Yes. I think we try to work at changing the perception (except in hopeless cases!) but admit it is, in a hostile environment, a hard and often unrewarding task. And I, who really admires various of the early second wave radical feminists and also MacKinnon, don’t want to persuade people by disavowing them. But of course I do often go softly-softly and present a fairly lowest-common-denominator of “feminism” at first.
(But see my next comment.)

I face a room full of young women virtually all of whom insist that they’re “not feminists but…

I admit I was lucky, I didn’t get this. Not in my classes. (My “I’m not a feminist but” experiences come from outside class and often, outside academia.) My female students were heading for good jobs, probably initially at least, as good as the ones male students were heading for, yet they understood the feminist message (as it were). They disagreed with a lot of what I said but not on the basic points. I would have struggled a bit if they’d been like your students, as getting the material across while also having to argue for its very relevance would have been more than a little rough.

They regard feminism as a matter of ideology and personal style,

is this perhaps the influence of “cultural feminism”? Or are they simply very badly informed? (Both, I suppose.) I do understand your anger, cultural feminism drives me berserk and yes, can be, to a point, wonderfully unthreatening as well as non-productive. But still I’d want to keep the F-word. (sigh)

thanks for not being annoyed; I meant “feminist academic who writes about women/’gender issues’”, but somehow couldn’t phrase it.

Either you use this word, and are likely to scare off prejudiced people (and possibly hurt yourself), or you use other words, but then it might take a long time to get your views (or demands) across.

Yes. But also I don’t want to give in to those prejudiced people. I do though take your point abou economics (not only economics, I add; but it did seem to me one of the least hospitable fields for feminist studies). Also of course it’s normally thought “better” for people writing on gender to work in a department other than women’s studies/gender studies. As that’s been so for decades, I can’t see it changing.

(There can be good reasons for a feminist to choose another type of department, but that’s another story.)

Connecting your comment about hegemonic masculine identities with your comment about making it easier for men to take care of kids, would it be fair to say that one feminist strategy or option you see is that creating alternative status roles for men that are not hegemonically masculine will help women by changing the gender “caring mix” in non-market work?

I can see where this reveals a tension within feminism, where one group seeing non-market caring work as hopelessly low status wants to decrease the importance of it for personal growth (such as strategies that shift more caring work of the young and the old to the state or the market) and another group that think the only way to get men interested in increasing the status of this work is to create envy and exclusion about it – for example, by raising the status of recapturing these tasks from the state and market such as homeschooling and more time at home in general.

People holding these opposing positions can get in some nasty spats.

On your first question (#44) – would it also be possible that there is no one single driver, but rather that there are a number of causal effects that reinforce eachother? In any case, identities play an important role—especially hegemonic masculine identities play a hampering role in creating a more gender just society. And of course, we shouldn’t be naive and think that households work entirely according to rules of love and altruism – household members often also have competing interests and the gendered nature of the labour market doesn’t make it easier for women to have or work towards gender egalitarian households, if they would wish so (as many do indeed).

I’m so glad you self-identified as a feminist, because with so many of them being circumspect about it its hard to find one to ask questions.

A second question. What is the feminist position on the use of economic power for status and power purposes. What is the legitimate market for condescension and inferiority.

An example, let’s say person A likes the people who perform services for her (say retail sales) to grovel and suck-up. She is willing to pay extra to feel superior to the help. Person B does not. Person B derives no pleasure from feeling superior and won’t pay a higher price to be in charge.

Is this use of economic power legitimate?

Now, carrying this further let’s assume that 75% of men are type A and for women its only 50%. Furthermore, let’s assume that the type A’s carry this behaviour over to marriage. The type A’s will pay to be superior (either in monetary or other ways, such as accepting a lower status mate.)

Now, it would seem that the type B people care less about status are willing to be looked down on for money. It seems to me that the B’s have a rational position because only snobs believe in status, so what’s the harm, right?

On the other hand, isn’t there a feminist case to be made that unless this trading of status issue is deemed illegitimate, then its harmful to women because the sensitivity of men to power in the relationship lowers opportunities for women to have equal relationships.

The paradox of my feminism, is that since women clearly are equal to men, how did they ever come to be perceived as unequal?

I’m curious as to how you view market-work feminist issues as compared to home-work feminist issues in terms of importance and cause and effect.

For example, the data in the USA on time use shows that women work more in the home and less at paid employment and men the opposite.

One explanation might run that the workplace is biased towards men, so it makes financial sense for the women to let the men work more and them to do more domestic chores. Fix the market and the home chores equalize.

Reversing the causality would say that men are unwilling to share the domestic chores so women compensate by working less which is a negative for women’s workplace compensation due to hourly pay scale effects. Under this model,fix the home attitudes and the market will follow along.

