The importance of female education

Scucca · 06-29-08, 10:51 AM

Luker (1984, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood) writes:

... for pro-life women the traditional division of life into separate male roles and female roles still works, but for pro-choice women it does not. Having made a commitment to the traditional female roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, pro-life women are limited in those kinds of resources-education, class status, recent occupational experiences- they would need to compete in what has traditionally been a male sphere, namely the paid labour force. The average pro-choice woman, in contrast is comparatively well endowed in exactly these resources.

To what extent can we agree with his summary that whilst "on the surface it is the embryo's fate which seems to be at stake, the abortion debate is actually about the meaning of women's lives", with less educated women turning to their domestic and maternal roles for satisfaction?

1069 · 06-29-08, 10:53 AM

This is an excellent topic.
I have many thoughts on the subject.
Unfortunately, I have a number of errands to run today, but as soon as I'm home, I will attempt to address this.

Scucca · 06-29-08, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1069

This is an excellent topic.
I have many thoughts on the subject.
Unfortunately, I have a number of errands to run today, but as soon as I'm home, I will attempt to address this.

I look forward to it. In the mean time, here's another snippet from Luker to wet one's whistle:

Women who are opposed to abortion, by contrast, are far less likely to work outside their homes; 63 per cent of them do not work in the paid labour force, and almost all of those who do are unmarried. Among pro-life married women, for example, only 14 per cent report any personal income at all... Half of all pro-life women who do work earn less than $5000 a year, and half earn between $5000 and $10,000.

1069 · 06-29-08, 03:45 PM

This is a touchy topic; we've had several threads in the past on related topics, all of them started by Bodhisattva and titled "Why Does Society Hate Families" (parts 1, 2, and 3 respectively, as each thread was eventually locked down because of the contention that ensued), in which he bemoans the waning popularity of the "Traditional Family", as more women abandon traditional female roles either by choice or by necessity.
I have long asserted that while sex is a biological imperative, gender is a social construct, and that people of both sexes should feel free to disregard gender roles if they do not find them useful.

Here's my position: I feel that the main point of traditional female gender roles was to keep women isolated in their homes and occupied with minutia and drudge work, so that they would not compete with men educationally or in the workforce.
Women are individuals and have varying aptitudes and levels of competency and capacities for learning, just as men do.
Men have suspected if not acknowledged this for centuries, and understood that if permitted to, many women would be capable of competing with them if not outdoing them in many different previously male-dominated fields: business and industry, politics, medicine and science, the arts, you name it.

Their answer to protecting the power structure was to define women's role as to stay at home, keep house, raise children, and be a supportive player in their husbands' success in the larger world.
As time went on and women began to openly question this- starting in the late 1800s, probably- those with an interest in maintaining the status quo had to work harder to silence and discredit these dissidents, and to glamorize the traditional female role so that the majority of women would remain complicit in it.
This phenomenon peaked in the post WWII era- the 1940s and 50s.
During the war, unprecedented numbers of women had left their homes to work in factories, in offices, in hospitals, and in government-related work. The power structure had at that time actually encouraged them to abandon their "sacred, god-given roles" as wives and mothers, and go to work to help their men on the front lines, to help America win the war.
Women did that, and found they liked it. Many young women also went to college during this time, since enrollment at colleges and universities was low with so many young men gone to Europe and to the South Pacific.

Then we won the war, and the men came home. They had suffered years of unspeakable trauma and misery overseas, and they wanted comforting, "traditional" women like their mothers waiting to welcome them home.
Instead they found that their young wives had become independent and assertive in their absence- self reliant working women accustomed to raising their children alone and running their homes the way they wanted to, not used to explaining their decisions, being argued with, or even having any input from any one else on the issue.
The men wanted their jobs back. After all, they had been on the front lines. They had won the war. They were the heroes.
Women were forced en masse to leave the workplace, give up their independence and return the home.
Men wanted to attend college on the new GI Bill. Women were forced to abandon their studies to make room for them.
Anything else would've been unpatriotic, anti-American, subversive, practically treasonous. These were war heroes.

