The stay-at-home versus career-worker has been a long-standing debate in the feminist movement, right alongside the question of whether you're buying into the dominant paradigm by dressing in a revealing manner, or whether you're expressing your own sexuality as its owner. And it also slams both: I've gotten the "you're not a real woman until you're married/have kids" and I've had friends who've gotten the "you're not a real contributing member of society unless you have a career". And the thing is, so few of us are truly at an extreme. Many of us who work do have home lives, and many of us who don't have an outside salary still have outside lives -- I'd put your volunteerism, and your work with your church, and various orgs, squarely in the category of an Outside Life. I mean, it's not like you never get to leave home except to do grocery shopping.
These people miss the point that the goal of the feminist movement was to allow women the choice.
Which is why I get most frustrated at women who slide all 'feminists' into the category of 'women who are bad' or somehow 'destructive'. It's not WHAT choice is made; it's that a choice is POSSIBLE.
In some ways, the debate reminds me of several studies I read a few years back about the pro/anti abortion debate. In a major survey, the pro-choice women, for the most part, expressed no discomfort with the idea of other women refusing to get abortions. It was the anti-abortion women, most specifically those who classed 'pro-abortion' as 'anti-family', who considered a pro-choice position as being a direct threat on their way of life. Consider traditionally-minded women found the negation of tradition to be more of a threat than progressive women did in return; the studies drew a few tentative conclusions that this might be because most of the women interviewed (in the 80s, I think it was) had been raised with a traditional perspective but the progressives had moved away from that, but were familiar with the traditional. In contrast, the traditionals found the progressive attitude unfamiliar, and therefore threatening.
Most of those I'd read while working with an organization that did conflict resolution, and one of the directors did a series of outreach programs designed to bring anti/pro forces together to find common ground. I think it was for a neighborhood where a Planned Parenthood chapter was supposed to open. The org's director and her project partner did a write-up, and told me at one point the weekend was as hard as any war-zone negotiation they'd ever done, but in some ways had a great deal more hope of resolution. It all depended on differentiating between someone else's choice, and one's own, and seeing them as mutually acceptable but not intrusive.
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Date: 4 Aug 2005 07:08 pm (UTC)These people miss the point that the goal of the feminist movement was to allow women the choice.
Which is why I get most frustrated at women who slide all 'feminists' into the category of 'women who are bad' or somehow 'destructive'. It's not WHAT choice is made; it's that a choice is POSSIBLE.
In some ways, the debate reminds me of several studies I read a few years back about the pro/anti abortion debate. In a major survey, the pro-choice women, for the most part, expressed no discomfort with the idea of other women refusing to get abortions. It was the anti-abortion women, most specifically those who classed 'pro-abortion' as 'anti-family', who considered a pro-choice position as being a direct threat on their way of life. Consider traditionally-minded women found the negation of tradition to be more of a threat than progressive women did in return; the studies drew a few tentative conclusions that this might be because most of the women interviewed (in the 80s, I think it was) had been raised with a traditional perspective but the progressives had moved away from that, but were familiar with the traditional. In contrast, the traditionals found the progressive attitude unfamiliar, and therefore threatening.
Most of those I'd read while working with an organization that did conflict resolution, and one of the directors did a series of outreach programs designed to bring anti/pro forces together to find common ground. I think it was for a neighborhood where a Planned Parenthood chapter was supposed to open. The org's director and her project partner did a write-up, and told me at one point the weekend was as hard as any war-zone negotiation they'd ever done, but in some ways had a great deal more hope of resolution. It all depended on differentiating between someone else's choice, and one's own, and seeing them as mutually acceptable but not intrusive.
Gyah. Dhed. Rants take a lot out of me...