can we discuss feminism please

trisher

Galaxy I'm suggesting that the criteria for dividing sport into categories could be something other than sex.
Rosie51 I was simply demonstrating that academic papers can be used to support anything.

trisher This is getting farcical when you backtrack on the academic paper you quoted. I'm curious as to why you didn't state this opinion alongside your link? Or do you only backtrack when your own evidence can be used against your argument?

Rosie51

trisher how dare you suggest I'd favour segregation on the grounds of skin colour, that's an extremely insulting low blow to try and win an argument! The advantage one race would have over the other is much, much smaller between opponents of the same sex, than that between opponents of opposite sexes whatever their race. In fact you have demonstrated why a fight between a white woman and a black man of the same weight category would be immensely uneven.

Rosie I wasn't back-tracking simply explaining something which you apparently believed was somehow personal. If you don't understand irony that isn't my fault.
You chose to use an academic paper to support your argument I showed that academic papers can be used to support totally unacceptable ideas.

trisher???????? How facts are used does not negate them being facts. Perhaps it's you that doesn't recognise irony. It's not my fault you are unable to see unfairness where it definitely would exist.

Why is it so difficult to have an informed, broad discussion On feminism without provocative confrontational posts led it seems to me by one poster. One with whom I’ve often agreed

Is that me if so why not say so. If I'm being provocative it isn't meant to be I do realise that some of my opinions are not the widely held middle of the road ones, but I also think if feminism isn't about tackling difficult issues then it will never progress
At a meetng when we were discussing the suffrage movement we asked what our personal limits would be, would we be a suffragist and march and petition, a suffragette who threw stones or a more radical arsonist and bomber. Not surprisingly I went for the extremist. I would have destroyed property. Interestingly when the first suffragette histories were written after WW1 the women who wrote them chose to leave out the really radical women because they were ashamed of them.

Apologies trisher, I posted in haste and should have used your name.
I’d have been a suffragist. Our area has a wonderland created by a local businessman over 100 years ago. I spreads over moor and hills, lakes, waterfalls, kitchen gardens, all being renovated in recent years. It was gifted to the council but fell into disrepair till fund raising recently. There was an Edwardian house where the owner lived. It was burnt to the ground by a local suffragette. Yes, she’s one of my hero’s but, I wish the building had been preserved for its architectural and historical value.

Accepted Iam64 There is usually a lot of private thought behind some of my posts. For example the death of Katherine Whitehorn reminded me of her "sluts" campaign and made me wonder why so many years after she wrote about it women were still shouldering the majority of domestic work. I thought the quote about women being trapped because of their own standards was interesting and made me realise that perhaps we are partly responsible for our own situation. Along with the fact that I am useless at housework of course and my DS irons better than I do!

tRisher, as we know, the personal is political. We are all influenced by our lived experience. Katherine Whitehorse was one of my hero’s, along with Jill Tweedie, Polly Tornbee, the spare rib gang and the American feminists.
I agree with your concerns that women in the main, still shoulder the Bulk of the practical and emotional demands of family life. I’m generalising and it’s much improved from the 70s. Until shared care of children is accepted by employers, how will that change. I can’t blame women for men’s co tinted ability to slide of of their share

I don't think it's just employers who don't accept shared childcare I think some women do as well. I can understand this when children are little the mother-child bond is strong and some women will find seperation difficult. I do wonder about housework though. If a woman criticises her partner's hoovering skills and even goes over it again can she wonder if he stops doing it? I can only compare this with when I shared a house with other girls at college, we shared the chores and some did them better than others but none of us took over and re-did things.

I always think , though I understand why, radical feminism did not pursue and promote the value of caring, child rearing and homemaking enough.
As a movement feminism has been very focused on smashing the glass ceiling, equality of pay etc. and has not worked as hard at raising the value of 'care' work.
If we continue to value particular roles/jobs/careers that were traditionally male /female differently then we will never achieve better equality.

I think that the problem with that is that everyone does it one way or another (home-making etc), so it would be difficult to pay for it in a way that makes a difference. Giving everyone the same amount of money for cleaning up after themselves would make no difference, as prices would rise to restore differentials.

Also, it would be impossible to administrate. Would there be house inspections to make sure that targets were met, for instance? Perish the thought!

What about people who don't want or can't have children, so don't take part in child-rearing? Should their income be reduced, and even worse, be reduced whilst they are forced to contribute to the payment of parents? It would have to be paid to men as well as women, so what would it achieve for feminists? Would it encourage population rises? It is far too problematic, and I'm not convinced that it even works in theory.

When it comes to care of others (eg carers in care homes) it would be great to see them being paid a lot more, but that would require state-sponsored social care. As long as people are making a lot of money from care of the elderly, costs of care will remain high whilst wages remain low. A more equitable and humane approach to care of the infirm is desperately needed, but it will need government backing and finance.

Doodledog I was not specifically thinking of pay. Just that if childrearing & homemaking are always considered "lightweight" & unimportant then non damaging career breaks, shared childcare, proper parental leave etc., which would support equality, will never get off the ground properly. Think some Scandi places have it sorted better.

