So the beautiful ladies of Jezebel are at it again today, all in a gleeful lather that fewer and fewer girls express a desire to make caring for their families a priority, and that the labor market definition of an egalitarian relationship seems to have triumphed in the mind of the young.
http://jezebel.com/5979665/holy-crap-is-feminism-actually-working-and-changing-the-world
They start by mocking all the dumb twats whose work doesn’t include sitting in a cubicle sorting out the marketing strategy for OPI nail polish, which, as we all know, is an incredibly important social issue.
You see, for the Jezzie crowd, the only thing that counts as work is stuff you do in exchange for cash. All you folks volunteering for your favorite causes? That’s not work, and it contributes nothing. All you folks taking care of either younger or the older generation because they are your family and you love them? Nope. Sit down, you’re not working. None of that counts. All you folks with hobbies? Nah. That isn’t work either.
Oh wait, now. If you are taking care of the older or younger generation, and they are not related to you, and you are doing it for COLD HARD CASH, well, that IS work. If your hobby is quilting and you do it for fun THAT’S NOT WORK, but if you work in a quilting factory and someone pays you, ok. You get a pass.
My point here is that no matter how much Jezebel and their ilk like to shriek that women (and increasingly men) who are at home, taking care of their families AREN’T WORKING, that work still needs to get done.
So who does it? Who cooks the food, washes the dishes, cleans the house, sorts out the laundry, does the gardening, raises the children, takes care of the elderly, walks the dog and every other thing that needs to get done?
Well, looky here.
http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/EEO/10_5YR/EEOALL4W
Here’s the summary: women of color.
All the nice white feminist ladies abandoned their homes and children and husbands and rushed pell-mell into the labor market, and then paid all the brown-skinned ladies money to do the work for them.
Isn’t that nice of them?
And the lovely white lady feminists wonder why black women don’t identify with them?
Feminists are celebrating two triumphs:
One, that they have succeeded in convincing young women and men that a woman’s value can only be measured in labor market achievements. Honestly, this more a triumph of late capitalism, which has ensured that the major proceeds of capital go to shareholders and not workers, creating a situation in which women work for survival, and not because they want to. The rush of women into the labor market COMBINED with the supremacy of the shareholder has seen real wages stagnate, and the family wage has all but disappeared unless you are very well off.
Most women wake up to the lies of feminism too late. It’s not until they have children that they realize they have not made the choices in life that allow them to make a choice! Most women WANT to be at home with their small children. In the UK, the number is 75%! Only one out of four women with small children who are working are doing it because they want to. The other three have been sold a pack of lies and they have guilt and shame and despair to show for it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2199539/75-new-mothers-stay-home-bring-child-afford-to.html
And that’s something to celebrate?
The second triumph of feminism is to shove all the work of caring for a family off onto women of color. It’s mostly white women who benefit from feminism, as scant as those benefits are. Earning a family wage is tough enough for a white family. For black families it has become nigh unto impossible, because their labor force participation is limited to doing all the work white ladies don’t care to do, for very little money. Combine that with a cultural narrative that celebrates single motherhood as empowering and beneficial, and dismisses the importance of fathering, and you end up with a whole lot of black women who have no decent chance for success in the labor market at all.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4043451
Feminism hasn’t been a triumph for women of color at all. It’s been a disaster.
The solution to this mess isn’t more of the same. When is it ever? What we need is to start telling the truth to young men and women about how they will feel when they have small children to care for. We need to start telling the truth about just how fulfilling it will be to sit in a cubicle while your baby is being raised by someone else. We need to tell the truth about what impact it will have on men’s ability to support a family when women move into high-status and high paying jobs. We need to give the younger generation a clear picture of the consequences of their actions.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/16/no-you-cant-have-it-all-you-have-to-fucking-share/
And then let them choose. Yes, women should have the right to have any occupation they like (except combat solider), and they have the right to pay someone else to do all their hard work of raising a family. Men have the right to choose women based on how much she earns. Go right ahead.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/28/no-women-should-not-be-in-combat-are-you-fucking-kidding-me/
The reality is that most women WON’T choose to value themselves for how much they can earn in the labor market. The ones who are in the labor force are deeply, despairingly unhappy. “Opting out”, which is another way of saying “become a housewife” has become the new dream.
It doesn’t have to be a dream. It can become a reality. All it takes is a little dose of the truth. You won’t find that truth in the mouths of feminists. Time for a game change.
The sooner, the better.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
….but you’d be surprised how good your sales skills need to be, once somebody’s been on the “DINK budget” for a while, to sell them on the notion that they can not only survive, but be perfectly happy, on a single income. (Granted, most of them would be happier, since you and I both know that “buying useless shit” does not make a person nearly as happy as experieiencing cool stuff does).
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I’ve never understood it. Why is it to best work my tail off for someone who doesn’t care about me at all and their only concern is the bottom line? Why is it wrong to work my tail off for the those that love me? Why is it bad to clean my own house, care for my own children and cook our food but great to be a housekeeper, a childcare worker, or chef? I will proudly be a housewife for life!
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“So the beautiful ladies of Jezebel…”
You almost lost me there… ALMOST!
😛
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Such a group of cutie pies!
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I’ll say it before and ill say it again. Feminists choose to denigrate house work/ mothers/ etc.. because they try to ‘shame’ women into a workforce so that they don’t have to toil alone.
Misery loves company.
These are women (and i use the term as loosely as possible wrt Feminists) that are so absolutely ASHAMED of their own gender, their own natural strengths, their own femininity (or because they were born pure butt fucking ugly with no chance of mating with alphas) that they deigned for ALL women to share in their misery to behave like boys/men. If you can’t take pride in being a woman.. pretend to be a man.
