Feminism – A Step Back?

Feminism – A Step Back

Feminism: The Confusion of Male/Female Relationships

From the beginning of time, Women had specific roles in the world and the home.

Each culture would have a few variations but basically being a female was the same.

From the Suffrage Movement to the current Movement, there appears to be a dramatic change. But things are not always what they appear:

In my studies I have found that women succeeded in freeing themselves from the roles they were created for and then fight for the return of those roles and bemoan the loss of them.

For Instance, In my interviews with career women , I found that most were not happy with their career choices(particularly those in previously male dominated fields); the demands that a career placed on their time; they wanted the security of Husbands to provide for them so that they could stay home and raise their families.

One case in particular stands out :

There were two young women – Best friends ; one was a housewife , the other had a job in a mans field. Their friendship began to suffer because the woman who worked was envious of the one who stayed home. Both women were married and when the woman who stayed home went to visit her friend she had car trouble; The other woman's husband immediately went out and fixed the problem.

More Examples:

They had jobs, but feminists weren't satisfied; every other woman had to get one too. So they opened fire on homemakers with a savagery that still echoes throughout our culture. A housewife is a "parasite," [Betty] Frieden writes; such women are "less than fully human" insofar as they "have never known a commitment to an idea."

David Gelernter, Drawing Life, Surviving the Unabomber, Free Press, 1997, p. 95

Housewives, not men, were the prey in feminism's sights when Kate Millett decreed in 1969 that the family must go. Feminists do not speak for traditional women. Men cannot know this, however, unless we tell them how we feel about them, our children, and our role in the home. Men must understand that our feelings towards them and our children are derided by feminists and have earned us their enmity. Whether or not this understanding garners men's support, traditional women must defend ourselves because the feminist offensive is, most essentially, a breach of solidarity with us, a disavowel of the obligation to honor the Women's Pact [that religious celibates, professional women, and homemakers respect each other] that women in the movement owed to us.

F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p. 97

"I am not the sort of woman who goes blonde," writes novelist Jane Smiley, before explaining how she did just that and, in the process, what sort of woman she discovered herself to be. A feminist intellectual and practical Midwesterner, Smiley had always "abjured vanity." She wore glasses and plain white cotton underwear, had a "short, masculine hairdo," and never, ever shaved her legs or underarms. Her looks reflected her convictions. "If I dyed my hair," she thought, "that would lead to makeup, and inevitably, to manicures, facials, panty hose, and the wholesale submission to the patriarchy." But that reasoning itself reflected the stereotypes of an earlier era, the idea that women must choose between intelligence and beauty, mind and body, substance and surface.

In her early forties, Smiley discovered that her studied indifference to her appearance was sending unwanted signals and hiding important aspects of her personality. The man she was interested in didn't see her as a woman. She fretted to her therapist. The therapist sent her to his colorist. Thus began her new life of blonde hair and shaved armpits -- of new pleasures and new meaning. "Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and simply admire it," she says of her caramel-colored hair. "It is a beautiful, layered, shimmering gold, soft and sparkly, a hair color that has no relation to me and no counterpart in the animal world. I would hate to give it up."

 

I interviewed some women who were completely confused by the feminist movement and the feminism with in themselves.

Some thought their lives and relationships would be better if they had careers to Impress their husbands with. Some thought their careers Were the root of all their problems.

Some women want all the traditional comforts of a relationship; with the advantages of the feminist theory. The Feminist Movement advocates the treatment of women as the equal of men; and then disrupts the relationship by its very equality.

Woman have always had the distinction of being on a pedestal above men; In tearing down those pedestals Have they made themselves Less Than men?

In striving to be attractive and seductive, are they going against the Feminist Theory.

I thought the feminist theory was that women would be more than sex symbols, mothers, housekeepers? Is feminism going backwards? Can it be undone?

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/marriage-articles/feminism-a-step-back-1939615.html#ixzz0rIuvkN5T
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution