Pipistrella Felix

feministdisney:

bartons:

can someone help me right now

i can’t think coherently 

i

/HWTA/

I always find this frustrating because you almost have to be a middle to upper class, usually white woman (or man) in order to be saying and thinking that.  No one else in the world is so incredibly unaware of how much women have always contributed to the workforce of most civilizations throughout time and how often it has not been necessarily out of choice, but out of necessity, often in order to be “good” mothers when one income (or no income) wasn’t enough to support their family.  

It’s like history and what “women have been doing for centuries” never counts so long as it was poor women doing it.    It’s like having pride in motherhood doesn’t count if you have to (or want to) work at the same time.   And then these same people would, of course, complain about individuals who make bad parents, since it’s obviously not actually ideal for everyone- while simultaneously positing that women should not want or feel the need for any other position than “mother.”  So what if your mom enjoyed it??   My mom had a great time being a nurse, but it’s not like I’m going to assume every woman in the world is cut out for delivering newborns multiple times a week.

Internalized misogyny and classism at its “finest”… :/

Ugh. PLEASE look at history before you use it in an argument, please! Agreed with feministdisney, above, and also:

What you (FB poster) call “staying home and playing house all day”? For most women in most of the “centuries” you refer to, in Western civilization* that actually meant doing a shit ton of work that contributed at least 50% to the income of the married couple’s household. Depending on what era you want to talk about, that could be vegetable farming, agriculture, taking care of livestock, processing all kinds of food (like a butchered pig for example), textile processing, weaving, merchant trading and running whatever kind of business your family has, budgeting, repairing tools, machinery or your house— among many many other jobs that worked in concert with whatever your husband was doing and was invaluable to the income of the family. 

All of these things that you dismiss with the phrase “playing house” (& thanks, that saccharine phrase really makes my teeth hurt) changed with the advent of the industrial revolution, when suddenly people couldn’t make their income by home- and village-based work but had to go work in factories. I’m oversimplifying a huge amount here, but go with me. There are a lot of complicated factors going on, but this “woman stays home and is a domestic goddess” idea cropped up in the Victorian era, when society created (oh yes, I meant that) the ideal for men to go work in these new factory jobs and women to stay home and impart moral lessons to their babies. But hey, guess what? Only rich women got to do that! And rich husbands weren’t even working in factories, they owned them! Because poor women, the ones whose husbands were actually doing the dirty work in those factories? Yeah, those women had to work in factories too, because no one got paid shit for that kind of work. And this isn’t even getting into the ideals of the 1950s which is a whole other can of worms I won’t bother opening right now.  Check your history, please, before you make sweeping inaccurate claims about it.

So—honestly, now—I am really glad that it was the best time of your mom’s life. I really am. And I’m really glad that in your family, she got the ability and resources to choose to stay home and make that her contribution to the family. But that isn’t the case in most families now, or ever. And if I end up in a relationship with someone who makes enough money to support both of us without me working at all (haha, unlikely), and if we decide to have kids at all, I will still go out and find a job, because I want to, for a variety of reasons. And who the hell are you to tell me how my relationship should go? 

So no, this “get back in the kitchen” mentality is bullshit, internalized misogyny and I unapologetically hate it. “Incredibly different,” in this case, means “lesser than,” and that I will not stand for. 

*I say Western civ because that’s what I have better knowledge of; anyone that wants to add from cultures & histories other than that please do!

(*This is all also coming directly from a straight cis-female viewpoint, so apologies for that narrow focus as well. Although not apologies for the OP’s incredibly ridiculous and narrow focus. “Women have babies, men have jobs”?! What the everloving HELL?! Having a baby or not does not a woman make, and having a job or not does not a man make, and you have a lot of shit to learn. A LOT. kjabsjkfbsdfARGH.)