A Quick Post on Feminism and Status
Motivations, Past and Present
I recently saw a note from
in response to a post by called We Need to Talk About Status.
I’m a bit too late to join the live conversation but I disagree that feminism was motivated by the low status given to domestic work and I wanted to share some thoughts and context.
First wave feminism was about liberty and representation. While women were certainly seen as lower status than men, the Victorian era, during which first wave feminism developed, actually placed a very high value on motherhood and considered it a woman’s sacred duty.
Early feminists were demanding the freedom to choose the lifestyle that best suited them and the freedom to take their own risks rather than be protected by male authority figures (first father then husband). They were also demanding political representation as women recognized that men as a group would not sufficiently represent their interests in the public sphere. Neither of these motivations were related to the status placed on motherhood and domestic work. The desire for the freedom to choose a life outside of the domestic sphere was a recognition of the heterogeneity of women - no matter how high status domestic work is, not all women will be satisfied with it. So I disagree that we might not have had feminism if motherhood and domestic work was highly valued.
Second wave feminism was initially focused on the boredom and isolation experienced by middle and upper-middle class stay at home mothers (this is the focus of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique). To understand second wave feminism we need to pay attention to its historical context.
Post WWII America saw a renewed elevation of the role of women as mothers and increased social sanction for non-conformers. As Camille Paglia describes in her essay Feminism Past and Present: “While men were at the front, women had to take over their factory jobs: this was the heyday of Rosie the Riveter, flexing her biceps. But when the veterans returned, women were expected to step aside. That pressure was unjust, but after World War Two, there was a deep longing shared by both men and women for the normalcy of family life.” In addition, as America became more prosperous middle-class women moved from smaller homes where they were in much higher-touch contact with neighbors and other mothers to larger suburban homes as Adrienne Rich discusses in Of Woman Born. While prosperity is great all else equal, this made motherhood much more isolating and left women largely reliant on their husbands for adult social interaction.
Later second wave feminism focused on reproductive rights (again, a liberty motivation) and workplace equality. You could say that the focus on workplace equality includes an implicit denigration of domestic work, and I think that’s sometimes true, but it can also be motivated by a desire for freedom and fairness.
Finally, third wave feminism focused on broadening the movement - recognizing that the voices that had been given the most airtime were almost exclusively those of white, educated upper-middle class women, cue Intersectionality. It’s also focused on the undue value given to female beauty relative to other attributes (Naomi Wolf and The Beauty Myth) and has certainly continued the focus on workplace equality and harassment (Me Too).
I do think that contemporary popular feminism often implicitly denigrates motherhood and domestic work. Alice’s post explicitly says that this work is lower status and describes it as “serving”. But, if the woman is serving the family by doing the domestic work and the man is working to make money… isn’t he also serving the family? I think this really comes down to choice again - when women choose to stay at home or to have a less intense career describing them as filling a low status service role actually seems misogynistic to me.
Many of the examples she uses from other countries are obvious and uncontroversial outcomes of a patriarchal society and show an insecurity on the part of men when their wives gain higher apparent status than them. For instance, a more recent post from Alice presented research from Abigail Weitzman that found that “Indian women who have more education or higher earnings than their husbands have the highest likelihood of frequent and severe violence”.
But I’m not so sure that we can draw a similar conclusion from the divorce data she presents from the US, which shows that relationships in which the wife makes more money than the husband have lower satisfaction rates and higher divorce rates. Is it the men being uncomfortable with their wives having high status or the women feeling that they can do better? Without doing the requisite research I’d guess probably both. After all, the majority of divorces are initiated by women and this is also directionally true (but not statistically significant) for nonmarital breakups.
Overall, reifying the idea that motherhood and domestic work is lower status seems like the obviously wrong direction for feminism. As I discussed in my post Gender Norms and Gender Trouble I see this attitude as symptomatic of the self-selection of gender non-conforming women into the feminist activist space. And this attitude is why we’re seeing the rise of trad/reactionary feminists who are seeking to assert the value of motherhood and to recognize the reality of sex differences. I’m no trad woman myself, and I think these right-leaning feminists fail to appreciate the degree of heterogeneity between women and the value of freedom. I don’t think the answer is to regress to 1950s or Victorian era values. But I do think we need to be honest about sex differences and promote well-aligned but loosely enforced gender norms.
“Second wave feminism was initially focused on the boredom and isolation experienced by middle and upper-middle class stay at home mothers” --> I wonder how much this was also a response to geographic mobility and technology. In earlier societies, people moved around less. They were more socially connected, with all of their childhood friends nearby. Thus, stay at home mothers likely spent much more time with friends. Hence, less boredom. Also, without modern technology, house work was much more taxing: washing clothes was not a 2 second chore of pressing a button, but a 45-minute chore of hand washing. Hence, less boredom.
However, in my opinion, the feminist movement is BEST explained by the rising value of intellectual labor with technology. With the rise of automation, the most valuable jobs became jobs which involved thinking (rather than physical labor), something men and women are equally good at. Thus, the culture evolved toward that which maximized productivity: having both genders work.
I agree feminism is not just about increasing female status because of low status of domestic work. It was also, as you say, about the fact that many women simply do not want to be SAHMs and have other interests/desire freedom. But feminism was also about very basic things like women not having equal rights. In terms of control over their financials or even their bodies (marital rape was not punishable by law until recently). One has to wonder why women, despite performing their womanly duties, did not get granted these rights until feminism (which also challenged heteronormativity) came along! If domestic work was equally valued then I would have expected women to be constrained yes, but at least have equal rights given that they were performing the duties assigned to them.