1971, Rome, Italy I heard Betty Friedan tell an auditorium filled with working union women that what they needed to do was get jobs. That day I realized that many feminists were liars, and that I did not want any part of that lie.
The Italian working class women loudly booed her and I joined them.
Women have always been working for wages. They worked alongside their husbands on the family farm. They worked in factories. When the feminists were braying about women needing to work, women worked as teachers, secretaries, bookkeepers, waitresses,department store clerks,, social workers, factory workers, migrant workers, maids cleaning feminists' homes, check out clerks in the grocery store, musicians, artists, writers. All those "womens" jobs, feminists considered less than worthy, so they did not recognize these working women as doing REAL work.
These dismisive feminists had opted for marrying wealthy men. They lived in their castles for so long, apart from the "little people" that when their husbands left them for younger trophy wives, they then needed to work. But they needed jobs that would keep them in the lifestyles they had enjoyed while they watched soap operas and sipped booze at their country clubs. All that time, they never noticed who was serving their drinks or even working on those soap operas. They didn't notice the maid cleaning their homes or the nanny changing their silver spoon offsprings.
Wake up Betty. That's what I wanted to say in Rome that day.
Most women worked.
These self-named feminists claimed that no one was working in worthy jobs, i.e. upper management position, doctors, laywers.
They then made a leathal mistake. They asked the men who had created the situation where men owned businesses to share the wealth.
Why should they?
So the men don't share their power.
What the men have done instead is expand welfare to unemploy more women. Then they pulled one more cruel trick, telling women that they have to work at minimum wage jobs. They have to live on lower than welfare wages without foodstamps or medical benefits.
The men in power created affirmative action to keep women participation in the work place down to 50% of all job slots. They kept wages lower and promotion opportunities minimal for women.
Today Walmart is being sued, accused of paying women lower wages than men.
After 30 years, women of wealth still have not opened women-owned businesses, where women would be able to invest in themselves. They still rely on discriminatory affirmative action to keep women's job opportunities, salaries and promotions to a minimum. They still rely on welfare rather than wages, and the guarantee of child support from the fathers of their children.
Working class people are the majority of workers in this country, they always have been, always will be. Managers, middle and upper, are the fewest in the workplace, and the highest paid. Feminists were only interested in the higher salaried workers all along. They never cared about the working class, women, men, families. They still don't.
Read their magazines to see that they are talking about managerial positions, not the sweat shop worker, not the secretary (renamed administrative assistant), not the single mothers, not the women who are one paycheck away from being homeless, and certainly not the working poor.
It is in their best interest as upper class women to keep the rest of the women in their place.That is why those women who have made it are not investing in the rest of the women to give everyone an opportunity to make it. Instead they have an agenda to keep the poor women poor. It is part of the liberal-conservative political movement, who would have no agenda without an under class.
While welfare and affirmative action were two programs instituted to shut white women up, since they benefit mostly white women, these women have continued to allow the media to misrepresent these by putting them in black face.
If they told the truth about these poverty making programs, their lie would be uncovered, and they would have no where to run.
But those feminists are used to lying about a lot of things. Until the first wave of feminism, women didn't even know they were capable of having orgasms. Since not all men were able to bring their mates to sexual peak, women also learned how to fake them.
Keeping poor women poor by eliminating them from the potential job market through welfare and affirmative action was compounded by the abortion issue. Upper class feminists who claimed to be prochoice were not for choice for all. In fact, they ignored completely the poorest of women, the very women who would need the safest available abortions possible, and access to effective and safe birth control. Federal and state health care dollars cannot be used for abortion. Uninsured women, the majority, still cannot afford abortions.
Feminist completely ignore the need for education of poor and working class women's teenagers, to prevent teen pregnancy. They have completely ignored the epidemic of the impregnation of teenagers by men over the age of 18. They have also ignored the epidemic of AIDS killing teenagers, with girls at the highest risk.
They prided themselves into thinking that legalizing abortion was actually the best choice. Yes abortion must remain legal, for while it is a dangerous operation, to illegalize it will make it more dangerous. However, in accepting pregnancy termination as an optimal choice, as a good idea at all, they have put hundreds of thousands of women's health at risk who had abortions.
Abortion is necessary for three reasons:
- To terminate a pregnancy when the mother does not want to carry the fetus to term.
- The health of the baby is at risk.
- The health of the mother is at risk.
The real issue though is preventing unwanted pregnancy, eliminating health risks for children and mothers. Instead of demanding that the medical industrial complex solve the problem of complete and safe birth control so women who do not want to have a child, will not become pregnant in the first place.
Instead, feminists once again allowed themselves to be bought with the cheapest and easiest answer. Once again feminists ignore the majority of women. Once again, feminists allowi men to solve the problems which men have caused, and have yet to have any answers. This elitist attitude, shared by women of all spectrums of the political debate, is endemic in their greed.
On the one hand they claim to reject the idea of power because they say it is part of the evil patriarchy.
Yet all in all, women are still earning less than men. Women risk their lives aborting unwanted pregnancies. Women still raise their children alone because men are not taking responsibility for their spawn. Women are still homeless. Women are still the poorest segment of the adult American population.
Wealthy women are still not pulling other women up.
Women who are republicants or democants, who are in positions of power, in business, government or the media are all earning their livings on the backs of working families in America. Two more feminist waves have crashed into America. The second wave stopped calling women who worked as mothers, raising their children, housewives. Instead they called them homemakers. The third wave, the children and grandchildren of the Friedanfeminists, call them “stay-at-home” moms.
The second feminist wavers believed the myth that most women were homemakers. They didn't notice all thoese women working around them either. Once they did wake up a little more, to see those working women, they said those were the “supermoms”- or the women who wanted it all. They wanted to work and be mothers and wives., as if this was brand new. As if the working poor and middle class families had some kind of a choice.
Strangely, the third wavers are advocating chosing either to work or stay home. Of course, only those whose husbands earn enough to keep them in the lifestyle they enjoy can say this. It seems like the Friedanfeminists grandbabies have recycled. I wonder what will happen to them when they are tossed aside for younger trophy wives.
Until the women whose mothers and grandmothers worked realize that the feminist agenda, liberal or conservative, is based on a lie, women will continue to earn less than men, put our lives at risk with abortions, be single mothers, and continue to elect to office women and men who still don't care about us, work for women and men who get rich on our backs, and buy products advertised in a media who puts our poverty in black face in order to ignore the majority of American women and families. |
