Feminists don't understand conservative women,

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The supreme court is not a legislative branch of government. They can only rule on specific lawsuits and criminal cases that get appealed up to that court. They can only decide whether a law in one of these cases is constitutional or not. That said, the supreme court is arguably influenced by popular opinion.

You defined your straw-man version of feminism, so you could knock it down. There are many different types of feminism, just as there are many different types of conservatism. Not all feminists are opposed to the idea of gender roles, although the roles where the woman does all the cooking and cleaning while the man drinks beer and watches TV is definitely targeted for being inequitable.

Feminism is not necessarily a form of gender discrimination - on the whole, it has been about erasing discrimination against women. Most women I know who consider themselves feminists are not looking for an apology - they are looking for equal opportunity, the right to be recognized for their contributions at work and at home.

There have been some marginal feminists that have (loudly) championed gender discrimination. But they are not the mainstream of feminism. The John Birch Society (and their paranoid ranting about fluoride in the water being a communist plot) are pathetic and hilarious. But as a liberal, I do not equate all conservatives with that noise. I recognize a wide variety of conservative ideologies and movements: from the economic theories of Milton Friedman to the 'country club Republicans' and various social conservatism to the big spending/big government 'conservatism' of the current administration. From Eisenhower to Nixon to Bushes, with Goldwater and McCain and other prominent voices- conservatism is not one thing. Neither is feminism.

Last edited by monty on 05 Nov 2007, 4:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Actually, the majority of Amish live in Pennsylvania, a northeastern state which lies within the area known as the United States Megalopolis, an extremely densely populated area which spans from Boston to Washington, DC.

Ah, I would take issue with that. IMO, they're in their own little power-mongering world.

Actually it's widely regarded as being influenced by popular opinion. The extent to which is a contentious debate, however.

google book results for supreme court influenced by public opinion

Last edited by alex on 05 Nov 2007, 4:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think men and women should focus more on loving each other, than on exactly defining where each person's responsibility ends and the next person's begins. We should have an abundance of love for each other, not some exactly-dictated amount from which no one dares vary.

I believe in elastic order. Not anarchy, and not legalism. It's the kind of system where it's okay to step "out of line" once in a while, because we're all human, but where we also still have a guiding moral principle which we all steer toward.

That would be straw-manning my beliefs.

I don't believe in any kind of oppression. I believe that the man and woman who plan on marrying should work out the basic principles they wish to live by in that marriage, and then both enter into that as a voluntary agreement. If either member doesn't like it, then they change it before entering into it.

To me, the term "feminism" is divisive, as much as a term like "white-ism" would inevitably be.

Last edited by Ragtime on 05 Nov 2007, 4:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As a general theory, more love is fine. But what happens to that when someone wants to renegotiate a social contract that was dictated by men and is based on inequality? There was a lot of conservative opposition to giving the women the right to vote. Was that out of love, or on the other part of your statement: [avoiding] exactly defining where each person's responsibility ends and where the next's begins? At some level, society has to set laws and rules.

Would you say you are for parent's loving their children more, but against laws that define and punish child abuse, neglect, or abandonment? Obviously, the law cannot dictate every gesture in a complex relationship called parenthood. Yet there is a need for some regulation of conduct that is deemed excessive, which violates the innate rights of the individual.

Define "widely regarded". It depends on which circle you're in. Most people I know, and most news reports I read, relay most Supreme Court rulings with disappointment, and a touch of incredulity.

Maybe there would be no feminism if it weren't for the fact that anti-female sexism was so prevalent (although it usually goes unamed), and that sexism was used to set up the structures of society? Maybe the term "public health initiative" negatively implies that there are public health problems? Maybe the term "conservatism" is divisive?

Sorry to drag the thread back towards the OP -

I believe that Clinton would be a decent president if she was allowed to be, but I think that conservatives in this country hate her so rabidly (what's up with that, by the way?) that she will never be left alone for a second, and will be forced to expend large ammounts of her energy defending herself rather than running the country. Because of that, she will be less effective than she is capable of, and because of that conservatives will point to her for the next century as an example of why women should not be president.

Is she unfeminine? She's a politician. Politics is cold, brutal, and selfish in its intrinsic nature, and if being like that is being 'unfeminine' then the feminine is ruled out of politics by definition.

That said, I'm voting for Obama in the primary.

