Class- and- race based assumptions regarding gender and labor

[BainsBane]

I have noticed a tendency by some--women and men, feminists and sexists alike--to assume that their reality is universal. Take, for example, the issue of working as a stay at home parent vs. out in what is traditionally considered the work force. Some describe this as staying home vs working. I do not. That assumption is of itself based on a concept that devalues what has traditionally been seen as women's work. Although unpaid, work in the home looking after children and the house is indeed labor, often more exhausting and demanding than participating in the paid labor force.

With that caveat, I'd like to explore the uninformed assumption that women have the choice to stay at home while men do not. The question itself reveals an inability to look outside the world of white middle- and upper-middle class America, as well as a lack of knowledge of US history. Poor and working class women, white and of color, have always worked outside the home. Historically, African American women, who had limited access to jobs, often worked as domestics. Anyone with any familiarity of labor history knows that women and children alike labored in factories in the Gilded Age (as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle illustrated). Only with the advent of the Progressive Movement were child labor laws enacted, while the growth of unions excluded women from factory work. Women took on sweat work, being paid by the piece for sewing garments in their own homes or in sweatshops where groups of women furiously sewed and did other piece work without the security of an hourly wage afforded their fathers, husbands, and brothers.

Imagining women only entered the workforce starting in the 1960s (or during WWII) ignores the reality of ordinary, working Americans. The Leave it to Beaver ideal of the stay at home mom was never universal, though it was more obtainable for white middle-class Americans in the 1950s-1970s than today. For many families, however, it was never an option. Therefore assuming that women somehow have greater choice to stay home than men reveals an inability to look outside a bourgeois mentality. It's hardly surprising that those who deny the existence of patriarchy would be blind to realities of class and race as well. It shows how elitist the male-centric view of the world is. While women of color have rightly challenged white feminists to look beyond their race-based assumptions, it seems that concept remains unfathomable for MRA adherents or others who devote their time to worrying about men's plight. The fight to hold on to male privilege hence entails blindness to the dynamics of race and class that have always intersected with gender in proscribing the options any of us have in life.

[redqueen]

1. Amen!

And THIS is why it disgusts me to see MRAs cuddling up to third wave (or fourth wave or seventh wave or whateverthefuck) feminists as if they had a shred of a fucking clue.. AND why any feminist who accepts such cuddling wihout calling out said MRAs (or worse, if they chime in with the MRAs about how frigid and prude and hairy and anti sex all those eeeeebil radfems are :puke pretty much gives themselves away as proverbial oblivious white ladies.

[BainsBane]

2. As for some of the men

who have been explicitly told that others have never had a choice not to work but continue to ignore that fact, it shows that they don't think anyone who isn't white and upper-middle class matters enough to have their experiences enter their consciousness. They simply refuse to acknowledge that those less fortunate than themselves count or even exist.

[redqueen]

3. Yep, they're completely blind to that inconvenient fact.

As they are to pretty much anything at all which upsets their carefully-constructed, self-serving worldview.

[MadrasT]

4. Absolutely. These folks simply can't see past their blinders.

Prior to my mother's generation, women in my family always worked outside the home. It wasn't optional - it was a requirement in order to make ends meet. Not to pay for fancy cars and vacations -- but to put fucking food on the table, shoes on their feet, and keep their modest homes heated in the winter.

Growing up (late 60's through early 80s), the only person I knew who was a "stay-at-home" mom was my own mother. It was a modest, lower middle class neighborhood, and the women and their husbands mostly all worked in factories.

I guess I also knew a lot of farm kids whose mothers weren't employed by outside employers, but farm women work harder than anybody I know.

The whole whine about this being some kind of "female privilege" is utterly ridiculous.

The issues around this are (as you point out) more related to class than gender.

And shit, women with children who go "back to work" get slammed socially for abandoning their kids... the same way men who "stay at home" with the kids get slammed for not having "real jobs". Personally I think everybody needs to mind their own beeswax and let other folks figure out how to run their own lives without the criticisms.

