They make it harder for the rest of us to remedy the inequities that remain. We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women. It should be acceptable criticism to point out that, although everyone has the right to make their own life decisions, choosing to “opt out” reinforces stereotypes about women’s priorities that we’ve been working for decades to shatter, so just cut it out.
Okay, I have the right to make individual choices, but if I don't live for the sake of women in general and I happen to like traditional stereotypes that I live up to then I'm...what, a traitor to my gender?
And, the “individual choice” women have to become stay-at-home moms becomes precarious when they try to return to the workplace and find their earning power and options reduced. If we could see child-rearing as a necessary task and not an identity, and if we could collectively recognize that facilitating it benefits us all, we would go much further in guaranteeing women’s choices than we do when we are expected to uncritically celebrate every individual’s decisions.
But child-rearing is very much a part of many women's identity.Nobody replaces mom.
This proves once again that feminism is not about women. It's about ideas about women. Horribly wrong ideas.
But it really warms my heart though, knowing that the fact that I am not earning a paycheque thwarts feminist goals.
Something tells me that Gloria Feldt is the kind of middle class bourgeois feminist that Third Wave Feminists complain about.
I think.
Mind you, she is a big abortion pusher. That often makes one immune to criticism in the feminist camp.