She is not as unfeminine as Margaret Thatcher, a woman most conservatives love. I think conservative talk radio has been programming people to hate Hillary because they recognized her as a serious challenge to their power. They turn on the sexism (or swiftboating, or whatever) and keep repeating it. Doesn't matter if it is true or not.

Even if I lived there, I wouldn't vote. It would be like voting for the lesser of two evils, since politicians are just dirty liars. Doesn't make much of a difference, even if it is an insult for her to think all women are likeminded. I know narrowminded people exist, and that some politicians are narrowminded comes as no surprise to me.

Wow, that describes my thinking exactly, Ragtime, but I've never been able to sum it up quite so well. Actually, that is one of the things I give credit to feminism for-in the past it was perhaps a bit too legalistic, a bit too rigid (though not as much as is commonly believed, I think); feminism has really made us think about what it really means to be male and female and the different roles that come with it rather than just doing what everyone else does because everyone else is doing it (though that's certainly not meant to be a knock against custom and tradition in general).

Of course, prior, oh, maybe the '40's, those roles were really quite necessary; most of the cooking had to be done from scratch, and canning and drying had to be done, clothes had to be mended (and in earlier times made, right down to spinning wool), the washing had to be done by hand-it took so long that a whole day was usually devoted to it-and the cleaning was very labor intensive. In the meantime, men were working long, hard days out in the fields, mines, and factories, or laying brick or constructing things or building railroads. Many died on the job, others died early because of the nature of the work. Some had nicer jobs, of course, but I doubt even those were easy (men had it no easier than women, and in some ways probably had it harder). It was only after modern conveniences were introduced and outside jobs became less dangerous and labor intensive that it stopped making immediate sense to people to divide work.

I think though, that a lot of those old ideas still make sense, if in less obvious ways. When we traded in homecooked meals and the ritual of family mealtimes for convenience food and eating out, when homemaking stopped becoming an art, when chivalry died and femininity gave way to girl power, when we traded in time for money and family/community life and the deeply entangled mixture of obligations and joys in entails for autonomy, we really lost something. And that, I think-I hope-is what those of us who never hopped on the feminism bandwagon (or in my case, hopped off of it) are all about, and I don't get the impression that many feminists truly understand this (or have a very complete picture of history for that matter). For us, gender and gender roles are something very concrete and organic and an inevitable outworking of human nature; to many of them (gender feminists in particular) it is more general, tending to focus more on abstract ideas like power and privilege and social constructs. Very, very different ideas; it's no wonder we usually talk past each other. And I think these differences get enlarged and distorted when translating them into public policy, which makes things even more intense.

It is important, as some have mentioned, to distinguish among the various strains of feminism. Equity feminism, a la Christina Hoff Sommers, which focuses on equal opportunities, does have appeal among conservative women; I see the sense in a lot of it though I wouldn't consider myself a feminist. (Mostly since I believe that rights are individually based rather than group based- though of course it would be very short-sighted of us not to acknowledge the fact that some of those rights were very hard-won. I don't like the labelling of certain issues as "women's issues"; to me they are issues simply because they affect my fellow human beings. ) It is gender feminism and its focus on equal outcomes and criticism of gender roles or ideas of masculinity and femininity that is more problematic. Whether it is true or not, I think a lot of people see Hillary as being more of a gender feminist, and I imagine that is a big reason why conservative women feel that she does not speak for them. I think many feel as though a lot has been lost, and fear losing more.

It sounds more like your describing the lower/lower middle class lifestyles. Economic position had a lot more to do with the dangerousness/harshness of one's labor than a person's gender. It wasn't that long ago in history when children were forced to perform hard labor. Middle/Upper class women were actively discouraged not to have a career and to sacrifice their life to raise a family. This resistance (is what made it so much harder for women than men) to emerge in the the public sphere. Women had to fight hard for this priviledge of autonomy. It didn't happen by men suddenly having an "aha moment" (as Oprah would describe it) and coming to the sensible conclusion of including women in their sphere. Technology helped but it could be argued that the legal system enforced it. The potential of being sued really has an effect on peoples' ethics at work.

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Everyone would love to have a house(wife/husband) to clean their home, prepare scrumptious meals, take active part in the kiddie's education, sew, exc. I can see why having a helpmate to cater to your needs could both help you immensibly but also hurt you incredinly by losing the ability to take care of yourself. Autonomy is precious and any human regardless of their gender is not going to give it up easily unless they are either forced to or they desire to.



