving artists in a garret.

[amaliedageek]

Hmmm. My partner, hendersj, has encountered quite surprising resistance to his choosing to work from home four days a week. His immediate superior believed that team members would be less effective working away from the office, which strikes me as an odd position for an employee of a software company specializing in networking. Surely the solution for that is to observe the quality of the work and offer rewards or corrections as appropriate? His conference calls are with developers in Bangalore; what does it matter if he is calling from an office 45 miles away?

Now that the price of gasoline/total commute time due to construction have increased dramatically, it's his hope that there will be rather less noise made about it.

[amaliedageek]

Second.

[oursin]

I'm now screening anonymous comments, since occasionally well-intentioned people without ljs comment. And have deleted this particular spew.
(Oh, yes, and AM British taxpayer at quite a high rate, nyah, nyah!)

[oyceter]

Oy, yes. I personally think feminism is about choice and about widening available choices for women (and men, as when one gender is constricted, it inevitably affects the other gender).

And thank you for that Joanna Russ quote... I really must pick up her books/essays sometime.

[oursin]

This Russ quote is from Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts, which came out in the 1980s but has a lot to say that is still relevant today (and also includes one of the earliest articles on slash fiction).

[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

[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.

[juliansinger]

*fangirls Joanna Russ*

Meanwhile, um, I agree. In that feminism is (among many other things) about the widening of choices for women (and men, but I prefer to think *about* women when talking about women), and especially someone who's very identified with feminism may confuse her own desires with feminist practices.

The person in your second to last paragraph sounds rather difficult. And I keep going, "But also, of course, society encourages oppressed groups to pick fights with each other," and then mock my own wholesale swallowing of dogma. Mph.

[oursin]

society encourages oppressed groups to pick fights with each other

Yes, true. Given that person in question had a background in sociology, one might have expected them to be aware of this - or maybe it was something that they knew academically but didn't apply to their own situation, since they came over not unlike the BNP [British National Party] on immigrants and asylum-seekers when addressing the subject of other groups most people would concede were discriminated against if not actively oppressed.