By the hands of our mothers: An argument for how feminism has hurt women

Women have a place in the world, as do men. And because we were conditioned to put too tight a constraint on defining just what that “place” is, there is also a place in the world for feminism. Feminism recognizes that people have unlimited potential and capacities; so, for a person’s role to be defined by their sex is severely limiting. For many years, women have been fighting to achieve equal rights, unprecedented freedom and greater opportunity and there have been some unarguable successes in these endeavors. (WIC). In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” (United States Constitution.) During World War II, American women served in the Army and Navy. The Equal pay Act of 1963 gave women the right to earn the same as any man performing the same job and the Equal opportunity Commission, set into place in 1970, ensured women against sex discrimination in the work place. (WIC.) The ruling of Roe vs. Wade effectively put an end to back alley abortions and sanctioned a women’s right to choose whether or not to continue on in her pregnancy. The rights and their effects that feminism has allowed are great and are evident today with so many women in the workforce, in respectable and well-paying positions. They are evident in the availability of birth control pills. So, it would seem that we, as women, have overcome many of the prejudices against us. But at what cost have these rights come? Just as it was limiting for women to have their place, subjected to the role of mother and caretaker with little-to-no options provided, it is equally limiting to argue that for women to find her place she might cast aside the notion that a her aspirations are in tune with the role that she is biologically designed for. At least, with how far our rights have come, one would expect that women would be happier in their freedom today than they were in the prohibitive 50s. It seems though, that while the reasons have changed, women are still trapped. The irony is that in attempting to free women from the confines society set upon them, feminism has taken part in building the cage.

Feminists have fought for “equality”. They have fought long and hard but what is this equality and why do women want it so badly? As defined by the Oxford Concise American Dictionary equality is: “being the same in quantity, size, degree or value; (of people) having the same status, rights or opportunities; evenly or fairly balanced”. (Concise Oxford American Dictionary, 302.) So, which of these definitions of equality are we striving for? Men and woman are not the same in size or quantity. Women are generally smaller than men in stature and muscle mass. So how about value? This is certainly a more open question. Who is doing the valuing and what is it based on? Feminists argue that women are equally valuable, and as an example, offer that (In the assessment of men being stronger) “(People) ignored the fact that caring for children and doing such tasks as milking cows and washing clothes also required heavy, sustained labor.” (WIC.) This example only sustains the idea that what is valuable is equality as sameness, meaning that what men do is important (like heavy lifting), but woman are equal because they are capable of the same. But they are not the same; they are not mirror images of each other they are built differently because those differences are balanced and valuable. It is fair to say comparing men and women is like the cliché of comparing apples to oranges. The fruits are similar. Their basic shape is the same and they are equally valuable, but one is sweet and one is savory. No one argues that this difference makes one less than the other. No one needs to start a movement insisting that oranges can be baked in pies too. One has the right, the opportunity, to bake an orange pie, but it doesn’t make the orange any less valuable to never be baked in a pie. "Pretending we are the same as men –with similar needs and desires- has only led many of us to find out, brutally, how different we really are” (Crittendon) We do not try to define an orange with the qualities of an apple. We appreciate an orange for the qualities of an orange. So why does feminism try to define equality as sameness? Feminists declare that women are as smart, as strong, as disciplined as men and then cite examples in which women are acting as a man would. Men and women are not the same and never will be. In trying to prove our "sameness" we only brought attention to our differences. In that light the differences sometimes appeared as inadequacies. Had we simply agreed that though we are quite different we are equally valuable we would not be at the same crossroads, trying to prove just how tough, how strong, how equal we are.

Another place where feminism has become restrictive to women is in the guilt women feel for not availing themselves to what their foremothers fought for. If women seem ungrateful it’s not necessarily because they don’t believe in the ideas and ideals of feminism, it’s more that those things have become commonplace to the newer generation of women who grew up in households of working mothers. They grew up in a culture where feminism already existed. (Crittendon). Women know it’s a viable option to get an education and a career in a field that wouldn’t have even been considered possible 40 years earlier. They need only make a phone call or quick visit to the doctor to obtain the birth control pills that their mothers battled to have available. The younger generation does not (cannot!) appreciate these rights so much as they take advantage of them and it’s easy to see why. These young women were never involved in the fight. They were not impassioned by protest. They were simply handed these rights in the same way most of us know the right to go to school which is so easily available that not only do most not appreciate it, they are at times actually resentful of the right. The fact that these liberties are now taken for granted is bound to offend those who were part of the movement. The realization of that on the part of the younger generation only causes guilt over not making the proper choices with the rights they have been afforded.

