If Housewives Were Paid Salaries, cont.
September 15, 2012
IN RESPONSE to the post about the proposal in India to require husbands to pay their wives salaries, a proposal that is seriously being considered for a nation of over a billion people, thus proving that there are few unworkable fantasies beyond the imagination of modern, collectivist bureaucrats, the reader Forta Leza writes:
Here’s a thought experiment: What if a law were passed mandating that wives must cook at least five fresh dinners per week and do at least two loads of laundry per week? Or what if the law required that wives offer their husbands sexual relations at least once a week? Surely feminists would be outraged. And they would correctly note that under normal circumstances, the state should not get involved in peoples’ marriages. Which is exactly what is wrong with the wife salary proposal.
I think what’s really going on with these sorts of proposals is that feminists realize that withholding payment of money is one of the few things a man can do to enforce his authority over his wife. It’s illegal for him to hit her in any way but it’s still perfectly legal for him to withhold money as a method of punishment. Feminists hate traditional patriarchical marriage and desperately want to undermine it. They hate the fact that in a normal, healthy marriage it is the husband who exercises leadership and they really want to undermine the husband’s authority.
Laura writes:
Feminists also genuinely resent the fact that housewives choose to work for nothing when they have the option of paid employment. How can this be? And how can it be justified in liberal, pro-woman terms? After all, in their utterly materialistic worldview, nothing a woman does is honorable unless it is paid. So by paying housewives, feminists make sense of the fact that many women voluntarily forego what a feminist believes is the most exalted realm of human activity: the sphere of paid work. Reducing the housewife to paid employment is thus a great victory. As all else feminists accomplish, it is in reality a denigration and debasement of women as women.
—- Comments —–
Paul writes:
John P. writes:
