How Feminism Ruined My Life

There was a time where I would have been responsible for my children, my husband and my home. I would have been dependent on my husband financially and my work would have been caring for my family. As a younger woman this idea made me ill, it went against the “girl power” I bought into. To think of being dependent on anyone financially, let alone a man, was inconceivable. To spend my days doing laundry and patching the knees of kids clothes as I cooked and cleaned my way through each week, mundane and beneath me. It went against my nature to want these things, I was told that women were more than this. We were capable and intelligent and should be in the work force. Please understand I do believe these things to be true. I am intelligent, capable and in the work force. I am also all of the other things that a 50s housewife was back when. Today what we have done to ourselves in an effort to make things “equal” is make ourselves stretched so thin that I wonder if we are doing justice to our families or ourselves.

I am a single mother, because with equality came divorce. Now that both partners work, there is little financial requirement to stay together. A husband who used to have some shame about having an affair, really doesn’t. A husband rarely walked out on his wife and kids when the mother stayed home, he was responsible for the family. He was doing his duty! Now, we have convinced them that we don’t need them, we can take care of it all, so they leave us for their mistresses. We proved that we can go to work all day, then come home and take care of the kids, cook and clean and seemingly keep the house afloat. So, why do we need them again? Equality has created men who feel less manly and those who want a woman who isn’t tired and nagging at them all the time about “the house”. So, they apply the 80/20 rule and get themselves a woman without kids and entanglements whose only focus is them to distract them from their home. Meanwhile, the wife has to work twice as hard, for generally less pay, and is unable to take the time to care for their kids at the same level as they would have in the 50s. She can’t devote herself fully to the kids or to her husband, because there is always something else to be done. All the things she didn’t get done while she was at work.

My son used to spend 10 hours in daycare. from drop-off to pick-up, before he started school. Boy how I wish that I had been told that being a full time mom was 100% times more rewarding than being a full time employee and a part time mom. Now, that he is in school he is still too young to be a latchkey kid, so he goes to school and then to after school care. I envy the kids and the moms who get to walk to the school and pick-up their kid and take him/her home to have snack and ask about their day, go over homework with time to spare. I am in a rush to get him by the time after school care closes, then in a rush to get home to start dinner, we do homework while I am cooking which makes me distracted and mediocre at homework help, then its time to eat, time for dishes, bath/shower time, and if we are lucky time to sit and read or watch a little TV before its bed. How is this a more liberating life than my grandmothers?

I wish that I was stuck in the 50’s, that my husband had been decent enough to hide his affair and stay with his family. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, we all think a woman should leave a man who cheats on her, but if I never knew would I care? What I care about now is that my son doesn’t have us both to tuck him in at night. That I am a worker bee and homemaker all day everyday with little rest or time to breathe. That in a quest for equality what I got was a lot of stress, guilt and little compensation. 

What feminism gave to me is the right to choose whether I want to work or stay home and maybe the truth is I just chose wrong. Or maybe there is little choice anymore in an economy packed with 2 income families, wanting bigger and better things for their families. Maybe what we lost when we gained equality was the knowledge that the only thing that matters in life is family, love, children and time. If you asked me today what I want to be when I grow up I would say a homemaker. It’s the career I never knew I always wanted!