Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!uci-ics!gateway From: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Hypothesis for discussion Message-ID: <1989Nov25.185216.15506@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> Date: 30 Nov 89 06:41:43 GMT References: <5953@unix.SRI.COM> Sender: tittle@ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle) Reply-To: Dave Gross Organization: Youth International Party Lines: 48 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu In article <5953@unix.SRI.COM> trent@unix.sri.com (Ray Trent) writes: >Argue for or against the position: > >Hypothesis: One of the biggest dilemmas in feminism is that fact >that changing the status quo can only happen through education of the >next generation. This leads to the problem that feminist women, who >often reject the tradtional roles, may have less children or have less >influence over their children than traditional women. This imbalance >will tend to work against the goals of feminism in favor of >traditional values. I disagree. In other words, I don't think that if the mommy stays home with the children and the daddy goes off to work all day that ANYTHING the mommy _says_ about being liberated will fully overcome the message of what mommy _does_ -- which is staying home with the kids like a traditional mother, while dad plays the part of a drone, like a traditional father. All this message will say to the kids is: See, even feminist mommys stay home with the kids and send their husbands off to work. And what makes you think that the fathers, who will be presumably spending more time with the children since the mothers will be spending less time, will not be instilling proper non-sexist values in their children? >Correlary: If accepted into mainstream, the burgeoning men's rights >movement with its emphasis on men accepting more of the traditionally >feminine roles in the family, will have a more significant and lasting >effect on the gender status quo than feminism. I think this is true. I also think that if the men's movement had come first, that the women's movement would have had a larger effect. This is because ending sexism can only be maybe 10% effective if only one sex is involved. Add the other sex, and you get closer to 100% effectiveness. If we keep telling Becky that she _can_ be an engineer; but we don't tell Billy that he doesn't _have to_ be an engineer, who is going to try harder? Who is going to be more competitive? Who is going to effectively abandon the family out of a sense of financial obligation enforced by the gender status quo? -- ***************************dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU************************** "An expert system developed by the Rand Corportaion to ... simulate inter- national conflicts generally kept concluding that escalation into war was irrational. So the Pentagon ordered Rand to reprogram the system..." Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com