So, in the late 40s, American women reluctantly left the larger world and returned to the home, and closed the doors behind them. There they remained through the next two decades, until the civil rights and women's liberation movements finally broke them free of their exile for good.

But during the 1950s, things got very bad indeed. Women were not happy at home. There was nothing to do there. The economy was booming; new young families could afford to leave cities and move to the newly-developed suburbs, and millions did. This ultimately only increased women's isolation, however, removing them even further from anything that actually mattered to the world at large. In confusion, young families began spending thousands on new home furnishings and appliances, hoping that by making mom's prison more comfortable, she would become happier in it.
This only made things worse; with the kids in a suburban school all day and mom stranded alone in a ranch house full of washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, etc, she no longer had any role at all.
"Keeping house" only took fifteen minutes a day and involved nothing more strenuous that pushing a few buttons and flipping a switch.

Many women of this period became neurotic, depressed, alcoholic, even suicidal in their loneliness. They had random affairs with delivery men, got hooked on amphetamines which doctors prescribed like candy for weight loss and for the "chronic fatigue" which suddenly seemed to afflict every woman in the country, became "serial breeders" and had eight, ten, or twelve children to try to lend meaning to their pointless lives. They became neurotically controlling meddlers in their children's affairs as they attempted to live their lives through their children, and as a result raised an entire generation of universally unhappy and unstable people who have had difficulty assuming adulthood or maintaining relationships (the Baby Boomer generation). Some became irrational hypochondriacs. Some overate chronically. Some couldn't stop crying, and had to be hospitalized. Some killed themselves. A few abandoned their husbands and children and ran away.

Just as the "Rosie the Riveter" propaganda campaign had lured women en masse into the work force at the start of WWII, now the power structure, in conjunction with advertisers, the entertainment industry, and the media, aimed a new propaganda campaign at women- one whose goal was to convince them to stay home.
It was in everybody's best interest that they stay home and not participate in the larger world- everybody, that is, except the women themselves, and probably their children.
It was a two-pronged campaign: first, the "traditional women's role", the role of housewife, was ludicrously glamorized; second, women with other ambitions who diverged from this role were viciously maligned as "unnatural", "unfeminine", "unattractive", homosexual, anti-American (which was no joke during the McCarthy era; people were being fired, blacklisted, and even arrested on similar charges), un-Godly, anti-family, etc.
Our society made having ambitions beyond washing dishes and changing diapers seem so fundamentally unsafe and undesirable and terrifying for women, that most women meekly complied by subjugating their humanity, their dreams of being more than a housewife and mother- of participating in a meaningful way the world outside their ranch homes- and they remained prisoners of the "traditional female role" for twenty years.

In the late 60s, they broke free, and they did this so powerfully and definitively that they shattered- forever, I think- the illusions and myths and outright lies that allowed them to be imprisoned in the first place. Never again will society be able to credibly insist that all women are "best suited" for housework and isolation. Women have proven definitively that they are well-suited for participation in the larger world, as suited for it as men are.
What is not widely acknowledged, however, is why it happened, nor what the motives for it were, nor the fact that it was systematic and deliberate. It was not just some mindless social phenomenon that picked up momentum on its own. It was planned by men in board rooms.
Yet, there will no reparations for women of my grandmother's generation, whose lives and health and educations and dreams and human potential were stolen from them.

Today, the law has made things ostensibly "equal"; gender discrimination is against the law, along with racial discrimination and a number of other evil things. It still happens, of course, but now victims have recourse when it does.

Where was I going with all this?

Oh. The "Pro-Family" movement. The new one, the pro-christian, anti-contraception one.
All I can say is, they're trying to thrust women back into their prison. They're trying to strong-arm them out of their rightful, hard-earned place in society and chain them once again to the kitchen sink. One of the most effective ways to do this is to subvert them from the inside out: to remove their ability to control their own bodies, their own fertility. A women with ten children has little strength or energy, few resources to fight back.

