Are you referring to the US, where women have no freedom to decide what happens inside their uterus and slavery is still allowed for their millions of prisoners?
Subservience is forced, has been forced, due to biology, until the very recent past. Women could not even control having children until birth control. No one likes "corporate drone" jobs. No one likes being a servant or a slave either. Sometimes you take what you can get at the time just to survive.
The unstated alternative here is that women would be forced into the misery of sexual slavery. As a man, my daughters have the freedom to decide to participate in marriage, and nobody will take that right away from them.
What? I don't want to misinterpret you, so what are you actually saying? Because it sounds like an argument to switch to a Handmaid's Tale-like society.
For almost all of history in almost every society both man and women have been ignored, oppressed, controlled. Things have drastically changed in Western world. Not sure we need to impose a Brave New World style "utopia".
Your romantic notion of motherhood in traditional societies totally denies centuries of oppression and abuse, continuing to this very day in those traditional societies you praise so much.
Every society that denies women independence from men. I agree this is a sliding scale, but near the extreme end is this staple: Girls belong to the parents until such time as they are married off to a husband, who is then in effect their new owner. I take the liberty to call this slavery.
Given how many countries and cultures allow women to be treated as property and owned with little recourse it's hard to say this is the last stronghold of slavery. We just prefer not to raise this too often, as it's often the result of religious rules.
On the sliding scale of law regimes that try to regulate human labor, going from a universal declaration of labor rights all the way down to chattel slavery, this is rather progressive for that part of the world.
Naturally no one in European or Anglophone countries would countenance such a thing, but in Asia this can provide women with a means of self-determination that they didn't have before.
I remember reading a book about Britain's service class from the Edwardian era until the end of that culture after WW2. Service class culture replaced something far far worse. And the ugly labor regimes that replaced those were better than the service class. If you had an issue with the way one particular factory treated you, well, there was another one right down the road. If you had an issue with the way your masters treated you, your options for finding better employment were far more restricted. This dynamic caused women to leave the service industry in droves to go work in factories.
The classist society in Britain had been fighting a rearguard action to maintain the service legal regime for decades, until WW2 thoroughly annihilated any chance of it ever coming back.
Nowadays any time I hear about some crazy contract law, I immediately think about what human agency is being liberated here.
> It's not hyperbole. If you're not allowed to hold a job because you're female, how is that much better than slavery?
You serious? Just to point out a few of the glaring problems with your position:
1) you're essentially offering up a straw man to over-broadly condemn a wide range of social practices (which you haven't demonstrated much understanding of);
2) your general assertion that married women (globally, I assume) were generally not allowed to "hold a job" is questionable on many levels (for instance, on a family farm, do you think the husband had a "job" but the wife did not?);
3) if you weren't aware: slaves are legally property that can be bought, sold, and killed if it suited their master, serfs weren't slaves and neither were wives.
> I think that a revolution—a socialist revolution—will break down the family structure as we know it now. The woman, being freed from her menial position, either as the lowest-paid worker or as household slave, will be out of the home more. -Denise Oliver, Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971
"Will break down"? Why the future tense? China's Great Leap Forward took place in 1958-1962, and by abolishing the family and raising children communally,
it "freed" their women to work more in the fields. How fulfilling that must have been.
> As professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies Kathi Weeks has written, the family, characterized by privatized care, the (heterosexual) couple unit, and biologically related kin, is “legislatively declared, legally defended, and socially prescribed” in the United States.
Just in the US? Not in Italy, France, Egypt, Algeria, China, India, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Mexico..?
It never ceases to amaze how these advocates of various revolutions are able to tactically ignore history and other countries.
As a counterpoint to this argument:
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that both oppression, and freedom, are present in every society from tiny to huge, the "egalitarian hunter gatherer" trope is a huge oversimplification, and really it's the cultural choices we make that determine whether we live in a free society or one full of domination and oppression. My favorite quote:
"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."
We could very well have accepted that some people are slaves. But we, as a society, decided that this is a bad idea. Why can't we do the same with gender roles?
It's like ... slavery-lite. Fundamentally what's the difference between Lola's role and a common role of a wife a hundred years ago?* And second – a dangerous question – is it necessarily wrong? I ask not to lead one to believe to think that it isn't, certainly there are aspects which are unquestionable immoral, but is there room for such a social construct? More importantly, answering why not in a robust way could make the societal goal of maximizing each individual's personal freedom a little closer.
* not that every wife was treated like a slave or that there aren't still women who are
It isn't pointed out because removing freedom is not an option. We have evolved beyond such primitive ways.
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