OT: How much baggage will you accept?

[NotCranky]

[quote=FlyerInHi]CAr, one minute you’re a feminist, and the next min you wish feminists would rot in hell.

You complain a lot about the past and present fate of women… but think about it a moment.

Women have the uterus and the eggs… they don’t need men. They can buy the best quality sperm for cheap; and in today’s tech world, they could cast men aside. Pretty soon, they could control the whole economy and write their own tickets.

By wanting to be a housewife, you’re giving men power. So stop bitching.[/quote]

Most men don’t have much power by virtue of having a job. People with power hire and/ or don’t need jobs. In a household, power is probably more expressed by who spends the money than who earns it.

[CA renter]

[quote=Blogstar][quote=FlyerInHi]CAr, one minute you’re a feminist, and the next min you wish feminists would rot in hell.

You complain a lot about the past and present fate of women… but think about it a moment.

Women have the uterus and the eggs… they don’t need men. They can buy the best quality sperm for cheap; and in today’s tech world, they could cast men aside. Pretty soon, they could control the whole economy and write their own tickets.

By wanting to be a housewife, you’re giving men power. So stop bitching.[/quote]

Most men don’t have much power by virtue of having a job. People with power hire and/ or don’t need jobs. In a household, power is probably more expressed by who spends the money than who earns it.[/quote]

Power is expressed by who controls the money. That goes in every relationship, including employer/employee. Rarely is the person who isn’t earning a wage the one who has total control over the money. They might have a say, but rarely ever total control. OTOH, there are many wage earners who feel as though every penny earned is 100% theirs, and they often feel that they are doing a favor to those who do the unpaid labor.

[CA renter]

[quote=FlyerInHi]CAr, one minute you’re a feminist, and the next min you wish feminists would rot in hell.

You complain a lot about the past and present fate of women… but think about it a moment.

Women have the uterus and the eggs… they don’t need men. They can buy the best quality sperm for cheap; and in today’s tech world, they could cast men aside. Pretty soon, they could control the whole economy and write their own tickets.

By wanting to be a housewife, you’re giving men power. So stop bitching.[/quote]

I’ve not been a feminist, in the traditional sense of the word, for many, many years. I was fortunate enough to see the light early enough to change course. I absolutely advocate for women’s rights and for legislation/social norms to reflect the work that women do, but that’s a far cry from traditional feminism. Women are not men with breasts, we never will be, and we shouldn’t strive for this, IMO.

[NotCranky]

[quote=CA renter][quote=Blogstar][quote=FlyerInHi]CAr, one minute you’re a feminist, and the next min you wish feminists would rot in hell.

You complain a lot about the past and present fate of women… but think about it a moment.

Women have the uterus and the eggs… they don’t need men. They can buy the best quality sperm for cheap; and in today’s tech world, they could cast men aside. Pretty soon, they could control the whole economy and write their own tickets.

By wanting to be a housewife, you’re giving men power. So stop bitching.[/quote]

Most men don’t have much power by virtue of having a job. People with power hire and/ or don’t need jobs. In a household, power is probably more expressed by who spends the money than who earns it.[/quote]

Power is expressed by who controls the money. That goes in every relationship, including employer/employee. Rarely is the person who isn’t earning a wage the one who has total control over the money. They might have a say, but rarely ever total control. OTOH, there are many wage earners who feel as though every penny earned is 100% theirs, and they often feel that they are doing a favor to those who do the unpaid labor.[/quote]

[CA renter]

[quote=njtosd][quote=CA renter]…

The younger women are smart enough to look at the experiences of these women instead of following the rhetoric of the feminists who have destroyed the family unit, made women and children even more vulnerable, and denigrated the very important work that women have traditionally done. May they (collective feminists, not you personally) rot in hell. They have destroyed so many lives.

At least the feminists are self-extinguishing as fewer of them have children; and when they do, it’s often one or (maybe) two. The feminist movement cannot die soon enough.[/quote]

Wow. I don’t know that I am anything that ends in -ist. I guess I’m somewhere between CA Renter and BG. I worked full time until I had kids, was a stay at home mom and now I’m a PT working mom and so far our family unit has not been destroyed. I am probably what would be considered highly educated (MS, JD) but my mind didn’t turn to mush when I was home with the kids and, frankly, I had a lot of fun with them. Sooner than I think, they will be at college and I want to be working when they are, as otherwise I will be bored and will fixate on whatever they are doing. They say I do that already. Live and let live – my favorite moms are the ones who are not sure whether they’ve taken the right path. The ones who are sure they are right always puzzle me.[/quote]

You and I are not far apart at all. I was also on a steep career trajectory and made it to corporate management before dropping back in order to fulfill other needs/desires. I plan to re-enter the workforce in a few years, too , if anyone is willing to hire a middle-aged woman who’s not been in the workforce for just over a decade — one of the main obstacles for women who want to “have it all.”