I think that can also be applied to the view of nursery workers, childminders, etc, nearly always women. I think it also may be connected with our view of children, I am not sure we are willing to invest in children in the way some European countries are.

..sorry posted accidentally..
Would be possible to support parental leave by giving firms tax breaks to pay people to have flexible workingetc. All is possible..just needs more men to want it & women to expect it.

PECS that would seem reasonable unfortunately the evidence seems to be that companies and other organisations are actually going the other way and making pregnant women unemployed by one method or another. The woman who formed "Pregnant Then Screwed" was working for a major charity, and well in to a complicated pregnancy, when they terminated her employment. This is partly because the period for objecting to dismissal is only 3 months and pregnant women are usually busy with other things and don't appeal. I was shocked to hear that a right we thought established was actually being steadily eroded.https://pregnantthenscrewed.com

Try again pregnantthenscrewed.com

When I was at uni I got married and the scholarship I had was removed because of it. I went on to complete my degree in relative poverty . I am 100 % sure that ,had I been male, there would be no question of removing my scholarship because of marriage. I think the view was that I became my husband’s responsibility. Pretty disgusting and a wake up call to me because I had not experienced sexism like that before, having attended a girls’ grammar. Some things have improved over the years but equally many have not and I think the struggle needs to continue and not get sidetracked by identity issues.

Thanks nanna8 for bringing us back to basics. Lets agree to differ on trans issues and focus on the very real problems now. I have no doubt that Covid will produce more pregnant women being dismissed because employers don't want to pay maternity leave. This Thursday Pregnant Then Screwed are taking the goovernment to court because their financial assistance for businesses in Covid classed maternity leave as the same as a holiday!!! pregnantthenscrewed.com/were-threatening-legal-action-against-the-chancellor-for-indirect-sex-discrimination/
Interestingly nanna8 there is still no legal protection for students who become pregnant. This is one of their campaigns
pregnantthenscrewed.com/campaigns/

PECS

Doodledog I was not specifically thinking of pay. Just that if childrearing & homemaking are always considered "lightweight" & unimportant then non damaging career breaks, shared childcare, proper parental leave etc., which would support equality, will never get off the ground properly. Think some Scandi places have it sorted better.

I agree in principle, but think that the best way to tackle it (outside of a massive shift in the way society operates) would be for men and women to be paid the same, so that it would not be a default position for women to be the ones who stay at home, or do the childcare when they are working at home because of Covid. I know numerous young women who have done both, and pragmatically, it is the right decision for the family, even if the men want to take an equal share, but long-term it is damaging for their careers as well as for their pensions and so on down the line.

Having said that, I shared childcare with my husband, and consequently needed very little by way of adjustments at work. The only thing I asked for was to have finish times if meetings were called for late in the afternoons, so I should know whether to make arrangements for someone to collect the children from after-school club if it was my turn to collect and I might be late. My then manager (a childfree woman) was so anti-mother that she refused, and made a big deal of my 'not being fully committed', and 'expecting special treatment' when nothing could be further from the truth.

Anyway, a male colleague found himself a single parent after his divorce, and he was treated as a saint. He regularly took time off if his son was ill, left early to cover childcare emergencies, and never stayed on if meetings over-ran, but all of that was excused (even by Evil Manager) with a 'Poor X. He's so good with that boy, isn't he?' and a tolerant smile.

Anecdotes are not always helpful in discussions like this, as someone else can just as easily tell a very different story from her own experience, but I do think that this illustrates a fairly typical scenario back then (late 90s/early 00s). I would like to think that things have changed for the better, but having read so much about how Covid is pushing women back into the home, I'm not so sure. I do think that younger women need to be vigilant (about far more than this particular issue), as there is no room for complacency where our rights are concerned.

One of the questions which has been asked on GN is why nurseries have remained open during this second lock-down, well I have just found the answer on their website. Pregnant Then Screwed are running a "Save Our Nurseries" campaign. Apparently many of them are massively underfunded and only survivedtherough the last lock down because of extra government funding. The Early Years Alliance is woried about the loss of children's services www.eyalliance.org.uk/forgotten-sector-report
It doesn't look good for working mothers.

It isn’t good for working mothers . Mothers are still carrying the bulk of family responsibilities.

I'm afraid, Iam64 this brings me back to my own little hobby-horse of early years support and "education" in the widest sense.

I can't believe that nearly 50 years on I am still banging on about this.

Home life won't change (especially for the least stable) unless both boys and girls receive the same support and skills and opportunities in the very very beginning.

NotSpaghetti, same here, like Groundhog Day isn’t it. Especially the way things are working in lockdown, where mothers are wfh, home educating etc as well as doing the majority of domestic duties

I have a vivid memory of a Youth Club discussion in the early 1960s about 'working' mothers/ 'latch key ' children. I was about 13 ...from that time on I have done what I could to promote equality....

I can go back further than that. In 1948 when my mother was ill I attended a full time day nursery, delivered and collected by my dad before and after he finished work. It was completely free. At the time there was more nursery provision in the UK than at any time since. The result of course of women's labour being needed during the war. Most of them were closed in the 1950s. Governments can afford such things whhen they want to.