Thread by @manumiss1on

Privilege is indeed about choice. The only why people can deny female privilege is then to claim that women's choice is a forced decision and men's forced position is a choice.
Which is exactly the lie that feminists tell.

I'm reporting that feminists are wrong about being forced to stay at home, becasue they are.
Being *allowed* - not *forced* - to stay at home is a privilege. Historically only some women had that privilege. Men were *forced* - not *allowed* - to go to work to support women.

The difference between being *allowed* to do something and being *forced* is important.
It's the difference between employment and slavery.
Between sex and rape.
Between imprisonment and accommodation.

This is why feminists always frame men being forced to do something as men being 'allowed' to.
draft - men being forced to fight is cast as men being 'allowed' to fight.
gender roles - men being forced to support women under threat of imprisonment = men being 'allowed' to work

This is as ridiculous as a man claiming female rape victims are privileged because they are "allowed to have sex".
Or slaves are privileged because they are "allowed to work".
Or conscripted men are privileged because they are "allowed to fight".
Oh wait, that last one is real

Since some people still credulously believe the feminist narrative that men historically (and present) were not forced to work and that women were not 'allowed' to work, let's go through the facts.
Some citations in screen-shots to save space. (thread)

Myth 1: Men don't want to stay at home
A 2007 survey by the employment web site Monster.Com found that 70 percent of fathers would be a stay at home parent if money were no object.
(1)

Warren Farrell reported in "The Myth of Male Power" (978-0-425-18144-7) that 80% of men he surveyed said that if they could stay at home with no loss of income and their wives approval, they would.
(2)

Myth 2: Women want to work outside the home
Only 10 percent of British part-time female workers surveyed expressed an interest in working full time [Stockman, Women's Work in East and West, p. 200.]
(3)

Women are far more likely to file for divorce if her husband does not work but she does than vice versa.
(4)

80 percent of women said they would ostracise a man who failed to provide for his family "as he should"
(5)
L. Staines, "Men and Women in Role Relationships," in Ashmore and Del Boca, eds., The Social Psychology of Female-Male Relationships, p. 228.

Feminists in particular have repeatedly complained about declining alimony (men paying so women do not have to support themselves).
(6)

Myth 3: Historically women were not 'allowed' to work outside the home.
In early agricultural societies women worked by grinding grain for as much as 5 hours a day to make flour, in addition to tilling soil and harvesting crops by hand.
cam.ac.uk/research/news/…
(7)

Confirmed by studies of Ancient Egypt which show that almost all non-aristocratic women worked, including spinning, combing, and carding cloth.
(8)

This lasted till the *early* (important) industrial era.
A study of 1,350 working-class households from the early 19th Century Britain suggests that the husbands’ proportion of family earning was as low as 55 percent.
(9)

Between 1787 to 1815 in families with unemployed children (!) wives earned 41 percent of household income.
(same citation)
(10)

In 1833 Britain, women made up 57% - the *majority* - of factory workers.
(11)

The share of household income generated by women started to decline rapidly from 1850.
[Horrell and Humphries, "The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family," p. 48]
(12)

We can speculate this was because the extra wealth from industrialisation meant it became possible for some people to not work outside the home, and women got this benefit.
(13)

By 1890, women’s work in Europe and the United States contributed just 1.9 percent to 3 percent of household income.
(14)
[Haines, Life Cycle, Savings, Demographic Adaptation, p. 49, table 3.1.]

This was entirely because of married women being supported by their husbands.
By 1887, 3/4 of female workers in German cities were under 25 years old. 96 % of them were single.
(15)

By 1911 only 25% of British women worked. By 1939 only 10% of married American women worked.
(16)

This is a good overview of the late Victorian era, still more women being 'allowed' to work outside the home than feminists claim, but far fewer than pre-industrialisation.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
(17)

This change from close to the vast majority of women working (pre 1850s) to a small percentage (by 1930s) was overwhelmingly welcomed by women, and universally seen as a benefit to women.
(18)

John Stuart Mill, thought that “it is not... a desirable custom that the wife should contribute by her labor to the income of the family.” - Mill, The Subjection of Women, p. 47.
(19)

The German Government stated in 1940: "the goal remains to ensure that, in 20 years' time, no woman is obliged to work in a factory." [Winkler, Frauenarbeit im Dritten Reich, pp. 110-9.]
(20)

In the Soviet Union, when mothers got permission to work part time instead of full time, and fathers still had to work full-time, this was welcomed as "liberating" by women's groups.
(21)

Even as late as 1915 Clementina Black was bemoaning the fact that so many women had to work to keep a roof over their heads, supporting their husbands in bringing home the bacon.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
(22)

During WWII, when many women had to do war work in factories, it was found that
women had been "made miserable by the [war work]" and "fervently wished themselves back into their prewar home routine."
(23)

During WWII the British and US governments spent a fortune on propaganda encouraging women to work, but less than 40% of women of working age in both countries took it up.
Men were not given the choice.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys
(24)

Myth 4: Historically men were not forced to work outside the home (usually phrased as "men were allowed to")
The way this is implemented is by forcing men to support women, and take sole responsibility to support children. For most men this means having to work.
(25)

As early as 92BC men were forced to support their wives by law.
[Marylin Arthur, "'Liberated' Women: The Classical Era," in Bridenthal and Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible, p. 75.]
(26)

Men who refused to support their wives were legally punished under Roman law.
[Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity, p. 146.]
(27)

Vedic law and traditional Islamic law also say a man must support his wife. (28)

In English common law, men must support their wives. This was reinforced in successive acts of parliament in 1861, 1881, 1920 and 1964.
In practice nowadays it is enforced by the woman divorcing and claiming support.
[Gillis, For Better, for Worse, p. 199]

In the 19th Century women could sue their husbands for maintenance while still married, and if she won the man could be imprisoned.
(31)
[Gillis, For Better, for Worse, pp. 209, 251]

After 1880 in Britain laws were passed absolving women of liability for their husbands’ debts. But husbands’ liability for their wives’ debts were universal and absolute.
Men could, and were, imprisoned for not paying their wives debts.
(32)

This also applied after divorce; in Victorian England and the USA a divorced woman had the right to be maintained "at the level to which she had been accustomed."
And similarly elsewhere. (33)

As late as 1979, the United States Supreme Court had to strike down an Alabama law that denied alimony to a person simply because he was male [Leo Kanowitz, "'Benign' Sex Discrimination: Its Troubles and Their Cure," Hastings Law Journal, 31, 6, July 1980, p. 1386-7]
(34)

The result of this is that men spend nearly twice as much of their total time working than women - 66% vs 34%.
(35)
[United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report, 1995, table 4.2.]

Neither sex wants to work outside the home.
Both sexes want to stay at home with the children.
Historically only men have been forced to work outside the home to support their partners.
Being denied a choice is not 'privilege'.
Being given a choice is not 'oppression'.
(end)