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Post by AustinAvery on Jun 15, 2009 10:46:30 GMT -5
To me the weird thing about what she's saying is not that married partners sacrifice for their kids, but that somehow the only partner who is or should be expected to do so is the woman. Yes, to me that's the weird thing too. The terrible thing even. And unfortunately it's not just this woman who thinks like this, many QF/P christians do. Vyckie writes that she used to believe that women couldn't have it all (all being a career and a family), and that's what I read on many QF/P blogs. However, I've never read men can't have it all. In fact, though no QF/P blog literally says "men CAN have it all", the idea seems to be that men in fact can have it all, should have it all even. All, being a career and a family. Men are good Christians if they have a family (are the head of a family), a wife and children, and work to provide for this family of them. If men have a job and a family it isn't just tolerated, it is seen as the perfect situation. So, men can have it all, but if a woman wants the same thing, it's "women can't have it all, and dying to self, and being godly, and oh her poor children who will care for them when she is working?" From my perspective, krwordgazer is correct. Many men are realizing that they can't have it "all" because they have redefined "all." Men in my profession--women too, actually--who want to climb fast and high through the professional hierarchy simply have to give short shrift to their families. And while it is probably still more understood or accepted for a man with children to do so than a woman, I credit the women's liberation movement with making men far more aware of what they sacrifice. I don't ever remember my father giving me a hug. I know he loved me. He even said so from time to time, but only when he'd had too much to drink. I feel liberated by contrast. I hug both my sons. I still kiss the 9 year old frequently (not with his friends around of course), and I tell all three of my children that I love them all the time. I'm very involved with my younger childrens' lives by choice--home work, baseball dad, dance troupe taxi, swimming pool companion, etc. But I remember, quite vividly, a day some time ago when I got up to go to work (big law firm) before my older son was awake, and came home after he was already asleep again. I remember that day because it was a concrete presentation of a choice I had to make. If I wanted to go the corporate superman route, I could expect far more days and nights like that. And that was not what I wanted. So, for those of us who define "all" to include both being at the top of our career and being actively involved in the lives of our children, we can't have it all either. Well, at least I couldn't.
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Post by castor on Jun 16, 2009 3:12:32 GMT -5
Austinavery. I certainly agree with you and Krwordgazer when it comes to some men. But that doesn't change that the message that men can have it all, all being a career and a family and women can't, is something I see on QF/P blogs. It's normal there that the husband has a family AND a job outside the house. But if the wife wants that it's "women can't have it all". So men can?
There are certainly men and women who have redefined having it all. I think their realization that both climbing fast and high through the professional hierarchy, and spending lots of time with their family isn't always possible can even come in handy for the quivering group. They will be able to use it to argue that, no, they don't believe men can have it all either. Men sacrifice by going to work everyday, they don't get what their wife gets, lots of time with their children. And well, that is most certainly true. But this argument ignores the real problem. The real problem is that men in the QF/P movement can have both a job and a family without hearing "you can't have it all" (and that they can come home early from their job and play with their children without hearing "you can't have it all"). But if a woman in this movement wants the EXACT SAME things as the men in her movement, she is told "you can't have it all".
The problem is the double standard. The problem is that women are constantly put in "their place", by the use of the phrase "you can't have it all". The problem is that women don't have the right to work outside the home, and therefore, they don't have the right to make all possible (possible!) choices for their life.
Of course they can't have it ALL. No-one can, I would like to live every life lived, and every life that will be lived, yes, every life, I'd like to be all people. I'd also like to be an animal, a tree, a. Can I have all of that? Most certainly not, I can have this one life. As this one human being. But I am "allowed" to make all the POSSIBLE choices, I can choose just a career, a career and family, just a family. I am allowed to make all possible choices and I am allowed to make exactly the same choices as the men around me (I'm ignoring sexism here, this is how it officially is). Quivering women are not. They don't get all the choices that other human beings do get, and if they protest they are told "you can't have it all".
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Post by AustinAvery on Jun 16, 2009 12:47:21 GMT -5
Austinavery. I certainly agree with you and Krwordgazer when it comes to some men. But that doesn't change that the message that men can have it all, all being a career and a family and women can't, is something I see on QF/P blogs. It's normal there that the husband has a family AND a job outside the house. But if the wife wants that it's "women can't have it all". So men can? I don't mean to counter any of that. First, I don't visit QF/P blogs, so I don't know what they say (although I'm afraid my head might explode if I read too much there, so I certainly admire your pluck). Second, my parents were college professors and my mother always worked, as did all of the women in our "college professor slums" neighborhood. When I dated a young Mormon woman in high school, the idea that a woman would stay home with children and not work entered my consciousness for the first time (I led a very sheltered life in a ass-backwards sort of way). I thought the idea was odd. Why would someone not want a career? Anyway, aside from the fact that I have not read that to which you're referring, it sounds like the double standard you mention is designed in direct response to feminism. To the QF/P leadership the idea that a woman could work, raise her kids, and be happy all at the same time must be terrifying. That being said, as a former "faculty brat," I'll run over to your other post and add my explanation of what "community college" means in the U.S.
