theremorseless asked: In response to the "If you think that women should have to choose between family and a career, you might be a conservative." I read the article you used as a source for this and I'm just not quite understanding how it supports your statement. Please clarify where in the article it indicates that conservatives believe this (cite and paragraph number please). As far as I can tell, the woman writing the article saying it's not possible to "have it all" right now isn't a conservative?
These are all from the first page of the article.
“What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.”
Conservatives tend to believe either that men and women are equal and feminism is unnecessary, or that men being more powerful than women is just natural and shouldn’t be tampered with (depending on which camp you talk to).
“Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children.”
Conservatives generally oppose any sort of social support for people like single working mothers.
Conservatives believe in policies which cripple the job market for people seeking work, and are also opposed to affirmative action to help even the playing field for women who have been historically denied access to many professions.
Conservatives do not believe in subsidizing social support systems such as daycares.
Conservatives do not favor the kind of funding and regulation of public schools that would help improve the quality of education.
“The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.”
No comment necessary.
The author of the article was saying that it’s not possible to “have it all” as a woman because of the economic and social structures largely favored and perpetuated by conservatives. Make sense now?
