It only "evens out" on the average, and only if you consider "women" to be a group of people. If you were let go from your job and someone with the same first initial as you were hired instead, would you think to say "Oh, well, it all evens out for people with a name beginning with __" instead of "That really stinks for me!" You probably wouldn't think that, because you don't normally think of people as being grouped by their first initials. In the same way, Mrs. Businessman isn't hurt because Ms. Businesswoman doesn't get the promotion-- at least not in the same way that Mr. Businesswoman (the stay at home father of their mutual children) is!
Feminism is, in a way, ABOUT seeing the female half of the species as a group of people. It's about lumping together the experiences of all kinds of women: the unfairness, the expectations, and so on. It's about saying, for instance, "I see that women's work, in many cultures, is considered less important or taxing than men's work"-- and that applies to discrepancies in pay in the "pink collar" fields, to ways that traditional women's work isn't counted in gross domestic product, and to everything in between.
I would say that seeing women as a group is a defining characteristic of feminism. Saying that one isn't necessarily a feminist doesn't mean that you don't think all those injustices happen, it just means that you think the other things you can find in common for those injustices are more important, or that rather than grouping injustices according to who they happen to, you ought to think more about some other cause and reasoning.
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Date: 2008-05-03 02:16 am (UTC)Feminism is, in a way, ABOUT seeing the female half of the species as a group of people. It's about lumping together the experiences of all kinds of women: the unfairness, the expectations, and so on. It's about saying, for instance, "I see that women's work, in many cultures, is considered less important or taxing than men's work"-- and that applies to discrepancies in pay in the "pink collar" fields, to ways that traditional women's work isn't counted in gross domestic product, and to everything in between.
I would say that seeing women as a group is a defining characteristic of feminism. Saying that one isn't necessarily a feminist doesn't mean that you don't think all those injustices happen, it just means that you think the other things you can find in common for those injustices are more important, or that rather than grouping injustices according to who they happen to, you ought to think more about some other cause and reasoning.