And you and I are from the ranks of the fortunate few these days, and it’s getting even more difficult for young women today to do what either of us are doing or hope to do. But there is no denying the fact that divorce rates are exceedingly high, and fatherless families/single motherhood is epidemic in many communities.

This is what I’m referring to when I say that feminists have destroyed the family unit and put women and children in an even more vulnerable state. And you know the poverty statistics where single mothers and their children are concerned.

“The rate of single motherhood, which has been steadily increasing since the 1940s, has skyrocketed in recent years, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau released on May 1st.

While the birth rate for single women has greatly increased across all demographics — according to the report, which is based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the birth rate for single mothers in 2007 was 80 percent higher than it was in 1980, and 20 percent of that increase happened between 2002 and 2007 — the numbers are particularly high for recent mothers (mothers who gave birth in the previous 12 months) between age 20 and 24.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/single-motherhood-increases-census-report_n_3195455.html

This is what feminism has wrought. It is nothing short of a disaster, IMO.

[CA renter]

[quote=zk][quote=CA renter]May they (collective feminists, not you personally) rot in hell. They have destroyed so many lives.

[/quote]
I don’t think that’s fair. Even assuming they’ve hurt more than they harmed (which I don’t agree with). They were and are doing what they thought was best for women.

Obviously women, to paraphrase you, have been getting screwed for millenia. (Insert your own joke here).

So feminists have been trying to fix that. Whatever their results, it’s pretty hard to argue with their intentions. I’m not sure how you can rail against men for having beat up and held down women for eons and then rail against feminists for trying their best to fix it. It’s obviously an extremely complicated subject, and to expect feminists to get it perfectly right on what is essentially the first try is absurd.[/quote]

That is a fair point, and I don’t begrudge them for trying to do what’s right for women, but once it became obvious that it was causing more harm than good (IMO), then they should have reevaluated and changed course. They have been resolute in pushing their failed agenda, no matter how many lives they destroy in the process. I have a huge problem with that.

[CA renter]

Messed up. This is a dup, but meant to add the bolded part below.

[quote=njtosd][quote=CA renter]…

The younger women are smart enough to look at the experiences of these women instead of following the rhetoric of the feminists who have destroyed the family unit, made women and children even more vulnerable, and denigrated the very important work that women have traditionally done. May they (collective feminists, not you personally) rot in hell. They have destroyed so many lives.

At least the feminists are self-extinguishing as fewer of them have children; and when they do, it’s often one or (maybe) two. The feminist movement cannot die soon enough.[/quote]

Wow. I don’t know that I am anything that ends in -ist. I guess I’m somewhere between CA Renter and BG. I worked full time until I had kids, was a stay at home mom and now I’m a PT working mom and so far our family unit has not been destroyed. I am probably what would be considered highly educated (MS, JD) but my mind didn’t turn to mush when I was home with the kids and, frankly, I had a lot of fun with them. Sooner than I think, they will be at college and I want to be working when they are, as otherwise I will be bored and will fixate on whatever they are doing. They say I do that already. Live and let live – my favorite moms are the ones who are not sure whether they’ve taken the right path. The ones who are sure they are right always puzzle me.[/quote]

You and I are not far apart at all. If you look back at my posts, you’ll see that I’ve stated that every situation is different, and each family needs to decide what works best for them…that there is no black and white. What I detest is the denigration of women and their *very valuable* contributions to society.

[FlyerInHi]

The very idea of imputed income as you put it CAr, is just weird.

Value is the what the market will pay, no more, no less.

More kids, more work = more income/savings? sounds ludicrous.

[NotCranky]

Don’t blame the feminists, when a bunch of women 20-24 years old start having babies. They are not even old enough to have families in this day and age.

OTOH, it’s simply time to start paying those single mothers some serious cash so they can stay home and make what they deserve. No cheesy ebt ,were talking 100K minimum . Society is really dropping the ball on this one.

[njtosd]

[quote=FlyerInHi]The very idea of imputed income as you put it CAr, is just weird.

Value is the what the market will pay, no more, no less.