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Post by castor on Jun 16, 2009 14:42:21 GMT -5
Austinavery, yes feminism is very scary to Quiverers. And yes, I think these ideas they have are definitely responses to feminism. Quiverers themselves of course think that the idea that a woman shouldn't work outside the house is a timeless truth, a law of God. Or something like that. Once I even read a post in which someone argued that the God ordered situation had been, woman bears children and stays at home and man works outside the home, since "the Fall". Because in Genesis 3 God tells the man that he will have to work, and not the woman. Well yes, but he also only tells the man (if in fact, God is only speaking to the man here), that he will one day die, not the woman. I don't hear any quiverers say that since God only tells the man he will die in Genesis 3, women are not allowed to die.
And those QF/P blogs make my head explode too, but I find them terribly interesting at the same time. The first blog I ever read was a QF/P blog. It's called biblicalwomanhoodonline.com. I'm not sure it still exists (I can't find it now), it became more and more boring and I stopped reading it after a while. But when I found it the blog writer talked a lot about "the" biblical role for women, and about how bad feminism is. What I read shocked me, I had no idea people thinking like that existed. I kept on reading, I wanted to know more about this way of thinking, and I wanted to know what someone who thought like this was like (I think the blog writer is quite nice, just following a destructive truth). So this blog was my first introduction to "feminism haters" who were far away. I already knew people who didn't care about feminism, or who thought it was old fashioned or, but no-one who thought it was a sinful movement.
Later (I don't know how much later), when my best friend had become a muslim I read something on a website she liked, something about how bad feminism is. I went to my friend to tell her about the terrible thing I'd read. And she said she understood... you could look at it from different sides, at feminism... and maybe, possibly... you know, the writer of this piece, he could be right too. Oh I remember that conversations so well. The first time I realized that feminism haters (she wasn't one yet, but this was the moment I realized where her ideas were going) were right here, sitting next to me. I was (again) shocked.
I guess, no, I know, I grew up sheltered in an ass-backwards sort of way too.
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Post by jemand on Jun 16, 2009 14:56:27 GMT -5
Or something like that. Once I even read a post in which someone argued that the God ordered situation had been, woman bears children and stays at home and man works outside the home, since "the Fall". Because in Genesis 3 God tells the man that he will have to work, and not the woman. But the verse also mentions "sweat of the brow" and when I respond to these arguments "well, are you opposed to air conditioning in businesses?" they invariably say "OF course not!" Which shows that they really only care about limiting the woman's options and comfort, not the man's.
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Post by AustinAvery on Jun 17, 2009 12:56:02 GMT -5
castor, You have a stronger stomach (or perhaps skull) than I. But thanks for sharing what you've found at such sites. On your observation about "feminism haters," I wonder if you were exposed to what went on here in the US in the early stages of the feminist movement. The press, led and encouraged by conservatives, particularly men I suspect, managed to define "feminists" as ugly, bra-burning, men haters. If you watched the elections here, you know how our press, particularly the conservative press, can pick up on one little event or statement (like President Obama's peripheral contact with Bill Ayers) and reduce everything about a person or program down to that one point. In the case of feminism, for example, it became one of those urban myths that some prominent feminist (either Dworkin or MacKinnon) had said all sex is rape." No one said that, of course, but it didn't matter, the myth took hold: [See this: www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.asp] That sort of tactic seems ludicrous, but it worked. It painted a picture of feminists in the public consciousness that was so unattractive that even women began to think of themselves as anti-feminist. (I don't know the sociology here, but I expect male-dominate religious movements capitalized upon the negative press as well). My own wife, who is a decade younger than I, really thought that "feminist" was a bad word when I met her. Imagine that scene: me, a privileged male WASP (except the "P" is really an "A"), then soon to be over 40 (now well over), defending feminism to a young woman with whom I wanted to become romantically involved. As I said, very ass-backwards. And I hope I'm not telling tales out of school, but in my early e-correspondence with Vyckie, before her break from QF/P, I had the feeling that she, too, had a sort of viscerally negative reaction to my use of the term "feminism." That being said, and not to discount the work we Americans still need to do to bring about gender equality here, the thing that I find just baffling is the lack of outrage around the world at the degradation of women in the Arabic world, at least what I read about. There is some warlord, for lack of a better name, in Afghanistan that for a while had some sort of radio transmitter and he'd announce from time to time that such and such a school educated girls, and he was going to blow it up the next day. Everyone had to listen to their radios and try to find the right frequency or risk losing their daughters. Schooling of girls, as I understand it, has just stopped in that area. What reception does news like that receive where you are?
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