How we’re celebrating International Women’s Day
A Day Without Women, LI style
As privileged women around the country don Soviet red and abdicate their responsibilities for their Day Without Women, the women of Legal Insurrection are hard at work. In fact, every woman I know — my friends, my sister, my mom, my cousins, my aunts, and in-laws are all working today.
You see, we don’t feel it necessary to vanish in order to prove our worth or value. We’re confident in who we are.
Our work is never done. As a wife and Momma, there are no days off. But having the never-ending needs of a family to satisfy is far from burdensome, it’s a privilege.
We’re raising two wonderful little girls. It’s our goal and hope that we can impart to them strength and resolution of purpose, not a core meaning which thrives on the validation of others or whatever bourgeois movement du jour.
I want them to know that true equality is not in berating or objectifying men, but in appreciating and celebrating their strengths. That partnership works best when each can be strong for the other. And that while as women, we’re wonderful and amazing, men too are incredible creatures in their own right.
There are many problematic aspects of neo-feminism, but the most concerning is its attitude towards men. Collectively, it objectifies men by using them as a screen on which to project a bevy of insecurities and demanding that men pay eternal penance for being born dudes.
Neo-feminism won’t be satisfied until every man has been emasculated and has been made womanly, and all under the banner of “equality”.
Men are not the enemy. They’re not out to destroy womanhood or keep women down. Not in this country anyway. The men as perpetual foil mantra might be politically expedient, but it’s enormously damaging culturally and relationally.
So this International Women’s Day, we’re not absent. We’re showing up for our husbands, our children, our jobs, and our responsibilities. If I spend money today (those participating in Day Without Women have been encouraged not to spend money unless it’s at “small, women- and minority-owned businesses”) it will be to buy my husband beer.
I’ll be celebrating today the same way I celebrate every day — by holding my husband tight, trying to tackle the never-ending mountain of laundry, changing diapers, chasing a baby in a walker and a curious little dog, making my husband his favorite dinner, spending my time here, on the blog with you, and reflecting on how thankful I am to have been given the life I have.
Happy International Women’s Day!
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Comments
Great way to celebrate!
A day without communist woman: a great.
Now, if they can take their excuses for their men with them.
Think we could persuade them to go away for a decade or maybe even a century?
Very few of those beasts have men. Besides those women doing as much as they can to make themselves unattractive, any guy with a spine and a brain heads for the hills as soon as one opens her harpy, bitchy mouth.
Any man who would be drawn to a woman who presents that way is not a man I would have.
I must say that A Day Without Women (or whatever they’re calling it) is, as you say, a day for privileged women to skip work and responsibility. Real women, like real men can’t afford it and besides what is the purpose?
My father was a high school drop out in 1938 and joined the Army. Just in time for, well, you know…
My mother had a Master’s Degree from UVA. They adored each other their entire lives.
I have an Engineering degree, my wife has a year of college. We’ve been happily married for 42 years. We have raised 8 children. Everything we’ve done or accomplished has been together. The $$ I earn is our money, not mine.
Hey, BTW, I’m a white guy and paid for my college from my own pocket. I was a full time student, working full time, in the Air National Guard, and with a wife and four children. That’s what my White Privilege got me.
I could not have done any of that without her. She is more precious to me than anything!
Those women are graduates of the College of Perpetual Victim-hood. A college someone else, most likely, paid for them to attend.
Kimberlee – hang in there, you’re doing the right thing. Our children are all grown up now but we are still their parents. There is no goal line in parenting that once you cross it you’ve won and that’s it. Parenting goes on forever.
<3 this so much. Thank you for your encouragement and thank you for sharing your story.
I just want to reinforce what you said. Both my wife and I have advanced degrees in operations research, and we were without kids for years. When we started adopting (5 total) she started cutting her professional time until it was 0. All the kids received at least some home-schooling.
It has always been a team effort. We never kept separate finances, we never argued over “whose” money was being spent – it was always “ours” and all significant decisions, financial and otherwise, were / are joint.
We are in our 42md year of marriage. It has been a great run and will hopefully continue for many more years.
Every good marriage is a team effort, and it is always best when each considers the happiness of the other to be more important than their own. Coming to one mind politically is also of value, and we have always treated our politics a bit like our finances – you might even say we do a bit of a mind meld. Apparently some of this has rubbed off on the kids, since, including our one daughter-in-law, we all supported Trump in 2016 despite early misgivings (which are happily gone with the wind).
<3 this too. Our marriage is very much the same. There is nothing that is not ours, jointly. We have built and continue to build a life *together*. We help each other in whatever needs helping, whether that's emotionally or around the house. Focusing more on the other person than on ourselves is the only way to do it. It's not always easiest, but it's the best. And congrats on 42 years! That's huge!
My contribution today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwRrKaq0IyY
The toughest job you’ll ever love.
Klara looks like she was just given a heads-up on her share of the national debt!
That is a beautiful child!
Haha. She’ll find out soon enough. And thank you!
These women make the rest of us women mad. I love my husband and 19 & 17 year old sons, and would never want them to be anything but men.
Beautiful picture! Thanks for the story.
There’s a great Futurama episode called Neutopia where the team crashes on an alien planet and an alien makes them compete to see which gender is better. I won’t give anything away, but it would be an absolutely perfect episode to watch today.
Must check this out.
Do you have a sister? ;^)
I do! She’s gorgeous. And happily married. 😉
What I’ve always said, and this applies equally to men, women, people who feel ‘underappreciated’, people who think they’re worth more money, people who think they ‘keep the company running alone’, and so on:
If ever you think you are indispensable to a company, you’d better have another job lined up before you test that theory.
All the women who work for me showed up today. I doubt any of them even knew they were supposed to take the day off. Probably because they’re busy working, then going home to take care of their kids, and don’t have the luxury of throwing hissy fits at the President. What precious free time they do have isn’t devoted to being a news junkie or social justice warrior, it’s devoted to improving the lives of their families. You know, what normal people do.
….sniff….sniff… I smell testosterone in here.
I would like to celebrate all of the women who reconcile moral, natural, and personal imperatives to favor human dignity and value, self-moderation, and personal responsibility… and men who reach a similar conclusion.
Equal and complementary.
I have recently realized how right my father was when he would say back in the late 80’s, women have more power than they realize, but they will blow their opportunities by trying to men! I would always get angry with him and would argue as we would, all with love of course. However, now about the age he was then, I so get it! Women have spent so much time and energy wanting to be men, we have lost some of the beauty and strength that is woman. We may have missed opportunities to make a huge impact by being women. If we could embrace the qualities that make us uniquly innately different from men and be true to our design and stop trying to be men, perhaps men might have a better chance to behave as men and fathers. We might all benefit from a team approach rather than competing for disaster. KB