Several weeks ago I was in a discussion with a "progressive theater" feminist talking about the pay gap. I pointed out that there are laws against pay discrimination, that in fact they have just become more strict, and that most of the observed pay differentials are due to career choice and number of hours worked. She never explicitly disputed these facts, but this didn't stop her from later making arrogantly off-handed comments about her boyfriend making twice as much money as her because he was a man.
Feminism doesn't seem to really have a point as a consciously espoused ideology, other than to bolster some kind of cultural predisposition that sees itself as diametrically opposed to whatever "traditional" family life has been caricatured as.
For the most part, it seems like feminism has most of its relevance autobiographically. The notion that there is a long-standing cultural prejudice that women are simply meant to be domestic servants doesn't have a terribly firm historical basis. For a significant part of American history (not to mention world history) when most of the economy was still agricultural, women participated in the activities of managing the family farm to no great extent less than men. Social life itself was primarily based around the domestic environment for both sexes.
It's true that women were not permitted to vote, for instance, but was this widely perceived as a travesty of justice? The public political sphere is now a locus of power to an extent that it was not in previous eras. Government bureaucracy and the state management of various aspects of personal life were never given a huge role in in the affairs of society until the 20th century. In an age in which there were many more loci of social life, much more decentralized into localities and based on the relations of private property (mostly in land at that), what was the purpose of political institutions?
It is hard to imagine politics having much more significance than that of a Property Owner's Association. That is, politics was perceived as the mutual agreements made amongst owners of property for its management insofar as those property owners had mutual concerns that could not be addressed individually. The public sphere, instead of being an end in itself, was thoroughly rooted in the affairs of the private sphere.
Indeed, examining the major demands of feminist movements, it is almost entirely clear that feminism has no basis apart from industrial/post-industrial society and state bureaucracy. In point of fact, the word "feminism" was never so much as coined until the 1880s. The movements in the 1970s to open up various spheres of employment to women that had previously been closed only existed because modern society had created those roles in the first instance. Significant municipal police departments, for instance, didn't exist until the industrial age. Demanding that the state intervene further in the institution to rationalize it according to the dictates of gender equality was only one further step in the state management of society that the police department was itself a product of. Nothing particularly radical was achieved by such a movement.
The upshot is that there were aspects of the way that society was organized in times past that account for previous gender norms and institutions in those periods far better than any insinuations of a haughtily contemptuous patriarchy. What does exist as evidence of its existence, as I said, appears to be mainly autobiographical and anecdotal. There is a video on youtube.com in which a female Rabbi is describing her "awakening" to feminist ideas. She mentions how, when she was a young girl, she and a friend gasped at an ad that showed a woman in a hammock with her husband hanging clothes on the laundry line. This is somehow supposed to be taken as evidence of the entrenched social prejudices they had internalized as a result of male dominance.
I myself have lots of stories from my childhood about misconceptions I had about the world and naive prejudices I developed that were purely the product of my own lack of life experience or understanding, having nothing to do with any grandiose cultural perjudice I had absorbed. Once when I was really young I saw my father receive change for a 20-dollar bill after purchasing a meal at a fast food restaurant. I noticed the smile on my dad's face as the cashier gave him his change. I thought for sure this was a great restaurant; afterall, they hand out money when they give you your food. The idea of making change had not occurred to me.
Why can't being floored at the idea of a woman relaxing while a man does a domestic chore be the same kind of thing? Are we to take it that there were no women in existence living in an "unconventional" life situation at the time this ad was published? No female business owners? What about Elizabeth II? Is it simply possible that these girls were just reacting from a prejudice developed from their own limited experience of sheltered middle-class domestic life at a particular phase of American history?
So, yes, it's hard to know what to do with feminism anymore. People say things like "feminism is the radical notion that women are people!" The first time I read that was on the door of the office of the Campus Women's Organization at my college. My first thought was "when did I say they weren't?" What were these people even referring to? Is it the fact that men want to have sex and try to go out and "get laid"? That's treating a woman as less than human? Well, come on, what is?
I used to struggle really hard to express just what it was about feminism that bugged me. In fact, I'm still struggling to express it now. I think what it comes down to is the desire to not be brow-beaten for everything I do that comes off as the least bit stereotypically male, the fundamental faith that men and women (while psychologically different in incredible ways) have the ability live with one another peacably in a loving relationship that doesn't involve constant sparing over the politics of domestic life. But for the most part I guess there's nothing I can do anymore but let these feminists go on their rants as the urge happens to hit them, secure in the knowledge that I don't have anything to prove anymore.
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