[feminism] a fine answer to a supposed detractor

Welshcakes has answered my posts on radicalism:

First of all, let us remember that throughout history, there would have been no change without those who were willing to be strident, to break the law for what they believed in and even to risk their lives for it.

In the following paragraph, if you take out the word "feminism", which claims the credit for women's advances and substitute the word "women" for the people who actually achieved it, then I agree that:

[Feminism], in winning the freedoms and rights that women in western countries now enjoy, was and is a necessary movement, for once freedoms have been won, they have to be protected.

Welshcakes, of course, correctly observes:

Where it all goes wrong, I believe, is when we say, “Ok, we’ve got those so now let’s get more rights and freedoms than men have.” I have never, for instance, gone along with the “wages for housework” idea for none of its proponents ever stopped to consider that single women have to do it as well, and certainly nobody was going to reward us.

This was my point all along. It was radicalism, not feminism, which I was attacking but feminists might tend to overlook that. The next part, strangely, I cannot agree with:

And, however “hard” running a home might be, it cannot, just cannot, be compared with competing in the ruthless, target-setting environment that is the world of work today.

I'm in this "ruthless, target-setting environment" now and I also have to run the home and of the two, I feel the latter is far harder, especially when there is a family. Welshcakes is an adept - just look at her productions - so she might feel the former is harder.

It's a lovely post and argues the case for feminism very well. The feminist lobby could do worse than to snap up her text, as JMB is doing and use it as a bulwark against the sorts of incursions I've seemingly been trying to make.

If you haven't already read it, here it is again.