See, I totally disagree with this.

Well, not totally. People must create change. But the *environment* to create a change is created by technology. Women’s liberation couldn’t have had any success, no matter how many women railed against the inequalities of life, as long as women had no means of controlling their own reproduction… Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of the writer of Frankenstein, was an early feminist whose career in advocating for both human rights in general, and women’s rights in particular, was cut short by death in childbirth. That kind of says it all right there. Childbirth needed to become something a woman could avoid, with safe technology that was under her control, and it needed to become something that kills very few women who do undertake it, before a society that pushes all women who have children into child care could produce enough women who were free from the burden of child care that they could create a social change.

Slavery was not eliminated in the North until after the North’s industrialization made slavery less necessary. The South required slavery to maintain their agrarian economy, so they would not voluntarily get rid of it, but it took the North being free of slavery for many, many years before there could be a powerful enough abolitionist movement in the North that it could create serious opposition to the expansion of slavery, which is one of the proximate causes of the Civil War.

Yes, change won’t occur until the people make it happen… but often, the people can’t make it happen until a technological change occurs that allows large numbers of people to agree that the change in question can be implemented. (Sometimes the “technology” in question is a social science tech, rather than a physical science tech… for instance, it was the rise of the merchant classes in Europe that gave rise to the middle class and social mobility, which eventually gave rise to the Enlightenment and the notion that humans have inherent rights and that kings don’t have a divine right to rule. And the rise of the merchant classes may have come about because of the invention of the corporation. Ironic that an invention which promoted human freedom and human rights at one point may now threaten it.)

Hmmm? Puts that failblog post in a new perspective.

Second, we have a really long way to go. Yes, we now have washing machines. That means we get to have a career and housework too.

We do less housework than women did in the fifties. But that is not because we have changed gender norms. It is because standards of cleanliness have gotten lower. And many middle class women can afford to contract out their housework to a less fortunate woman.

Since the fifties, men have doubled the amount of housework they do. But when you double a tiny amount, it is still a tiny amount. And when men do housework, they choose the more preferred jobs, such as cooking and shopping. We are so grateful they are helping at all, and there is such a stigma attached to being a nag, that we are still not making them do the gross work like clean toilets. Plus, traditionally male jobs are weekend jobs like trash or mowing the lawn. Traditionally female jobs are every day, basically adding up to a second shift.

Many women make their sons do housework, and not necessarily gender based work. But when they see their fathers sitting on their ass, or doing the easier stuff, they are still more likely to sit on their ass when they grow up. Thus perpetuating the cycle.

All of this is also very linked to the wage gap.

It’s not _absolute_ bullshit.
After that, it sure depends a lot on the way it’s said ^^’

Yeah. Really, Labor-saving devices improve the efficiency of women’s efforts. This doesn’t really translate into more time to do what you want, it just means that there’s more energy to do more of that job!

Noone built a labor-saving device so that people could take a break. They built it to get more work out of you.

And we may just not agree on this, and that’s fine.