They are using many of the same glamorizing "catch phrases" that were used during the 1950s: praising housewifery and motherhood as "the single most important job" anyone could have (overlooking the fact that most women today manage it nicely while still holding down full-time jobs outside the home at the same time), talking about women's "natural, god-given" role, as if there's only one, and women are more or less interchangeable. The villainization of strong, independent women. It's all old, tired news.

Anyway, these are my thoughts.
If they manage to widely ban contraception and abortion, I'd recommend that all the women in this country go on strike from sex or become lesbians.
It would only take a year or two for the birth rate to plummet to levels that would panic them, and make them give us whatever we ask for.

But, yes, as per the OP, certainly the poor and uneducated are the most susceptible to propaganda campaigns.
Women who truly are suited to little else but performing drudge work and basic biological functions (eating, crapping, sleeping, reproducing... and there are a few, just as there are a few men like this. Collectively, they are the lowest common denominator of any society) are obviously going to be proud and happy to suddenly be elevated as an example for all other- and previously, more competent and successful- women to follow.
It's not their fault, they can't help it.
I'm sure it's very validating to them to suddenly be told that their way is the only truly "correct" way, that their "job" (of lying on the sofa all day watching soap operas) is somehow "more important" than everybody else's, they are fulfilling their natural feminine roles, while more accomplished and independent women are ungodly, unwholesome, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.

I doubt many people are going to fall for it this time around, though.
As of yet, this movement's pretty much been restricted to fringe-element conservative christian factions, while being rejected and laughed at by the mainstream public.

Scucca · 06-29-08, 04:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1069

Oh. The "Pro-Family" movement. The new one, the pro-christian, anti-contraception one.
All I can say is, they're trying to thrust women back into their prison.

Thanks for the interesting points. I only dabble with feminist analysis, so I'm not going to be able to offer any in-depth reply to your post. I've therefore chosen the above quote to discuss.

The worrying aspect is that studies have shown that, compared to the pro-choice position, the pro-lifers are much more likely to finance political lobbying. Given the continued desire to maintain the male domination of the family (and therefore impotence of the male), these lobbying differences are a big concern. The pro-life voice is exaggerated and genuinely threatens our society to that "chain them once again to the kitchen sink" backward scenario.

talloulou · 06-29-08, 04:35 PM

I don't think all prolife women are uneducated nor do I believe they all or even most of them are lacking access to resources available to any women.

I would join 10's NO SEX FOR YOU CAMPAIGN if women were forced to give up birth control and chained to the kitchen sink. I would be irate if my staying home wasn't a choice. If I was forced to not work I'd probably desire a career just to rebel against such a force.

That said staying home is a great choice for my family. I'm a perfectionist with some things. I don't like to half a$$ anything. So, for me, if I'm gonna raise kids I want them to be my number one priority. If I were going to have a career I'd want that to be my number one priority. I'd resent leaving my job to go handle sick kids, I'd resent all the time they have off school, ect if it were conflicting with my career. If it made me $hitty at my job. So I currently choose to stay home for my own peace of mind. My husband is capable of making more $$$ than I am so it makes sense for him to work. If the opposite were true I'd want him to stay home while I worked. My husband is better at his job because the kids and our family don't in anyway genuinely interfere with his ability to do his job. He doesn't have to deal with finding childcare, ect.

As far as staying home goes I found it mind numbingly boring when the kids were little. I had them close together and there was little point in trying to leave the house when they were both babies. But now, that they're older, I'm no longer bored and/or trapped in the house. We spend lots of time outdoors hiking, biking, and what not and I find it rewarding. Now that they also are in school for a huge chunk of the day I have time to pursue other things, things I couldn't get into in depth if I were nailed to a desk from 9-5. So now it is my husband who is sometimes jealous of me and my freedom and time to do whatever I want much of the time. He grumbles about how he has to work while I just can't wait for them all to be gone so I can go about my day in absolute freedom. I feel spoiled now but I also feel like I earned this freedom, earned it by literally being trapped indoors for years.