I think it is disingenuous ( and i mean that in the sense that you are being insincere) of you to say that the majority of feminists don't understand the costs of being the "got it all woman", perhaps due to your own disillusionment on the issue is why you decided not to define yourself as a feminist anymore. I also think it's inaccurate for you to define gender as something organic when you have a portion of the human population that cannot even be put in the biological box of man or woman. Biology has always been careless on which reproductive carriers are the women and which are the men and which are a combo. If hormones are responsible for secondary sex characteristics and hormones change throughout a person's life due to illness or age then it makes little sense to treat gender as a concrete category. As for gender roles those are created by humans. The only role animals have is to reproduce/nurture their offspring. There are species in which the male nutures the offspring and the female could care less if the young survive or not. It is a human luxury that we can define ourselves by more than just our reproductive capabilities and to be able to take our secondary sex differences to the next level by distinguishing male and female behaviors. Does biology influence this? Sure to an extent but it would be ludicrous to suggest that women innately prefer to act like women for if that was the case then there wouldn't be such apparent discrepencencies between the behaviors of different groups of women. (


But due to the division of gender by both biological and sociological means some issues are women's issue and some are men's issue. An example in point would be abortion. A male has to worry about many things in life but becoming pregnant isn't one of them. It is also weird that you would say that given your stance on gender roles. Not every human issue is a public one up for debate and gender issues tend to be the most senstitive and private.



Gender issues are problematic regardless if they are discussed/studied or not. What do you mean by equal outcomes. I know gender research has shown the gap narrowing for much of the intellectual differences between men and women such as spatial ability but nobody is going to deny that males have 2/3 more muscle mass on average on their bodies then women or that women have less respiratory capacity. Of course with environmental pollution/diet wreaking havoc on our bodies who knows what can happen? I think all of human nature should be throughly critizied. Who are we to say that the path to further understanding of this area should be forever closed. There is an old saying that the more you think you know about the topic the more you realize how little you know about the topic. When I get back in school I can't wait to discuss and read up on the literature on all the male studies that have been conducted in recent years. It is not just a woman's issue, or a feminist's issue, to be interested in the similarities and differences of the sexes and of course the sexes ( ie intersex) that lack definition in our modern society.



If I had to define what type of feminist Hillary was I would say she was a democratic (aka traditional) one of her own era. From what I know of her background she is a lawyer not a researcher on gender issues. Also as far as I know she is more interested on her platform being universal healthcare not women's rights issues. I think radical conservatives like to bash on Hillary because she doesn't have a squeaky clean past (what politician does at least she is not solicitating sex in a public bathroom). I myself am pretty neutral when it comes to Hill and think it's absurd for anyone to vote for or against her based on her gender. Her gender is not running for election she is. FYI she only needs about 47% of women to vote which is why she is running her campaign on more mainstream issues then women centered ones. I think it is a little too early for everyone to call her out as the prez nominee for the democrats. It's politics anything can and will happen. Your up one day and down the next just ask Nixon.

I'd like to point out that the "traditional" lifestyle that conservatives(i'm a fiscal conservative, but not a social one), like to bandy about wasnt really there very long. Its a bit of myth making. As you can see by my profile, I am not American; I live in the western Plains of Canada. But my ancestors on my paternal Grandfather and paternal grand mother came from Kansas(from german settlements in russia). Neither in Germany, nor later Russia, nor Kansas did they live the rockwellian life style, despite being middle class farmers.

Sitting down to breakfast happened, but rarely lunch, and often not supper. The men would eat later as they worked late, especially in spring and fall. And by men, i mean all males from age 12 and up. Younger for the first born. These are church going Lutherans and Catholics. Very much religious Conservatives. Packed lunches 6 days a week was the norm, and 12-18 hour days.

This is true of almost all farmers up until the end of WWII, when mechanization really took off. They still work long hours like that, still often pack lunches. Its just that modern transportation and more disposable income allows one to go home during the day.

Meanwhile, the women at home washed clothes by hand for 3 or 4 hours, cleaned for 3 or four hours, and cooked for 3 or four hours. Eldest daughters helped the mother, middle daughters watched the babies.

It got noticably better after WWII. Combine that with the lifestyle of upper middle class eastern states Americans from 1900 to 1950, and a myth was born.