I don't believe in some evil Patriarchy designed to intentionally keep women down with malice aforethought. I believe our current situation grows out of what worked best for humanity in the aggregate for most of human history.
I think our housing standards and our job standards are all rooted in a de facto expectation of a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother and dependent children. Jobs were designed for men to provide for their family.
Jobs for pay are an emergent phenomenon. Enough money circulating in the world to broadly support a work-for-pay model has only been around for 300 years or so.
Women weren't excluded from paid work to keep women down. It just made practical sense to shift male labor in the household onto the shoulders of women to free up men to go get a paycheck. That raised standard of living for everyone.
According to the book More Work For Mother that's how our current status quo evolved. Prior to paid jobs being some kind of norm, men and women both worked from home on a routine basis.
Whether they were farmers or bakers or shoe makers, your work and your living space weren't physically seperated like they are now. In town, bakers and the like routinely lived above or behind the shop where they made and sold their wares.
Before that, most people worked literally to provide for the needs of the family. Trade was something of an exception, not the norm.
Men raised crops or hunted food. Women had vegetable gardens and cooked and cleaned and made clothes for the family.
People labored to provide for their own needs and for the needs of their immediate relatives. They didn't work for money.
When working for money became a thing, it initially was fitted around the existing model. And then the existing model gave way to fit life around a paid job.
And that's led to problems that we didn't anticipate and people don't know how to escape this model. The almighty dollar has become excessively influential in how we decide how to spend our time and live our lives.
It's a model that works in a "patriarchal" system with a powerful male head of household and all that standard stuff so many of us have grown used to as the norm for the world. But it's not really how things used to work before money became so central to how our lives work.
And then women try to compete with men in a man's world on a playing field that is not level and never will be. The outcome is that it tends to not work well to do that and often does egregious harm to women to try to play that game.
I did have a corporate job for a few years but I spent many years as a full-time wife and mom. I left my corporate job when it became clear that would never work for me. I have health issues and that system was not ever going to serve me well.
I needed to leave that job to get healthier. I needed to leave that job as my only hope of resolving my financial problems.
In 2017, I applied for "my dream job" and didn't get it. I was told for some time that I might yet get another shot at it.
I no longer want the job and it's recently become clear in my mind that job suffers from the same ailment my corporate job suffers from: It's a "Yang" or patriarchal model that comes with a huge amount of systemic baggage about HOW you do things and I am incapable of living a "Yang" lifestyle.
It is absolutely essential that I arrange my life is some kind of "Yin" fashion. I can get things done if I work from home and put my personal welfare ahead of my job aspirations and so on.
That doesn't mean I can't have ambition. Kings and queens also "worked frome home" historically and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz revolutionized an industry so they could finally have children together.
The reason reruns of "I Love Lucy" wer so popular for so long on TV is because it is the oldest TV show for which we have archival quality foootage. They planned it that way from the get go and it was not the norm before that show.
I think Lucille Ball was past the age of 40 and wanting to have a baby. Her musician husband was on the road all the time and her movie career kept her on location a lot.
TV was a grueling industry at the time. You had to do TWO live performances a day to have a TV show, one for East Coast and one for West Coast American audiences. The times zones in between got shown some low quality recording of some sort.
They made "I Love Lucy" so they could broadcast ONE live show per day and have high quality recordings for the other time slots so they didn't have to work like twenty hours a day. They invented the re-run because they had to slow down the schedule to accommodate Lucille Ball's pregnancy.
I Love Lucy was the Star Wars of its day in terms of being technically revolutionary. Desi Arnaz had a home office and routinely continued to work late into the evening after they had dinner with the kids and read them bedtime stories.
It was more family-friendly for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to revolutionize the TV industry than to continue on with their entertainment careers by the standard path of the day. It allowed them to conceive and have children at all plus be home for dinner and read the kids bedtime stories, something not possible any other way as a Hollywood actor married to a career musician at the time.
I think we have erred too far in the direction of "Yang" patterns (for lack of a better word). I think it's doing a lot of harm and not just to women who want serious careers.
For the first time in my life, I think maybe being born with a genetic disorder might have been a feature, not a bug. It's the reason I never had a conventionally successful career.
It's the reason I see positives in what I have termed The Butterfly Economy while the rest of the world decries the death of the economy. Instead, I see the death of the old economy and the birth of a new one.
