Feminism Hijacked

I consider myself a blood-thirsty feminist; I think the feminist movement was and is a good thing.  I was a participant at one level or other from the days of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.  I’ve read all the best known books.  My favorite: Elizabeth Janeway, Man’s World, Woman’s Place.  A great title, don’t you think?

When I was teaching history at a community college, I created a course called “Women in European History” which, as I said in the course description, was not so much about great women as about gender roles in various historic eras.

It was a joy to see feminist goals become main stream and to see women gain their legitimate position in society.

I think, alas, the feminist movement had unintended consequences when it was hijacked by clawing, greedy hands.  One of the unintended consequences  is the required two-income couple.  Two parents both with careers started out as a choice, allowing women to use their education and training to pursue careers while having a family, a routine expectation for men.  Working women, including working moms, have been a boon to society as they have added their talents to the work force.

Two parents working has now become a necessity as employers have found ways to reduce work benefits, changes tolerated by employees who could afford reductions because of the two incomes.  Layoffs are more common and more tolerated now than they once were.  An employer’s commitment to a work force is not expected.

More and more income over the last 30 years has flowed from workers to the very top of society.  Here are some discouraging statistics.

• Today, the people whose incomes are in the top 1% get 23.5% of all US income.
•  In the 1990’s, the top 1% got 19%.
•  In 1980, the top 1% got 14%.
•  In the 1970’s, the top 1% got 8%.
•  Right now, the top tenth of a percent of the population (.01%) gets 12% of all income.
•  Between 1980 and 2005, 80% of new income went to the top 1%.

The growing, even ballooning, income for the upper income brackets has required that wages for regular employees be held down.  Wage increases before the 1970’s correlated with increases in productivity; since about 1973, wages have stagnated while productivity has increased.  The workers produce more so that the upper income group can have more.  From 2000 to 2004, for example, hourly wages rose by 1% per year while median family income fell by .9%.  Productivity, however, increased by 3.8% per year.

Robbing the middle class to feed the rich has been tolerated, I believe, because working couples have two incomes.  The rich have grabbed the benefits of feminism for themselves.

A Koch brother

The rich have become richer in part because of the dramatic rise in executive salaries in absolute terms and as compared with the salaries of other employees.  In some countries, there are controls on the size of executive salaries; fat chance of any controls getting instituted in the U.S.  But income disparity is the stuff of revolution and reaction.  If the bottom starts to grumble significantly about the lack of parity, the wealthy and powerful and their political lackeys will enact repressive measures quickly enough.

Another benefit reduction in this regime of robbing the worker is the replacement of pensions with 401(k) plans, the biggest scam ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.  For people with the time, the inclination, the knowledge, the skills, and the luck to manage personal investing, the 401(k) might be good.  Even then, the personal investor managing a 401(k) is until he/she reaches age 59 1/2 confined to the plan's small pool of allowed funds, a violation of the first rule of investing, diversify the portfolio.  Individuals can be led astray into various schemes, they can ransack their 401(k) funds for emergency purposes, or they can make decisions that do not follow the best investment practices.

Examples:  A former coworker of mine, an intelligent, thoughtful and hardworking man, lost much of his 401(k) in a Ponzi scheme, not the infamous and gigantic Maddoff scheme but in one of many local scams.  Some years ago, a work colleague told me that he was putting his 401(k) funds mostly into the then booming tech companies.  “But they have such poor price-earnings ratios,” I said.  His response: “What’s a price-earnings ratio?”  He admitted some years later that his 401(k) fund was still recovering from the collapse of the “dot com” bubble.  An acquaintance says she had to stop her unemployed husband from using 401(k) funds to buy a new car.  Still another acquaintance says she and her husband lost tens of thousands to a corporate scam similar to that launched by Enron.

The 40l(k) is a vast boon to investment firms, banks, and other corporate big shots who have way too much influence over our government.

The two-income family means that mom has to be super-mom and, now, dad has to be super-dad as well as men have stepped up to participate in raising children and keeping house.  Women can work but working couples must both work full time with a commitment that largely ignores family life.  Life for many is tight and stressful.  For me personally, time has been for many years a crushing tyrant.

I have a solution to the stress-and-tension side of life.  I think we should change work.  Fat chance, I know, especially now, an era when capitalism has been described as " a transnational phalanx of giant corporations that eat their young and flatten everything in their path."  But I'll say anyway that I think work, where possible, should be broken into more part time segments so that parents can organize a decent work and home life.

My husband and I have worked for many decades in professional level jobs where we nonetheless were not supervisors.  All of those jobs could be segmented to provide couples with flexibility.  A management challenge, I know, and corporations according to the "dismal science" (i.e. economics) are not supposed to do anything but make profits.  But then anything good for children is good for society, right?

Fat

Fat causes a lot of psychic misery and health problems.  It’s now a national obsession under its bulkier clinical name, obesity.

While fat causes so much trouble in bulking people out, it is itself such a trim little 3-letter word.  I suggest it be bulked out by being spelled “phaatt” or maybe all upper case, “PHATT,” followed by an exclamation mark.

