From the very beginning, feminism has focused on shattering the so-called glass ceiling. That invisible barrier that keeps women from becoming CEOs, doctors, lawyers, President, and all those other exciting, rewarding, glamorous careers. Feminists looked at that content housewife from the 50s, taking care of her husband and children, and told her that she was oppressed. That if she was unshackled from her oppression, she could become President one day. Believing them, women joined the feminist movement in swarms. And after 50 years of amazing gains, they're unhappier than ever, and certainly unhappier than their housewife mothers.

What happened? Simple. Feminism's exhortations to be "independent" was a lie on two fronts: one, that being a housewife was oppression, and two, that if she wasn't she could become President. Let's examine both in detail.

1. ​

We all know the stereotype of the 50s woman: staying home, taking care of the kids, not having her own career, having dinner ready for her husband when he got home, and spending her free time watching soap operas and having tupperware parties with other housewives in the neighborhood. Feminism came up with the supposedly radical idea that women could work just as much as men. But here's the thing: that's not a radical idea. Indeed, throughout most of history, women (along with children), worked like dogs, just like the men. What was radical was the idea that a woman could stay at home and *not* work, without having the family starve as a result.

Before the industrial age, pretty much *everyone* worked from sunup to sundown, plowing the fields, tending cattle, or anything else, in order to grow enough food to feed their family, with very little left over for any sort of "luxuries" like shoes or meat. This included old people who would work until they keeled over (retirement wasn't really a thing), and kids as young as 2 or 3. Outside of a very small class of aristocrats, everyone else had to work fulltime just for the very basics of living.

With the industrial age, men and women still had to work, this time in dangerous factories, to keep their families solvent. The only people who got a pass were kids who now could wait until 7 or 8 before joining the factory, and old people, who were kicked off the assembly lines when they were too weak.

Indeed, for the vast, vast majority of human history, men and women worked their butts off (albeit often in different jobs) to keep their families afloat. As productivity improved, fewer people needed to work, but women were the last to be freed of this responsibility. First, child labor laws meant children could go to school and avoid working until 16-18. Next, social security and pensions allowed old people to spend at least a few of their final years in a reasonable retirement.

Finally, women were able to stay at home. And it was only for a few decades that productivity rose so high that something previously inconceivable could be possible: in an average family, a single wage could now support 6 people: 2 parents, a husband and wife, and 2 kids. Contrary to feminist thought, the novel idea was not that women could work, but that they could be afforded the privilege of staying home and caring for the family. And even that was not universal. Plenty of women (about 1/3rd) worked in the 50s/60s. Most of them were in lower and working class groups, where a single wage was still not enough to live on.

What's more, even the housework that was remaining had become so much easier: in the old days, cooking meant threshing the wheat, gathering the water from some distant stream, churning butter, and sitting over an open fire breathing smoke for hours in order to make some tasteless gruel. Similarly, washing clothes meant taking them to a river and pounding them on a rock for an hour. By the 50s, advances in cooking, laundry machines, etc. meant that actually tending house took so few hours of the day that they had to invent a new form of entertainment to occupy the rest of the hours. Thus soap operas and tupperware parties. Any woman who thought being a housewife in the 50s was tantamount to slavery while watching soap operas every afternoon has no idea what their own mothers and grandmothers had to go through just a few generations ago.

So this was the first lie that women were fed: rather than celebrate their newfound freedom, they were told that being "forced" to stay home was a sign of longstanding patriarchal oppression, and that progress was to throw that away and join men in the workforce. No one bothered telling them that that was exactly opposite: progress was allowing women to stay home (just like children and elderly were allowed out of the workforce in previous years), and joining the workforce was the actual historical oppression that most people tried to avoid if at all possible.

2.

The second lie was that if women would just leave their comfortable home lives, they would all have the type of glamorous careers that they dreamt about. Feminists never told them the truth about work, something that men have known forever (and women knew, until they stopped working and forgot): the vast majority of work is largely soul-sucking drudgery, not some empowering, glamorous work; being beholden to a boss or (worse) some faceless bureaucrat in a distant corporate HQ for your monthly paycheck, career development, and daily marching orders is hardly a picture of independence; and the only reason to submit to such torture is to put food on the table for your family, not to "actualize your innate awesomeness" or some other BS propaganda that bosses talk about.

Sure, maybe it's more fulfilling to be a doctor and save countless lives than it is to raise 2 well adjusted kids and have a happy home life. But how about being a secretary, answering angry phone calls all day? How about being a janitor, sweeping floors every night? Are they really more fulfilling than raising a family? I don't mean to disrespect secretaries and janitors. Their jobs are absolutely needed. But none of them are under any delusions about how "empowering" it is to deal with Karens asking to speak to the manager, or scrub the toilets after the cafeteria has its weekly Taco lunch. Most of them do it because they need the money, and then try to get meaning in their lives from everything else they do, whether it's raise a family, be a good friend, win the local bowling league's championship, etc. And there are far, far more secretaries and janitors than there are doctors (also, if you talk to most doctors, they'll tell you how disillusioned they are by the profession, which turns out to be just as soul-sucking and frustrating as most others; they have one of the highest suicide rates of any career and many of them long to leave the field as soon as they save up enough money).

