From my mother, Merina Smith. For some reason her computer won't post this, but I thought her reflection was valuable and wanted everyone to see it. So I'm posting here, with her permission:
"I think the second wave feminists had a difficult task. They could only make a splash by perhaps overstating their case along the lines of "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". I remember reading a particularly condescending article around 1980 by a woman who was trying to figure out why any woman would become a housewife. She said that she spent countless hours having coffee in living rooms trying to get to the root of this mystery, but as I recall never managed to come up with the answer that women were responding to the very great needs of their families, especially their children. It was thus easy for women who were engaged with the important (though often tedious) work of raising children and caring for families to dismiss feminists as out-of-touch with the real lives of women.
Friedan's life was probably not so meaningless and trivial as she made out in order to make her point, but there was definitely a problem for women who needed to support their families. When my Mom started teaching in the early 60s for example, she was paid less than male teachers because they were supporting families, except that she also was supporting a family. When I was growing up the big three (low-paid) professions for women were teacher, nurse and secretary. There is nothing wrong with these professions, but that is waaaay too limiting given the considerable talents and desires of women. So feminism has done a lot of good.
Once, early in married life, a Yale grad student working on some sort of counseling degree wanted to interview us about our marriage. She asked lots of questions about division of work and the like, and was surprised that we agreed on so many issues. I think she was used to a lot more conflict between couples. At the time, I was kind of proud of this and thought that our agreement stemmed from a very traditional understanding of roles with which we had been raised and to which we generally adhered. I thought that was good, especially in light of the controversies of the day. This understanding helped us know what our duties were. There are and were many good aspects of tradition, among them the desire to come together at all and create a family, something that is much weakened these days. But over the years we have had to grapple with problems that stemmed from this traditional understanding. A true partnership really can't happen with the view that the man has the last word when there is a disagreement, as the traditional view dictated in those days. Rather, controversies have to be talked out and worked out. Couples have to grapple with what is most important to each of them and how to compromise for the good of the family. It's not an easy task. It requires thought and compromise. So, while I recognize the importance of tradition, it can't do all the work that I then thought it could.
Second-wave feminists were able to moderate their views somewhat after they had become an important part of the culture. I remember Steinem admitting at some point that maybe having a husband and children could be valuable, after younger women began to revolt against a feminist message that rejected these important aspects of life. Abortion, though, has been a feminist staple from the get-go. I think a more nuanced approach to abortion would still benefit hard-core feminists. In general, the Christian traditions regarding sex and marriage are right and true IMHO (and feminist efforts to destroy the Christian understanding have led to terrible things), but some of the adjacent beliefs, likely designed by religious leaders to simplify conflict in marriages, didn't really do what needed to be done. Contemporary efforts to renew these beliefs lead to similarly cartoonish results. People want simple ways to work through problems. It is not hard to understand this desire. But some things cannot really be made simple, especially anything having to do with human relationships, which very much includes the male/female relationships and the divide between the sexes. Bridging this divide in marriages and culture in general, is absolutely necessary to the human race, but it will never be easy."
Solomon spoke of his search for a good person (a bit like Diogenes) and he said:
"Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found."
I like to take him literally. When we do the math, we find that men are 1/10th of 1% better than women.
This is fairly in the range of Freud's narcissism of small differences, and any man who takes pride in it is probably the same kind of man who plays the lottery. As in, a man who is worse at math than "math is hard" Barbie.
I find pretending “men are this” and “women are that” to be generally unhelpful. People are people, made in His image to be loved and to love. Pretending that all members of any group behave one way, feel one way or are made to assume one role is silly. He gives us gifts according to our own design!
I fail to see how feminism is responsible for abortion, which is common (or even forced) in many patriarchal cultures like India and China. Abortion becoming safe/available does coincide with the rise of feminism--but I disagree that it's causal. I do see a lot of feminists who strongly believe in abortion rights...but also who support broader policies that make life easier for mothers. I see examples of men who rely on abortion to abdicate responsibility. They're not doing this because they're so "feminist," rather there is a deep sexism in it and a desire to continue taking advantage of women with no consequences.
Anyway, you're right in naming the complexity of the feminist movement and I loved hearing your backstory. I think feminism is so often the "boogeyman" for religious fundamentalists. These same groups can often do things like cover up sexual abuse, especially when committed by religious leaders. It honestly makes me 🤮 what women in these groups often have to put up with.
It seems odd to suggest there’s no causal link there when second wave feminism was really the main moving force behind efforts to legalize abortion in the mid-twentieth century.
However I do think it’s important (and this is something I also note sometimes) that abortion is also legal in lots of countries with very patriarchal cultures and minimal feminist influence. People find lots of reasons to want to kill their children. Children are a blessing, but a burdensome blessing. In the West though, feminism and the quest for greater autonomy/opportunity for women definitely seems to be part of the story (really the central part I think) and you need a story more there because unlike China (say) the West’s Christian history gave people pretty powerful reasons to oppose abortion. (As some did and have done of course but not enough to counter that powerful interest.)
Abortion rates will get better when we put policies in place that support families. We say we are pro-family, and yet do not support families with our policy-making. We should be ashamed.
I hear this said a lot, and I do certainly think it would be good to make our society more family-friendly generally. (Though, I'm also someone who thinks that the entitlement state has already done a lot of harm with its invasive policies, so putting families on the dole en masse doesn't delight me.)
I'm far from sure though that pronatal policies could substantially impact abortion rates. Maybe! These things are hard to predict! But having a baby will always be a pretty huge deal no matter what sort of social safety net we create. No policymaker can turn a baby into an oh-why-not (nor should we want that).
States that have pro-natal policies DO have lower abortion rates. While states/nations that outlaw abortion and don’t have family friendly policies actually have higher rates of abortion - they are just done secretly, behind closed doors.
Things like paid maternity leave and high quality healthcare aren’t welfare. They are marks of a society that prioritizes caring for the welfare of its people, especially its young.
It doesn’t benefit ME to make sure that the next generation has access to funded maternity and paternity leave. But I think it needs to happen because it it the right thing to do. It is the JUST thing to do and the pro-life thing to do. There is nothing pro-life about telling a 3 week postpartum woman to leave her nursing baby and go back to work because she doesn’t have any more PTO.
