A couple of years ago, I was having an on-line discussion about feminism with someone I'd never met. Her name was Susan. She wasn't a very pleasant person and she was also someone who held views that I just found hard to take.
She didn't believe that feminism — the movement — had improved anyone's life. She insisted that it hadn't had any effect on her life. (She's a woman in her 40s.) She said she had a university education, a post-graduate degree, a husband, and she had the beginning of a potentially successful career when she decided to stay home and raise her children.
Look at me, she pretty much shouted. I've got it all and feminism didn't do it. I did it myself.
But feminism has affected Susan's life and it seems shocking to me that in this day and age, she honestly didn't seem to know that.
I saved my response to her declaration that feminism did nothing for her life. This is what I said:
Susan, your life is so immeasurably better because of feminism. Not very long ago, in my lifetime, women had few rights. A couple of examples: in my first career (I’m a writer/editor now), I was a nurse. I, and my fellow nurses, used to spend countless hours on the phone looking for husbands/fathers who may have abandoned their family years before — or who were simply not in the picture any more. We needed them to give consent for their wives or children to have life-saving therapy — even emergency surgery.
I have clear memories of standing by with a woman who’s already prepped, anaesthetist at the ready, surgeon scrubbed, while we frantically followed leads all over the country looking for that elusive consent from some long-gone husband.
If we didn’t find him — and if she had no adult male family member — we had to call the Chief Surgeon who would come to the hospital, review the efforts we had made to find the husband, and then sign the consent form.
Susan, women could not consent to their own surgery!
Women couldn’t get bank loans or mortgages on their own. If they didn’t have a husband, a father or brother might be able to help out but there was no guarantee.
These were LAWS that feminists fought to get changed — not attitudes. It was certainly socially accepted that husbands could beat or rape their wives — but it was also LEGAL.
You have a post-graduate degree but a generation before you, there was a quota on the number of women accepted into graduate programs. Believe me, you didn't get that Master's degree on your own.
Women did get fired for becoming pregnant — in some positions, they’d get fired for getting married. And contrary to an often-expressed anti-feminist notion: feminism doesn’t automatically admire or honour women who succeed in the corporate world. It depends a lot on what they do with the power they may hold. In my feminist world there has always been more emphasis on putting value on “women’s work.” Feminism does recognize the work of mothers, teachers, nurses, the CWL or the Women’s Institute etc. a lot more than such jobs were ever recognized pre-feminism.
Susan, you refer to “feminists” as if legions of women of all different ages, interests, political beliefs, sexuality must all hold the exact same opinions on everything if they self-identify as feminist.
I've been an active feminist for decades now; I know and have known feminists in the professions, in academia, in high school, in minimum wage jobs — many of them would not recognize themselves as they’re portrayed in this discussion.
Feminism is a big world. It has benefitted — and continues to benefit — all of us, women, men and children. And yes, Susan, that includes you.
I didn't convince her, of course. I didn't really expect to. I don't usually have this discussion with women who reject feminism — especially young women. I know that life will be more convincing that I can be and it's usually just a matter of time. I only talked about it with Susan because she was older and I found it hard to believe that she really thought she got to where she is on her own.
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