Photo by Flickr user Sharon Drummond. Used under a Creative Commons license. />

So. Was the crucial fallacy of early 2nd-wave feminism in the 1970s the idea that women could somehow possibly live in the public world with the same social, economic, political, and personal rights as men? No, we might still not be there but it's still self-evidently true. Was it that "when women were equal to men" we'd all wear unisex clothes, use unisex bathrooms, be apathetically/indifferently bisexual, and, I dunno, have special cigarettes for women? No, that was mostly about insufficient imagination in a culture just a couple of years removed from the world of Mad Men. Was it that women would become the dominant sex and give up men, shave their heads, braid their armpit hair, and wear nothing but Birkenstocks, wool socks, and purple mu-mus? And definitely no bras because they'd all been burned? No, and besides, that possibility existed mostly in the fevered imaginations of (male) sitcoms and late-night comedy sketches.

So what was the crucial fallacy of early 2nd-wave feminism? Via DailyKOS, Laurie Penny says, I think correctly, it was the meme that feminism meant women could "have it all."

Without wishing to sound like a conspiracy theorist, if I had to invent a way to undermine feminism as a socially useful movement, here's what I'd do. I'd set up a ridiculous standard of personal and professional attainment, one that would be unachievable for the vast majority of women who weren't independently wealthy, white and upper-middle class and I'd call it "having it all". After I'd set up this impossible standard, I'd be sure to make women feel like failures for not attaining it.

Source: The Independent

 Yeah, about that "having it all" business?  Where you can simultaneously have a great education, a brilliant career, a fulfilling social life, a rich and complex family life, feed your family fabulous, balanced meals that you cook from scratch yourself, completely immerse yourselves in your children's upbringing, keep your house spotless, have a wild and tireless sex life with your spouse (or, if a single mother, with an enviable stable of beaux that includes Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, George Clooney, and Ryan Gosling) and, I guess, never ever grab the wrong remote control while using the tv/cable/x-box/dvr/stereo?

Yeah, that?

Folks, if anyone knows anybody, male or female, who ever could or ever can "have it all" I'll kiss my own behind! So why on this big blue marble would anyone think the benchmark for the success of feminism would be "having it all?

To paraphrase my very successful, accomplished, and well-rounded cousin (who came pretty close) when you see someone and think he or she "has it all" it means you just don't know them very well.

Sweet mother of pearl!  Have you gotten a load of Anne-Marie Slaughter's life lately?  That woman's hella accomplished!  She's got a lot!  She's a former dean and current endowed-chair professor at a prestigious university! She had a great 2-year stint as a crucial policy maker for the United States State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton!  She's a darn good mom.  Sounds like she's got a pretty good marriage.  And she's deft enough, well-connected enough, accomplished enough, and talented enough to contribute to cover articles in The Atlantic Monthly!  That's admirable!  Enviable!  By any measure an amazingly long string of successes!

The only fault I can really pin on her is an incredible gullibility when it comes to what someone, somewhere decided had to be the core promise of feminism back in the 1970s.  And her credulity on that point turns out to be a pretty significant fault.

Because instead of swinging from the Princeton and/or State Department and/or Atlantic Monthly headquarters flagpole hollering "I'm top of the world" she sees herself as such a miserable failure that she... got another cover story complaining about it!

Listen, gang, nobody has it all.  But guess what?  Nobody needs to have it all in order either to be a happy, healthy, well-rounded person or... for feminism to be working just fine.

Instead the only real promise of feminism, for women and men, is that there aren't going to be any bullshit social, economic, political, or domestic barriers to being whoever you actually really are.  All the rest? The ordinary constraints we face in the actual physical world, like the numbers of hours in a day, the number of years in a lifetime, the demands on our immune systems, the forces of gravity and atmospheric pressure?  Only a propagandist or his dupes would think feminism, or any other manner of -ism, ought to let us transcend that.

Sheesh!