Feminism tells a woman that the only thing keeping her from being a CEO, or doctor, or lawyer, or multi-million dollar jetsetting humanitarian crusader / fashion icon (or whatever BS dream job women think exists) is the Patriarchy. But that's not true. If it was, then every man should be one of those. It's not like the garbageman never had dreams of becoming an astronaut. But the truth is, even for the vast majority of men, such careers are out of reach and were probably never within their reach due to a combination of their innate intelligence, social support structures, economic factors, and sheer dumb luck. The same applies to women.

The only reason guys still sign up for those thankless jobs is because there is no alternative for us. There's no rich woman waiting to marry a poor unemployed guy to raise a family with and share a life together. But no guy is foolish enough to think that it's "liberating" to spend your days filling out TPS reports while being beholden to some pointy-haired boss who can fire you whenever the company's profits take a dip.

3.

There's a common belief among the Left that racism is what the Right uses to keep poor white people and poor black people from uniting under a common economic cause. By keeping them divided and thinking each other is the enemy, they can avoid action against their corporate and Wall St. donor class. If that's the case, then the Left has used feminism to do the same: keep poor (i.e the 99%) men and poor women from uniting under a common economic cause to take action against the Left's corporate and Wall St. donor class (largely the same as the Right's donor class). Feminism taught women to view men as the problem rather than The Man. And it achieves the same purpose as racism for the Right.

And they do it the same way: the racial strategy is to convince a white man the reason he's poor is because a black man took his job, and not the fact that thanks to lax labor laws and favorable trade agreements, the job actually went to an illiterate 12 year old in China, with the CEO keeping the profit. Similarly, feminism says what's keeping a woman from having financial security / happiness / fulfilment in her life is her husband "forcing" her to stay at home, and she should instead depend on the vagaries of Corporate America to provide her those benefits. Just like a racist says "I may be poor, but at least I'm not black" (meanwhile he has to play dancing monkey for his corporate masters to keep his paycheck), a feminist says "I may be unhappy but least I'm not dependent on a man" (meanwhile, being utterly dependent on her corporate masters for that "independence").

It's not a coincidence that wages in America began to stagnate in the 70s, just as women began to enter the labor force in larger numbers. Under the guise of feminism (and civil rights, see my note below), there was a huge new influx of available workers. Of course that will lower wages.

4.

Now, all of this would be fine, *if* it increased women's happiness. That is, if women were truly unhappy or oppressed at home, and found greater happiness or got closer to their life's goals, by working, then feminism would be fine. After all, no man is entitled to his job, and if a woman can outcompete him for it, then so be it. But women's happiness has gone down, because it was a lie: only a tiny, tiny majority of jobs actually deliver enough intrinsic worth, challenge, respect, etc. that they beat the fulfillment and satisfaction that comes from raising a family. That's true for both men and women, but only men knew this. Their hope was that, if they put their noses to the grinder and worked hard, they could provide for that family, and if they married the right woman, she would raise that family well, and that joint life's work would be something both could cherish for the rest of their lives. As long as that possibility was there, men would be willing to break their backs (literally, as they disproportionately take the most dangerous jobs) to get it.

The bargain offered to men in the 50s/60s was this: "yes, most likely your job will be boring / dangerous / etc, but in exchange, you will earn enough money to marry a good woman and raise a family with her. And in the end, that will bring you fulfillment, not the job." The bargain wasn't easy, but at least it was an honest offer. Feminism offered this bargain: "yes, your mother was happy staying at home and raising a family, but you can do better. Sign up with us, and your career will give you even more happiness and fulfillment than your mother had raising a family." Or, at the very least, they promised that you could have both an amazing career *and* the same family life that their mothers had.

Unfortunately, most women didn't read the fine print on that bargain, which read: "a) <1% of you will get those jobs, because they're exceedingly rare and hard to get into; b) by signing this deal, you sign away your chance at the happiness your mother had, because you will be so busy building and then sustaining your career you won't have time to build a family life". IOW, by signing up for this deal, women agreed that they were either going to be part of that 1% with great, satisfying careers, or be left without the safety net of at least having what their mothers had: financial stability (through a husband), a family, and a life partner who, for all his faults, was still better than being alone.

