I don't know what you've read. But I do know something about my family and its history. And I don't see any special women's oppression there. I do know that women got the vote in 1920 and that was a good thing. But other than that....
One of my grandmothers raised 12 kids on the various farms they rented over the course of her married life. I think it was a pretty hardscrabble life. When the kids were grown and they were getting too old to farm, they moved into a small house in town with one of the daughters who never married and worked at a shoe factory.
The other grandmother owned the 40 acre farm inherited from her father. So she owned property - I know from census records from the 1800's occasionally women did own property by themselves. She worked on larger farms (the whole family did and I did too some as a kid) picking and packing produce - peppers, cukes, peaches, apples, etc. Long ago I know she worked in town cleaning and cooking for some of the more well off folks. And I recall her working at a local state hospital when it would hire some women to work canning fruit for the patients. She had lady friends who worked as cooks at the schools, were nurses, and things. So women working including away from home was not anything new or unusual. This grandmother was the best educated of my grandparents - she went through the 8th grade. She also did a lot of little things to make a little money here and there - picking up walnuts, husking them and carrying bags to sell, growing and cutting yellow daffodils and tying them up in bunches to sell (I remember doing this but I have no idea who bought them), taking tomatoes and rhubarb and eggs and on and on to town every Saturday morning to sell to a list of customers (usually ladies she knew) and to little restaurants. None of these things made much money but the walnuts paid for Christmas presents, I know, and they are evidence of independent enterprise of a modest kind.
I'm trying to imagine if someone had suggested they were oppressed as women, what they'd say. The only complaint I ever heard one of them make was about the long dresses down to the ground women wore a generation before them. How hot they were. But I don't think it was men making them wear dresses like that - I think it was just the fashion of the time. I just can't come up with anything.
It was about being acknowledged as a person capable of making intelligent, informed decisions, with the right to vote, to be educated, to own land, to receive equal wages, to not be sexually harrassed. It was about being allowed to write as a woman, think as a woman, and not be demeaned for it.
Okay, I'll go through the list. They made intelligent informed decisions. They got the right to vote in 1920 and exercised it being about as interested as their husbands in politics. One of them got more education as a girl than any of my ancestors had ever had. She owned land and a car. She worked both at home and away from home - as I know other women of her generation did and it pretty obviously wasn't a big deal. As to 'equal' wages, they were often paid by the bushel - no matter who picked it, thus equal. I don't think it was ever okay to sexually harass women. I don't think my grandmothers would sure have never put up with that. One of my grandmothers grew up in a family which didn't whip their kids (it worked for them). She told me one time if my grandfather had ever tried to whip my mom when she was little, she'd have shot him. They both had their opinions about things and I can recall one of them arguing with her brother-in-law about things that were going on then in the nation. I don't think she was brow-beaten.
One of the things I have done for the past ten years as I struggled to write is to immerse myself in women's literature and history. but the history of woman as oppressed and dependent is very much there. .... It was about being allowed to write as a woman, think as a woman, and not be demeaned for it.
It may be there in the books you've read. I just don't see it in my family tree. And I think my family wasn't too unusual for the old days. But they didn't write any books. It occurs to me the type of thing written about in 'women's literature and history' may have existed in a fairly high refined social class that wasn't germane to most people.
If you honestly believe that is feminist rhetoric and the status quo was just dandy, that women should be denied these same rights that you as a man enjoy,
I neither believe nor have I said women should be denied any rights. I'm claiming it looks to me like women have always had a lot of the rights and freedoms (the exception would be the vote) men had.
Women should have the choice of how they wish to live, and they did not have that choice in the past.
I agree with the first part. I can't see the second.
We redefine because the terms have for various reasons the terms have lost their ability to focus us on the problems, or their new meanings are distracting us from their old utility. Redefinition is what is happening now as we talk about househusbands, or gay couples as parents.
Time will tell whether these redefinations will work, like the old definitions have worked well for a very long time and still work excellently for most. Also I note we all have the right to decide whether we want our definitions changed. I don't think those two examples are ever going to be very widespread. As to househusbands, I guess there's nothing wrong with that but I suspect most women would look down on a man who didn't work outside the home. I presume gay people can be good parents and when they are parents naturally they should be the best they can. Though I don't believe in social engineering by elites like the 'Beyond Gay Marriage' announcement in the NYT recently.
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Morality has always been entwined with religion for most people. Sure people CAN be moral and atheists. Though if you convince most people to be atheists, you will erode their morality most of the time. That's just being realistic.
In asking for new terms, you seem to think I was rejecting the concepts of an orderly, productive, rational life.
I don't think you personally have. I do think eroding traditional morality has resulted in more people not having orderly productive rational lives though. And I think that will be true for most people in the future. Traditional morality leads to those good kind of lives for most people, so breaking down morality endangers a lot of people. |
