Monday, April 30, 2012
Feminist Capitalists?
I asked my husband to guest post tonight, because he recommended I read a "great" article from yesterday's FAS (Sunday Frankfurter Allgemeine, a German Sunday edition of a rather serious daily national newspaper), which I didnt find that interesting. It was on how capitalism has created a new modern feminist: careerists. (He didnt want to write about it, so I will.)
These "feminists" argue that women who have children are moving a step backwards, giving up their financial independence and opportunity for self-fulfillment.
I didnt understand what was novel about this argument, but my husband claimed that men these days only come across such "feminists". I guess a la German Family Minister Schroeder, whom I wrote about a while back. "Feminism" defined as "anti-stay-at-home-motherhood". I responded by saying that he's obviously surrounded by careerist women at work, and few female politicians who are high enough to make public statements on women other than Ursula von Leyen (Germany's Employment Minister, mother of six or seven) even have children.
Is this not just an extreme version of my own argument: don't say at home for too long, or forget that there are other important issues in the world to talk about and act upon? It's just the black view ("no kids!") vs. the white view ("nothing but kids!"), whereas to me it makes perfect sense that one can aspire to the gray ("kids and career...in that order of priority, but in some sort of fulfilling balance!").
These extreme positions again made it clear to me how difficult it is to define feminism. How in the world are women ever to improve their position if there is so much battle between these extreme and mutually exclusive views (and policies that follow from these)?
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Read that article as well but didn't like it. As you say, the argument is not very new and it's very extreme, without mentioning the gray, or that there are different definitions of feminism. What I particularly didn't like about the article was this undertone of "...and this is why feminism is a bad, and stupid, and exaggerated thing".
ReplyDeleteI don't like to use the term "feminism" precisely because everyone has a different idea of what it exactly means (sort of like economic growth - quite liked the op ed about different politicians' different ideas of growth in the same paper).
I suspect the FAS, or at least its conservative editors in the politics and economics sections (the Feuilleton editors are very different, I think they are based in Berlin, not Frankfurt), have an agenda to promote their conservative views by including such suggestive articles. (Anti-)Feminism has been on their agenda for several issues now (remember the stupid Gesellschaft-article about how the Betreuungsgeld really doesn't have the negative impacts its critics say, as proven by a handful of Bavarian career women who would like the money so they have to pay less for their nannies out of their own pockets?). That's why I sometimes don't read the politics section at all, and the economics section with a big pinch of salt.
Thanks, Jonna. Glad I wasnt the only one who didnt feel that the article did justice to "feminism" in any form. I rarely read the FAS, although there are few alternatives on a Sunday (newspaper-wise).
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