3 ms·
I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same. I meet a lo
by sudonim 16y ago
I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same.
I meet a lot of women in the states who have adopted career advancement and a high salary as their version of "success". I had a long conversation with a female friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, worked as a VC. She said that there is a lot of pressure from other women to go into business and be competitive. That if as a woman you decide "I want to have a family and raise children", you're selling out.
With all of the effort for women's rights (and there is still more to be done), no one is defending a woman's right to be a successful mother and homemaker.
- jnovek 16y agoA Stanford graduate working as a VC is hardly a representative of an "average" woman. It may be hard for HN readers to imagine b/c so many of us are city dwellers, but there are parts of the US where it is still socially unacceptable for women to defy traditional gender roles.
- sudonim 16y agoShe isn't the "average" woman. My main point is, in her circle she felt it was socially unacceptable to _adopt_ traditional gender roles.
- jnovek 16y agoI'm saying that I believe her problem to be a unique consequence of her very unusual social situation. It's not a problem that most women have. Incidentally, how do you think a man would be treated if he finished his degree at Stanford Business and decided to be a homemaker? would it be different than a man who graduated from another school in another field?
- zem 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual: "The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."