What mix of the two do you think is the driver, do financial issues drive the bias, or does the bias drive the finances?

For myself, I would say that the relationship issues far outweigh the market effects in terms of personal meaning. A question to test, would you rather make 20% more but be considered and treated as inferior or make 20% less but in other ways be treated as an equal?

Could the prince be talking about the workplace but mean “I love kids, but no way am I going to take care of them.”

Why do some men fear feminists? Are they protecting monetary privilege, or do they just hate domestic chores?

I understand that this is a sensitive subject, so hackles go up. My point doesn’t require that Ingrid be any sort of “-ist” in order to draw the response she describes. Doctor slack seems to realize this, perhaps because (s)he is better disposed to. Ingrid was introduced as a feminist, and that is all it takes. I don’t know when her disclaimer came in the conversation, but it seems to have come after the point at which the Prince’s face went funny. My point was that it is possible to misconstrue the Prince’s response as distaste for the views of feminists when it was instead a response to what he thought might be an uncomfortable social situation. The Prince is a public individual and we don’t know how many times he has suffered through lectures about vivisection, alien mind control or feminism. I wasn’t there, so I have to take Ingrid’s word for the atmospherics of the meeting, but in reading her desciption, I see hints of a man trying to make conversation, and on a topic that he has been given to believe is important to his conversational partner, while not sharing entirely the views of of that partner.

I cannot tell whether this –
“He then asked whether I had children. No, I didn’t. That seemed to disqualify me to talk about gender issues, because if I would have a child, I would have understood that women can never be equals to men, since they are the ones who become pregnant and give birth and care for children, and are therefore naturally unsuited to compete in the hard world outside.”

I realize that in the blogging world, one resorts rather quickly for tactical reasons to suggestions that others have failed to read the post, follow the links or whatever, but in this case, your suggestion is in error.

Yes, I think this is way too true way too often—in progressive politics generally, too, not just in feminism—and exactly the kind of thing I find really crazy-making.

A sadly common attitude: you’ll feel different when you have kids. Funny, I didn’t, either! But it’s their way of stopping the discussion and feeling that they’re ahead.

I tell people that history shows that people have combined parenting with all sorts of other activities, inside and outside the home, for the length of recorded history—it’s their perception that is the innovation and my understanding that is conservative, if we want to split hairs.

But I also have to agree with the earlier commenter that we do have a weirdly ironic situation where a huge number of women embrace feminist ideals but refuse to call themselves feminists because it’s become too associated with the ideas of some radical fringe feminists in the public eye.

In the trenches, teaching women’s studies and applied ethics classes, I face a room full of young women virtually all of whom insist that they’re “not feminists but…” They expect to have the same crack at good jobs when they graduate and to keep up with their careers when they have kids. It takes a mighty lot of talking and hard data to persuade even a few that discrimination exists and that the male/female playing field for a variety of reasons isn’t level.

Most look at the statistics about sex segregation and wage gaps and smugly conclude that it’s a result of other women “making choices”—choices which they of course won’t make. Most believe that gender equality was achieved long ago and that remedies, like equal opportunity regulations, are just part of some silly ideological agenda wrapped up with identity politics, bra-burning or whatever and has no practical import for them. The small minority who identify as “feminists” are even worse. They aren’t interested in bread-and-butter issues either. They regard feminism as a matter of ideology and personal style, like being a punk or a goth.

Semantics aside, how do you fix that? It’s the harmlessness of “feminism” as popularly understood that’s vexing—wearing tee-shirts proclaiming LGBT, hanging around the Women’s Center consuming chewy whole-grain cookies, little herbal teas and other feminist-approved foodstuffs. That’s not feminism—and that’s why, arguably, the term “feminism” has become a liability for feminists.

I think to stop using a name because people react to it adversely is a retreat.
I think you hit a nail here—this really is a dilemma for people with a feminist agenda. Either you use this word, and are likely to scare off prejudiced people (and possibly hurt yourself), or you use other words, but then it might take a long time to get your views (or demands) across. There really is a lot of strategic use of the term here – and often I think this is very wise indeed. For example, in feminist economics, those scholars whose research is more at the mainstream of economics, or who are working in countries where the word feminist is much more loaded, are more likely to describe their own work as ‘gender economics’, whereas those scholars who either have already burnt all the bridges to the mainstream, or who don’t care about their professional prospects, or who work in very progressive universities, would rather use the term ‘feminist economics’. (there is more to say about this, but in any case this is one aspect of it).

You would think, though, that such a person would have the wherewithal not to actually say out loud his ridiculous theories.

To clarify: I said “identifying yourself as,” not “introducing yourself as.” Ingrid (wisely, IMO) chooses not to introduce herself as a feminist in many situations despite the fact that she identifies as such. I was not talking just about the incident with the Prince (in which obviously the choice about introduction was made for her).