I don't think that has to be a bad thing at all. I think we can return to a more people-centered world where we don't worship the almighty dollar and don't sell our souls as wage slaves.
I think our housing standards and our job standards are all rooted in a de facto expectation of a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother and dependent children. Jobs were designed for men to provide for their family.
Jobs for pay are an emergent phenomenon. Enough money circulating in the world to broadly support a work-for-pay model has only been around for 300 years or so.
Women weren't excluded from paid work to keep women down. It just made practical sense to shift male labor in the household onto the shoulders of women to free up men to go get a paycheck. That raised standard of living for everyone.
According to the book More Work For Mother that's how our current status quo evolved. Prior to paid jobs being some kind of norm, men and women both worked from home on a routine basis.
Whether they were farmers or bakers or shoe makers, your work and your living space weren't physically seperated like they are now. In town, bakers and the like routinely lived above or behind the shop where they made and sold their wares.
Before that, most people worked literally to provide for the needs of the family. Trade was something of an exception, not the norm.
Men raised crops or hunted food. Women had vegetable gardens and cooked and cleaned and made clothes for the family.
People labored to provide for their own needs and for the needs of their immediate relatives. They didn't work for money.
When working for money became a thing, it initially was fitted around the existing model. And then the existing model gave way to fit life around a paid job.
And that's led to problems that we didn't anticipate and people don't know how to escape this model. The almighty dollar has become excessively influential in how we decide how to spend our time and live our lives.
It's a model that works in a "patriarchal" system with a powerful male head of household and all that standard stuff so many of us have grown used to as the norm for the world. But it's not really how things used to work before money became so central to how our lives work.
And then women try to compete with men in a man's world on a playing field that is not level and never will be. The outcome is that it tends to not work well to do that and often does egregious harm to women to try to play that game.
I did have a corporate job for a few years but I spent many years as a full-time wife and mom. I left my corporate job when it became clear that would never work for me. I have health issues and that system was not ever going to serve me well.
I needed to leave that job to get healthier. I needed to leave that job as my only hope of resolving my financial problems.
In 2017, I applied for "my dream job" and didn't get it. I was told for some time that I might yet get another shot at it.
I no longer want the job and it's recently become clear in my mind that job suffers from the same ailment my corporate job suffers from: It's a "Yang" or patriarchal model that comes with a huge amount of systemic baggage about HOW you do things and I am incapable of living a "Yang" lifestyle.
It is absolutely essential that I arrange my life is some kind of "Yin" fashion. I can get things done if I work from home and put my personal welfare ahead of my job aspirations and so on.
That doesn't mean I can't have ambition. Kings and queens also "worked frome home" historically and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz revolutionized an industry so they could finally have children together.
The reason reruns of "I Love Lucy" wer so popular for so long on TV is because it is the oldest TV show for which we have archival quality foootage. They planned it that way from the get go and it was not the norm before that show.
I think Lucille Ball was past the age of 40 and wanting to have a baby. Her musician husband was on the road all the time and her movie career kept her on location a lot.
TV was a grueling industry at the time. You had to do TWO live performances a day to have a TV show, one for East Coast and one for West Coast American audiences. The times zones in between got shown some low quality recording of some sort.
They made "I Love Lucy" so they could broadcast ONE live show per day and have high quality recordings for the other time slots so they didn't have to work like twenty hours a day. They invented the re-run because they had to slow down the schedule to accommodate Lucille Ball's pregnancy.
I Love Lucy was the Star Wars of its day in terms of being technically revolutionary. Desi Arnaz had a home office and routinely continued to work late into the evening after they had dinner with the kids and read them bedtime stories.
It was more family-friendly for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to revolutionize the TV industry than to continue on with their entertainment careers by the standard path of the day. It allowed them to conceive and have children at all plus be home for dinner and read the kids bedtime stories, something not possible any other way as a Hollywood actor married to a career musician at the time.
I think we have erred too far in the direction of "Yang" patterns (for lack of a better word). I think it's doing a lot of harm and not just to women who want serious careers.
For the first time in my life, I think maybe being born with a genetic disorder might have been a feature, not a bug. It's the reason I never had a conventionally successful career.
It's the reason I see positives in what I have termed The Butterfly Economy while the rest of the world decries the death of the economy. Instead, I see the death of the old economy and the birth of a new one.
I don't think that has to be a bad thing at all. I think we can return to a more people-centered world where we don't worship the almighty dollar and don't sell our souls as wage slaves.