Oppression 3.0

I’ve been thinking about division of labor lately and I realize just how dramatically the who-does-what-around-the-house process has changed for me.

Twenty years ago, the question of who emptied the dishwasher was a feminist issue. Ten years before that it was completely non-negotiable because I flatly refused to do any “traditionally female” activities. This hard-ass attitude was less impressive than it might have been, given that I had neither dishwasher nor many dishes in my household…nor, come to think of it, a man. But, hey, the principle was still valid.

I’m not less of a feminist now; in fact I may be giving off a higher reading on the Sisterhood Geiger Counter. But two things have changed, one of them positive, the other anything but.

The positive is that I’m married to a man who is a feminist, which means a load of laundry is just a pile of dirty clothes, not a teaching moment. On the downside, I’m more worried about other kinds of bigotry–that based on race and class.

I wonder what my younger self would have thought if someone had prophesied about the open-ended ransom being paid now to banks and other protected corporations, while the folks ponying up the dough are losing homes, cars, jobs. Or what I would have made of the spreading Neo-Klan mentality that’s come to light during the discourse on that Congressional moron insulting the President.

It’s enough to make me miss the days when my big worry was who did the vacuuming.