High quality healthcare, paternity/maternity leave, access to sex ed/contraception/sterilization, etc should be at the top of conservatives’ agendas. But they aren’t. And it makes us look like fools. It makes liberals look CORRECT when they say “it’s about controlling women’s bodies, not about helping.” Because these strategies DO help lower abortion rates. Very few women get their rocks off having an abortion. When given the chance, women do want to practice responsible sex. But we need to give them access to education and contraception (and sterilization if they choose it, without demanding that they be a certain age if have reproduced a certain number of times). Respect adult women enough to let them make their own decisions.
"Things like paid maternity leave and high quality healthcare aren’t welfare. They are marks of a society that prioritizes caring for the welfare of its people, especially its young."
Anytime taxpayers are buying someone else's groceries or paying their rent, that's essentially welfare. Maybe we're okay with that, there are arguments for it, but let's try to be clear about what's at issue. You could of course suggest that it should be employers, not taxpayers, who pay people's bills while they're caring for their babies, but now you have a different problem: employers are potentially disincentivized from hiring people who seem likely to become parents. That's not great.
Don't misunderstand me. I realize there are some very hard challenges here that parents face, and I want us to go on looking for better solutions. I just want it to be understood that "let's have the state dump tons of money on people" isn't always as good of a solution as it appears to be from afar. It doesn't embarrass me that conservatives are more cautious than progressives about doing that. That's very prudent, in fact.
But sure, let's pay attention to the data! Data is complicated, it requires considerable interpretation, but such things do matter.
Is our defense “welfare”? Our educational system “welfare”? Using our tax dollars to support a program doesn’t make something welfare.
I don’t see conservatives sending their Social Security checks back, or refusing Medicare.
Our taxes are used for many things that we agree on for the common good.
Most modern nations have concluded that supporting parents being home with their children during the first few months after birth is important. The US seems to think that’s a luxury only the rich deserve.
We pretend we are pro-life with our mouths, and then actively work against the poor with our policies. It’s shameful.
"I think it’s really quite clear that people today have a much better appreciation overall of the range of women’s potentialities, and of the excellences they can attain. To some extent this is true of people generally..."
Yes! That's the point. Progress is real: in science and technology, in rights and liberalism, in capitalism and economic growth, and there are a whole lot of benefits to go around.
"... but the change is more striking for women..."
Can you quantify that? "Striking" is an openly subjective word, but is there an *objective* way to define and measure the relative "change for women" that is taking place?
And how important is "appreciation... of... potentialities," anyway? Suppose a woman can't get married and raise kids because she has too much student debt and that scares the men away. Is "appreciation of her potentialities" a compensation? How does it balance against other things a person might want, such as offspring, love, or happiness?
I'm inclined to think that *expansion of opportunity sets* is presumptively a good thing, because people might find an option better than what was previously available. "Appreciation of potentialities" is a little bit connected with expansion of opportunity sets-- people may give you new opportunities because they've gained a new appreciation of your potentialities-- but not much, because all sorts of recognized potentialities-- yes, you maybe *could* do these things under the right circumstances-- are out of reach for financial or social reasons.
Have women's opportunity sets expanded? A pure expansion would move from A to A+B, where A is the old opportunity set and B is a new set of opportunities added to it. But for many women, it seems that the possibilities of faithful, fertile marriages to a devoted provider are more limited than in the past. So no, the opportunity sets haven't expanded, they've shifted.
Evaluative standards are elusive. And yet you don't seem to be aware of that.
You roll along, opinionated and judgmental, complacently mainstream, vague, but throwing blanket *ad hominems* all over the place, like...
"today’s antifeminists are mostly just selling their own flavor of resentment."
How do you know that they're motivated by resentment? And if they are, so what? I'm not above learning from a resentful man who wields good arguments. Judge people by their evidence and logic, not by the mood or motive you impute to them.
If you're entertaining the case for a "Christian feminism," I suggest that you look to the Bible for guidance. What does it have to say about this? It's a good corrective to the combination of vagueness and opinionated complacency in this essay.
And while the fact that a reader of this essay would come away completely muddled by what "feminism" means, as you seem to admit in some of your comments, I don't think it's *actually* that hard to define. Feminism starts from the knee-jerk question, "Why shouldn't women do whatever men can do?" There are good answers to that; there are a lot of reasons why men's life outcomes differ systematically from women's. But feminism doesn't ask the question in sincerity; rather, it asks rhetorically, and then launches an inquisition against anyone who tries to answer it except in the most sycophantically feminist way.
You write:
"For blinkered ideologues of all persuasions, I think the road to recovery begins here. Let’s be open to learning. What are men and women actually like? How are their experiences similar and different? What helps them to thrive?"
But by far the main blinkered ideologues in the room are the feminists. People have been open to learning since the dawn of time, and have drawn many, many good lessons about what men and women are actually like, and those fed into the rich, manifold human traditions which feminism condemns and anathematizes. And as long as the feminists are in the room, I'm going to be very wary of speaking publicly about what men and women are actually like, because I know they'll scold and howl with indignation and anathematize.
When we win the war on political correctness, then we'll have the space to start thinking in public about these important questions.
Rachel, you wrote: "So perhaps we should be neutral on “feminism,” given that range of benefits and evils." Okay, this may seem like a reasonable stance, especially if one studiously bypasses the history of feminist hostility to the Christian mandate. But this, along with a certain strain of outright misandry which runs through much of feminism makes it hard for some to be as neutral as you. Of course, one can be a new sort of feminist and not adhere to the hatred of men or the rejection of Christian virtues by stating so clearly.
I understand, but look. I’m very opposed to misandry. I have five sons! Of course I want them to have rich and thriving lives!
Thinkers in an antifeminist mold don’t always seem to think it’s really *that* big of a deal whether women can pursue professional opportunity. Be full-fledged citizens who can vote. Be permitted to inherit, say, the business that they themselves spent decades helping to build, instead of the distant cousin. There are antifeminists *now* who think that stuff is basically fine. So, any note of misandry is absolutely unacceptable but I should be blasé about those things? Why?
I feel it’s reasonable to default back to “complex phenomenon.”
Informed, clearheaded feminists today are redefining feminism for these times. This is a good and necessary endeavor. But having studied feminism myself, what is in the back of my mind is that feminism really does have a dark side and these aforementioned women, whom I respect, are quite selective about being silent on that darkness.