And not liking what happens when you exercise a choice is not at all the same thing as not having a choice.

If I was a man who was doing the work of childcare provider and anyone asked me when I was going to get a "real job" I would tell them "I have one and fuck off." And then that person would be evicted from my social circle.

[BainsBane]

5. Well said

I suspect that part of what a few (I won't even say some) of these men find so difficult to handle about working as primary care givers is that they so disrespect women in general, when they do what they perceive as women's work they end up disrespecting themselves. They then seek to create an ideology out of their own feelings of inadequacy rather than simply dealing with them.

[ismnotwasm]

6. +1000

[redqueen]

7. Internalized patriarchal values got you down?

[BainsBane]

8. That's impossible to do if one doesn't recognize patriarchy exists

[MadrasT]

9. Lordy I still have more to say.

It has been stipulated that having a penis requires you to live 1/3 of your life as a wage slave.

Boo fucking hoo.

Tell that to my non-penis-bearing grandmother who raised the last 3 of children on her own after my alcoholic philadering good-for-nothing grandpa flew the coop. Even before he left she worked her fingers to the bone around the clock, both inside and outside the home, raising 7 kids on their meager combined incomes, and then after he split, she was on her own.

She even cared for HIS ELDERLY MOTHER after he left and she needed help.

She was a remarkable woman who was strong as an ox emotionally, but the story or her circumstance is not unique or especially remarkable.

It is the story of millions and millions of people, female and male.

Life ain't easy for ANYBODY who wasn't born into the silver spoon class.

It's not about your penis, or lack thereof.

I am privileged as hell but it isn't because of my genitals, and I am acutely aware of my (actual) privilege and how hard my ancestors worked so that my life would suck less than theirs.

[BainsBane]

10. Oh, yeah. I remember that one.

Last edited Sat Oct 5, 2013, 12:49 AM - Edit history (1)

Everyone on the fucking planet has to work except for a very few. Jesus. And said person was born pretty fucking close to silver spoon. Some of us are actually grateful to have jobs that pay enough to provide food and shelter. A lot of people on the planet have far less.

My grandmother was not dissimilar to yours. She was born in the late 19th century and worked until her 80s. That's what people do, men and women alike. I myself worked in W2 jobs since age 13 and babysat before that. If I don't work, I go homeless. It's that simple.

My grandmother on my Dad's side didn't work out of the home, but she was a daughter of a banker and married to a doctor. She was very fortunate and KNEW it.

Whiners like that piss me off. It's like Mitt Romney complaining that if he'd only been born in Mexico, he'd be President now. Some people are just fucking pathetic.

[redqueen]

12. "It's like Mitt Romney complaining that if he'd only been born in Mexico, he'd be President now"

[redqueen]

11. That kind of boohooing REEKS of racism.

That is exactly the kind of unchecked privilege that women of color fought so hard to have recognized by white feminists back in the day.

While middle class white women were fighting for the right to work outside the home, women of color had always worked outside the home out of necessity.

And as always this whole discussion once again puts domestic work into a separate class as if it wasn't actually work. Unpaid domestic labor is still labor. Ask any janitor, short order cook, daycare worker, hospice worker, chauffeur, etc.

[BainsBane]

13. Also, what the fuck would someone do if they didn't work?

It's not like women who stay at home with the kids aren't working. My sister-in-law left a job at Cargill to look after her kids. She says it's way harder. Whenever I've looked after toddlers, it's way more exhausting than my paid job. Everyone works in life except the very, very few.

[redqueen]

14. True.

Many people, male and female, will attest to considering work outside the home to being a break from childcare + housework.

For the privileged few with housekeepers and nannies (or the men who come home from work and put their feet up), it's not on their radar.

[MadrasT]

16. The myopic point of view

and lack of awareness (privilege blindness) is staggering.

