this comment went into it, i thought and it's something rarely discussed -- "... Capitalism has a long history of dependence on free labor or underpaid labor. Women often work for nothing more than room and board, make a significant contribution to the common good, and get their social security docked (or no social security at all) in thanks for their services.

Patriarchy owes a huge debt to women — a debt it has no interest in acknowledging. Patriarchal society does not want to admit it is so heavily dependent on women’s work to function. It is one of the reasons it prefers to keep us and our work invisible.

There needs to be some part of feminism which works to make sure that women’s work is valued, in much the same way that feminism works to make sure that women are valued doing “men’s work.”
..." -- http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2008/11/...

it's so true--i think Europe has done a few things to help with that (mostly because of not enough population growth tho) --paying for children, and extensive social services, and paid leave, etc--the state devotes more resources and money--and it's not just a husband's responsibility or the couple's alone. Not that it's perfect, but it fundamentally establishes that the society and government play a role and have a responsibility, and value at least part of what used to be wholly private and dependent on a man's earning power.

i think it's not insurmountable--but who even recognizes that without women doing all sorts of things for free, men would never be free to do what they do? i guess education is needed first?

For his stand against homophobia--after proposition 8 passed.

And then within days, he pushed--yet again--to incite murderous misogyny against a public woman. My God. I keep trying to compare this to recent history and the best match I could find was how the American press normalized intense racism towards blacks during the '20s, you know, when lynching was a public event to share with the family. Honestly now. That's where we're at.

Forty years ago the major papers rightly called out the racism inherent in the attack on the Birmingham Church that killed four little black girls. Just two years ago, no one in the major papers reported that misogyny caused the violent massacre of those Amish girls. Hell, they never even mentioned misogyny. No, it was reported as some "school" shooting and the bigot was written off as just a "crazy." Just a crazy who happens to systematically target one gender and prepared intensely to rape each of these children before slaughtering them. That's how bad it is today. Wait no, it's worse. Back then we didn't mock victims of hate crimes. Today we do (see: "Missing White Woman Syndrome," where you'll see bloggers regularly ridicule yet another victim and regard the reporting of these stories as silly, trivial shit; mind you, they never would do that with news stories of gay bashing, which universally depicts white men being targeted). Let's face it: anti-female violence, gender-based hate crimes are widely seen as either righteous or entertainment. Hence, the public spectacle of it all.

I remember what my sister always told me: as a Latina she faced casual discrimination, but as a woman she faced the casual threat of hate crimes (e.g., murder, death). She has to alter her entire day around the threat of a misogynist violently attacking her. I can't even imagine doing that with regards to racist violence. I never think about it.