I really enjoyed reading the texts for this week, particularly I Want a Wife and The Politics of Housework, the two both hitting home with a familiar rhetoric that felt very familiar to what my mother engrained in me, not as a premonition of what my life had to become, if “wife” was in my future, but what I should fight for it not to be (in agreement with those particular authors).
The readings from the 1800s seem to emphasize a call to action for equal rights, with a focus on suffrage, when we jump to second wave feminism we now see the focus on not only equality but also women’s gender expectations and their space/roles in society. I believe that by the second wave of feminism the façade of equality is unmasked, that gaining those rights that they have fought for historically (ex. suffrage, right to education, etc) have not amounted to the equality, but served as merely a compromise and a guise to equality while still keeping those in power in their positions.
With that being said, these separate time periods in feminism still share a communal sense of wanting recognition of what it means to live in a patriarchal society by those who uphold it. They also share a sense of understanding that to advance feminism you also must advocate against racism. These are both structures designed to disenfranchise groups and uphold the structure of those in power.
I thought it was also interesting, the emphasis on including the “inhumanity to man” (Steinem), and the role feminism has on liberating the toxic role of masculinity and the gender norms that go along with it, and how those are unfair and harmful to everyone.
“We want to share the work and responsibility, and to have men share equal responsibility for the children… man will be relieved of his role as sole breadwinner and stranger to his own children.”