To me, their augments would be stronger if they were more open about what they don't except in feminist history while still advocating what for they are for. It is a question of honesty even if they will have to take flack in doing so. This means that I don't take seriously those feminists who both know the history and defend all of it without qualifications.
At this point in time there are many highly accomplished women in numerous fields who serve as examples for younger women wishing to pursue professional opportunities and this trend is apt to continue. There is an antifeminist* augment that fields like the law and medicine change when women come to dominate. The university is a living example of this occurring as we speak. As to whether this is a looming is a good thing with positive outcomes remains to be seen.
* Helen Andrews
In my prior post I should have mentioned the Women's Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
I think I, and most of the sex-realist feminists I have read, are pretty up-front about what we don't accept in mainstream feminism. You're not going to do a whole lot better than Erika Bachiochi, Ivana Greco, Leah Libresco Sergeant, Elizabeth Matthews etc for that. They're happy to hit hard at mainstream feminists when they're wrong.
But take the Andrews piece. Look, I can talk about this stuff, I'm not going to freak out, cry, call the social justice police. But, this is just where we are. If you're female and on the right, you have to pen missives explaining why "the very fact of people like me being permitted to enter mainstream professions hasn't destroyed America." Because that's actually very persuasive to a great people right-leaning people in the West today. You have to explain, seriously and carefully, why it's *not wrong* to be "a professional and also female."
The thing that most amused me in that Andrews piece was the part at the end where she gets all, "It was really hard for me to say this today, I was so scared that people would judge me harshly..." Oh right, yeah. Giving a speech like that at Nat Con, so risky. They're not going to absolutely eat that up. (They ate it up. Obviously.)
When you're a rising female writer on the right, the pressure to write antifeminist clickbait is relentless. There's a huge grievance market there. When people like Andrews or Gress pretend like that's not the case... well...
They may not be the most honest writers in the world.
Thank you for the Washington Examiner link. I had missed it mainly because some time ago I decided that reading the NYT and turning to places like the Examiner for an alternative take was a miserable way to begin a day. As in Law & Liberty, you open up useful avenues of critique which were important. And yes, Bachiochi, Greco, Sergeant, Matthews have each made important contributions as well.
However, it was inevitable that a counter reaction would arrive to shed light on different aspects of what one could call militant progressivism. I see Andrews as a polemicist who enjoys poking the beast, so you are correct that her Nat Con speech wasn't risky. But most worthwhile endeavors in life impose risk and she sure lit a fire.
Marry Harrington was once coming from the fringe Left but had an epiphany while pushing her baby daughter's strollers one day. She said to herself, "I'm a mother and I'm a feminist - where do I belong in feminism proper?" From this thought (or maternal instinct) became her Feminism Against Progress volume and soon she shot to fame. But why was she was adopted by the Right? This is strange unless it was the Left that wasn't listening.
I set Carrie Gress aside in her own category because she is deeply Catholic. What I mean by this is that her attack on feminism comes from (in my view) her belief that abortion in murder. This, of course, is a binary and explosive stance. It is black and white, as the blowback to her views shows quite clearly. Can we say Gress is just an ideolog if her deeply held religious beliefs are what lead her? If so, what does this make the deeply held secular stance of those who have attached her mercilessly? Or take Cory Clark, is she on the Right or the left? Should I care? Can her work stand above politics on its own merit? There is a lesson in all of this someplace.
A strange and historically aberrant radical individualism informs these times. It places the fully autonomous self at the center of all things and therefore, virtually anything can be claimed as therapeutic self-realization. A "F**k Men" Frenzy or a "To Hell with Women" squabble helps no one, obviously. But intelligent people need to inquire where this act of self-defeat is coming from.
In the end, men and women were created for one another in the biblical sense. We will thrive together or we will die together. But for the time being, we do not exist today in a society which honors our shared natures and complementary differences.
There's a piece of this you're not adequately factoring: the shill. The would-be influencer who is willing to say whatever they have to say to get the fame, the clicks, the book contracts, and the professional opportunities. Every media space has a fair number.
Andrews' view is deeply degrading to women. That's not necessarily displeasing to her target audience. For many, a selling point. But how should the rest of us see someone who "lights a fire" by stroking resentful people's yearning to believe that a resented group truly is beneath them? Especially when we're already so familiar with that unhappy social dynamic?
Gress is just very dishonest. Her arguments, evaluated qua arguments, are terrible; her textual readings are often completely absurd. Very little of what she writes can stand up to serious scrutiny. But she has a PhD in philosophy! She's neither stupid nor uneducated. So what explains this? I don't think it's her "deeply held pro-life beliefs." How does her stack of dishonest antifeminist books help to end abortion? She's not even convincing anyone on that point. She's hardly *trying* to convince anyone. She's pretty much exclusively a choir-preacher, getting into firefights with other people on the right who generally also hate abortion. Nobody on the left, so far as I can see, pays the least attention to Gress. Trashing other pro-life Catholic moms for their stance on Mary Wollstonecraft is hardly taking the fight to the enemy on the abortion front.
No, the explanation for Gress is obvious: there was a ready-made platform for someone willing to play that role, and she claimed it. The educated woman willing to argue that other women who wanted careers or opportunities for civic participation were just bamboozled by the world's insistence that women should "be like men," because a woman is naturally domestic and maternal. Lots of people badly want to believe this. Gress assures them it's true. Her arguments for it are terrible but her audience isn't too picky on that front.
I suppose you could give her this much at least: there are plenty of other women eager to claim that platform, and she was more successful than most. But to the people who saw that same platform, were offered some of those same opportunities, and declined them for principled and truth-based reasons, Gress is not an impressive figure. If you read a measure of scorn in some of her critics, those are the reasons.
I agree that we need to "see where this act of self-defeat is coming from." To that end though, you might need to consider that sometimes, antifeminism is very little more than a servicing of male resentment.
So, I skimmed through the article and got the general gist of it, but I think a big problem with discourse around feminism that no one can answer the question “what is feminism?” You mention your sex-realist feminist friends, but there are plenty of feminists who would say your friends aren’t feminists.
