This article was last updated on May 20, 2022
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First, to take care of some housekeeping. I’ve added a badge to my profile to let the older feminists who say I don’t exist know that I am here. I am what a young feminist looks like, I do exist and I am making a difference. I also had a post go up on Abortion Gang examining the anti position of motherhood as punishment for sex. I’ll have another post going up Wednesday looking at the anti fallacy of comparing a fetus to an unconscious person. The second part of The Dating Adventures of an Unapologetic Feminist went up on Small Strokes today, which outlines a little bit about how I ended up in a relationship. I also have a third post in the works for that series about compromise and feminism.
Now that I’ve "come out" with my relationship, I’d like to revisit an earlier post I wrote about a woman who decided to stop calling herself a feminist, in part because she enjoyed what she considered to be non-feminist activities, like child-rearing and cooking. She wrote,
I’m ambitious and educated, and I have two degrees, but a big part of my dream includes one day staying home with my kids. I blog about body image. I cook dinner for my fiancé a lot. He works 12 hours a day, so the idea of equally distributing household chores doesn’t make sense. Also, I like to cook.
At the time that I read this I felt that it made very little sense; none of these seemed to be legitimate reasons for handing back your feminism to the patriarchy. It was especially baffling because she admitted that many of the things that feminist are fighting for, such as equal pay, are still issues. So my question was, if the issues are still there, why the hell is she quitting? I also realized that I couldn’t understand her purported reason because I was single and did whatever I wanted. Now that I am in a relationship, I feel like I can offer a legitimate critique. In short, she is full of shit.
I had a scheduled surgery 2 weeks ago and as a result, I am on crutches. My mom travels for business during the week and my brother, with whom I lived all summer, is too busy to help me recover. 2 weeks before the surgery I started dating my now boyfriend and we were moving quickly. It so happens that we are very, very compatible and we both want the same things, and I am heading back to school in a week. As a result, if we are going to survive my 3 month absence, which we both want, we knew that we had to be pretty attached to each other. After surgery, I came back to my boyfriend’s apartment and he is currently helping me recover. I am fairly self-sufficient and it mostly requires him to carry plates to the table because it’s tough on crutches. That being said, I’ve gotten a good taste of what it is like to be the stay-at-home partner.
My boyfriend works 10 to 12-hours days. The first time I stayed over he had 2 cartons of expired milk, a jug of OJ, stuff to make sandwiches, and beer in his fridge. He’d left a serious relationship the end of 2009 and had been living as a bachelor since. He ate out every night of the week, and visited his parents for dinner and laundry on the weekends. The first few nights that I stayed over, I always left when he left for work. After a few days of that, he gave me a key so I could cook dinner and I’ve pretty much been staying with him for the last 3 weeks. I do the dishes, cook breakfast most mornings and dinner most evenings. We do cook together but the reality is I’m around all day and he is working. It makes the most sense for me to do the cooking. I’ve also done some baking, which turned out great. I am months away from my second degree and the start of my high-powered career as a lawyer, and whilst I have no desire to stay home with children, I am basically doing what this woman decided meant she should quit feminism. I also see no reason to quit being a feminist just because I am cooking for my boyfriend.
This woman needs to call a spade a spade; she quit feminism because she was never really a feminist. She became a feminist to rebel, she called herself a feminist to get ahead, and then when she got all she needed from the label and the community, she called it quits and blamed her non-feminist activities for it. Well ladies, I am here to tell you, you can have it all! You can be ambitious, yet dream to be a stay-at-home mom; you can want a career, yet cook for your partner; you can even enjoy cooking; and you can still be a feminist! What you can’t do is be anti-choice, anti-woman, or claim women have 100% equality. The latter are sure fire ways to not be a feminist. The former are simply manifestations of being a person with pleasures and hobbies and goals and dreams. Being a feminist is not any one thing, it is a collection of beliefs; you can be a feminist and have a family with traditional gender roles, so long as you don’t believe traditional gender roles are the only option. Too bad Kate didn’t get the memo.
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If she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, the only way that will be possible is if she has a financial provcomment_IDer. Feminism can only provcomment_IDe that to her through a government benefit.
Being a financially supported stay-at-home mom is an option that is born out of [i][b]female privilege.[/b][/i] Such a privilege depends on the acquiescence of a male provcomment_IDer. Employed women are far less willing than their male counterparts to even provcomment_IDe the option of being a stay-at-home-dad to their male partners, hence my use of the term female privilege. Such an option is more available to women, and less available to men, and this is due to breadwinning men’s generosity and women’s lack thereof.
Women have enormous legal advantages over the men they live with. Laws on divorce, cohabitation, parenting time, and domestic violence all work against male provcomment_IDers, even the law-abcomment_IDing. Feminism made being a male breadwinner a tremendous risk, reducing women’s options.
It sounds like “feminism” is being used in a narrow misinformed version that we often hear in media. Feminism is very wcomment_IDespread and includes various comment_content_IDeologies. It is not a singular school of thought. There is a whole group of stay at home moms across the world who are “feminists”. Feminism does not preach you have to be like a man, or you dont believe in being feminine, or that women must have their own careers. These are ignorances spread in media and the whole comment_content_IDeology is much more complicated than that. There are also antioppression feminists, liberal feminists, third world feminists, lesbian feminists, radial feminists and list goes on, and they do not all agree. Some of the greatest feminist writers were mothers.
Do look up all the different kinds of feminists and lets not spread the black/white ignorance of the term. I also encourage young readers to take women’s studies courses. I believe Prof Bokhari teaches those, she writes for Oye Times and is a very outspoken feminist. Thanks.
@Sam: Assuming that a woman invokes her uniquely female privilege to be financially supported at home by a male provcomment_IDer, what other relevant and productive role does feminism have to play in the matter?
If a woman can be anything, then who will enable her? If society heaps shame upon men who decline financially to do the enabling of such a woman’s demand, would feminists stand up for such men?
Opting out of obligations that are related to gender roles cannot just be the purview of women. Since occupying the stay-at-home nurturer role requires a breadwinner to make it possible, it should rightfully be perceived as a privilege and not a right. But this column seems to be saying that if a woman wants to be a stay-at-home mom, she can be that (somehow). What does such a statement mean? Is it (A) that she shouldn’t be condemned for utilizing that option if it’s available to her? Or (B) that she shouldn’t be denied her entitled demands for financial support?
I am not sure what this column is saying, I am not understanding the article myself. It seems the author is not clear on the concept of “feminism” as it is much deeper than meets the eye.
In anycase, I think among leading feminist thinkers the comment_content_IDea is that women can be stay at home moms or have a career, or both, or either, and all of those options are ok. Being a feminist doesn’t mean you abandon feminine roles, it is really up to a woman and based on her life. It doesnt mean stay at home moms are any less or more “women”. Women need not feel they have to subscribe to some comment_content_IDeal of womanhood. Every woman is different.
In addition, feminism is about understanding the status of women, it does not mean women should be treated like men. There are rooms full of research on why women need certain protections under the law that men do not require. I do not have space to detail them here. Do take a while to let your gaurds down and learn about feminism.