Elizabeth Stewart is angry at the world:
I have a job that makes no allowances for the fact I have children who don’t always get sick with three weeks’ advance notice.
The boarding school and nursery assume I wait around at home with nothing to do but attend conferences and plays and sports events on their schedule. No wonder I’m filled with a permanent nebulous, undirected rage that my life has become a Gordian knot of obligations, responsibilities, guilt, duties and expectations.
I can’t even go for a walk in the park without factoring in the needs of half a dozen people. I resent that every second of my day is owned by someone else.
Yes, I’m angry. I’m angry with a world that still doesn’t acknowledge how hard women work, in and out of the workplace. I’m angry with men for dumping the childrearing problem in our laps. I’m angry with women for refusing to admit it’s too much, that we can’t do everything all the time.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore my husband. But there are times I could cheerfully strangle him simply for having the luck to be born a man…
Most of my days are a near-precipice experience. I’m so close to the edge that I’m in a semi-permanent state of panic. I have a constant list of things I have to do running through my head like a stock market ticker-tape.
Women, of course, tend to be angrier than men. They also tend to be more happy, sad, jealous, and frustrated. Women generally feel all emotions more strongly than men as a result of hormones and brain chemistry.
Still, this purported epidemic of female rage is a result of something far more subtle and important than a husband’s alleged lack of parental and household responsibility. Women are angry today because they realize that feminism sold them a false bill of goods. If a woman is middle-aged, childless, and single, then she likely knows that she focused on the wrong priorities earlier in life. If a woman is young, then she probably believes that the feminists of former generations have made their lives worse.
After gaining the rights to vote and not be treated like property in the legal system, feminists then decided to change Western culture. Now, decades later, the unintended consequences have become obvious.
The entry of millions of women into the work force depressed average wages for everyone, forcing households to have two incomes rather than one. (When you double the supply of labor and demand remains constant, the price of labor is cut in half. It is simply the law of supply and demand.) When women then needed to work to provide for a family, children became increasingly ignored by their mothers and fathers. More stress within families as a result of both parents working in order to make ends meet was probably a reason for the increase in divorce in the 1970s and 1980s.
But there were other consequences. Women delayed serious relationships and marriage in order to pursue graduate degrees and careers. Now, when they are desperate for children in their thirties, they see that men are no longer interested in them. Feminism “liberated” women from traditional sexual morals, enabling them to has much premarital sex as they want. As a result, men are no longer interested in buying the cow in marriage because they can get the milk for free. Pornography also became mainstream and accepted as a result of the sex-positive school of feminism, further reducing the necessity for men to have relationships and get married. Feminists succeeded in getting family courts on their side, and men know that they will lose their house, their children, and at least half their assets if they ever get divorced. Score one more point against marriage.
Women worked so hard to get what they thought they wanted, and now they realize that it was all for nothing.
My earlier essay: Critiques of Feminism: Arguments Against Feminism Essay. Vox Day offers his thoughts as well.