That’s what feminism is. A dog and pony show for the less genetically gifted women to make things like looks and feminine behavior obsolete and wealth/status/power and earning potential the GOLD standard in getting high value mates.
They’ve forgotten their place. That’s how men attract mates. Not women.
Homemakers and stay at home moms get in the way of that. You are gender collateral damage for the cause. A few women must fall for the greater calling of creating more female paper pushers.
Because we can’t have them working high rise construction and coal mining now can we.
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Another cautionary tale of people espousing egalitarianism in order to set themselves up as a new elite.
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Much respect to you.
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Re: the stagnant job (& subsequent marriage) market for black Americans.
It’s always nice to read articles that are written by people who “get it”.
I have half a dozen female relatives who work in corporate structures. Their most common complaints.
1. Not enough black men in corporate America
2. Having to push their way past black men to get *into* corporate America
3. White women hogging all of the good/”hot”jobs
4. Black women having to push their way past black men for lower-level/blue collar jobs
5. Not enough black men with jobs, period.
This is not a joke or an exaggeration. I’m related to intelligent and educated women who brag about their jobs, brag about using AA to get jobs, brag about their “poor” friends who use AA to get jobs, complain about all of the white women who work above/around them, then complain about the lack of black men with *gainful employment*. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees…
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Interesting post. So what happens to the brown/black women you speak of when the good white women come to their senses and return to their exalted place in the home?
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Good question, and obviously no easy answer.
In my opinion, a large part of the reason the black family structure has been so decimated is because the criminal justice system disproprotionately jails young black men for what are essentially economic crimes. White prep school kid dealing pot gets a dressing down after his daddy talks to the prosecuter on the golf course.
Black kid gets 20 years.
Moving white women, who by and large, do not NEED the money out of the labor force opens up a lot of jobs for black women who do not have a whole lot of choices, given that such a large percentage of black men are in jail.
Add shitty schooling and entrenched poverty to the mix and you have a clusterfuck of social conditions that make it nigh unto impossible for either black women or men to get out of poverty and support their children.
Opening up the job market is a good start. Why should single black women wash dishes and do laundry and take care of white children when white women have partners who can and should be supporting them?
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I agree with you, there are no easy answers. But what’s frustrating for me is that these ideological squabbles between white women of a particular cohort often times exclude or distort the voices and realities of the very women who sacrifice their own families and communities to make the lifestyles of white women possible. I see the analog in my own work as a photographer… I amplify the voices of people who live in transitional neighborhoods who have to contend with “urban pioneers” who often times take drastic and exclusionary steps to redevelop them like no one lives there….
What you’ve laid out in your response helps to explain why black and brown women end up having to take these caretaking jobs, but I don’t think these factors speak to my question. I also believe that white women of a SES cohort don’t really care what may happen to black and brown women who take care of their homes, children and pets. Their position is, “let all that crap work itself out when the time comes, when I’m ready to exercise the choices that are available to me..it’s really not my problem.”
Many of the women you refer to do have families of their own. Many of these women go after and take these caretaking jobs to provide for their families, often out of a sense of pride and refusal to throw in the towel and become the denigrated “welfare mother.” They often times do the back-breaking work that no one else wants to do for the benefit of their children and loved ones who depend on them.
So again, what do we do with them when the good white women decide to come to their senses? What economic opportunities will be available to them when their domestic/childcare/caretaking jobs cease to exist? Society has already made it clear that it resents “takers,” but offers no alternatives that provide a living wage and a sense of human dignity.
And, although your idea that the jobs and careers that were available to white women will open up to black and brown women is a noble one, it’s not realistic. Until we as a society contend with things like, the inequity of our public education system, disinvestment in urban communities, all of which track directly back to our biases, prejudices and preconceived notions about the capabilities of said women (and people of color in general) to be successful in those jobs, we’ll see many of these women shifting from low-wage shit jobs to complete dependence on public assistance.
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Is it strange that I’d find your blog more empowering than any feminist spiel? I ran across this blog while searching for relationship advice and I realized, at least for today, that I had forgotten how to be a woman. Thank you.
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I hadsimeone tell it as that everything should be done by proffesionals because it allows more people to be proffesionals. He was talking about carrepair but i imagine some think that way about the thinhs you mentioned aswell.
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And this sounds as feminist as any feminist nonsense you can find on tumblr. Blaming white women for what nonwhite ones fail to do is not hitting feminists where they live, it’s you submitting to political correctness where whites are supposed to hang their heads in shame for being white and are “racist” for not putting all the attention on nonwhite women, which is selfish of them to demand. Sure, feminism sucks, but it’s not supposed to be about catering to a certain race. That’s stupid, frankly, and has nothing to do with equality as all feminists say they want.
This post would get applause from most feminists as it reeks of a self-hating white woman with something that sounds eerily like a white saviour complex, at least white knighthood.
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….or black and brown women could try actually earning their way to the top instead of relying on racist affirmative action and politically correct businesses needing to full a racial quota to get their way. If white people can do it the hard way, so can everyone else.
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This is an example of how racists are like feminists. Both groups think like spoiled children who have more privileges than many others yet still imagine that they are treated unfairly. Affirmative action is not racist, it attempts to correct racism.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
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Acknowledging the existence and value of other people is not the same as self-hate. Whites systematically destroyed other cultures, and now some white asshats smugly claim that the victims of this destruction have some moral problem. Racist police and courts lock men up in cages so they cannot support their families while the culture paints them to be villains and deadbeats.
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Why don’t you think women should be combat soldiers? I always wanted to be one but they dont allow women, which is very sexist. I never wanted children, so I am pretty happy that I was pushed into having a career. Being a housewife sounds boring and sitting in an office also sounds boring. Thats why I want a career in which I get to work outdoors.
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