Radical

• Role of women as wives

  1. Strong ideology suggesting that being a wife is the most important female role

  2. Wives often have to be subservient to their husbands

  3. Marriage reinforces patriarchal relations from the outset

  4. Husbands spend more time outside of the home compared to the wife, spend more money on himself, do less housework, and generally benefit more from the relationship

  5. Wives tend to see it as their job to keep the husband happy, while the husband may think he has done enough just by marrying her
• Victims of domestic violence

  Reluctant to report crimes against them due to the private nature of the family
• Germaine Greer (2000): 'The family continues to disadvantage women'
• Family being private


  Makes it easier for domestic violence to continue hidden away from public view
• Physical violence against women

  Main way male domination over women is maintained
• Men and women have different interests

  Part of radical feminist strategy is consciousness raising to help women realize this
• Challenging women's ideas about the nuclear family


  Encouraging them to question whether they need to have children or families at all
• Friends, neighbours, and state agencies

  Reluctant to investigate domestic violence due to the private nature of the family
• Ideology of the privatised nuclear family

  Makes it easier for men to commit domestic violence
• Radical alternative family structures

  • Women only households
  • Adopting lesbian relationships
• Germaine Greer: '‘mothers bear children in pain, feed them from their bodies, cherish and nourish and prepare to lose them’'
• Mothers and babies are generally not welcomed in society in places like restaurants and public transport
• Married men report higher levels of satisfaction than non-married men
• Final role for mothers is to take the blame if their children go bad
• Greer's work makes sweeping generalisations which are not backed up by evidence
• Three quarters of divorces are initiated by women, leading to a decline in stable married-family in recent years
• Greer suggests women would be better off in matrilocal households, where all the adults are female
• Women are expected to ‘regain their figure’ shortly after childbirth
• Typically women are more likely to think they need to be married in order to be happy, but in reality, men do better out of marriage than women
• In childbirth, the attention focuses mostly on the well-being of the child, neglecting the mother's health
• Wives tend to see it as their job to keep the husband happy


  Husband thinks he has done all he needs to keep his wife happy just by consenting to marry her
• Society attaches no or little value to motherhood
• Single women report higher levels of satisfaction than married women
• Married women and men are no happier than those cohabiting, according to a 2019 comparative study of subjective well-being
• Daughters are quite likely to experience sexual abuse from male relatives
• Women are expected to return to work shortly after giving birth, on top of all child care duties
• Around 40% of men and women say they share domestic chores and housework equally
• Women still do more housework and childcare than men
• 25% of women in the U.S. have to return to work two weeks after childbirth due to minimum statutory maternity pay
• Women did 30 minutes more housework per day than men and an hour per day more childcare

  2022
• Comparative study of the subjective well-being of men and women in cohabiting and married relationships found that married women and men are no happier than those cohabiting

  2019
• Same-sex couples share domestic chores more equally
• Professional women are far more likely to get more generous maternity packages
• 38% of women in full-time work say they are primarily responsible for childcare and housework compared to only 9% of men
• Marriage doesn't make you happier
• Male same-sex couples do more paid work than females
• Social policy in America only requires companies to provide a minimum of two weeks paid leave