I occasionally attempt to get the house cleaned but we're a fairly messy lot with tons of hobbies and numerous projects that are strewn all over the place. My house has never been a "show home." If there is a way to get the house cleaning down to 15 minutes a day I haven't learned it. I've always got a mountain of laundry and other dull chores to do. My husband knows I'll get to them when I get to them but they're certainly not my priority. I keep up enough so that everyone has clean clothes to wear and I make a point of keeping the kitchen & bathrooms clean. But the rest of the house only gets picked up once a week or so.

I feel blessed to literally have the choice to stay home or work at my choosing. Not everyone has that choice. Everyone should. We'd all be more sane in my humble opinion.

Scucca · 06-29-08, 04:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by talloulou

I don't think all prolife women are uneducated nor do I believe they all or even most of them are lacking access to resources available to any women.

I don't think anyone would argue that all pro-lifers are uneducated. There clearly are multiple factors behind anti-abortion attitudes (e.g. see the empirical analysis by Driedger, 1997, Pro life or pro choice: Politics of career and homemaking, Population Studies, Vol 51). However, the argument that female education is a dominate factor is difficult to dismiss.

OKgrannie · 06-29-08, 05:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1069

This is a touchy topic; we've had several threads in the past on related topics, all of them started by Bodhisattva and titled "Why Does Society Hate Families" (parts 1, 2, and 3 respectively, as each thread was eventually locked down because of the contention that ensued), in which he bemoans the waning popularity of the "Traditional Family", as more women abandon traditional female roles either by choice or by necessity.
I have long asserted that while sex is a biological imperative, gender is a social construct, and that people of both sexes should feel free to disregard gender roles if they do not find them useful.

Here's my position: I feel that the main point of traditional female gender roles was to keep women isolated in their homes and occupied with minutia and drudge work, so that they would not compete with men educationally or in the workforce.
Women are individuals and have varying aptitudes and levels of competency and capacities for learning, just as men do.
Men have suspected if not acknowledged this for centuries, and understood that if permitted to, many women would be capable of competing with them if not outdoing them in many different previously male-dominated fields: business and industry, politics, medicine and science, the arts, you name it.

Their answer to protecting the power structure was to define women's role as to stay at home, keep house, raise children, and be a supportive player in their husbands' success in the larger world.
As time went on and women began to openly question this- starting in the late 1800s, probably- those with an interest in maintaining the status quo had to work harder to silence and discredit these dissidents, and to glamorize the traditional female role so that the majority of women would remain complicit in it.
This phenomenon peaked in the post WWII era- the 1940s and 50s.
During the war, unprecedented numbers of women had left their homes to work in factories, in offices, in hospitals, and in government-related work. The power structure had at that time actually encouraged them to abandon their "sacred, god-given roles" as wives and mothers, and go to work to help their men on the front lines, to help America win the war.
Women did that, and found they liked it. Many young women also went to college during this time, since enrollment at colleges and universities was low with so many young men gone to Europe and to the South Pacific.

Then we won the war, and the men came home. They had suffered years of unspeakable trauma and misery overseas, and they wanted comforting, "traditional" women like their mothers waiting to welcome them home.
Instead they found that their young wives had become independent and assertive in their absence- self reliant working women accustomed to raising their children alone and running their homes the way they wanted to, not used to explaining their decisions, being argued with, or even having any input from any one else on the issue.
The men wanted their jobs back. After all, they had been on the front lines. They had won the war. They were the heroes.
Women were forced en masse to leave the workplace, give up their independence and return the home.
Men wanted to attend college on the new GI Bill. Women were forced to abandon their studies to make room for them.
Anything else would've been unpatriotic, anti-American, subversive, practically treasonous. These were war heroes.

So, in the late 40s, American women reluctantly left the larger world and returned to the home, and closed the doors behind them. There they remained through the next two decades, until the civil rights and women's liberation movements finally broke them free of their exile for good.

