The argument isn’t new, but on International Women's Day, which was yesterday (I was so excited that I forgot to celebrate it, but then I felt guilty and drank an extra glass of chablis), it always resurfaces as if women are ever going to agree on feminism, femininity, and womanhood when disagreeing is much more empowering and rewarding:
[…] women know ideology has no place when we talk about the dubious practice of stressful, long day care for infants. Mothers of young children can enter the work force but we have produced a society in which mothers are considered to be doing valuable productive work only if they are also in the paid work force. Whether it is inequitable tax arrangements that penalise single-breadwinner families or government-sponsored maternity leave that omits women who have forgone employment to rear a family, ideologues of the Right and the Left have transformed the care we thought of as the freely given gift of mother love into a commodity called child care.
Aside from equal pay, post-war feminism has not done much for women. Its proponents have taken the credit for what women in the 19th century had already done and what World War II accelerated.
My mother went to university in 1947. She wasn't spurred on by feminism but by her family and ambitious, well-educated nuns (one a brilliant graduate of the Sorbonne), whose ideals of poverty and obedience and, of course, chastity, were comprehensively trashed by the feminists of my generation.
Those feminists told us that our problems would be solved by the contraceptive pill and abortion. But the pill was the best thing men ever invented for men because it ensured women's constant sexual availability and men's abandonment of old ideals of honour, also leading to more abortions. Now the research is telling us Australian women are unable to have the children they want. So women are fed up with feminism. Its legacy is barrenness. Of course, the feminists are not going to tell you that.
I always yawn after reading such arguments because their goal isn't to move the discussion forward, but to stall it as a way to show that the debate is meaningless, that femininity and philosophy don't mix, and that nature is always right .