How many of us play the lottery with our life's savings? That's what feminism fooled women into doing, and they bought it. And now, the ones who gambled away their safety net chasing that tiny fraction of careers are looking around wondering why they're even worse off than their "oppressed" mothers.

But it gets worse: feminism altered men's bargain too. Because now, men simply can't find a good woman to raise a family with, and even if they do, rising divorce rates and biased family courts mean they might lose their children and spouse regardless. So all of a sudden, the bargain they signed up for doesn't hold either. As a result, lots of men are asking "why am I working so hard and risking my physical safety if I can't find a good wife and raise a family anyway?" And deciding to go for an easier job which provides just enough for them to live a single life and make peace with that.

In the end, neither men nor women are happy with the choices they're now offered. Even the married ones now have to work 2 jobs to provide the same standard of living that 1 job used to provide before. Interestingly however, Corporate America is tickled pink about having doubled labor availability (while paying for the same standard of living as before), neither one now having a safety net, making them even more reliant on their bosses.

NB:

FWIW, I believe the civil rights movement to end racial discrimination for jobs was different, because access to those jobs *did* make lives better for black people. If a black man couldn't get a job, neither could his black wife, which meant the whole family was condemned to poverty. So allowing him (or her) to get a job was a net increase in their happiness and financial stability. But white women already had financial stability and happiness: through their husbands. Feminism was just asking them to transfer that dependence from their husband to their boss (ironically, usually also a man), while telling them they were becoming "independent". While Corporate America no doubt benefited from the influx of labor when minorities were allowed to compete for jobs, at least it did provide a net increase in happiness for those minorities (of course, the real solution would be to grow the economy and provide more jobs for everyone). There is no reddit full of black people wishing they could go back to being sharecroppers. Like I said before, if feminism did the same thing for women, increase their net happiness, then I would accept it as well, but it didn't.

5.

tl;dr summary:

1) The glass ceiling, ie the barriers to having a glamorous, fulfilling career, exist for everyone -- men and women-- and have always existed, and *will* always exist, even if The Patriarchy is demolished, for the simple reason that those jobs have always been rare and ultra-competitive to get into. If you demolish one barrier, another one will come up, because there just aren't enough of those jobs to go around for everyone who wants one. For every company that employs 100,000 people, there is only one CEO. For our country of 300 million people, there is only one President. Break all the barriers you want, it won't make the constitution allow for 2 Presidents.

2) In contrast, the glass floor for women has been gradually raised higher, to where women in the 50s/60s could avoid work, have financial stability, raise a family, have a life partner, and still have time to watch soap operas (or pursue other avenues of personal fulfillment like volunteering, reading books, developing hobbies and interests, etc.).

3) Feminism offered women the chance to break the glass ceiling, in exchange for removing the glass floor that acted as their safety net.

4) Women, having been out of the workforce for a generation, forgot how crappy most jobs were, and how few and far between the glamorous careers actually were, and took that deal. They were aided by feminists telling them that the only thing standing in the way of them becoming President was the men in her life (her father, her husband) keeping her down, conveniently forgetting that 150 million men also will never become President, because the bigger obstacles are things like class and money: every President for the past 30 years has come from an Ivy League school; here's the list from 1988 until this year (counting re-elections): Yale, Yale, Yale, Yale, Yale, Harvard, Harvard, UPenn. Also, here are the law schools of all of the current 9 Supreme Court Justices (men and women): Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Yale, Yale, Yale, Yale, Notre Dame. Gee, looks like Patriarchy is the real problem, right?

5) After taking the bargain, women then dedicated their best years to "building a careeer" as feminism told them that handing over your 20s/30s to a faceless company or (worse) paying an immensely wealthy University to take those years from her, was more "empowering" than dedicating those years to a man who loved her and would in turn dedicate his life to her. Because, you know, that career would be far more fulfilling than anything that oppressive, patriarchal man would give her.

6) After a few decades, many (most) women realize that they could not, and will not, crack the glass ceiling (turns out it's made of bulletproof acrylic, designed by the ones above it to protect themselves from the ones below, both men and women), and that the jobs they managed to find provided less economic security, fulfillment, or happiness, than the glass floor they gave up.

7) Meanwhile, men have been damaged too, since, with fewer women interested in focusing on building a family and being a good life partner, they're wondering why they need to work so hard at those same jobs. So now, fewer men are available who are willing to provide what their fathers did for their wives.

8) Thusly, having crashed through the glass floor, forced to work a soul sucking job to put food on their table, beholden to a boss less interested in their welfare than the most uncaring husband ever was, the vast majority of women have actually regressed: less happy, less secure, less fulfilled, less independent. Yet rather than recognize the failed ideology that brought them to that unhappy place, they double down on their assumption that men are the source of their problems while simultaneously crying out for us to rescue them.

Funnily enough though, for a winning socialist movement, corporate profits are up...