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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
Simple economics!
Women achieved productive parity with men somewhere around 1900 due to the near-total mechanization of society at that time. The means of producing food and primary goods (mining) was, for the first time in human history, automated to the extent that physical strength (the primary advantage of men as a class) was rendered mostly to completely irrelevant for the average profession of the time. The impact of mechanization was so great that even elementary-age children could drive a combine, thread an industrial loom, or press a switch as well as a grown woman or man, which is the reason even they were part of the labor force at that time.
With productive parity comes economic parity, and with economic parity comes social parity, hence suffrage in every industrialized nation before the 1920s were over.
(And then, after those nations became great or bombed themselves/each other back into the Stone Age, the bottom fell out/was removed from the labor pool; child labor was the first to go for specialization reasons, and then most unskilled/nominally-lower-class labor got shipped to Asian countries for the same reason. The effect is the same- sociopolitical [and to a lesser extent, economic] consequences for these two groups have been substantial.)
Automation is part of it, but what everyone seems to forget is that women and children did work down mines alongside men and much of the reforms were passed because it was felt that this was not fitting with women's social role (not alone to be homemakers but to be modest, chaste, etc.) Women and children then moved on, as you point out, to the factories.
The social driver for feminism was capitalism. While the suffragettes and others were looking for votes for women, and for women to have equal rights with men (and I think we tend to forget the great imbalance legally as regards women and men within marriage and other spheres), there was a limited source of employment for women. Women were dependent on marriage to keep them out of poverty. So broadening the type of work that women could have access to was both a feminist project, to give women economic independence, and an employers' project, to have access to a greater labour force than men alone.
Employing women meant that jobs could be less skilled and more importantly paid less. Now we have modern society where it is expected that you will be a two-income family if you want a mortgage or any other rung on the ladder of achievement (unless you are in a very well-paying job where one person can be the sole breadwinner). Alongside the usual stuff about equality and opportunity and the rest of it, is the admission that having women working helps to grow the economy. I think we're at a point where we're dependent on constant growth or else the bubble will burst and there will be a lot of fallout.
Buried down in this piece is another reference to this:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/female-labor-force-participation-gender-gap-pandemic/
So once all the talk about "gender wage gaps" and so forth is stripped away, the underlying skeleton is that every warm body that can work is needed in order to keep the plates of the economy spinning. Taking time out to have children is a career-killer, if you have a career, and hurts your income if you're working jobs (not employed in a career) since you're more likely to have to work part-time hours in order to run the home as well.
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