I’ve been fighting with PHAATT! for most of my life.  As I see it, my problem emerged when I was in the 8^th grade and went off to get a physical exam to enter high school.  At the end of the exam, Dr. D (he’s long gone but I’ll mask his name anyway) informed me in a somewhat surprised tone that at 5’3” and 120 lbs, I was 17 lbs. overweight; I was supposed to weigh 103.  I was devastated and humiliated.  He gave me no suggestions, oral or written, on what I should do about this problem.  I knew my mother wouldn’t help.  I was left with what felt like a lodestone of failure.  Also a long term dread of going to doctors who would bring up this humiliation again, a dread banished eventually with the emergence of many more women into medical practice.

Half way through high school, I had a much larger problem than at that 8^th grade physical.  I was bookish and plain in a blue collar Catholic school with little money to spend on hair, makeup and clothes.  I was a major failure as a teen and food became my game.  I’ve been battling weight ever since.

The rest of the story is the usual one of getting motivated and/or equipped with diet pills, losing weight but never so much that my weight is “normal” for my 5’5” adult height, giving up the diet after many months, and regaining more than the lost pounds.  In the meantime, I’ve become pretty knowledgeable on food, calories and nutrition.

I had my usual luck the first time I joined Weight Watchers in an at-work program.  I was motivated by a leader who sympathized with my typical slow progress (9 weeks, 11 lbs.)  After a year, I had lost a lot but was still many pounds above normal, had hit an impenetrable plateau, was very tired of tracking everything I ate and being focused so much on food, all to no avail.  I drifted away from the diet; the weight returned once again over the next several years.

I mention with much gratitude that my husband, a slender guy, has always been tolerant of my weight no matter what it might be.  But I won’t admit the number even to him.

I have a theory about weight which my doctor thought was reasonable.  The Darwinian pressure is to gain weight to offset the food-short circumstances in which people lived for eons.  When we diet, we teach our bodies to find ways to end-run our self-imposed deprivation.  Over time, dieting becomes harder and harder as we have to outdo the tricks our bodies have learned.  I think young people should be told that they must never go on a diet.  If they find that their weight is higher than it should be, they should concentrate on healthier eating and on getting more exercise. 

In 1999, I bought a horse, something I had wanted from childhood.  The riding hobby along with other activity has made it possible for me to get into pretty good shape.  My excess bulk bothers me less but I sure wish I could get rid of it.  It would be nice to be normal.

Horses

I was one of those horse-crazy kids.  I’m not sure exactly when I started on this obsession but it was well established by 2^nd grade.  My teacher, the blue-lidded Mrs. Gorr, gave our class some time on Friday afternoons to draw anything we wanted.  My pictures were always horses, sometimes with cowboys, sometimes with circus acrobats, sometimes with jodhpur-clad show riders.

One day, my dad gave me the book, How to Draw Horses by Walter T. Foster.  It wasn’t for a birthday or Christmas or anything, just out of the blue.  I was thrilled.  I spent a huge amount of time thereafter drawing horses as Foster taught in that slender volume with its folio-sized pages. Start with an oval for the horse’s belly.  Add circles for chest and rump.  Just the right pair of curves for the neck, a near rectangle for the head.  Then the complicated details.  The large, thoughtful dark eye with the depression above it.  Big nostrils and sculpted ears.  Legs and feet; very difficult, those feet; they got lots of space in the book.

I held onto Foster’s book through high school, then lost sight of it.  Not too long ago, I was in an art store where I saw the book, more correctly, a later version of it, on a rack.  I bought it and love having it to help me resurrect my horse-drawing hobby.

I read all the horse books of my youth: Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind and Misty of Chincoteague, Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Dorothy Lyons’ Golden Sovereign and more.  I got familiar with an oft-used illustrator, Wesley Dennis.  I could tell in previewing a book whether it would be really good or merely OK by whether Dennis’ drawings were finished pieces or just outlines.

Despite my obsessive interest, I had to love horses from afar.  My dad was a railroad man and we were urban folk.  There were no funds for me to pursue the expensive hobby of riding.  I went to livery stables a few times with my cooperative younger sister or with one friend or another, .  When my daughter took an interest in horses after a summer Brownie Scout horse camp, she and I took lessons off and on for a few years. 

Finally, in my 50’s, I bought a horse, the culmination of a life long hope.   A major thrill and a major piece of luck that I got such a sensible beastie as Scout, an appaloosa and a mellow fellow with plenty of spirit.  More luck: a great barn with terrific people, including helpful riding instructors.

Scout was my mount and my equine friend until he was felled by colic 5 years after I bought him.  He is now galloping around horse heaven, a trail of his appaloosa spots swirling through the air behind him.  I then bought MJ, a bulky sorrel-and-white paint with huge, deep brown eyes.

Advancing arthritis forced me to sell her to a lanky and flexible teen. 

I’m now on another appaloosa, the smooth-gaited Mohican.  I still can’t believe the good fortune that has brought me these horses.  Life is good.