I go back to the foundation of feminism to assess what it is, and the foundation isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft, who I’m sure had some good ideas, but Percy Shelley, her daughter’s husband (only because Percy abandoned his first wife). Shelley gave us the foundational myth of feminism, which reinterprets the Garden of Eden story as a story about Eve and the serpent rebelling together against the “unjust” and “oppressive” authority of both God and Adam. Anything that follows in the spirit of this myth is feminism, and anything that breaks with or rejects this myth, even if it calls itself feminism, isn’t.
I would also propose that we didn’t need feminism to get some of the good things mentioned. The education of women was already on the rise - that is why feminist authors existed in the first place. Who taught them to read and write? Who taught them how to engage with the popular, enlightenment philosophy of the day and adapt it to peculiarly female issues? They didn’t just stumble into this; they had an education. Domestic violence and rape were already illegal and communities punished them more harshly back then (stockade, hanging, exile, etc, even mob justice) than we do today. Even if we wanted, as we probably should have and do have now, more formalized systems for dealing with these crimes, we did not have to embrace the evil ideology called feminism in order to obtain them. In fact, these issues were the trojan horse feminism used in order to go mainstream, because their core ideas about female nature never would have flown, and are anti-christian.
I don't see who could possibly be in a position to adjudicate what qualifies as "real" feminism. And why would that conversation even be interesting? This is one reason I generally haven't bothered to argue about whether or not I qualify as a "feminist" (who cares?), though the sex-realist feminists have put me in a bind that way, insofar as I am inclined to identify with them. (Can you be a sex-realist feminist without being a feminist? Hmm.)
I'm not totally uninterested in historical "what might have been" hypotheticals but it does seem fairly unrealistic to me to suppose that a super-harmonious, "everyone feels great about this every stage of the way" social change was ever at all likely. Social change is hard. The questions on the table here are complicated and potentially socially disruptive. None of that should be seen as a justification for evils like abortion, but if the implication is that even the first-wave feminists were making a fuss over nothing (because any existing injustices were well on their way to being gently and organically resolved)... yeah, no. Color me unpersuaded.
I didn't say that the first wave feminists were making a fuss over nothing, but that they could have made a fuss over the right things without embracing the evil ideology of feminism.
We have the historical record available to us. First wave feminists were occultists, not Christians, and they did not like Christianity.
What of the alleged "assignments"? Neither maternity nor paternity is assigned or imposed on female and male--it's natural, true, and facilitating such a human good, so necessary to human flourishing, is more important than teaching literacy. The encouragement, facilitation means much. 1. Of course it will be expected that women become familiar with work that allows for pregnancy and proximity to babies soon therafter. 2. Of course it's more important for the male to play an equal role in the household which requires that he do more of the acquisition further from the house. 3. Finally--and this is missed--friendship. There is a big need for single-sex conversations, intimacy, so in a fishing community, the boy who really would prefer to sit and tend the nets, and not go out with the fathers all day is properly encouraged to suck it up, and so too with the girl who'd prefer to fish and not tend nets. This last "encouragement" is difficult, and maybe unfair, but it's not an arbitrary imposition. I'm glad we have more freedom as to 3--largely caused by a diverse and freer market.
I could quibble here and there, but it mostly seems to me like you're just filling out some of the context for how "social assignment" tends to work.
And insofar as your reply is, "OK, but in that case, social assignment is natural, organic, and not bad," I will simply agree that yes, it's pretty natural, and not always bad. But the human race is fallen. Natural, organic arrangements can still incorporate certain mistakes, false ideas, and injustices. Sometimes it's worth trying to correct those.
To David and Jared—cultural assumptions are pretty powerful. It’s not that women were such wimps before second-wave feminism, but truly, women were largely relegated to secretary, teacher or nurse. And, John Wayne style(remember, he often spanked his love interest), men were expected to rule the roost. Reality was softer, sure, but it was a restrictive time for women. As I argue above, second-wave feminists were pretty militant, but perhaps they had to be to be noticed. In combination with the sexual revolution, we’ve had some pretty disastrous results, especially for children and families. There’s a lot to correct, but I would not go back.
From Erika Bachiochi's article that I posted Wednesday:
In Bradwell, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote for the Court: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood."
That's an American judge in 1873, infamously upholding a state statute prohibiting married women from practicing law. So clearly many people believed things like this, right? We don't have to endorse caricatured narratives with brutal, barbaric men and terrified, cowering women to look at that and say, "Well, that's rather a problematic view. Some correction was merited there."
"In a conversation touching the case and his opinion, while this paper was in course of preparation, Justice Bradley playfully remarked that he was the better satisfied with it because it had the approbation of his wife, who, on having the question presented to her, expressed her views very decidedly and emphatically against the idea of women becoming or practicing as lawyers; and declared that it was abhorrent to all the finer feelings of delicacy that ought to characterize every pure and respectable woman. He looked upon these utterances, he said, as the spontaneous expression of womanhood, and for that reason he thought them of value." It is blinkered ideology that immediately concludes that Bradley was a monster, Mrs. Bradley an idiot, etc. And it's even more blinkered to think that the Bradleys' view was uncontroversial at the time. Six years later COngress--males all--voted that any woman admitted to the bar of any state could be admitted to the Supreme Court bar.
I didn't call anyone a monster or idiot, but I do think this is a problematic view reflecting a false understanding of woman's nature. Yep, standing behind that.
As a matter of faith and some experience, I believe that man is corrupt, that there was no golden era after the Fall, and also that degeneration and decline is still to be expected, as both the Old and New Testament indicate. My main objection is to an overly dark view of America, 1600-1968, a caricature that means that tradition is presumptively wicked.. Incidentally, a year ago I listed to Chrstopher Caldwell's book, which is pretty reactionary--but he has an interesting account of America, 1945-1964. He says the culture became absurdly dominated by the tastes and opinions of male WWII veterans. And I think that John Wayne stuff and its culture reflected that excess--and was not truly "traditional."
Oh, I agree with you on this mostly. Those times were not exactly the bad old days, but some aspects needed improvement. See my long post above if you are interested.
However, I believe the characterization of the Christian west, and espeically Christian American history, that so often finds its way in feminist discourse, is largely false. So many claims imputed to our traditional customs (e.g., violence in marriage was lawful, men denied that women had intelligence) are not supported by the evidence. Even more so, the alleged terror and stupidity of our great-grandmothers is simply belied by spending some time with what we have of their own writings.
