Source : https://archive.ph/RdlTL
So I've been seeing a lot of "trad" women blaming feminism for why they have to work. According to them it's feminism fault for why they have to work and get jobs rather than being a stay at home housewife. This shows how little they know of the past. Plenty of women back then held jobs. Especially during wartime millions of women took over jobs previously held by men since all the men were gone. Even before then plenty of women of worked as maids, worked as family farmer, seamstresses. Even since the dawn of time women worked as gatherers and even hunted small animals. The whole vintage housewife thing you see was only available to middle class or upper class (white) families and was nothing like you see on old TV shows and many were on hard drugs and were abused and even lobotomized.
Not only that but that whole housewife didn't last long but it was not solely due to feminism but also because overtime it became much harder for families to live on a single wage thus forcing women to get jobs shortly after birth to pay the bills.
Women have always worked, all feminism did was advocate for better job opportunities for women and give women another option rather relying solely on a man who could turn on you at any moment. When these women say they hate feminism for making them get jobs it also tells me that they don't think being a housewife is an actual job and that think that all they have to do is stay at home and look pretty for their husbands. Guess what, being a housewife is also a very time consuming job too but the thing you don't get paid and if your husband randomly ends up gone, you'll most likely be left poor and destitute. I'm sick and tired of zoomers and millennials romanticizing the obviously flawed past that they know nothing about and never experienced
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It's feminism that made houses and rent so expensive? Feminism that made the cost of food explode? Feminism that made everything cost so much that people work multiple jobs? Feminist have managed all of this despite women owning about 2 percent of the world's property.
Capitalism is playing them like a fiddle. The elite win again.
When I was born my mom worked. Partly because she refused to just stay home. My dad and she were both fresh out of college. My dad was an engineer but the first job out of college was low paying and we lived in a HCOL city. A couple years later my dad and literally thousands at the company were laid off. We moved to a city closer to their childhood homes where demand for my dad's education and experience was high but COL was low. Mom got a job while dad looked. Mom had a very portable skill, bookkeeping, but this was the early 70's and women weren't paid well for this kind of work. Even though it was a difficult time for them, the time with my dad was great. He cared for me and my brother and was quite good at it. He was patient, gentle and attentive. Dad ended up finding a job 100 miles away in a small city very close to where they grew up. So we moved there and thrived for a long time. The cost of living was much lower.
It was then that my mother quit working outside the home, partly due to pressure from her mother and mostly from my sisters birth. She was not a calm, patient, attentive parent. I think my mom hated being a stay at home mom, even though she ran a very efficient household. She was angry all the time. She did cottage industry types of work from home. She typed papers for graduate students and business men for pay because this was before computers, word processers etc and many people lacked good typing skills so it was a nice side business for a lot of stay at home moms. She also was a good seamstress and made costumes for a local theater and occasionally made curtains and made to order clothing for people. But I think she disliked sewing for a business and did it more for pleasure and for us. She kept an amazing garden.
As soon as my little sister started full time school, she got a full time job. She worked until she retired. She had too much intelligence, energy and ingenuity to be a stay at home mom and be content. She did it when it was practical. From an economic perspective she ran a super awesome household. But as a parent she was not good. Her anger was scary and frequent. In retrospect I realize she felt trapped and unfulfilled. She was much happier when she was working. My dad pitched in and took over a lot of domestic work after she began working but I also was expected to take on a lot of it. I resented that because I felt it made me into a co mom. When I became a mom, I did things a little differently to ease the burden of housework. I didn't make my daughters do work I could do. I made them do their own laundry and clean areas of the house they used most then traded off dish duty. It didn't alway work because they resented it but had my mom made us do our own laundry when we were old enough to do it, then assigned our own day for laundry, it would have saved a lot of trouble. My brother and I were more than capable of doing our own laundry the day she went back to work. My sister wasn't old enough but eventually would be. Anyway, just different ideas of redistributing the housework.
My mom worked even when she was a stay at home mom. Honestly I think she worked longer days and more than when she worked in an office. She did a lot of things to make our household run economically and efficiently when she was at home which saved a lot of money, things she couldn't do when working outside the home. The shift of costs seemed worthwhile to her though. And I think once she began working full time in the early 80's, she earned a lot more money than when I was an infant. Our economic quality of life became visibly better with more material things. She was much happier after she was able to work on a career full time. Is that always the answer? No. But she stayed home for most of the early childhood of 3 children. My brother and I were not put in any kind of daycare when mom worked when we were babies because my mom and dad worked opposite schedules. Women don't have a lot of good options for dealing with childcare even now and working. But back then there was precious little childcare available.
What does that have to do with feminism? My mom had to have my father's permission to have a bank account until I was 4 years old. I think the law change was slow to be implemented because it was 77 when I recall witnessing a lot of women on my street suddenly getting jobs, then a few years later many of them got divorced. I recall overhearing a lot of fights between married couples over men not having access to their wives money and over husbands resentments over women going to work full time. My mom was working full time several years before women could get credit without their husband. I was a teenager then. I was a pre-teen when women finally could rent a property and not be denied for having children. My mom could have left my dad by taking us to live with her parents on their farm. But that is all. A landlord had the right to refuse to rent to her until I was a teenager. This was never a problem for us but it made it very difficult for her to leave my dad if she wanted to or felt it necessary. Many of these things directly impacted a lot of women I knew. My parents didn't have the arguments or disagreements about how money was handled or about my mother working that other couples had. My mom managed the household money and my dad supported my mom doing what was fulfilling to her as far as I could tell. I knew more about my neighbors marital problems than my parents. Feminism gave women options and made it possible for women to not be held as property. The difficult road that came with this is entirely due to patriarchy, not feminism. Patriarchy seeks to exploit women no matter what we have or do.
doing household chores, looking after children 24/7, and being your husband's therapist is more labor than most jobs.