Feminist Deception

Zoe Lewis writes the one thing that women are not sup­posed to admit:

I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruth­lessly pur­su­ing my dreams — to be a suc­cess­ful play­wright. I have sac­ri­ficed all my wom­anly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resound­ing no…

I argue that women’s lib­bers of the Six­ties and Sev­en­ties put careerism at the fore­front, tram­pling the tra­di­tional role of women under­neath their Doc Martens. I wish a more bal­anced view of wom­an­hood had been avail­able to me. I wish that being a house­wife or a mother wasn’t such a toxic idea to middle-class lib­er­als of yesteryear.

Increas­ing num­bers of my fem­i­nist friends are giv­ing up their careers for love and chil­dren and bak­ing. I wish I’d had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the prob­lem is not so much time as men­tal­ity. I made a con­scious deci­sion not to have seri­ous rela­tion­ships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It’s about under­stand­ing what is impor­tant in life, and from what I see and feel, lov­ing rela­tion­ships and chil­dren bring more hap­pi­ness than work ever can.

One should not argue with nature — or, more accu­rately, what has made human civ­i­liza­tion sur­vive and thrive for thou­sands of years. A house­hold in which the male con­tributes labor and brings in assets and the female builds a nur­tur­ing home and fam­ily makes prac­ti­cal sense. It is a log­i­cal divi­sion of labor that allows each per­son to focus on what he and she does best. In bio­log­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal terms, a man is built and taught to work and pro­vide; a woman is designed and encour­aged to focus on hearth and home. It was the end­ing of these prac­ti­cal roles that has dam­aged West­ern soci­ety in sev­eral areas.

When both a mother and father work and take care of the kids, the par­ents can focus on nei­ther task suc­cess­fully. If a man devotes half of his time each to work and fam­ily, then nei­ther one gets one-hundred-percent atten­tion. As most peo­ple are aware, multi-tasking is inher­ently inef­fi­cient. Of course, the argu­ment in response is that both work and fam­ily get one-hundred-percent atten­tion if both part­ners con­tribute half. But two defi­cient, incom­plete halves do not cre­ate a sta­ble, viable whole. More­over, the hus­band and wife need to spend valu­able time com­mu­ni­cat­ing and com­pro­mis­ing while try­ing to nav­i­gate their hec­tic sched­ules and deter­mine who will do what.

The entry of mil­lions of women is also to blame for the cur­rent neces­sity of two incomes to sup­port a middle-class lifestyle (or per­haps even a lower-class one) today. It is the sim­ple law of sup­ply and demand. When the sup­ply of labor dou­bles and demand remains level, the price (salaries) will be cut in half. In essence, fem­i­nism resulted in lower real salaries for every­one. If every work­ing woman remained at home, unem­ploy­ment would plum­met and wages would rise. Fam­i­lies, along with soci­ety in gen­eral, would be much bet­ter off. The world needs good moth­ers more than more female res­i­dents in cubicles.

Except for the suc­cess in gain­ing the right to vote for women and in get­ting the law to treat them as peo­ple rather than prop­erty, the rest of the fem­i­nist move­ment has sold West­ern soci­ety a false bill of goods.

Related: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay