Rat Race Feminism
Accepting a Twisted Value
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic takes a look at a pernicious element of modern feminism: our expectation that women work the same as men. Yet, is this an advantage for women, or are we regressing in how we treat women? These expectations feed the rat race, and yet we call it progressive; let’s find out if that’s true.
Intro
Rat race /ˈrat ˌrās/ noun informal
A way of life in which people are caught up in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth or power.
An exhausting, usually competitive routine.
Very little good has been said about the rat race of corporate life in the First World. It’s a slog of chasing the next thing and keeping up with the Jones, which is why it’s also referred to as a hedonic treadmill:
The hedonic treadmill is the idea that an individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences.
It perfectly encapsulates much of modern society and is also a great way to think of current feminism because, in an odd twist, the drive for women to be employed seems to trump everything else. Feminism seems to demand that women are successful only when they compete equally with men in the Rat Race of life.1 We dug into this quandary a bit in Rediscovering the Goddess where we noted:
First-wave feminism was focused on giving women legal rights as equal persons. The Second Wave focused on achieving social equality. I believe the Third Wave has actually abandoned the feminine and treated the unique idiosyncrasies of the female as a liability.2
It’s gotten so twisted for women that it’s better to be paid to raise someone else’s children while paying another person to raise yours than it is to want to raise your own children. Being a stay-at-home mom is a waste of talent. Being in the workforce is empowered freedom.3
Lest you think I’m being hyperbolic, it’s a challenge I’ve faced hand in hand with my wife. She stays at home to raise our three kids and educate them. There’s a noticeable social pressure to ensure no one thinks she’s being held back from work, which has led to many questions, to which her typical answer is, “Why would I pay someone else to raise my children?”
Thankfully, we have a good group of friends who are similarly minded in our professional milieu, as well as a good cohort in the homeschool groups we work with. Remember, she’s a double major in computer and electrical engineering with experience working in aerospace. She just hasn’t fallen for the quandary G.K. Chesterton pointed out over 100 years ago:
"Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers, but slaves when they help their husbands."
Let’s disabuse the notion that her work could even be considered slaving.4 A few years ago, I ran the numbers on how much Lisa would have to make to equal $15 an hour in take-home pay. The first issue is that anything she earns, on top of my salary, is taxed at the 25% tax bracket. Then, factoring the costs of childcare, after-school care, the additional cost of convenience vs. budget groceries, the additional wear and tear on vehicles, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum… Well, to cut to the chase, she’d have to make almost $90,000 a year to come home with $15/hr. Put another way, for our family, her staying home is worth over $60,000 a year on the modest side.
Clearly, the financially intelligent path is the one where she raises and educates our children, gives them a healthy and stable home life, and has the flexibility to travel with me. This is exactly what the family did on a recent work trip to San Diego, where they played on the beach and the zoo, and the mid-week ski trip, where I worked in the mornings and snowboarded with the family in the afternoons. So why have we gotten so caught up in the rat race?
The Rat Race
For millennia, men and women split the labor required for survival along lines of general physical difference.5 So, humans divided tasks into evolutionarily beneficial separations of duties, with the women taking tasks closer to the home and children, and men taking the tasks that required more physical strength as well as those that carried more risk and reward.
Another layer was slowly added based on the proclivity for men to form structured organizations that allowed different groups to engage with each other. We call this commerce, but simply put, the world of business was developed by, and for, men to conduct transactions, whereas the community of homes was developed by and for, women to successfully nurture and educate the families.
If your blood pressure is rising, reading these paragraphs, it’s critical to note something important. This wasn’t subjugation as much as it was protection. As this image I came across online aptly captures:
An example relayed to me is an old family friend who was raised on a farm in the 1950s. She railed against working in the house while her dad and brothers went outside and worked, and so, she demanded to join them. To her surprise, her dad willingly accepted. Their day was spent, like most days, working in the fields. They took the first break after three hours of hoeing and hauling rocks. After three more hours, they paused for lunch and shifted tasks to chopping and hauling wood, moving hay, and shoveling grain. By the end of the day, her hands were blistered, she was exhausted, sore, and wondering why she thought that what the men did was better.
It’s a simple story with many layers. Today, we don’t work on farms, and the physical requirements for aerospace engineering are the same for men and women. The transition to factory labor, especially during the Industrial Revolution, caused a drive for women to enter the workforce.
It all boiled down to simple economics. First, women would still leave to raise a family, so the unskilled and junior women could be paid less and quickly replaced by new hires. Second, women were significantly less likely to demand pay increases and rarely tried to strike, as male factory workers did then. But why was this accepted?
I propose it’s that, for some reason, all male structures have been de facto accepted as the valuable structures. I find it oddly misogynistic to believe that nothing women have done for millennia was worthwhile. That the work men did was the only useful thing in society.
