For Clinton feminists, not all women are equal
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Female liberation has been captured by a wealthy elite.
[…] When it comes to embracing feminism, there’s a well-established gap between working and middle-class women on both sides of the pond. One UK poll from 2018 showed that 31% of middle-class women think of themselves as feminists – a figure which dropped to a mere 20% among working-class women. And the numbers are broadly the same across the US; 16% of women educated to high school level identify themselves as feminist compared to 26% of graduate women. Why is that? Surely feminist liberation and equal opportunities are for all women? Well, kind of. When you look a little closer, it becomes clear that the Clinton feminism of “gender” doesn’t just sweep class under the carpet (or, perhaps, asks the cleaner to do so). It also hides what ‘gender’ refers to: sex.
The relation between class and sex becomes clearer when you remember that chasing workplace equality gets steadily easier the less physical a job is. It’s one thing to demand an equal right to earn hundreds of thousands a year as a lawyer, but there’s no feminist campaign for an equal right to become bin men. And everyone knows why. It’s because waste collection is arduous work, and males are – as I learned aged 11 – almost always stronger than females.
Gruellingly physical jobs are just less appealing, too. You’re bound to fight harder for a crack at the jobs traditionally done by men in your social class if those jobs have titles like “lawyer” rather than “sewage worker” or “bin man”. And even for lawyers, Clinton feminism can only ignore sex so far: what we call the “gender pay gap” is mostly an effect of the brutal fact that smashing the glass ceiling is difficult to combine with having babies. Although this is also easier if you’re rich, because along with doing non-physical jobs wealthy women can subcontract the work of raising babies – and even, for some, gestating them. Seen from this perspective, the shortfall in working-class women identifying as “feminist” seems justified.
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