Is it feminism to insist that women enter the world of work whilst continuing to devalue traditional women’s occupations? Things like teaching, childminding, nursing, caregiving, housekeeping – at what point will these crucial professions be given the value, respect, and remuneration they deserve? When men start to do them?
Is it feminism to imply that women who choose to occupy a more traditional, unpaid domestic role without also holding a ‘male’ profession are wasting their talents? Does a woman with a CV gap due to unpaid domestic activities have less value when re-entering the workplace? Is she more of a liability? A risk?
Is it feminism to insist that women work without providing the childminding and caregiving infrastructure to facilitate this? And properly respecting and remunerating the workers – most commonly women – who occupy these roles?
If gender is an imposed social contract based on perceived biological sex, is it feminism for someone with female anatomy, having decided that they don’t want to occupy what they perceive to be a ‘female’ social role, to remove themself from this role with a nonbinary identity? Does this expand the respect and roles accorded to womanhood or does this merely expand what it means to be nonbinary? How do nonbinary people define womanhood such that they do not wish to occupy it? Is it that women are expected to look or act a certain way? To accomplish certain things? Is it feminism to define womanhood in a certain way, reject the definition, and insist therefore that you are not a woman?
Is it feminism to reject and belittle our female elders, to talk down to them, to patronise them for choices they made during their era and only extol and glorify the ‘rebels’ among them? How will the women of the future treat us when we’re no longer new, when our present is past?
Is it feminism to seek to occupy the male sphere at the expense of the female sphere? To continue to devalue and belittle women who seek to occupy and uplift this sphere? At what point do we rebuild institutions which are traditionally male, in order to better accommodate women? At what point do we open the female sphere to accommodate the needs of men?
At what point do all of these questions start or stop being feminist?
Sonya Blanck writings 