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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28400 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Now what was that verse by somebody or other?

Well, two can play at that game.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"

A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future

It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.

I big part of this is perception though.

It’s seen as working as most jobs (and yes, motherhood is a job) are. The thing of any of the jobs you choose to do (or in earlier eras were thrust upon you) were the reasons behind them. Mothers are raising the next generation of humans. Rocket engineers are building things that can take us to the stars. Cops and soldiers keep people safe. Teachers are passing down critical knowledge to future generations. See the difference? Focus on the tasks and even the most important jobs will seem like drudgery. I mean, the President is in boring ass meetings with people he has to pretend to like all day, broken up by reading really complex boring reports. Those are the tasks, but the job is to lead the entire country.

There’s mystique to any set of tasks. From the daily, they’re all boring. But the mystique comes from the importance of the job that requires you to do the tasks.

Oh no, a middle-class housewife is living in a "comfortable concentration camp".

I think perhaps the author has no fucking clue what the original concentration camps were like, and that the Boer women in them were not living dreary lives eating peanut butter sandwiches with their children. And that working-class women often combined paid work outside the home alongside child-rearing and home-making duties, because of economic necessity.

"Woe is me, I have food, shelter, clothing, and the looming shadow of the bailiffs repossessing our goods is not over us, but I'm bored because my life is easy and convenient. How much happier I would be working in a job outside the home!"

two decades later "Woe is me! I have to work outside the home and be a housewife and home-maker as well! And that's only if I can find a man who wants to marry me! I thought we were supposed to have it all!"

I'll weep tears over the hard burdensome toil of the women expected to "chauffeured Cubs and Brownies" when this book tells me the author had direct experience, like my mother, of living in a house with no running water and hand-washing the clothes for herself, husband, two kids and bed-ridden mother outside in a plastic tub - all of which I saw as a child.

she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"

I've always thought this was a ridiculous question. The answer is clearly "yes" and I don't think this would have been difficult for most people before WW2. Indeed, Ecclesiastes said millennia ago:

Men are born only to die, plant trees only to displant them. 3 Now we take life, now we save it; now we are destroying, now building. 4 Weep first, then laugh, mourn we and dance; 5 the stones we have scattered we must bring together anew; court we first and then shun the embrace. 6 To-day’s gain, tomorrow’s loss; what once we treasured, soon thrown away; 7 the garment rent, the garment mended; silence kept, and silence ended; 8 love alternating with hatred, war with peace. 9 For all this toiling of his, how is man the richer?[1] 10 Pitiable indeed I found it, this task God has given to mankind; 11 and he, meanwhile, has made the world, in all its seasonable beauty, and given us the contemplation[2] of it, yet of his own dealings with us, first and last, never should man gain comprehension. 12 To enjoy his life, to make the best of it, beyond doubt this is man’s highest employment; 13 that gift at least God has granted him, to eat and drink and see his toil rewarded.

The human condition is the indignity of being an eternal soul bound to a finite body, trapped in a fallen world filled with suffering. Even non-Christians feel a similar void. I'm no Nietzschean but I sympathize with him when he says:

“If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Therefore, there are no gods.”

The default experience is to "struggle alone," to wrestle with the apparent fact that life has "no goal, no ambition, no purpose," feel that one is "buried alive" by the hideously mundane, tedious, and exhausting demands of daily life.

It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother.

This is a bit complicated because the working mother chooses to forego motherhood to a greater extent than the non-working mother foregoes work in most cases. It's pretty easy to work a part-time job while caring for kids, or leave the workforce for a few decades and then return later (though shockingly, relatively few voluntarily return to the workforce). It's very difficult to raise kids while working a full-time job, or put off having kids for a few decades to work on your career.

I get what you're saying though. Especially in the modern world, where household chores are much less important and time-consuming than they used to be, it certainly seems like everyone should be participating in life outside the home to some extent, regardless of your views on gender.

I don't think /u/FarNearEverywhere's point was that working life is drab and meaningless, rather that employers are pretending to be covering the costs of their employees' abortions under the guise of feminism, but it's really just naked self-interest. Paying for an abortion is cheaper than paying for maternity cover.

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