Thoughts interrupted by typos tries to answers the critiques who say that feminism and SOW is no longer relevant.
How?
By putting forward more feminist propaganda.
She writes:
While my job will be waiting for me if I take maternity leave, this isn’t the case for a great deal of women.
There's maternity leave across Canada. If a woman works 600 hours in the past 52 weeks, she is entitled to 55% of her salary. Maternity leave is guaranteed by law. The laws differ from province to province.
As Human Resources Canada says:
Maternity leave is now covered and protected in the labour/employment standards legislation of every Canadian jurisdiction, and in most collective agreements. It is designed to give expectant mothers the possibility of withdrawing from work in the later stages of their pregnancy and to allow them some time to recuperate after childbirth. Maternity leave clauses represent one of the key practices with respect to work and family balance.
Status of Women would not be any help on this issue, because it's not a federal issue: it's a provincial issue.
Maternity leave is well established in Canada. The quibble stems on the issue of how many weeks to allow, how much to pay and other conditions.
Furthermore, this career interruption and the still widespread expectation that childcare is primarily a mother’s responsibility contributes to a reduction in opportunities for women;
Once again, more feminist crap.
1. "Childcare is not primarily a mother's responsibility". Here's a clue: women have breasts. They breastfeed. Men don't. They have the hormones that wire them for nurturing. Their brains are wired to nurture. Men aren't. Women have the primary responsibility because of biology. They always have had the primary responsibility and always will. Once again, a feminist is denying the complimentarity of the sexes. Women mother because it is a woman's nature to mother.
2. She puts forward the notion that women are entitled to opportunities they did not create or seek out or merit because they have kids. Not on merit. Not on experience.
Every choice has an opportunity cost. If I choose to buy one dollar of goods, my opportunity cost is all the other goods I could have bought with that dollar. There's no injustice in an opportunity cost. Not to mention the fact, most women value having MORE than having a career.
those who choose not to have children.
What? If a woman chooses to have no children, she will gain more experience, more skills, more opportunities, not less.
As a result, we have a pay gap. “In 2003, the average annual pre-tax income of women aged 15 and over from all sources was $24,400, just 62% the figure for men.”
If you correct for childbearing and the type of job a woman chooses (pink ghetto as opposed to non-pink ghetto jobs) there is no pay gap. Society is not obliged to give women what they have not earned. If a woman wants to earn the same salary as a man, she can, by finishing the same degree and obtaining the same years of experience.
But even if I granted that the pay gap existed, SOW wouldn't do a thing about it, except pay another lobby group to lobby the government and write another study. SOW funds projects through its Women's programs. You can't fund a project to further the pay equity issue through SOW.
I suggest that if feminists are serious, they simply convince more women who don't want to be affected by the pay gap to take up non-pink ghetto jobs and not have kids. That would create more of a demand in pink ghetto jobs and that would drive up wages.
Something tells me this won't happen, because pink ghetto jobs, for all their crappy pay, fill a desire for women to serve and nurture other human beings. Women are good at that. Teaching, nursing, childcare, personal attendant-- these are all jobs that chime with a woman's desire to mother. You just can't kill that.
The federal government promised affordable daycare back when I was young enough for my mom to have benefited from it.
And we survived.
We still need feminist work to make it so that parenting is not an economic punishment for working families.
Parenting is an economic punishment? When you make a choice, it's not a punishment. If I choose to drive and SUV and pay the exorbitant price of gas, I am not being economically punished. I am paying for the choice I make.
Does that mean the government has no obligation to help those in need? No.
But this statement does show the twisted logic of leftists. Punishment implies someone is conspiring to make one suffer negative consequences for a choice. No one is punishing anyone for having kids. Rather, leftists feel punished because they think that if they're having a hard time making ends meet it must necessarily be someone else's fault.
I would also like to point out a slight contradiction in her statements. She says that parenting should not be assumed to be a woman's primary responsibility.
But daycare is a feminist issue.
Perhaps childcare shouldn't be considered a feminist issue. Works for me.
The only way SOW could possibly be helpful on this front is funding a childcare project. Otherwise, it can only fund another study or a lobby group.
Women around the world still face a real threat of violence merely for being women.
Yes, around the world women face many issues. But you do not need to be a feminist to acknowlegde this. The other thing that I find ridiculous is that radical feminists will claim that Western women (in general) are oppressed, which is patently ridiculous. What they really mean is that most women aren't socialists.
Many more often refrain from enforcing the laws they do have, and even in Canada, violence against women is often hidden.
Enforcement of such laws is a provincial jurisdiction. SOW couldn't help.
Women in Canada do not have the same level of representation in Parliament as men do.
So what? Why can't men do as good a job as women?
Maybe not enough women want to run for office. Is that a respectable choice? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that since are the childbearers, they have spent part of their active years having kids, raising them and not networking.
Is that such a bad situation? If men are doing the job, what's the problem?
It might also have to do with the way politics is. Politics is like sports or war. There's strategizing. There's fighting. There's networking. There's teamwork. It's not that women can't do these things, but men are more inclined to do them because men wired for this kind of activity. I know that some feminists are trying to change the way politics is done.
You can tinker here and there, but politics will always be the same because human nature will always remain the same. There will always be backroom boys (and girls), there will always be elites; there will always be insiders and outsiders, and so forth.
SOW funded one project in Laval to help women participate in politics. How much you want to bet it was feminists training women to become feminist politicians?
Quite simply, the Women's program was a feminist indoctrination fund. It's no wonder the feminists are all upset.
This is a qualitative statement, partially reflected by the sad spectacle of seeing the oh-so-few female Conservatives being given what seem to be essentially kamikaze portfolios, expected to take one for the team.
Or maybe it has to do with the fact that women are strong and can take a licking and keep on ticking. When women get minor portfolios, it's treated as tokenism, when they get tough portfolios, it's a stab in the back.
And then if the women can rise to the top, like Margaret Thatcher, and don't toe the feminist line, they're men in skirts.
I guess non-feminists can't win.
And that is that girls today are facing a crisis and that crisis stems from an inordinate and dare I say unnatural interest in their sexuality.
Encouraged, no doubt, by the feminist movement. It's the feminist movement that created this idea of the ultra-liberated woman being completely free of all sexual restrictions and boundaries.
From religious and social Conservatives, we have a seriously creepy interest in the virginity of young women.
Creepy? What the heck is creepy about virginity? Saying it's creepy is creepy. Being able to give oneself to only one sexual partner is a beautiful thing.
From Hollywood and the fashion industry, we have an intense pressure on teen girls to be more sexual.
And the so-cons are trying to DISCOURAGE that.
So which is it? Do we want virgins non-sexual girls, or sexual girls?
Not an easy contradiction to be facing when you’re still figuring things out for yourself. So yes, we need more feminist work to ensure that girls have positive role models and culture of respect when they’re growing up. And even after that.
Okay. We don't want girls to be sexual. But we don't want them to be virgins. We have to discourage them to be so sexual. But we can't encourage abstinence?
???
We do not need feminism to provide positive female role models. In fact, I would suggest it's the lack of positive MALE role models that's more of a problem. A girl who has many positive male role models is less likely to engage in socially toxic behaviour.
What I find noteworthy that this person doesn't think outside the box. Her answer to critic of feminism? Put forward more feminist assertions. Do not anticipate arguments, and do not show concretely how any of these issues would be helped by SOW.
What this boils down to is: feminism is still useless. So it the Status of Women Agency.
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