Main
argument was that the biggest barrier to feminism is individual women, and
that, rather than arguing for collective rights, workers’ rights, and a curve
changing of women's position in society, as a class, and as a whole, what the best thing to do was; focus on individual success in your career, and your
family life. And I found that quite troublesome because to me it feels
individual women, and women as a whole for the position that their own, for the
gender pay-gap, for kind of maternity dismissals, for all of the problems we
still see, in like many societies around the world. Instead of only focusing on
kind of mentoring as a way of helping women, or individual women's attitudes to
work, point out about maternity leave helping women. Or for instance, kind of
sharing household chores, looking more at who cares, how they care, how their
recompensed for care etc. It's all very much about the individual. It also true
you need a partner for sharing household work with you. But you also rely on
cheap domestic labor like nannies and cleaner or housekeeper. While it's a
step forward in a sense that you can have a relationship where these responsibilities
are shared, there's a whole layer of domestic work that's being done mainly by
low-paid women, that's not shared about stories of individual success. Completely,
in order to work a 100 hours a week and also have two or three children, and
your partner to do a similar job, you need people to take over the domestic duties,
need people to clean your house, you need people to drive you home at night so
you can carry on replying to emails, and what I've noticed is that increasingly,
the domestic labor is picked up by poor immigrant women who first of all have
almost no rights whatsoever, and that should be a massive feminist issue.
I
think migration is a huge feminist issue, especially when it comes to domestic
workers and no one really acknowledges that.
There's
always an assumption that women, when they get to the top, were always out from
the best interests of their gender, but nobody asked if people like Margaret
Thatcher wouldn't instead act in the best interests of their class. If you're
elite, if you're very wealthy, you feel a lot closer to very elite and very wealthy
people, not necessarily a migrant domestic worker who shares a gender. But in some
ways, I mean, certainly, Margaret Thatcher was a product of a system that was so.
I mean, she had to be more “male” quote than any of her peers or contemporaries,
and so in a way it meant to me she illustrates the point of what happens when
you don't have many women in power, you have somebody who almost feels that
they have to prove themselves more and be tougher and harder than men are. And I
think if you really did have gender parity in these positions of power, couldn't
you envisage things being different? Or think the class and the other sort of
other thinking conscious prejudices are… If you had a mass movement where a lot
of institutions have reached gender parity very quickly, then that would force
a culture change. But what I feel instead is a media and a climate that tells
us that every single time a woman gets a senior job, that's to be applauded,
because it trickle-down feminism, once you get one woman, then that will
automatically benefit people lower down the chain, but then don’t actually see
that happening. Recruitment in the public sector means that it's almost 50/50
men and women and at the same time the private sector which is right next to
our public sectors which gender parity hasn't changed at all. So even though the
public sector is more representative, that culture change hasn't kind of
drifted out to the private sector because they haven't been forced into it.
So what should we do?
Refusing
to participate in systems that perpetuate oppression. So it's going on strike,
it's withdrawing your labor, withdrawing care, etc. That’s quite hard for people
from underprivileged backgrounds. What can someone go away from this and say, I
see this is unjust, what can I do? There are few people who are doing it. So
for instance, a lot of housing campaigners, for years they had a store in the
center of town, where they speak to people about their housing and issues, and
they get more and more people talking about it, and saying that the housing
policy actively harms people. If they try and evict young mothers, then they
ask the community to come out, and either resists eviction or occupy the Town
Hall. There are a number of women who have to do a huge amount of unpaid care, which
basically broke down every single thing they had to do and then calculate their
expenses and how much they were saving over and over again. Social care had to
be one of the feminist issues and then was funding. So if you ask people what
they want kind of taxation to pay for, people will say social care, but it's
such an invisible issue sometimes, people don't see it being taken away.
How
feminism had moved from the goal of improving all women's lives, the idea of sisterhood,
and it's been replaced by this idea that you can improve your life. If you're a
feminist you can improve your life. You can be a feminist and wear high heels,
and whatever else, and that's the sort of shift that's really happened is, you can
be a feminist, and be much focused on self-improvements. It's a strange idea
that feminism is a lifestyle rather a political movement. So it's like so you know
the distractions look cool can you be a feminist. That feminism is very inward-looking
and but it also going to absorb they are going to the patriarchal idea that you should
always be critiquing yourself etc, rather than the institutions that stop you
from earning as much as you might like, or spending enough time with your
children, etc. And this strange lifestyle feminism is quite toxic, and it's also
used as a way to kind of sell goods like advertise products. Because we've got
to the point where like feminism is gaining ground but also kind of diluted a little
bit by brands and uses a way to sell things back to women. But we're talking
about the phenomenon where women losing a lot of the kind of hard-won and so
women now who want to take an employer to court for unfair dismissal, being
sacked during pregnancy or for a pay dispute, now hat to pay a tribunal fee,
which is out the reach of many women. So we're losing a lot of those rights for
instance at the same time we have a lot of companies who are bringing in kind of American-style
perks. There's often a perception that feminism is a bit like an onwards march.
Whereas it's more like a staircase, and you can go up as well as down. And quite
often we forget that right to be rescinded as well as given. So the fact that
we now have to pay tribunal fees, the fact that more women than ever of being
laid off during pregnancy, the fact that the gender pay gap is widening again,
is quite worrying. And sometimes people forget that. And if you focus on public
attitudes of sex, and be feminist, and then just assume that you’re legal
rights are protected, then we can end up in a really terrible position, as we
increasingly.
Again
a lot of that comes down to, who sets the agenda in feminism. If it's upper-middle-class women
who have relatively okay jobs, and their main problem is of cultural attitudes towards
women, does that mean that we forget about the women who precariously employed,
the women who have care and responsibilities or disabled women who struggle of
work? The women who were cleaning houses and looking after the children of the
middle-class women who are doing those jobs.
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