There is an incompatibility between number 1 and 3. The argument from traditoin--what has been passed down--proceed from a belief that on average and in general, fathers do give their sons food wihen they ask for bread or fish, and not useless thing or even poisonous things (stones, serpents). According to number 3, until very recently (and gosh, it's the 70s for so many) our forefathers unjustly and brutally oppressed our foremothers, and our foremothers were too scared or stupid to resist. If the latter is true, then tradition is at best stupid, if not wicked--nothing but cycles of abuse and evil until that singular group--the feminists--noted for their superior intelligence and martial virtue (vir--almost manly!), came and started shouting. If that's how things get better, then louder, more radical, more vulgar women--they are our saviors, and not our evil and stupid ancestors.
This strikes me as a fairly aggressive caricature of what I said. I didn't rail against "unjust and brutal oppression" or call anyone "scared and stupid." I guess you can argue that the sort of organic social role assignment I described is best seen as "cycles of abuse and evil" but that doesn't seem true to me. I mean, fallen humans are often unjust, even evil, and social arrangements do tend to facilitate those injustices in various ways, but I haven't suggested that older ones were dramatically more unjust than what we've got now. In fact, I've bent over backwards to stress the reverse.
What I actually said contextualized the under-appreciation of female potentiality within a larger general truth: That people tend to over-read the extent to which "nature" rather than "contingency" explains existing social arrangements, which in turn can lead to mistakes in their understanding of what other people are really like. This is not just a Mars/Venus thing. We see similar patterns in class distinctions, ethnic distinctions, the assumptions people make about other professions or nationalities. We have a tendency to over-read nature! It makes the world feel more comfortable and more just. This is not necessarily brutally unjust or evil, but it does give rise to mistakes sometimes, and when that happens we should be open to correcting them and increasing our understanding of the truth.
Women aren't the only people, by the way, whose talents have been chronically underestimated. The same is surely true of peasants. The poor. In specific historical contexts, often particular ethnic or cultural groups. It's actually pretty extraordinary how complex and diverse humans are; it's unsurprising that we don't always successfully appreciate their real potentialities. Because the male-female difference is more categorical than, say, class difference, "the story of sexism" might seem more singular or dramatic than these others, but in my understanding at least it's really more garden-variety human behavior, not necessarily involving brutal oppression or pervasive feminine terror. If you read it that way, that might actually say more about your desire to see male-female differences as categorical in ways that are necessarily deeply defining of social realities.
I don't mean to caricature it--and here's why I went there: "feminism as the main reason women can now be doctors and lawyer, get university degrees, run for office. It’s the reason women can now take over the family farm or business when their husbands unexpectedly die, instead of being placed under the guardianship of some distant cousin. Are we now… opposed to those things?" What is feminism--a new, modern thing, I suspect, and advanced by a minority--which is to say that the majority of our ancestros, traditions, would have opposed women's education, opportunities, etc. I think it's unfair to our American tradition to suggest such dependence on some few radicals. Rather, all these changes resulted from more wealth, more leisure time, more general opportunities that came about rather readily without violence, and where opposition was not some monstous injustice but a misunderstanding, mistake, and yes, perhaps a not-reasonable fear that it would harm the household.
A couple of things that are odd to me about that complaint. First, you make it sound as though I've been zealously canonizing historical feminists, but I really haven't at all, here or anywhere so far as I can remember. The only one I've even mentioned was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her primarily in the context of characterizing today's feminist/antifeminist debate. I did say, in a broad-brush sense, that the feminists were right about some things. Weren't they?
The other oddity is that this comment makes it sound as though the integration of women into our public life was a bruising, deeply polarizing experience, a source of national trauma. One we get to the 70s, maybe. When abortion becomes part of the picture, that's another ball game. But before that... was it really all that bruising? I'm not saying the suffragettes were perfect, again I haven't ever moved to canonize them, but they don't seem to have been all that scary to me. I guess Frances Willard was famous for smashing up pubs to get the drunkards home to their families, but apart from a few broken bottles, was there really that much violence or serious aggression?
I'm not a huge enthusiast for social causes, but you know. Social change does generally involve some angst, opposition etc. If the women's movements we got weren't gentle enough for you, I have to wonder whether your expectations were realistic.
I haven't demonized Most Of History for not giving women more opportunities. There were some non-ridiculous reasons! I've bent over backwards to agree to this! But... they didn't always give women a lot of opportunities, you know? I'm not sure a non-violent women's movement, involving marches, sashes etc etc, can fairly be dismissed as a wild overreaction to historical circumstances.
I read this line in a certain way: "you’ll see feminism as the main reason women can now be doctors and lawyer, get university degrees, run for office," and I assumed by "feminism" you meant a certain definition of feminism, akin to what I think the vast majority of self-described "feminists" think of: a martial and revolutionary cause championed by a minority of rather smart and spirited women on behalf of the sisterhood. I think the real reason is democratization, technological liberation--the more stunning change to the peasantry, male as well as female, and the suffrage, equal education, came about rather seamlessly--and very quickly in America. I find both the American tradition (#1) and the third development (#3) to be largely harmonious.
Right, I see where you're going with this, and I definitely wouldn't agree to any theory along the lines of, "But for Susan B. Anthony, women would still be unable to vote or inherit property!" No, that seems almost certainly untrue. You're also clearly correct that feminist activism worked only because a great many men agreed that the greater inclusion of women was beneficial and just! That's *why* we never had a Feminist Weather Underground, or at least one reason. That all matters.
At the same time. I find *in general* that there is at least *very substantial overlap* between 1) people who view feminism as abhorrent, and 2) people who *even now* don't really think women should have broad professional opportunities, or even the franchise or the ability to inherit property. Usually, of course, people don't have fully cohesive ideas about all this. They just figure that feminism is bad and if you press them for specifics you might get a range of answers, and sometimes a frank admission that "I'm not sure whether giving women the franchise was good or not," or whatever. Fine, I'm not trying to strong-arm anyone into saying The Correct Thing, but the point is, however we understand the precise historical process by which these things happened, they are *even still* associated with feminism. It's not just me who connects "female franchise" and "feminism"; that's what almost everyone thinks. The definition of feminism is fuzzy. But if you think "female franchise" isn't a central part of it, you're the outlier here.