It is not just guilt that the modern woman feels in the wake of the feminist revolution. She is also feeling torn. Every opportunity is available to women today. They actually have more opportunity than men, considering that a woman can fill nearly every professional role that a man can but a man can never take over a woman’s original role- as mother. Feminism made it so women to have every choice available to them and now they feel completely overwhelmed by all the choices. It is undeniable that feminism has provided us with more opportunity, but it’s also fair to say that it has made things more complicated. It is no longer a question of ‘Can I go into law?’, instead it’s, ‘Can I prepare for the LSATs while working part time to keep my three-year old in daycare so I can assure she’s being taken care of while I study?’ And, at the same time, ‘Am I ignoring what’s really important?’ Being all things leaves most women feeling that though they’ve been able to strive for a lot, they can never quite reach those goals. There are no longer one or two goals- raising healthy children, keeping a happy home- there are four, maybe six “main focuses” to a woman’s life- having the career and moving up in it, raising the happy family, keeping a clean house, preparing homemade meals and dealing with guilt over not appreciating how wonderful it all is.

Guilt and pressure aside, there is still a greater impediment that feminism has created. That is the devaluing of “women’s” roles. Motherhood has, for centuries, been women’s most significant profession until feminism fought for women’s right to be more “significant”. This movement implied that child-rearing is a less significant role. We were formed to fulfill the role of mother. Our bodies create new life within them. We birth this life. Our bodies make milk to nourish this new life and yet society still values "men's roles" -as businessmen, as leaders. It’s not that feminist didn’t tout the importance of what a woman, and only a woman, can do. It’s just that they simultaneously fought for women to be afforded the right to do what men do. This, in effect, is like saying ‘we want to do what you do because what you do is better’. In her book, What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, Danielle Crittendon writes, “Should men and women be trying to lead identical kind of lives, or were there good reasons for the old divisions of labor between mother and father, husband and wife? If so, do these divisions make us “unequal?” (Crittendon) Feminism, in its quest to prove woman were equal, taught them to become "like men" to hold a valuable place in society. Feminism asserted that women can be bankers, but it didn’t tell them how. So those women looked to the only occupational role models they had, men, and modeled themselves after them. Women, in their quest for power, didn’t recognize it within themselves and instead tried on the proverbial “clothing” of a man, perhaps taking the term “power suit” a bit too literally. Singer and song writer Damien Rice makes a case against women making this mistake in his song “Women like a man”, in which he sings,

“You want to get boned. You want to get stoned. You want to get fucked like no
one else… You want to be a woman like a man… We’re bad what we do, stupid
fools.”

Rice is, in a sense, speaking out to the women treading in the wake of the feminist revolution. Women today are not just fashioning themselves after men in the work place. Most of the women Cittendon interviewed for her book expressed casual attitudes towards sex. Sexual freedom affects women in different ways both emotionally and physically as Cittendon points out: “There are 18-year-old girls who believe they can lead the unfettered sexual lives of men, only to end up in an abortion clinic or attending grade twelve English while eight months pregnant.” (Crittendon).

There is still the question of who adopts the women’s old post? Men are not clamoring for this kind of role reversal. Women still have to play the "old role" as well as the new-playing dual roles, living dual lives as both man and woman.

Maybe it wasn’t equality feminists should have been fighting for. It was integration, because in some ways the fight for equality caused disintegration of worth of women’s predetermined role. Men and women are different, equal in value but not the same. It was important for women to be able to do anything, but it should have been made clear that they didn’t have to do everything. Feminism was striving to fight the injustices put upon women instead of celebrating that they were already justified by the balance that nature intended to exist between men and women. Working as a whole; men and women, separate but together, create that balance. That balance is important to all things but feminism wants to fight against it by arguing that woman can do it all. The truth is there is no “one side” that can do that. There is no balance to yin without yang, no balance to light without dark, and no balance to good without evil. So, why would women be any different? Even feminism cannot create that balance and make women be both sides, all on their own.