Women's Day

My early contact with feminist literature were the writings of Erica Jong and Simone de Beauvoir. I was much too young and naive to fully grasp the significance of what I read. The value of their ideas came to me much later. The modern feminist agenda is a lot more confusing. This excerpt a blog post by Erin McKean is very typical of the female empowerment messaging that is currently in vogue 

You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

On the surface, this seems to be exactly right. Why would a woman need to botox-up to remain employable in her late 50s while a man can get away with quadruple chins? That is exactly the issue McKean is pointing out -  Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

While that sounds great that women do not owe rent to be female, there will be some consequences to not "try" and look "put together". Almost no woman in a powerful position ever shows up in public without makeup or nice clothes. They are not excused from paying rent on account of their very impressive resumes. For a young girl, these women serve as role models for who they may want to be when they grow up. 

So understanding the difference between reality and rhetoric helps. Seems to me that modern feminism has devolved into a lot of grand-standing but is not giving women levers to make the skewed system work for them. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from women who carved their niche in the most oppressive and backward societies, old matriarchs in families where men made all the rules. These women played the game using rules that were to their great disadvantage and still came out ahead. Their strategy likely involved building alliances and behind the scenes power-brokering but little overt discontent. Those are the skills our girls need to learn too.