But during the 1950s, things got very bad indeed. Women were not happy at home. There was nothing to do there. The economy was booming; new young families could afford to leave cities and move to the newly-developed suburbs, and millions did. This ultimately only increased women's isolation, however, removing them even further from anything that actually mattered to the world at large. In confusion, young families began spending thousands on new home furnishings and appliances, hoping that by making mom's prison more comfortable, she would become happier in it.
This only made things worse; with the kids in a suburban school all day and mom stranded alone in a ranch house full of washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, etc, she no longer had any role at all.
"Keeping house" only took fifteen minutes a day and involved nothing more strenuous that pushing a few buttons and flipping a switch.

Many women of this period became neurotic, depressed, alcoholic, even suicidal in their loneliness. They had random affairs with delivery men, got hooked on amphetamines which doctors prescribed like candy for weight loss and for the "chronic fatigue" which suddenly seemed to afflict every woman in the country, became "serial breeders" and had eight, ten, or twelve children to try to lend meaning to their pointless lives. They became neurotically controlling meddlers in their children's affairs as they attempted to live their lives through their children, and as a result raised an entire generation of universally unhappy and unstable people who have had difficulty assuming adulthood or maintaining relationships (the Baby Boomer generation). Some became irrational hypochondriacs. Some overate chronically. Some couldn't stop crying, and had to be hospitalized. Some killed themselves. A few abandoned their husbands and children and ran away.

Just as the "Rosie the Riveter" propaganda campaign had lured women en masse into the work force at the start of WWII, now the power structure, in conjunction with advertisers, the entertainment industry, and the media, aimed a new propaganda campaign at women- one whose goal was to convince them to stay home.
It was in everybody's best interest that they stay home and not participate in the larger world- everybody, that is, except the women themselves, and probably their children.
It was a two-pronged campaign: first, the "traditional women's role", the role of housewife, was ludicrously glamorized; second, women with other ambitions who diverged from this role were viciously maligned as "unnatural", "unfeminine", "unattractive", homosexual, anti-American (which was no joke during the McCarthy era; people were being fired, blacklisted, and even arrested on similar charges), un-Godly, anti-family, etc.
Our society made having ambitions beyond washing dishes and changing diapers seem so fundamentally unsafe and undesirable and terrifying for women, that most women meekly complied by subjugating their humanity, their dreams of being more than a housewife and mother- of participating in a meaningful way the world outside their ranch homes- and they remained prisoners of the "traditional female role" for twenty years.

In the late 60s, they broke free, and they did this so powerfully and definitively that they shattered- forever, I think- the illusions and myths and outright lies that allowed them to be imprisoned in the first place. Never again will society be able to credibly insist that all women are "best suited" for housework and isolation. Women have proven definitively that they are well-suited for participation in the larger world, as suited for it as men are.
What is not widely acknowledged, however, is why it happened, nor what the motives for it were, nor the fact that it was systematic and deliberate. It was not just some mindless social phenomenon that picked up momentum on its own. It was planned by men in board rooms.
Yet, there will no reparations for women of my grandmother's generation, whose lives and health and educations and dreams and human potential were stolen from them.

Today, the law has made things ostensibly "equal"; gender discrimination is against the law, along with racial discrimination and a number of other evil things. It still happens, of course, but now victims have recourse when it does.

Where was I going with all this?

Oh. The "Pro-Family" movement. The new one, the pro-christian, anti-contraception one.
All I can say is, they're trying to thrust women back into their prison. They're trying to strong-arm them out of their rightful, hard-earned place in society and chain them once again to the kitchen sink. One of the most effective ways to do this is to subvert them from the inside out: to remove their ability to control their own bodies, their own fertility. A women with ten children has little strength or energy, few resources to fight back.

They are using many of the same glamorizing "catch phrases" that were used during the 1950s: praising housewifery and motherhood as "the single most important job" anyone could have (overlooking the fact that most women today manage it nicely while still holding down full-time jobs outside the home at the same time), talking about women's "natural, god-given" role, as if there's only one, and women are more or less interchangeable. The villainization of strong, independent women. It's all old, tired news.

