How community property without community responsibility hurts women

Community property without community — responsibility ultimately boomer­angs against women. When ignorance allows her to share a fortune but not share a jail cell, then ignorance pays in the short run. But in the long run, it creates the most ubiquitous form of female "learned helplessness" — financial learned helplessness Thus if she has doubts about her marriage and knows her financial ignorance is not her best postdivorce survival tool, she fears expressing her feelings and begins to feel like a marital prostitute.

The feeling of being a marital prostitute is part of the female morality dilemma We cannot really consider ourselves moral until we know what compromises we are willing to make to provide financially for our family. But being financially ignorant allows many women the luxury of focusing on spirituality or on the family rather than having to dirty their hands with finances. It teaches a woman who ignores the moral responsibilities of financial responsibility — to consider herself morally superior. Yet exactly as she is feeling this moral superiority, she is also feeling like a marital prostitute Thus creating the female morality dilemma.

The collective unconscious that supports shared community property with male-only financial responsibility is the same collective unconscious that retains its need to see woman as child In a Stage I world, this division was understandable. But by the year 2020, it is likely that a woman will become president of the United States (probably one who is first elected vice-president). To see this woman as a child is to predict that a child will soon run the country-. Is that an exaggeration? Well, think of how Geraldine Ferraro was treated as a child: when her husband’s money financed her run for Congress, it was thought of as family money — at least half hers; yet as soon as the money was thought to have been produced illegally, only her husband risked a possible prison sentence, and her husband was seen as having dragged Geraldine Ferraro down Ms Ferraro was not treated as if she were equally responsible Did we unconsciously think of her as a child? Let’s look.

Had a househusband run for office on money produced by his wife, we would have thought he was "using" her We would have questioned whether a man who could not financially support his family could finan­cially lead a country, And if his wife earned the money illegally, we would say, “If he can’t keep corruption out of his home, how can he keep it out of government?. . If he can’t share responsibility for corruption with the one person he loves, how can he share it with the thousand strangers he appoints?"

Yet when a feminist who was a potential U. S. president used money produced by her husband, no one questioned it Nor was her right to share the money while avoiding responsibility for illegalities incurred in its creation questioned No one asked, "If they were a team ‘for better,’ why weren’t they a team for worse?" We saw the attack on him as sexism against her, rather than as sexism against him (When a man is a candidate and a woman a spouse, the man gets investigated, when the reverse us true, the man still gets investigated That’s sexism against men.)

Encouraging women to run for high political office cannot be separated from simultaneously treating women like full adults — not as adults when it comes to rights and children when it comes to responsibilities. The alternative? Having a country run by a child The solution? Sharing commun­ity property and sharing community responsibility — creating a Stage II family for a Stage II country.

Updated: 07.10.2015 — 15:21