More kids, more work = more income/savings? sounds ludicrous.[/quote]

Imputed income is a tax concept. Take a look back at my earlier post on this matter. It is particularly discussed in terms of real estate but it is just an interesting concept in terms of what this thread is addressing

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=njtosd][quote=FlyerInHi]The very idea of imputed income as you put it CAr, is just weird.

Value is the what the market will pay, no more, no less.

More kids, more work = more income/savings? sounds ludicrous.[/quote]

Imputed income is a tax concept. Take a look back at my earlier post on this matter. It is particularly discussed in terms of real estate but it is just an interesting concept in terms of what this thread is addressing[/quote]

Yes, I realize that.

But CAr renter implies that all the work done around the house is income/savings.

[zk]

Hurt more than they helped, I meant.

[UCGal]

Ok – I want to clarify a few things.

I think a family’s choice to have a single earner and SAHP is a fine choice. I think a family’s choice to have two working parents is also fine. That’s the more common feminist view – the opportunity for choice.

I am an engineer because of feminism. I remember being told by a professor that I was a waste of a seat that could be filled by a male. (Yes – I reported him to the dean and he was forced to apologize to me and the other 2 women in the class.) I was told by a manager at an internship that he felt the internship should have been offered to a male student – he assumed I was like his daughter, at college to get the “MRS” degree. He also “encouraged” me to wear skirts to work, despite the fact that the job required climbing poles on top of buildings to retrieve the weather instrumentation for calibration. Feminism made these guys obsolete. I am proud to have the label “feminist” assigned to me because it suggests that I believe that women AND men should have all choices available – and should be compensated equivalently.

Now – back to the childcare and budget and work vs stay at home. I’m a numbers gal. When I had my first child I was able to negotiate a 3 day work week. That was the perfect compromise for me. My husband also dropped down to 4 days a week, so we only had our son in an in-home daycare 2 days a week. The daycare was with a friend who was a SAHM who we were the only client of. It was a win win – and comparable care to what my son got from me.
When pregnant with my second son, and in a different state than the first daycare provider I made a spreadsheet to figure out what the best financial options were. 2 kids, one in a “2s” room, one in an infant room is pricey. I think we paid $26k/year for both of them during two expensive years while the youngest was in the infant room. That dropped significantly when they were out of diapers. This was Kindercare – not the cheapest option, not the most expensive. The parents I met there were definitely professionals: lawyers, doctors, Phd chemists and biologists, engineers like myself, corporate managers.

My spreadsheet confirmed that we would still be ahead, financially, if I returned to work. And it was more than 30cents on the dollar. We also had columns for nanny, in-home daycares, and for both options of stay at home parents. (I made more than DH at the time plus provided the benefits.) One of the factors that played into my continuing to work was the fact that engineers, MALE or FEMALE, become “stale” if unemployed for a few years. The only way around that is to get a graduate degree during the parenting break, to justify current skills. I’ve seen guys get burned by this same gap – it’s not a problem just for mommy-track women.

For us – it came down to life balance vs income. I continued to be part time until I retired. Part time options happened because of feminism, also. At least at my employer… it was women pushing for family balance – and then DADs taking advantage of it. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s Motorola consistently got awards for being “mommy friendly”.

And to reaffirm BG’s point. I brought my lunch to work – saving a fortune. As an engineer I could wear jeans or crops and flip-flops to work. (And did) Even if I had customer meetings a skirt or slacks and blouse was more than adequate. I never had to wear a suit outside of job interviews. (Legal and Banking professions are different in that respect.)

At this point – I’ve chosen to be home with the kids full time. I’m calling it retirement. I can afford it because I didn’t hire outside help to take care of my household… brought my lunch… never spent a fortune on clothes. My part time salary was under $100k – but I was still able to save a lot, pay off my mortgage, and still have time to coach my kids FLL team and cheer them on in basketball and baseball.

You have made your choice to be a stay at home parent. That’s a great choice for your family. I made a choice to continue to work. That worked for me and my family. Feminism promotes these kind of choices. But families MUST consider the financial impact of their choices – regardless of what choice they make. You should make the choice with open eyes.

[scaredyclassic]

The only thing I like about death is no more money worries.

Seems like men take failure to earn and support way more to heart than the ladies do.

[NotCranky]

Good story, UCgal. You have a lot of grace.

I am sure that there are some hysterical women with some weird ideas of feminism and score settling teaching in liberal arts/ humanities too. Our boys are pretty sure to run into some like that.

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