And, finally, it does seem to me that some form of activism probably was at least *a* necessary component of the relevant social change. It wasn't going to happen *absolutely* organically. If not Susan B. Anthony, perhaps someone else. Maybe someone wiser! How should I know? But this was enough of a break *historically* that someone had to push for it. It's ungenerous not to give those people at least a little bit of credit. And normally, we call them "feminists." "I support the female franchise but feminism was terrible" really is kind of a weird view. That's what most normies think early feminism *did*, and really, they're not wrong.
I'm now laughing imagining one of those silly alternative history videos (because my kids love those) with a feminist Weather Underground blowing things up, to the soundtrack of "Well done, Sister Suffragette!"
Pretty sure they never actually did stuff like that.
From my mother, Merina Smith. For some reason her computer won't post this, but I thought her reflection was valuable and wanted everyone to see it. So I'm posting here, with her permission:
"I think the second wave feminists had a difficult task. They could only make a splash by perhaps overstating their case along the lines of "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". I remember reading a particularly condescending article around 1980 by a woman who was trying to figure out why any woman would become a housewife. She said that she spent countless hours having coffee in living rooms trying to get to the root of this mystery, but as I recall never managed to come up with the answer that women were responding to the very great needs of their families, especially their children. It was thus easy for women who were engaged with the important (though often tedious) work of raising children and caring for families to dismiss feminists as out-of-touch with the real lives of women.
Friedan's life was probably not so meaningless and trivial as she made out in order to make her point, but there was definitely a problem for women who needed to support their families. When my Mom started teaching in the early 60s for example, she was paid less than male teachers because they were supporting families, except that she also was supporting a family. When I was growing up the big three (low-paid) professions for women were teacher, nurse and secretary. There is nothing wrong with these professions, but that is waaaay too limiting given the considerable talents and desires of women. So feminism has done a lot of good.
Once, early in married life, a Yale grad student working on some sort of counseling degree wanted to interview us about our marriage. She asked lots of questions about division of work and the like, and was surprised that we agreed on so many issues. I think she was used to a lot more conflict between couples. At the time, I was kind of proud of this and thought that our agreement stemmed from a very traditional understanding of roles with which we had been raised and to which we generally adhered. I thought that was good, especially in light of the controversies of the day. This understanding helped us know what our duties were. There are and were many good aspects of tradition, among them the desire to come together at all and create a family, something that is much weakened these days. But over the years we have had to grapple with problems that stemmed from this traditional understanding. A true partnership really can't happen with the view that the man has the last word when there is a disagreement, as the traditional view dictated in those days. Rather, controversies have to be talked out and worked out. Couples have to grapple with what is most important to each of them and how to compromise for the good of the family. It's not an easy task. It requires thought and compromise. So, while I recognize the importance of tradition, it can't do all the work that I then thought it could.
Second-wave feminists were able to moderate their views somewhat after they had become an important part of the culture. I remember Steinem admitting at some point that maybe having a husband and children could be valuable, after younger women began to revolt against a feminist message that rejected these important aspects of life. Abortion, though, has been a feminist staple from the get-go. I think a more nuanced approach to abortion would still benefit hard-core feminists. In general, the Christian traditions regarding sex and marriage are right and true IMHO (and feminist efforts to destroy the Christian understanding have led to terrible things), but some of the adjacent beliefs, likely designed by religious leaders to simplify conflict in marriages, didn't really do what needed to be done. Contemporary efforts to renew these beliefs lead to similarly cartoonish results. People want simple ways to work through problems. It is not hard to understand this desire. But some things cannot really be made simple, especially anything having to do with human relationships, which very much includes the male/female relationships and the divide between the sexes. Bridging this divide in marriages and culture in general, is absolutely necessary to the human race, but it will never be easy."
Solomon spoke of his search for a good person (a bit like Diogenes) and he said:
"Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found."
I like to take him literally. When we do the math, we find that men are 1/10th of 1% better than women.
This is fairly in the range of Freud's narcissism of small differences, and any man who takes pride in it is probably the same kind of man who plays the lottery. As in, a man who is worse at math than "math is hard" Barbie.
I find pretending “men are this” and “women are that” to be generally unhelpful. People are people, made in His image to be loved and to love. Pretending that all members of any group behave one way, feel one way or are made to assume one role is silly. He gives us gifts according to our own design!
Male and female He created them.
I fail to see how feminism is responsible for abortion, which is common (or even forced) in many patriarchal cultures like India and China. Abortion becoming safe/available does coincide with the rise of feminism--but I disagree that it's causal. I do see a lot of feminists who strongly believe in abortion rights...but also who support broader policies that make life easier for mothers. I see examples of men who rely on abortion to abdicate responsibility. They're not doing this because they're so "feminist," rather there is a deep sexism in it and a desire to continue taking advantage of women with no consequences.
Anyway, you're right in naming the complexity of the feminist movement and I loved hearing your backstory. I think feminism is so often the "boogeyman" for religious fundamentalists. These same groups can often do things like cover up sexual abuse, especially when committed by religious leaders. It honestly makes me 🤮 what women in these groups often have to put up with.
It seems odd to suggest there’s no causal link there when second wave feminism was really the main moving force behind efforts to legalize abortion in the mid-twentieth century.
However I do think it’s important (and this is something I also note sometimes) that abortion is also legal in lots of countries with very patriarchal cultures and minimal feminist influence. People find lots of reasons to want to kill their children. Children are a blessing, but a burdensome blessing. In the West though, feminism and the quest for greater autonomy/opportunity for women definitely seems to be part of the story (really the central part I think) and you need a story more there because unlike China (say) the West’s Christian history gave people pretty powerful reasons to oppose abortion. (As some did and have done of course but not enough to counter that powerful interest.)
Abortion rates will get better when we put policies in place that support families. We say we are pro-family, and yet do not support families with our policy-making. We should be ashamed.
This is how I feel too
I hear this said a lot, and I do certainly think it would be good to make our society more family-friendly generally. (Though, I'm also someone who thinks that the entitlement state has already done a lot of harm with its invasive policies, so putting families on the dole en masse doesn't delight me.)
I'm far from sure though that pronatal policies could substantially impact abortion rates. Maybe! These things are hard to predict! But having a baby will always be a pretty huge deal no matter what sort of social safety net we create. No policymaker can turn a baby into an oh-why-not (nor should we want that).
