Feminism, Pregnancy and Homelessness
My mother was extremely talented at adding a lot of value for little time and effort on her part. She had something of a hobby of helping people she personally knew make their lives work.
My mom cooked a lot and mostly didn't eat leftovers. I used to clean the fridge out as one of my chores and sometimes couldn't figure what I was throwing out that was two weeks old and covered in mold.
That stopped when she began making friends with poor single women, some of whom were single moms. She began giving away the leftovers to help keep poor people fed for essentially free.
One woman she knew was handicapped and couldn't work full-time. Mom helped arrange two part-time jobs and I think a cheap apartment so she could make her life work.
I was always sickly and couldn't really work full-time but I can be productive if I have control over my life and schedule. I helped my husband pursue his dream career and took care of everything other than earning a paycheck so he could successfully earn a good living and that made him worth putting up with.
My sister had a serious career and wanted a baby. Simply carrying a baby to term is a substantial burden on the body and then you have a demanding infant to care for.
Some infants are more demanding than others and you can't reliably predict ahead of time if you will have an easy baby or a difficult one.
My brother moved home with an infant in tow during his divorce. The baby slept with our parents and my mom once said to me the arrangement with raising his kid and her working full-time worked inpart because he was a good sleeper.
She said that on one of her visits, probably because my oldest wasn't a good sleeper. It left-handedly acknowledged that I needed to be a full-time mom because my kids were very demanding and that would have interfered with me being successful pursuing a career.
When I took care of my sister's baby for a month so she could qualify for a buyout, I often kept the baby in my room for part of the night so my sister could sleep. A paid nanny probably would not have done that.
My sister had a baby born early after a difficult pregnancy that could have killed her abd she was breastfeeding. She might not have made it through a month of working full-time to qualify for the buyout had she hired a nanny.
She needed that buyout so she could afford to take substantial time off work to recover from a pregnancy where she was bedridden for several months. Her second husband married her for her money and wasn't really a good provider and family man. In fact, he ran their credit cards up crazy high before she had a baby and was unemployed for many months, maybe as much as a year and a half, during the five years she stayed home with her child.
She's extremely, extremely fortunate that she had support from me and our mother. She's an overentitled "modern woman" who had a good job making money like a man who felt entitled to the child she wanted and felt entitled to live like a man because she made money like a man.
Men make good money in part because they cannot get pregnant. Even a "normal," healthy pregnancy is like running a marathon in terms of demands on the body and pregnancy frequently has complications that can leave a woman permanently impaired.
This is precisely why hormonal birth control pills are popular: The serious side effects of The Pill are less than the serious side effects of pregnancy even though some women die as a consequence of The Pill.
This is not really a thing modern feminists are addressing. Instead, they abusively expect other women to do the women's work and some upper class women pay a surrogate to give them the child they want.
Many of the most prominent, famous career women are not remotely good role models for how women can have liberated lives and pursue equality because they're privileges are bought on the backs of underpaid, underprivileged, underappreciated servants who are usually women themselves who have absolutely no hope of someday having their own nanny and housekeeper.
It's frankly monstrous because some of them make their money pretending to be female role models to be aspired to.
Kim Kardashian comes to mind.
I do not hear that women cleaned homes or babysat to put themselves through college and they were do fortunate to work for an upper class woman who was such an inspiring role model and it's why they themselves are now CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Women who work as nannies and maids often make a career of it and the pay never gets substantially better.
I believe my mother said "No, you can't come home again." to ME when her plate was too full because she felt personally responsible for the welfare of her children and grandchildren and trusted me to rise to the occasion and tale care of myself and my adult sons even while sleeping in a tent. She didn't trust my brother and sister to do so.
By all rights, my sister's decision to marry a trophy husband who was after her money and take high levels of fertility drugs to get pregnant and choose months of bed rest over surgery to keep the child should have landed her on the street.
Many homeless people are people like my sister who made a series of extremely idiotic chouced but didn't have two highly competent relatives making sure it worked out for the sake of the child.
Society needs to put in a floor so people who screw up can recover without bleeding everyone around them.
And so-called feminists need to stop being overentitled bitches treating women around them like slaves so they can have it all while pretending they are good role models improving the status of women and breaking down barriers when they are parasites creating an ugly class divide fostering horror stories like The Handmaid's Tale.