Women forced onto fishing boats? Not quite.

I came across a couple more items on feminism today.

The first is a definition of feminism by Susan Faludi. According to Susan Faludi, feminism:

asks that women be free to define themselves instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

That fits with my own claim that feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. It is liberalism which wants individuals, above all, to be self-determining or self-defining. So if your aim is to maximise the extent to which women are self-determining and self-defining what do you do? Well, you reject roles that are predetermined, such as motherhood, in favour of roles which can be thought of as uniquely chosen (career). And you promote the idea of women being independent of men, mostly through career, but also through state welfare schemes.

When you follow this kind of logic, equality comes to mean, above all, equal participation in the labour market.

And so it's no surprise that the European Union has been looking into the underrepresentation of women in the fishing industry. One member of the European Parliament, Stuart Agnew, is a member of UKIP and he challenged the EU on this policy. He used question time to ask:

What is the end game? ...Is this the beginning of a legislative process to say to people in the fishing industry, you have got to employ more women?...And if it's legislation what are you going to use, the carrot or the stick? ...In ten years' time, where do you think we ought to be with this?

Stuart Agnew wondered in his questions if the EU would force a role reversal in which the husbands would be expected to stay home while their wives manned the fishing boats. He asked the very interesting question of what the long-term aims of the EU feminists were on this issue. What was the response? The chair, Dolores Carabello, took a while to compose herself, but then gave this answer:

I was a bit taken aback, but really I think that I'm not aspiring to perfection, I'm trying to be intellectually rigorous, I'm not a clairvoyant, so I don't know what's going to happen in ten years. What I don't really want is that you've got attitudes like that of Mr Agnew, who is denying women the same rights and responsibilities that men have in the sector. That's what this is all about. We're trying to improve the situation in areas in which its been shown that women are an active part, an economically productive part, but this role has not been adequately recognised. Let's hope that in ten years that we have proper equal opportunities which the women are fighting for.

There are two interesting things about this answer. First, I think this is an insight into the mindset of the liberal managerial class. Dolores Carabello is not a revolutionary. She doesn't want to implement a grand plan through one violent, forceful action. She belongs to a class of people which is used to getting what it wants over time through its use of government agencies.

What she does have is a principle, which she frames as women having the same rights and responsibilities in the paid workforce, but which is really better expressed as the promotion of women's career outcomes. Once she has that principle, then her aim is to use administrative measures to carry it through over time. Where it leads to ultimately she doesn't know, nor does she really need to know.

I understand this, as I think much would be the same of traditionalism. We have very different principles to Dolores Carabello, and although we could lay out what our ideal society might be based on these principles, it would be difficult to say in advance how much of that would be realistically achieved over time. It would be enough to know that a community was advancing according to those principles.

Anyway, right now the intention of the EU is not to force women onto fishing boats. I read the EU document and the authors recognise that women don't want to go onto fishing boats as the work is poorly paid and dangerous (read my post on Trawlermen for some idea of the difficulties of working on a trawler in the North Sea). The EU report states:

Women on the whole don’t wish to go to sea and aren’t particularly wanted, so whilst ensuring that women can participate if they so wish (i.e. no unfair barriers) there is little point in pushing for greater involvement.

There are extraordinarily few women working on fishing boats. In Belgium there is one woman; not a single one in Denmark; none in Finland; and one full-time worker in the Netherlands and three part-timers. These figures suggest just how little this career appeals to women.

If there were more money or status in it, I'm sure the EU would be ready to push women into the field no matter what. Instead, what the EU wants to do is to promote women in the more lucrative fields (administration and aquaculture) and get them out or let them stay out of the less lucrative areas (processing/fishing boats). Here is what the EU report states on processing:

There is clearly discrimination in processing, but it is perhaps best to help women exit the industry rather than concentrate on upgrading what are likely to always be low grade jobs. So in non-FDAs there is little justification for special support other than the general education/training that will allow women to move out of these undesirable jobs

So it's not really a case of "equal opportunities" or "the same rights and responsibilities". The principle is that whatever promotes women's career advancement is right and good. Therefore, the EU is happy to leave women off the trawlers and to get them out of the processing side, whilst they boost women in the administrative and training side of the industry (and attempt to formalise and professionalise some of the supporting work that fishermen's wives do at home).

If that approach were to hold over time would women be equal in the industry? No, they would not be equal, they would clearly be privileged. They would have the cushier jobs, whilst men did the dirty, dangerous and lower paid work. But for now the principle is "promote women's career outcomes" and so the EU bureaucracy is happy to push on in this direction.

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Does career make a life?

There's a story in the Daily Mail today about Nene King, a woman who once wielded much power in the Australian magazine industry.

It turns out that a friend managed to steal $223,000 from Nene King. How was this possible? Because Nene King was habitually high on cannabis and prozac and so didn't notice what was happening (according to her wikipedia entry she has also been addicted to prescription medication and has admitted using alcohol to "bury her problems").

The drug addiction struck me, because the last few women I've written about have all been powerful in the media industry and have all been addicts: the American feminist Elizabeth Wurtzel to heroin, the English feminist Julie Burchill to cocaine, another English feminist Suzanne Moore to heroin (I presume to heroin as she is described as a junkie), and now Nene King.

