Regarding your post on Did Feminists Make Us Fat –
While it’s true that at one point in history a certain class of women were able to stay at home and focus on their family’s nutrition, it’s also true that many other classes of women were in the workplace, doing laudry, taking care of other women’s homes and families, etc., etc. Low income women and women of color, as a group, historically never really experienced the “stay at home mom” phenomenon. Low income families were lucky to be able to afford food at all, and even those families where the mom did stay home could be put into extremely precarious finacial straits if the father died or abandoned them. That was the origin of welfare – concern for the financial circumstances of widows of WWI. It’s easy to imagine another time and place where things would be easier, but historically, for the vast majority of women, life was harder than it is now. If you were lucky enough to be wealthy and content with a circumscribed life focused on the home and family, with a caring, fair and gentle husband, it was probably pretty sweet.
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Regarding your post on Did Feminists Make Us Fat –
While it’s true that at one point in history a certain class of women were able to stay at home and focus on their family’s nutrition, it’s also true that many other classes of women were in the workplace, doing laudry, taking care of other women’s homes and families, etc., etc. Low income women and women of color, as a group, historically never really experienced the “stay at home mom” phenomenon. Low income families were lucky to be able to afford food at all, and even those families where the mom did stay home could be put into extremely precarious finacial straits if the father died or abandoned them. That was the origin of welfare – concern for the financial circumstances of widows of WWI. It’s easy to imagine another time and place where things would be easier, but historically, for the vast majority of women, life was harder than it is now. If you were lucky enough to be wealthy and content with a circumscribed life focused on the home and family, with a caring, fair and gentle husband, it was probably pretty sweet.
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