States that have pro-natal policies DO have lower abortion rates. While states/nations that outlaw abortion and don’t have family friendly policies actually have higher rates of abortion - they are just done secretly, behind closed doors.
Things like paid maternity leave and high quality healthcare aren’t welfare. They are marks of a society that prioritizes caring for the welfare of its people, especially its young.
It doesn’t benefit ME to make sure that the next generation has access to funded maternity and paternity leave. But I think it needs to happen because it it the right thing to do. It is the JUST thing to do and the pro-life thing to do. There is nothing pro-life about telling a 3 week postpartum woman to leave her nursing baby and go back to work because she doesn’t have any more PTO.
High quality healthcare, paternity/maternity leave, access to sex ed/contraception/sterilization, etc should be at the top of conservatives’ agendas. But they aren’t. And it makes us look like fools. It makes liberals look CORRECT when they say “it’s about controlling women’s bodies, not about helping.” Because these strategies DO help lower abortion rates. Very few women get their rocks off having an abortion. When given the chance, women do want to practice responsible sex. But we need to give them access to education and contraception (and sterilization if they choose it, without demanding that they be a certain age if have reproduced a certain number of times). Respect adult women enough to let them make their own decisions.
"Things like paid maternity leave and high quality healthcare aren’t welfare. They are marks of a society that prioritizes caring for the welfare of its people, especially its young."
Anytime taxpayers are buying someone else's groceries or paying their rent, that's essentially welfare. Maybe we're okay with that, there are arguments for it, but let's try to be clear about what's at issue. You could of course suggest that it should be employers, not taxpayers, who pay people's bills while they're caring for their babies, but now you have a different problem: employers are potentially disincentivized from hiring people who seem likely to become parents. That's not great.
Don't misunderstand me. I realize there are some very hard challenges here that parents face, and I want us to go on looking for better solutions. I just want it to be understood that "let's have the state dump tons of money on people" isn't always as good of a solution as it appears to be from afar. It doesn't embarrass me that conservatives are more cautious than progressives about doing that. That's very prudent, in fact.
But sure, let's pay attention to the data! Data is complicated, it requires considerable interpretation, but such things do matter.
Is our defense “welfare”? Our educational system “welfare”? Using our tax dollars to support a program doesn’t make something welfare.
I don’t see conservatives sending their Social Security checks back, or refusing Medicare.
Our taxes are used for many things that we agree on for the common good.
Most modern nations have concluded that supporting parents being home with their children during the first few months after birth is important. The US seems to think that’s a luxury only the rich deserve.
We pretend we are pro-life with our mouths, and then actively work against the poor with our policies. It’s shameful.
You write:
"I think it’s really quite clear that people today have a much better appreciation overall of the range of women’s potentialities, and of the excellences they can attain. To some extent this is true of people generally..."
Yes! That's the point. Progress is real: in science and technology, in rights and liberalism, in capitalism and economic growth, and there are a whole lot of benefits to go around.
"... but the change is more striking for women..."
Can you quantify that? "Striking" is an openly subjective word, but is there an *objective* way to define and measure the relative "change for women" that is taking place?
And how important is "appreciation... of... potentialities," anyway? Suppose a woman can't get married and raise kids because she has too much student debt and that scares the men away. Is "appreciation of her potentialities" a compensation? How does it balance against other things a person might want, such as offspring, love, or happiness?
I'm inclined to think that *expansion of opportunity sets* is presumptively a good thing, because people might find an option better than what was previously available. "Appreciation of potentialities" is a little bit connected with expansion of opportunity sets-- people may give you new opportunities because they've gained a new appreciation of your potentialities-- but not much, because all sorts of recognized potentialities-- yes, you maybe *could* do these things under the right circumstances-- are out of reach for financial or social reasons.
Have women's opportunity sets expanded? A pure expansion would move from A to A+B, where A is the old opportunity set and B is a new set of opportunities added to it. But for many women, it seems that the possibilities of faithful, fertile marriages to a devoted provider are more limited than in the past. So no, the opportunity sets haven't expanded, they've shifted.
Evaluative standards are elusive. And yet you don't seem to be aware of that.
You roll along, opinionated and judgmental, complacently mainstream, vague, but throwing blanket *ad hominems* all over the place, like...
"today’s antifeminists are mostly just selling their own flavor of resentment."
How do you know that they're motivated by resentment? And if they are, so what? I'm not above learning from a resentful man who wields good arguments. Judge people by their evidence and logic, not by the mood or motive you impute to them.
If you're entertaining the case for a "Christian feminism," I suggest that you look to the Bible for guidance. What does it have to say about this? It's a good corrective to the combination of vagueness and opinionated complacency in this essay.
And while the fact that a reader of this essay would come away completely muddled by what "feminism" means, as you seem to admit in some of your comments, I don't think it's *actually* that hard to define. Feminism starts from the knee-jerk question, "Why shouldn't women do whatever men can do?" There are good answers to that; there are a lot of reasons why men's life outcomes differ systematically from women's. But feminism doesn't ask the question in sincerity; rather, it asks rhetorically, and then launches an inquisition against anyone who tries to answer it except in the most sycophantically feminist way.
You write:
"For blinkered ideologues of all persuasions, I think the road to recovery begins here. Let’s be open to learning. What are men and women actually like? How are their experiences similar and different? What helps them to thrive?"
But by far the main blinkered ideologues in the room are the feminists. People have been open to learning since the dawn of time, and have drawn many, many good lessons about what men and women are actually like, and those fed into the rich, manifold human traditions which feminism condemns and anathematizes. And as long as the feminists are in the room, I'm going to be very wary of speaking publicly about what men and women are actually like, because I know they'll scold and howl with indignation and anathematize.
When we win the war on political correctness, then we'll have the space to start thinking in public about these important questions.
Rachel, you wrote: "So perhaps we should be neutral on “feminism,” given that range of benefits and evils." Okay, this may seem like a reasonable stance, especially if one studiously bypasses the history of feminist hostility to the Christian mandate. But this, along with a certain strain of outright misandry which runs through much of feminism makes it hard for some to be as neutral as you. Of course, one can be a new sort of feminist and not adhere to the hatred of men or the rejection of Christian virtues by stating so clearly.