These women are living the highest dream offered to young women today, i.e. to be powerful working in a glamorous and creative field, and yet they have all needed drugs to get  by. Isn't one possible conclusion to draw from this that career, by itself, is rarely enough to anchor our lives.

Nene King had husbands (three of them), but had no children:

Nene King, at her height considered by many the most powerful woman in Australian publishing, confessed to being ‘ruthless … would not allow anything to come between me and the magazines’.

‘Power is an extraordinary thing,’ she confessed in Peter Fitzsimon’s biography Nene. ‘I didn’t want to be famous but I did want to be powerful.’

…Drug addiction and depression were part of a life that was too demanding.

‘Do I have any regrets? Of course. No children. Now, I can’t believe I went through with the abortions. I wish it was a different time. I would not have had an abortion. I hate abortions. I hate them with a passion. But I guess at the time that is what I had to do.’
 

A career, by itself, does not make a life. And yet that's sometimes the assumption when liberals talk about people "making it" or being "self-made" or having equal opportunity to make something of themselves. For instance, President Obama in his victory speech last year said:

I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight. You can make it here in America if you're willing to try.
 

 And from the same speech this:

We believe in a generous America...open to the dreams of ...the furniture worker's child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president.
 

The prize of life is assumed to be a professional career. And, in Obama's view, the "promise" of America's founding is to deliver such a prize to anyone who works hard, regardless of who they are or where they come from.

But what if you're the furniture worker rather than the scientist or diplomat? Does that mean you haven't made a life? How many people really get to work in a creative, high status, glamorous field of work?

And is it enough, say, to be a dentist? That's a well-paid and high status field in which you get to help people. But you're spending a lot of the day sitting in a chair drilling into the teeth of strangers. So does that qualify as a realisation of life and self in a liberal universe?

And it seems that even if you get to the very top of the liberal pile, and you "make it" in a well-paid, creative, powerful, glamorous field, that you can still be so unfulfilled that you turn to a lifetime of drug addiction to get by.

This is not to say that careers can't or don't provide certain kinds of satisfaction or fulfilment. But I reject the liberal assumption that they are sufficient to make a life.

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From the horse's mouth

Anne Summers is a very influential Australian feminist. She has been editor of Ms magazine, head of the Office of the Status of Women in Australia, and chairwoman of Greenpeace International.

She recently gave her two cents' worth in the Melinda Tankard Reist controversy. Melinda Tankard Reist is an Australian feminist who is anti-abortion, anti-porn and against the sexualisation of girls.

But can a feminist be anti-abortion? Anne Summers, a grand old dame of Australian feminism, thinks not. And her reason for thinking so is revealing:

Can you be "pro-life" and a feminist. I say an emphatic, No.

Let me elaborate. Feminism might be blandly defined as the support for women's political, economic and social equality, and a feminist as someone who advocates such equality, but these general principles need practical elaboration and application. What does economic equality actually mean? How can women in practice achieve social equality? As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women's ability to be independent.

There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one's fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.

That confirms what I've written about feminism for many years now. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. And the key principle of liberalism is autonomy - the aim of a self-determining, independent life.

Equality is a secondary principle. If you think that you, or the group you belong to, are disadvantaged in achieving an independent, autonomous life, then you will call for equality (or for an end to discrimination, or for social justice etc). In other words, when feminists demand equality what they are really asking for is a greater degree of autonomy/independence/self-determination, which they believe has been denied them by privileged men.

So how do influential feminists like Anne Summers believe they can make women more independent? She is very clear about this. The first way is to make women independent of men by having them successfully pursue well-paying careers (and, in practice, by making women financially independent of men via transfer payments such as welfare payments, alimony and child support payments, paid maternity leave payments etc).

Second, a pregnancy is likely to impede women's independence in a number of ways. It might make it more difficult to complete her education, or to progress in her career, or to use her sexuality for purposes of power. And it might make her focus on family rather than career or to become financially or emotionally dependent on a man as a father to her child. (Anne Summers is childless herself.)

So feminists take very seriously having the choice to abort. It goes back to their first principle of achieving autonomy/independence.

What really needs to happen is for that liberal first principle - that autonomy is always the highest, overriding good - to be challenged openly. That's what would open up moral and political debate in the West.

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The unhappiest award goes to...

Who is unhappiest at work? According to one survey, the unhappiest workers are female, unmarried, age 42 and a doctor or lawyer.

That's an interesting result. According to liberal theory, such women should be the happiest. Such women are "unimpeded" in their autonomy by any commitment to family and they have successfully pursued a glamorous, high status career outcome.

But they are unhappier than anyone else.

Mightn't this suggest that an unimpeded, maximised autonomy is not the sole, overriding good in life? And that marriage is more significant to women than the liberal theory allows for?

And who are the happiest workers? They are married men with children, a good income and a managerial position.

That fits perfectly with what traditionalists would expect. Such men are fulfilling their masculine natures to be fathers and husbands and good providers. They are the happiest despite the fact that they have sacrificed a considerable measure of their autonomy to make a strong commitment to family and career.

Some more interesting data comes from a recent Herald Sun article about longer working hours. Which sex starts paid work earlier and finishes later? Not difficult to guess:

The report quoted Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing about 30 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women are at work at 7am, and one in six men and one in seven women at 7pm.

Maybe that should be considered when feminists complain about the pay gap. The working day is longer for men which must account for some of the gap.

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