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A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.
Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.
So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.
What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
Am I correct in this assessment?
Feminism seems to put a lot of effort into defending the work of motherhood being done by institutions or otherwise en mass by the market(eg daycare, processed meals). As far as I know it is a trivially small percentage of the population which would judge a woman for buying her child fast food, but feminism spends a lot of its time attacking this very small percentage of the population(or rather, complaining vigorously in the hopes that some white knights will show up to attack them, but it seems like they can’t find anyone to attack).
Granted that feminism seemingly always prioritizes the interests of educated high income urbanite women, particularly those with professional jobs, it does have a plan for less high income women. It’s a worse deal, sure, but poorer people always get that. And while the poorest of the poor can’t afford daycare either, the feminist solution is for universal daycare, which is in fact more of a solution to their plight than what tradcons would offer(the poorest women didn’t have the opportunity to be housewives in the 50’s either).
There are legitimate criticisms of feminism as a class interest group for educated urban women(eg the focus on college campus rape while ignoring rape in the military), I just don’t think this is it.
I have personally not seen it, but will defer to it being the sort of thing that mothers are aware of(maybe it’s something moms judge each other for in a group of only moms?).
It seems potentially relevant that the cost of low-skilled labor skyrocketed shortly before second wave feminism.
I honestly thought what you're describing was an urban legend to make AWFL's look ridiculous. Like McDonald's is shitty food for poor people and it's not even priced to match, but really?
Sure. First wave feminism was mostly not interested in ending female domesticity- it was interested in raising the status of women outside the household(women's ed, women's suffrage, etc) and in protecting women's status in domesticity(more protections during divorce, temperance). You can claim(and I do) that a lot of this stuff led to de-domesticization of women beginning with the first sexual revolution in the 20's-30's, but it really wasn't the intent.
In contrast the second wave came after the WWII-induced societal changes had time to settle, and one of those changes was the effects of a drastic increase in the price of low-skill labor. Domestic servants are an effect of high income inequality and not an effect of societal expectations- when low skill labor is more expensive, domestic servants are harder to get, either because poor women work less due to their husband's higher earnings(as was the case in the 50's- when factory wages are enough to support a family, women married to factory workers have no incentive to do a richer family's housework in addition to their own), or because poor women have other things to do that pay better(remember, the price for domestic servants needs to be an acceptable fraction of an upper middle class salary for upper middle class people to employ them, and this applies generally to fixed expenses that are lifestyle expectations rather than strictly necessary- witness the recent declines in teen driving, or young adults living on their own, both driven by rises in the cost relative to salaries, for examples within our lifetimes). So when the post-WWII economic boomtime(and in parts of the USA, desegregation) raised low-skill wages, you had lots of upper middle class families needing to do things for themselves which their parents would have hired someone to do, and labor saving devices penetrated households slowly, so lots of upper middle class women felt like they were engaged in drudgery by doing their own laundry(which would have been the first chore outsourced to domestic servants before washing machines and wrinkle-free fabrics), even though, well, someone has to do it, has always done it, and that person was not about to be a man(and I have a strong prior that, then as now, a wife who objects to doing laundry can choose between complaining about her husband not doing it and complaining about her husband doing it wrongly, regardless of how her husband actually does laundry. I have never found anyone, male or female, able to disagree with this argument). Because, factually, they were compared to their mothers and grandmothers engaging in quite a lot of drudgery. And that must have felt like downward social mobility even if it wasn't.
I think so, although I’d point to labor saving devices(washing machines, dishwashers, disposable diapers, vacuum cleaners) as the main substitute for the household labor of upper middle class women in the 2nd wave feminist era because income inequality didn’t rise enough for most of them to hire maids until the late eighties early nineties, and factually this was the era when all those things I mentioned became more common.
Of course I do agree with you in broad strokes; the eighties stereotype of a yuppie mother poked fun at sending her children to preschool for a reason.
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