Feminist Transformation, TransformationCentral
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This class is an emotional rollercoaster.
I’ve said it once; I’ll say it again.
Every Thursday I can expect to reach a level of understanding of society that I’ve yet to experience before. And then, subsequently, I fall to a gloomy state of depression when that inevitable question arises: “How can we fix this?”
Because yes, things need to be fixed. We have problems, people, and lots of them. I used to think that the biggest of them all is not thinking that a problem existed. But with the upcoming election, it seems as if more and more people are clueing in on the drastic state that is in America right now. After over two centuries of believing that their problem is not my problem or they could never understand what I am going through because it is my problem and not theirs – well, it appears as if we’re all in the same shit now.
Take the crisis of balancing work and family, for example. This is one issue that is personally significant because when asked in another class “how were we planning on raising our families” – nobody had an answer. None of us had really considered what it would be like to simultaneously work and have a family. I’m sure a lot of us never even really considered it an actual problem – just something you schlep through as your parents did when raising you and as you’ll probably do in the future. But it is a problem, a crisis even, especially when you compare our status with nations of a similar caliber. They completely run us into the ground in how they have handled the problem their citizens face when balancing work and family.
Sure, some may choose to not work and have their significant other act as the “primary breadwinner.” But referring to the Feminist Transformation Processes, we as a nation have definitely blown past the struggle for “equal opportunity” in the sense that women do have the chance to enter the previously male-dominated labor force. Hell, we had one woman running to be President and another that is less than two days away from potentially being named Vice President the United States of America. So yes, we are now in the era in which women have the opportunities to perform paid work and having said that, most in fact, do.
On the other hand, we are human beings, a species characterized by our families. Families are important to us, and the chance to care and tend to our loved ones is a basic right of being human. It is not a mere benefit. Parental leave benefits are insufficient and a gross devaluation of what it means to be human. Instead, we need to “value the devalued” and accept the reality that caring for our families and for each other is critical in the development of our nation, of our kind. We have the right to care; to parental leave rights, to caring for the sick, elderly and handicapped rights, and to a job that is fulfilling and flexible with the rest of our lives! – We have that right!
So what’s stopping us? Why are we still living in a country that doesn’t believe in the following?
Parents have joint primary responsibility for raising the child, and the nation shall support them in this. The nation shall provide appropriate assistance to parents in child-raising.
– United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
(Ratified by all nations except SOMALIA and the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)
Source: Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart
Don’t blame the government. The Man. The Wealthy. The Poor. The Democrats. The Republicans.
We are what we make our country. This is our society. And in risk of sounding like a raging feminist: we need a social revolution. We need to start demanding rights, basic rights, to some of the things we value most in our lives. We need to stop thinking that our problems are not the same that the stress of figuring out who will care for our children is ours alone to endure.
We need a mental shift. A new way of thinking. An integration of all that we consider important, and in this case, both work and family/life (because even those without families suffer from work inhibiting them from having a life).
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. We can have both and lead a more efficient and equal, better balanced, life.
rovaira November 5, 2008 at 11:44 am