It is my understanding that the baby boomers recognized their mothers’ role in the family as a form of dependency and weakness. This so called “traditional” role was demeaning to women apparently, so it was your goal to change that. Activists sought to give women a “voice” in all aspects of life, from their children’s educations to paying taxes. Your goal was to eradicate all those traditional roles (i.e. raising a family, maintaining a home, having dinner hot and ready at 5:00 p.m.) from the woman’s responsibility to the husband and the wife’s. Equality I think you called it.

Women poured into the work force and sent their babies off to day care. Did you actually enjoy this? Getting up at 5:00 am every day, packing your kids off to be raised by strangers, and becoming dependent on a dual income. Basically, what I see when looking back at history is that women wanted to be men and women wanted men to be the woman.

Another harsh side effect of this “female liberation” is a soaring divorce rate, violent children who rule their parents rather than the parents being in charge, not to mention men who have little or no back bone (aka The Sensitive New Age Guy). Your mothers wanted a man who would be the bread winner and let her nurture her family. When I look at my 74 year old grandmother and the life she led I really don’t think it’s bad. In fact, I would rather have that than what my mother (her daughter) went through. My mother has been working every day of her life since she was 20 years old and a mother of two. I grew up in day care, raised by countless strangers, while my divorced single mother struggled to make ends meet. And it seems that is what the feminist movement wanted women to have.

I firmly believe in the traditional role of women.

“The Man is the Head of the Household, But the Woman is the Neck”

That is was your mothers had! And rather than embrace this, I see that you saw it as a negative. Look at how society was in the 1940s-50s. (I’m not going to go into racial equality, I’m sticking to gender issues here) Violent crime was relatively low, children had manners, and you could leave your front door unlocked! Please explain to me how this was horrible?

Today, our children take guns to school for the sole purpose of executing classmates by the dozens. Today, we have over 50% divorce rate. (Would you gasp if I said I am vehemently against single mothers and the government giving them handouts?) Today, 12 year old cocaine addicts are having babies. Today, women have no choice but to put their kids in the care of someone else, while they drag their knuckles to the salt mines. Today, many of your daughters are becoming welfare queens and your sons have been labeled as dead beats.

There are too many “what ifs” to look back at society and determine if it would have ended up the same. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we would have been a lot better off before Baby Boomer Feminists ripped the control out from us and turned a generation of men to resent the female gender.

I also suspect that the majority of you ladies out there wish you could undo the damage. Does it upset you that your message has been lost to a woman (dare I say girl?) my age. I have no doubt that a lot of the work you fought for has benefited me, but again, looking at Grandma…It wasn’t bad before. I could have been happy with my grandmother’s life.
Young women and mothers today want the option to not work. If I became a parent (Heaven forbid) I would do everything in my power to not work and to become a full time stay at home wife and mother. Unfortunately for your former cause, I want nothing to do with your lifestyle or causes. Neither did my mother, but she was swept up in the aftermath of a wretched divorce. The majority of young women out there want their men to be the bread winner and to take the lead as head of the family; not be this spineless effeminate male that always says, “Yes Dear, of course Dear.”

Women (albeit not all of us) were made to nurture. Take care of the man while he puts bacon on the table and a roof over your head. If I could trade a commute to work for ironing his shirts, I would gladly do it! Please explain to me what your ultimate goal was! Do young women like me, with these ideals, piss you off? Or do you secretly wish you hadn’t fought so hard to screw every last one of us over?

-Jenn
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Originally posted by skdadl:
2. "Jenn" is feeling vulnerable because she is having trouble surviving in our current screwed-up socio-economic system. She isn't alone. A lot of men are feeling that way too. That is what is driving her letter, and that is what we should address, not overgeneralizing fantasies about women in general or someone's paranoid and reductive notions of feminism.

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But this post disturbs me greatly. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but something about it gets to me. It looks to the past with both extreme rose-colured glasses and with such a mis-sense of what femminism was and is and what the conditions were that prompted these strong women to move us all forward.

I'm not looking for someone to iron my shirts, if I just wanted that I could get that done at the dry cleaners. A marriage, of any sort, should be a partnership of equals, that's what gets you through the tough times, not control. Strong marraiges and relationships of the past were based on this, it just wasn't necessarily always called feminism.

I am thankful for the women who fought the fight. Ultimately feminism frees all of us from our supposed roles and allows us to be who we are, whether that is as a nuturing parent or a welder or both. Feminism means that I to can define myself as a nuturing parent and partner, that I too can be a stay-at-home parent.

The comments from this young woman, are as skdadl says a critique of an economic system that is squeezing families into an ever tighter and tighter box. But staying home to fry the bacon isn't going to solve that problem. Economic and social justice is what is needed to move us all forward again. I will support the feminist mothers and aunts and cousins of the past by taking up that fight for people like Jenn and I hope she joins us.

My grandmother is 89. She's getting more frail, and she and I have been talking about her life more, because we know that our time together will come to a close one of these days. She is smart, funny and still has a boyfriend. Nana would have liked to have a career when she was young. She was the top student in her high school class, and would have liked to take some sort of post-secondary education, but her family couldn't afford it. A kind neighbor and family friend offerred to send her to college in the city, but her father refused it -- that would have been charity, and even the suggestion hurt his pride. Not to mention the fact that he didn't see any good reason for a woman to be educated or work outside the farm or home. I don't think she has ever entirely forgiven her father for that.

Not that she escaped into the idyllic life of a 1940s/50s wife. She worked as a domestic servant until she married, and after that she and my grandfather jointly ran a number of small hotel/beer parlour establishments. After he couldn't work any longer and had lost their investment through poor management (she wasn't allowed to have anything to do with the beer parlour, and that's what sunk them), she worked as a night manager in a hotel until she retired.

Would her life have been better had she been allowed to pursue her goals and have a career? Undoubtedly. She loves her children, but she was not cut out to be the at-home nurturer idealized in the '40s and '50s picture postcard family. That's just not who she is.

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But this post disturbs me greatly. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but something about it gets to me. It looks to the past with both extreme rose-colured glasses and with such a mis-sense of what femminism was and is and what the conditions were that prompted these strong women to move us all forward.[/QB]

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That's precisely how I felt when I read this, Grant. Normally I do avoid sticking my nose into this forum and generally leave it to the ladies to fight the good fight here (and they're doing a damn good job at it), but it was the very strange revionist history that struck me the most about the letter. It seems to me that Jenn is longing for a past that didn't really exist, or at least not in the sense that she seems to think it did. My original journal entry was on the topic of feminism as simply meaning "choice", but I think Jenn sees feminism as denying her the choice to disagree with it as a female, if that makes any sense. I think from her perspective feminism is about female dominance, not equality. If your only experience with feminism is reading some out-of-context Dworkin quotes on a men's rights group website, then I can see how one would feel this way, but it also shows an inability to think critically and learn about feminism before denouncing it. I'm also with Ginger on the point of education. Jenn's letter speaks to the point that our schools are not doing a good enough job teaching young people that feminism is about choice for women (as well as men, really), and that it has opened up a world of possibilities only dreamt of in previous generations.

"If I became a parent (Heaven forbid) I would do everything in my power to not work and to become a full time stay at home wife and mother."