[BainsBane]

28. Imagine in this economy people complaining because they have to work

Think how many people would love to have a decent job. I'm trying to figure out the mentality that makes people think they shouldn't have to work--because the fact that they have to provide for themselves is somehow a sign that men are oppression by us evil women.

[gollygee]

15. There's a great deal of sexism at DU

but honestly, I think there's even more racism, and when you add the two, it's horrible. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And it isn't just DU. It's the US in general, and we liberals are not immune by any means.

[BainsBane]

19. Liberals certainly are not immune

and I agree there is a lot of racism on DU. People seem to have no awareness of it. The worst of it seems to be directed against African American women.

[Squinch]

17. In the thread about women staying home, I see comments from men who have stayed

home while their wives were the breadwinner, and those men are saying that men do not get to choose to stay home. While the men saying it are staying home. While saying that men don't have the choice to stay home.....

Sorry, just getting my head around that.

It seems some of these stay-at-home men encountered people who expressed disapproval of their staying at home, and they took that as nullification of their choice to stay at home....nullification that they encountered while they were staying home... and thinking that men don't have a choice to stay home....

Sorry. There I go again.

I wonder if they have ever heard of "mommy wars." Personally I think "mommy wars" are a media created bandwagon that some are silly enough to jump onto. Because, really, who in their right mind would allow someone else's opinion to determine their life choices?

...while they are staying home....

[BainsBane]

18. It's pretty clear to me

They are taking their frustration over their family situations and projecting it onto women as a whole rather than dealing with their personal issues.

[Squinch]

22. Who knew it would be such a mistake to look at DU on the work computer where I wasn't logged

on? I remember now why I had that little "ignore" fest a while back.

Learned my lesson. No more looking at threads behind that curtain.

[redqueen]

20. Ok, wait... what?

Somehow experiencing social disapproval is interpreted as actually having lost the right to make a choice they've already made?

[Squinch]

21. Not exactly. It seems to be interpreted as never having had that right. I think.

[ismnotwasm]

23. What you are describing is a typical classist POV

Our resident MRA's neither accept or even acknowledge that every woman's experience is not the same. Feminists have long acknowledged classism as another social ill, and while we don't always address it gracefully, it is part of a feminist conversation.

The 1950's housewife, father knows best type of women was a kind of never never land ideal for America. Women have always worked, what they didn't do, were not allowed to do, was work in male dominated fields. From the sciences to positions of leadership. Women of color were allowed much less.

So we fought and fought to to get there, to get even as far as we are; and these frightened, insecure revisionist men have reinterpreted this to mean they were abused as "breadwinners", that they are not "privileged" because they went to work, never acknowledging the role racism, sexism and classism plays. (which invalidates their POV IMO)

But mostly because the playing field is beginning to show equality.

[BainsBane]

24. POV?

What does that stand for?

[ismnotwasm]

25. Point of view

I suppose it's more an unacknowledged prejudice-- privilege if you will, than than actual thought out opinion...

[BainsBane]

26. I thought you meant something else

some MRAsma acronym.

[ismnotwasm]

27. I don't know those

Now I think I'll go see if I can find some



Ouch.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mra

[seabeyond]

29. that is what i try to suggest stating over 60% of women in the work force and breaking down more for

college and unemployment, the number of stay at home is relatively small.

especially at the really young ages i have know young women who are single mothers, poor lower and middle class choose to stay at home. it is tough and sacrifices are made. paying for day care all day for little ones is almost or is paying to work.

again, we make our choices and deal with the sacrifices and ignore what society feeds us

stay at home has never been respected. even in the "leave it to beaver" 50's and 60's the stay at home was not respected. and they are not respected today. i will go along with men that choose this have an even harder time. i do like the point though that so many of the men saying they do not have the choice to be stay at home were exactly that during periods of their life.

it is not about choice. it is about weathering the disrespect and lack of adulation for this job. and job it is.

again, no different than what women have lived with always making this choice. the delusion people are in to pretend it has been heralded as something positive for women.