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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?
The social driver is that it is the attractive ideology. It is the attractive ideology because it is reinforced in media, education, and pop culture. Some of this is due to Democrat campaigns, some due to critical theorists, some due to tropes, some just due to capitalism.
A person doesn’t need to have a well-thought or personal motive for holding an ideology distinct from that it is the most socially attractive (cool, reputable) belief to hold.
It’s arguably still necessary, from the standpoint of obtaining maximal societal health, for more women to become homemakers. Our fertility rate means we trend toward ruin; we increasingly face diseases related to poor homemaking (diabetes, psychiatric disorder) and maternal stress (think of the 3% autism rate in some parts of the US, now remember it’s increasing); and it’s not even obvious that the expenses used to train women in education are of greater total utilitarian value than if they raised great healthy children.
The equality discourse pretty much bans this line of thinking, but women should be out of any stressful occupation for at least three years per birth, due to the additional benefits of breastfeeding and maintaining the mother-child bond. That’s 7 years total for three children (implying you have them one after another). If you’re a woman who has the potential to be a doctor, you’re the exact kind of person who should have 3-5 children (you are healthy and intelligent). Taking a woman who can raise 5 children and teaching her Anesthesiology and she winds up having one child at 35 is a net negative for the longterm good of society. My go-to example of this is Charles Darwin’s wife, who raised like 8 kids and three of them wound up being amazing scientists. And Darwin’s wife was trained to be a homemaker, so when he fell sick and despondent (as he often did) he was taken care of.
If you want an explanation, you can't just give one for why it is reinforced (modern popularity alone would explain that), but rather why it was enforced initially, back when it wasn't popular. You can't use "Democrat campaigns" or "critical theorists" to explain why Republicans outvoted Democrats in favor of the Republican-introduced Nineteenth Amendment before critical theory was developed, "tropes" is a category of explanation not an explanation, and "capitalism" just goes where the money is, so especially in a pre-"long tail" world it was another trailing indicator of popularity, not a leading indicator.
On the other hand, you seem to have given a pretty good explanation by accident:
We have four amazing scientists directly credited to Emma Darwin ... and yet I struggle to justify using the word "credited" to describe a paragraph where she still doesn't merit being directly named! With the status of homemakers that low, is it any wonder that people in search of status (to some extent, pretty much everybody even a little neurotypical) look for it elsewhere? The anesthesiologist might end up less contributory to and even more forgotten by history, but at least in the meantime she gets a title (edit: and an excuse to keep her surname with it) and a white coat and a big paycheck and deference from patients and underlings.
The bigger problem isn't even the loss of the opportunity to gain status imo.
It's the risk of losing status if the man tosses you overboard. Now you don't have that youth and fertility (since you "wasted" it on a bad match) and you don't have the wealth and security to compensate.
There is a solution to this, but it's a more feminist alimony/spousal support systems so that just leads us back to where we ended up.
And now I feel stupid, for not mentioning that myself. It's not far off from what a then-girlfriend specifically told me was the reason for her high-intensity education+career trajectory: not having her economic future out of her control.
Is there? Alimony can't fix status issues. Even in a world where "taking care of high-status man" and especially "taking care of successful kids" aren't given nearly the status they deserve, "dumped by high-status man, plus the state ruled that you can't take care of yourself without his ongoing compelled assistance" is irreparably worse.
Alimony is already good enough to handle most economic security issues ensuing from divorce ... but in my ex's case being divorced wasn't the concern, having a husband unexpectedly disabled/burned-out/whatever was. IIRC (though it was long ago so I may be completely misremembering here) her parents had fallen into that trap, with her mother suddenly having to start a mid-life career when her father had health problems, and even if it had worked out okay for them in the end, she thought it would be much safer to get a head start while she still had slack in her life.
It doesn't have to. We don't tend to create such complicated structures to only alleviate status concerns, AFAICT
The status concerns are especially trenchant because they're tied to serious economic concerns, like spending 20 years in a marriage and then not being able to support yourself. If that economic element was removed (e.g. everyone had enough money through a very generous UBI or parental program) I think the relevant importance of the status loss would change
The reason Western societies have infrastructure for alimony and child support is that the economic considerations are seen as so important as to mandate it, not cause women/men lost status (if anything they've made it easier for them to lose status via no-fault divorce)
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You have done a much better job wording my objections than I could have. I feel like the op and many other people responding fail to grasp what the question is, and that is probably my fault for not wording the post in a manner that this community is used to. Nevertheless I would like to continue learning, and I think any content, even if it isn't up to the usual standard of quality, will be helpful as the site tries to get off the ground.
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