after a lecture

We just got home from a lecture on feminism and Marxism that was really brilliant and stimulating. I'm thinking about the way patriarchy becomes invisible when women's oppression is hidden within ideas of love and family. The oppression of women is special because we aren't segregated, and our culture's ideas of what women are like have been formed by patriarchy itself.

The situation is intensified by ideas of nature, that women are the ones with breasts and a uterus and therefore it's only natural that we should make less money than men, since we can get pregnant at any time and quit our jobs to raise the children. Our childbearing equipment makes us a liability, so of course we don't deserve equal status, equal pay, equal respect, and really it would be easier if we just made the coffee.

In actuality, the whole idea of women being different, as in differeing from the norm--that men are the standard people and women are the child-bearing people--is based on an incorrect way of seeing humanity, that childbearing is inferior to wage-earning, and that what happens inside the home is unimportant compared to what happens in the workplace.

We can see it easily as we look at how much a preschool teacher makes as opposed to how much a lawyer makes. When someone asks why we still need a women's movement in the US, I guess I could just point to that.

Scoring CSET is going just fine. I survived the day smashingly and expect to do the same tomorrow.