The cost of women’s liberation

I once knew a woman who voluntarily included in her duties to her husband the application of the paste on his toothbrush before he went off to work. I know a Greek lady in her late 80s who, when she arrived in this country around 1950, would not catch a bus which was being driven by a woman.

Feminists are horrified at such examples of women who let the side down - but they overlook the reality that many people crave to have a very high degree of hierarchical structure in their lives. And, to feel oppressed you must first visualise yourself as being an oppressed person. With this in mind, the feminists of the 1960s set out to enlighten the average woman of the oppressed state that she was not aware she was in.

At the time my mother married at age 22 she had never had a paying job. She had lived with her parents. This was a reasonable option as the wages for women as shop assistants, bookkeepers and nurses were piddling. Along with making the family’s clothes, there was a lot to do in a home without electricity and running water.

Throughout her married life my mum never thought she was dominated by my dad. He was the breadwinner and she was the homemaker. She enjoyed immensely the structure in her life which he provided. They connected so beautifully that 38 years after his early death she still could not say his name without choking on it.

Men are by nature both creative and destructive. Men intuitively know that without that calming nature of women there would be no civilisation. Even before girls were seen to be worth educating, women were perceived by men generally to be the basis of the love and softness in humanity.

Feminists were unhappy with the social confines placed on their intellect and imagined most of their gender to be also unhappy with their situation. The social revolution which has evolved since has dragged the far greater number of women who did not feel any intellectual constraints into a direction they did not wish to go.

Money and not principles determine outcomes.

In my mother’s day the life of the “old maid” was socially and economically terrible. Many women married whomever they could get to avoid this fate. The financial independence made possible by all occupations now being open to women means that a woman does not have to have a man in her life at all. That is a good thing.

Of the number of benefits that liberation has clearly introduced, the most significant has been that the myth believed by both the average man and the average woman that women were less clever than men has been demolished. If men were the better thinkers then, it was due their world of breadwinners being more competitive.

So, what rational person could possibly oppose the principles of equal opportunity for women? The problem is that the outcome of every social revolution in some significant way fails to match the once grand vision. Society is too complex for anybody to understand it. As with the ecology, a correction overhere creates a totally unexpected problem overthere.

The “liberation” of women began almost insidiously during World War I when our culture’s view of a woman changed from that of being a homemaker to that of being an economic unit on the home front - a cog in the machine. This was re-enforced during World War II. It has continued to be reinforced in the decades of peace since - not due to any national emergency, but due to rampant consumerism.

As a nasty feedback mechanism, the more money that is circulating, the more an economy evolves which depends on excessive consumption for its survival. Through that feedback mechanism, the more women who had a paying job, the more of their gender were then forced to have a paying job.

Now due to this feedback mechanism, two incomes are needed to buy a house. This is because the price of real estate depends entirely on how much money is looking for real estate. As the relative number of two-income families increased, then so did the cost of a house. And, as the value of real estate climbed, then so did rents to justify the amount of capital tied up.

In this monster creation of our own short-sightedness are trapped hundreds of thousands of working parents who would prefer a life which could be fully supported by one income as their grandparents had. The woman in unskilled or semi-skilled work simply has a job. In this prison without the bars, there is no delusion of fulfillment for her. If nothing is more priceless than the limited amount of time you have on this planet, then those married women in mundane jobs have been pushed by the new social order into selling something which is priceless.

Of course, the mother alone at home with infants is not liberated - and she feels it. But how worse is the feeling when the time with the children is traded for time on an assembly line or serving on tables.

Sustained by delusions.

Many working women claim that, besides the money, they need the social contact a job provides. But, my mother did not need a job to socialise. The neighbourhood provided the company as no married woman in the street had a job. The economy in her day placed no pressure on the average woman to ever have a job after marriage. Today, even mothers with infant children are in the workforce.

