Turns out “feminist” in 2019 means “Woman who married a high-income man, then quit her job to ‘focus on starting and raising a family.’ [Wikipedia]”
[See also, the Rationale chapter of Real World Divorce:
Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”
We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”
Why isn’t there a rift in the sisterhood, with women who work full-time expressing resentment that women who met dermatologists in bars are relaxing at home with 2-4X the income? “[Child support profiteering] is kind of an underground economy. Most people just don’t know what is possible. We hear a lot from the media about deadbeat dads who don’t pay any child support and the poverty of single mothers. The media doesn’t cover women who are profiting from the system. The average person assumes that equal shared parenting is the norm and that, in cases where a man is ordered to pay child support, it will be a reasonable amount.”
How did we get to the divorce, custody, and child support system that prevails in Canada and in most U.S. states? “This is because of the amazing success of feminism,” answered Professor Fiamengo. “The movement has totally changed the sexual mores of society but held onto the basic perceptions that had always advantaged women, e.g., that a woman was purified through motherhood. Feminism did not throw out the foundations of the old order that it pretended to reject.”
Note: Professor Fiamengo had some interesting comments on the Christine Blasey Ford situation]
Related:
- “Melinda Gates: Capitalism needs work, but it beats socialism and the US is ‘lucky’ to have it” (CNBC), in which we learn that the woman who married a multi-billionaire is brave enough to say “she’d rather live in a capitalistic society than under socialism.”
Phil, you know Dr. Fiamengo? I am a huge fan.
I haven’t met her in person, but was on the phone call when we interviewed her.
To her credit, Melinda Gates does not present as a “gold digger.” She was known to take her three children to MCD after pre-school. Her budget for clothes and shoes is the antithesis of one Lauren Sanchez (Jeff Bezos’ one-time girlfriend). Her engineering degree and Duke MBA make her just another highly educated woman whose children benefited in theory from her full-time presence. I give her credit for wanting to travel to darkest Africa, rather than going only to cosmopolitan locations where her daughter competes as an equestrian (thus the Gates’ home in Florida with stables). At least Melinda isn’t an environmental activist like Laurie David (Larry David’s ex) who owns multiple homes and flies via private jet from the Vineyard to Santa Monica.
Not a gold digger just lucky that the sexiest boy toy she knew was 10 years older CEO at her place of work and a billionaire.
While Melinda hit the jackpot with Bill, there were quite a few men who’d been recruited from Harvard ’80 & ’81, who by virtue of stock options became phenomenally wealthy, whom she could have dated & potentially married. Luck played a huge role, but the odds were with her since the gender imbalance on the MSFT campus in the 1980s made her popular beyond her wildest dreams.
Bypassed millionaires to bang and bag the billionaire. Def not golddigger.
@Anonymous — I think it was more innocuous in Melinda’s case. I prefer to assume she was ambitious, so got a job at MSFT out of Duke’s School of Business. From an economic point-of-view, there was little utility to Melinda remaining at MSFT once their first child was born. With her engineering background, she would have been employable had she divorced Bill, and returned to the workforce. Is it fair to assign nefarious intentions to her, or to MacKenzie Bezos?
Wouldn’t say the same for Bezos’ erstwhile girlfriend, who has been involved with various NFL players as a way of life.
@Suzanne they are all living off men therefore are all true modern feminists.
So if everyone woman in the world was virtuous and self-reliant, Gates and Bezos would have no options for female companionship. Maybe Sam Walton’s daughter would be the exception, or one of the other 10 or 20 billionaire women on the planet. Fortunately for them, they’re not limited to such a small pool of potential partners.
@Vince nobody said every woman had to be self-reliant. OP asks why label as feminist a woman who is not self-reliant.
Ironic that the woman at Microsoft least interested in money ended up f**king the richest man at the company.
This blog should be renamed.. Reading the NYtimes so you don’t have to!
So this post includes three words ending in -ism. It’s pointless to discuss what feminism is since the people who call themselves feminists disagree what it means.
Regarding capitalism and socialism, it’s once again a good time to recall that the Gates fortune, one of the largest in world history, was accumulated in an industry built on corporate welfare. It might be mildly interesting to see if Mrs. Gates considers that to be part of what she calls capitalism. The bottom line, though, is that it’s been clear for 11 years now that discussing socialism and capitalism in the USA is waste of time.
The government buying things it needs to govern(i.e. Military R&D) is definitely part of “capitalism.” You could argue about definitions all day long, and conservatives certainly abuse the label, but if you don’t have some sort of replacement of private property rights over capital with social ownership, it’s not socialist. If Melinda Gates had problems with other people using government-funded research to launch private enterprises, or had a problem with other people earning fortunes, that would be very interesting. If she’s merely against expropriation of wealth for the soothing of popular envy or against turning ownership rights over to “workers” or the government, that’s not that interesting.
Presumably the definition of capitalism should include the notion that there should be rewards to the people who paid for the R & D if that R & D leads to profits. In this case the taxpayers paid for R & D, but the government didn’t apply for patents and demand license fees. If Dell purchased a single copy of Windows and then installed it on 10 million laptops, Microsoft wouldn’t be so generous. It sounds like many fans of capitalism are quite pleased by this kind of corporate welfare. It would be understandable if Melinda Gates held that view. It doesn’t really make much sense for the vast majority of the population didn’t get rich from that corporate welfare.
I hope that you aren’t blaming the long-suffering American taxpayer for DOS, Windows 3.1, BASIC, or the Baroque menus of Word!
Most things in the software field developed before
1980, had some taxpayer involvement. The most important exceptions were things developed at Bell Labs, which was a monopoly regulated by the government.
The project received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which was used to purchase a GE-225 computer for processing, and a Datanet-30 realtime processor to handle the Teletype Model 33 teleprinters used for input and output. A team of a dozen undergraduates worked on the project for about a year, writing both the DTSS system and the BASIC compiler.[4] The main CPU was later replaced by a GE-235,[4] and still later by a GE-635
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
> I hope that you aren’t blaming the long-suffering American
> taxpayer for DOS, Windows 3.1, …
Vince didn’t, so I will…
Taxpayer are also voters (“No taxation without representation!”): therefore they can, at least to some extent, be held responsible for the legal framework within which Microsoft has operated.
Bill Gates’s genius was to realise, earlier than most, that “copyright + network effects = massively lucrative monopoly” if he could win a major market share for PC software. This is to use the word “market” loosely since of course the law forbids anyone from providing MS software, or variants thereof, without MS’s permission. (Contrast with Linux which anyone may offer with whatever modifications they like.)
The long-suffering American taxpayer who groans about the latest Windows affliction should save some blame for an under-appreciated culprit – himself!
It is amusing to see how Melinda clumsily tries to jump on the latest virtue-signaling train while exemplifying everything it’s supposed to be opposed to.
SK nails it. Melinda saw an opportunity via a luxe family safari in Africa to become a philanthropist, rather than a scorned SAHM who’d squandered her education on 3 children. The absurd preferential tax status to charities/foundations aided and abetted her quest to find meaning once she and hubs were incipient empty nesters. Melinda exudes capitalism in her every speech and book interview.
Wait, Vince is Russian?
Selecting for men who were more likely to pay than be paid in a divorce was the effect of feminism on generation X’s later marriages. As if marriage couldn’t get any worse after baby boomers, forget about having any connection now.