Couple that with a rebellion on forced participation in masculine or feminine-coded work, and we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. My skin crawls with the phrases, “That’s women’s work,” or when someone suggests women can’t be engineers. There was a necessary correction that needed to happen, but what we’ve done, I feel, is equally misogynistic. We’ve deleted the feminine and expect women to act like men. From there, the Rat Race Feminism was born and accelerated.
Pausing the Treadmill
My wife and I are huge fans of first and second-wave feminism. I consider myself an ardent second-wave feminist, supporting my wife, two amazing daughters, and a son who I’m raising to be the same. Lisa and I have complaints about third-wave feminism and beyond, as we find it oddly anti-feminine and counterproductive to the equalities achieved in first and second-wave feminism.
This is where we put our feet down and paused the treadmill. Yes, Lisa is a highly capable and successful electrical and computer engineer. Yes, she also wants to raise our children. No, we don’t need her to work largely because we live well within our means and because her work at home, even if less compensated than a career, is more valuable to our family than feeding the Rat Race hedonic treadmill. She’s avoiding the third wave trap that we’ve characterized as:
To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
Lisa is not forced to stay at home or prove herself in a career. She is empowered to make decisions that consider her feminine desires without falling into the traps of what other people or systems think. She exemplifies first and second-wave feminism and does not fall victim to Rat Race Feminism, which she is also teaching our children to see and understand.
Rat Race Feminism is a tension I also wove into a novella titled Catalyst6 that I’m completing as part of The Singularity Chronicles. It’s a prequel to Paradox and provides a bit more of the backstory of Jasper and Soliel Vanden Brink and the events that motivate the creation of a cognizant AI. Here’s a sneak peek from Chapter 3:
“Congratulations on the National Science Foundation Award, Soliel!” Dr. Girard was breathing quickly after catching up outside the MindCraft offices where Soliel was walking, trying to clear her mind with some fresh air.
“Thanks…” Soliel’s smile slipped slightly as her eyes wandered the cracked sidewalk surrounding a sad patch of dry grass.
“What’s wrong?” Girard scanned her face and reached out to touch her elbow.
“Oh,” Soliel flopped her arms in a shrug. “The award is great. They loved the work on graph theory. It’s just—” She crossed her arms and hugged herself. “It’s just some people’s expectations.”
Dr. Girard nodded her head and waited.
Soliel kicked at a loose chunk of concrete on the sidewalk; frustration etched into the lines of her face. “After the award ceremony a reporter asked how much further I’d be if I hadn’t ‘wasted time’ raising my kids,” she said, voice tight.
Dr. Girard inhaled sharply, stepping closer. “Seriously? People can be so ignorant. You’re leading breakthroughs and raising a family. That’s—”
“Apparently not enough,” Soliel muttered, arms crossed over her chest. “I’m supposed to act more like a man, or else I’m ‘throwing away my potential.’” She stopped walking, glaring at the empty parking lot. A tear slipped free despite her best effort, and she swiped it away with the sleeve of her lab coat.
Dr Girard reached out and grasped Soliel’s shoulder. “You’re leagues ahead of anyone else, and you raised your kids.”
“But that’s not what matters to them. They see the kids as a liability. It feels like, to be a successful woman, I must look, act, and be like a successful man. It’s infuriating.” Soliel took a shuddering breath and continued, “Being a female scientist gets me on the covers of magazines. Being a mom gets me whispers about wasted talent.”
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There is a 4th wave that may be re-empowering, but since it’s based on the 3rd wave, it will end of collapsing. I think what 4th wave is trying to do sits better on the 2nd wave.
I came across this fantastic note from
quoting CS Lewis after finalizing this essay but I wanted to add it here:Humans have sexual dimorphism, meaning that men, on average, are larger and stronger than women. Human females also bear the weight of creating new life, and with the unique premature birth of our babies due to their exceptionally large heads, they also bear the burden of fostering an infant for far longer than most other animals.
I’ve decided to table the release of the prequel as it was a book solving no problem except to be a reader magnet. I may use it as supplemental material in other works.
 | A guest post by
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Great discussion.
We’ve recently been discussing the impact of women entering the workplace on house prices in the UK (and likely elsewhere too).
Initially, as some households moved to two incomes, they could secure larger mortgages and afford bigger homes. If this was achievable through part-time work, even better—it allowed for a balance between home and work life.
However, over time, as more people could afford to pay higher prices, house prices naturally rose. What started as an opportunity soon became a trap. What was once a choice—to work and contribute financially—became a necessity just to afford a modest family home.
I overall agree with this perspective and it's something I've struggled with as a new mom-- I've actually read people online saying "the daycare professionals are trained to do this and could do a better job than me," which struck me as a sad state of affairs to believe, regardless of whether it is true or not.
I think the big philosophical question is how this works in the context of modern solitude-- while raising kids is very important, it can leave women dependent on and even stuck with their husbands. No issue if they find a good man, but if someone ends up in an unhealthy or dangerous situation, having their own independent source of income is a safety net. Perhaps this is the other side of the "village" that we have forgotten about today...