Anyway, these are my thoughts.
If they manage to widely ban contraception and abortion, I'd recommend that all the women in this country go on strike from sex or become lesbians.
It would only take a year or two for the birth rate to plummet to levels that would panic them, and make them give us whatever we ask for.

But, yes, as per the OP, certainly the poor and uneducated are the most susceptible to propaganda campaigns.
Women who truly are suited to little else but performing drudge work and basic biological functions (eating, crapping, sleeping, reproducing... and there are a few, just as there are a few men like this. Collectively, they are the lowest common denominator of any society) are obviously going to be proud and happy to suddenly be elevated as an example for all other- and previously, more competent and successful- women to follow.
It's not their fault, they can't help it.
I'm sure it's very validating to them to suddenly be told that their way is the only truly "correct" way, that their "job" (of lying on the sofa all day watching soap operas) is somehow "more important" than everybody else's, they are fulfilling their natural feminine roles, while more accomplished and independent women are ungodly, unwholesome, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.

I doubt many people are going to fall for it this time around, though.
As of yet, this movement's pretty much been restricted to fringe-element conservative christian factions, while being rejected and laughed at by the mainstream public.

You have a great deal of insight into the changes in women's lives, but I do take issue with a couple of statements. I was a SAHM for many years, and I know that it takes more than 15 minutes a day to do the job no matter how many labor-saving devices you have, and spending the day watching soap operas is not possible if you're actually doing the job. The problem with being a SAHM is that you're unpaid, and therefore powerless, and the rest of the world views an unpaid job as not really a job, therefore you also don't get respect for your life work. I think you are saying that some men, and some women, want to keep women in their "place" so that they won't be competition in the real world, and I agree. Many men feel threatened by a woman who is in a position of power, and many women who have been successful at manipulating men to get what they want rather than meeting men on an equal basis are also threatened by a different way of life.

winston53660 · 06-29-08, 05:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OKgrannie

You have a great deal of insight into the changes in women's lives, but I do take issue with a couple of statements. I was a SAHM for many years, and I know that it takes more than 15 minutes a day to do the job no matter how many labor-saving devices you have, and spending the day watching soap operas is not possible if you're actually doing the job. The problem with being a SAHM is that you're unpaid, and therefore powerless, and the rest of the world views an unpaid job as not really a job, therefore you also don't get respect for your life work. I think you are saying that some men, and some women, want to keep women in their "place" so that they won't be competition in the real world, and I agree. Many men feel threatened by a woman who is in a position of power, and many women who have been successful at manipulating men to get what they want rather than meeting men on an equal basis are also threatened by a different way of life.

I'm a stay at hubby for right now and my gig is usually is about a 12 hour day.

talloulou · 06-29-08, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scucca

I don't think anyone would argue that all pro-lifers are uneducated. There clearly are multiple factors behind anti-abortion attitudes (e.g. see the empirical analysis by Driedger, 1997, Pro life or pro choice: Politics of career and homemaking, Population Studies, Vol 51). However, the argument that female education is a dominate factor is difficult to dismiss.

Well with the stay home or work issue I think you'll find loads of women getting highly educated and then opting to stay home anyway. It's a trend that makes the more ultra feminist lot hysterical. As far as the prochoice or prolife issue we're a prochoice culture. Most of the adults today were raised in a climate where it takes some nerve to suggest a women ought not kill her own baby. If fact our prochoiceyness is so ingrained the argument has now become, there is no baby.

Basically people are sheep and most idle along quite nicely with whatever mainstream culture dictates. So folks are gonna feel most comfortable on the prochoice side of the fence. They're especially gonna feel that way if they believe they're expected to feel that way and anything else is treacherous.

Since religious whackos tend to be so far out there anyway it makes sense that they'd be the most vocal lot shunning mainstream culture. Maybe they're stupid and uneducated or maybe they're just nuts but most likely and most probably they were raised in a very different climate, a climate isolated from the mainstream. There's not much to be done about that. The public schools do all they can to try to teach us all to march to the beat of the same drum but there will always be those who refuse to cooperate. That too is choice.