Those women in skilled work claim they need the intellectual stimulus. They overlook the fact that the internet and advances in printing technology have hugely enhanced the opportunity for learning for its own sake. There are now a vast number of courses one can enroll in. As technology made cooking and cleaning easier, as facilities such as gymnasiums and council pools increased in number, as any drudge of being always at home could be relieved by day care centres, the liberation of women should mean having more time for enjoyable activities. The direction women’s liberation has taken is not away from stress - but towards more of it.

Ambitious women wanted to become part of the man’s world - and now they are in it - only to discover that business is the spending of 50 to 80 hours a week meeting the demands of other people, and a good day in a profession is not a day of creativity, but a day when nothing went wrong.

To be able to live with this outcome, the delusion of personal fulfillment has to be maintained - as does the delusion that the high income is necessary to live a fulfilling life. I have been retired since April 1988. I know exactly what real liberation feels like. You are not liberated until you have complete control over your own time.

Men and women have different brain cell networks interacting with different hormones.

Our grandmothers were stuck with the men they married because that was the way society was structured. Now, most women are able to escape the men they do not want. However, the quest for independence was not the main thrust of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. The main thrust was that the traditional roles of men and women should now merge to become the one.

But, the ancient neural networks and endocrine systems were still there - and they say that men and women must have different roles to play. It would seem that to deny the biology is to generate expectations which cannot be fulfilled.

In management positions, the playing of power games is almost unavoidable. As so many women are now in these positions, the traditional male image of themselves as the providers and protectors of the basis of the love and softness in humanity is fading. Putting women in the front line of policing and the military is pushing that image towards vanishing point.

While human nature has an astonishing capacity to adapt to an unalterable situation, when presented with choices, human nature tends to manage them irrationally.

My mother’s contentment co-existed with an absence of choice. The new world of the liberated woman is a world of choices - and that means a wider world where there are new dangers. A laboratory rat forced to run a different maze each day ends up with both a sharpened intelligence and a neurosis.

Women leave their partners for one of two reasons; one is that he is intolerably negative towards her and the other is that (even if he is positive towards her) she feels she is wasting her life with him. The later reason hardly figured until 1975 when the Family Law Act allowed one spouse to walk out on another, wait 12 months, and then obtain a divorce. In the great majority of cases, it was the wife who left.

A marriage today has less than two in three chance of surviving. But, that figure relates only to formal marriage. Unlike the old days, many partnerships are now formed outside of marriage with every hope of being permanent. Now the failure rate jumps to five in six.

The more common breakups are, the more the culture accepts the situation as normal - and the more it encourages a low tolerance for any incompatibility. This is another nasty feedback mechanism. Relationships have become an emotional rollercoaster for a high proportion of the population. In my mum’s time the vast majority of the female population had only ever experienced one “permanent” relationship. Today this only applies to an ever-decreasing minority.

Negativity given free rein rapidly nourishes itself - so even what is reasonable begins to look bad. When physical escape from marriage was far from easy, the bad patches had time to heal. The animal capacity to adapt to the environment was given every opportunity to manifest itself. Any thought of my parents leaving each other would have been as alien as planning a trip to the moon. Now the silent concern in more than half of all partnerships is who is likely to pull the plug first.

The collateral damage is the developing minds of the children. In this country the proportion of single parent households is rising rapidly towards the million mark. But it is not only dad or mum who is never there. Nobody at all may be there when the child comes home from school. It meant a lot to my sense of stability that when I came home from primary school that my mum was always there.

Unconditional love is easily established between provider and dependent - but it is not easy to establish it with a competitor.

Distrust is becoming firmly entrenched in the psyche of many unmarried men. With marriage breakups so common, most single men know at least one former bachelor mate who has gone thorough hell in a dispute over his children.

Young women are frustrated by their failure to find a man willing to commit to what many men are now feeling to be looking increasingly like a game of roulette with very high stakes. As a consequence, many single women in their 30s have a growing fear that they are going to remain childless.

Conclusion

It is assumed by almost everybody that the average Western woman of 2009 is more fulfilled than the average Western woman of 1909 was. Nobody knows if she is. But we will continue to make that assumption for as long as it is politically incorrect to talk about the price paid for women’s liberation.