I understand, but look. I’m very opposed to misandry. I have five sons! Of course I want them to have rich and thriving lives!
Thinkers in an antifeminist mold don’t always seem to think it’s really *that* big of a deal whether women can pursue professional opportunity. Be full-fledged citizens who can vote. Be permitted to inherit, say, the business that they themselves spent decades helping to build, instead of the distant cousin. There are antifeminists *now* who think that stuff is basically fine. So, any note of misandry is absolutely unacceptable but I should be blasé about those things? Why?
I feel it’s reasonable to default back to “complex phenomenon.”
Informed, clearheaded feminists today are redefining feminism for these times. This is a good and necessary endeavor. But having studied feminism myself, what is in the back of my mind is that feminism really does have a dark side and these aforementioned women, whom I respect, are quite selective about being silent on that darkness.
To me, their augments would be stronger if they were more open about what they don't except in feminist history while still advocating what for they are for. It is a question of honesty even if they will have to take flack in doing so. This means that I don't take seriously those feminists who both know the history and defend all of it without qualifications.
At this point in time there are many highly accomplished women in numerous fields who serve as examples for younger women wishing to pursue professional opportunities and this trend is apt to continue. There is an antifeminist* augment that fields like the law and medicine change when women come to dominate. The university is a living example of this occurring as we speak. As to whether this is a looming is a good thing with positive outcomes remains to be seen.
* Helen Andrews
In my prior post I should have mentioned the Women's Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Oh, I'm familiar with Helen Andrews, and all her shenanigans. Here's my response to her, paywalled I'm afraid but maybe you can find ways:|
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3862729/great-feminization-falls-short-theory-of-everything-women-woke-culture/
I think I, and most of the sex-realist feminists I have read, are pretty up-front about what we don't accept in mainstream feminism. You're not going to do a whole lot better than Erika Bachiochi, Ivana Greco, Leah Libresco Sergeant, Elizabeth Matthews etc for that. They're happy to hit hard at mainstream feminists when they're wrong.
But take the Andrews piece. Look, I can talk about this stuff, I'm not going to freak out, cry, call the social justice police. But, this is just where we are. If you're female and on the right, you have to pen missives explaining why "the very fact of people like me being permitted to enter mainstream professions hasn't destroyed America." Because that's actually very persuasive to a great people right-leaning people in the West today. You have to explain, seriously and carefully, why it's *not wrong* to be "a professional and also female."
The thing that most amused me in that Andrews piece was the part at the end where she gets all, "It was really hard for me to say this today, I was so scared that people would judge me harshly..." Oh right, yeah. Giving a speech like that at Nat Con, so risky. They're not going to absolutely eat that up. (They ate it up. Obviously.)
When you're a rising female writer on the right, the pressure to write antifeminist clickbait is relentless. There's a huge grievance market there. When people like Andrews or Gress pretend like that's not the case... well...
They may not be the most honest writers in the world.
Thank you for the Washington Examiner link. I had missed it mainly because some time ago I decided that reading the NYT and turning to places like the Examiner for an alternative take was a miserable way to begin a day. As in Law & Liberty, you open up useful avenues of critique which were important. And yes, Bachiochi, Greco, Sergeant, Matthews have each made important contributions as well.
However, it was inevitable that a counter reaction would arrive to shed light on different aspects of what one could call militant progressivism. I see Andrews as a polemicist who enjoys poking the beast, so you are correct that her Nat Con speech wasn't risky. But most worthwhile endeavors in life impose risk and she sure lit a fire.
Marry Harrington was once coming from the fringe Left but had an epiphany while pushing her baby daughter's strollers one day. She said to herself, "I'm a mother and I'm a feminist - where do I belong in feminism proper?" From this thought (or maternal instinct) became her Feminism Against Progress volume and soon she shot to fame. But why was she was adopted by the Right? This is strange unless it was the Left that wasn't listening.
I set Carrie Gress aside in her own category because she is deeply Catholic. What I mean by this is that her attack on feminism comes from (in my view) her belief that abortion in murder. This, of course, is a binary and explosive stance. It is black and white, as the blowback to her views shows quite clearly. Can we say Gress is just an ideolog if her deeply held religious beliefs are what lead her? If so, what does this make the deeply held secular stance of those who have attached her mercilessly? Or take Cory Clark, is she on the Right or the left? Should I care? Can her work stand above politics on its own merit? There is a lesson in all of this someplace.
A strange and historically aberrant radical individualism informs these times. It places the fully autonomous self at the center of all things and therefore, virtually anything can be claimed as therapeutic self-realization. A "F**k Men" Frenzy or a "To Hell with Women" squabble helps no one, obviously. But intelligent people need to inquire where this act of self-defeat is coming from.
In the end, men and women were created for one another in the biblical sense. We will thrive together or we will die together. But for the time being, we do not exist today in a society which honors our shared natures and complementary differences.
There's a piece of this you're not adequately factoring: the shill. The would-be influencer who is willing to say whatever they have to say to get the fame, the clicks, the book contracts, and the professional opportunities. Every media space has a fair number.
Andrews' view is deeply degrading to women. That's not necessarily displeasing to her target audience. For many, a selling point. But how should the rest of us see someone who "lights a fire" by stroking resentful people's yearning to believe that a resented group truly is beneath them? Especially when we're already so familiar with that unhappy social dynamic?
Gress is just very dishonest. Her arguments, evaluated qua arguments, are terrible; her textual readings are often completely absurd. Very little of what she writes can stand up to serious scrutiny. But she has a PhD in philosophy! She's neither stupid nor uneducated. So what explains this? I don't think it's her "deeply held pro-life beliefs." How does her stack of dishonest antifeminist books help to end abortion? She's not even convincing anyone on that point. She's hardly *trying* to convince anyone. She's pretty much exclusively a choir-preacher, getting into firefights with other people on the right who generally also hate abortion. Nobody on the left, so far as I can see, pays the least attention to Gress. Trashing other pro-life Catholic moms for their stance on Mary Wollstonecraft is hardly taking the fight to the enemy on the abortion front.
No, the explanation for Gress is obvious: there was a ready-made platform for someone willing to play that role, and she claimed it. The educated woman willing to argue that other women who wanted careers or opportunities for civic participation were just bamboozled by the world's insistence that women should "be like men," because a woman is naturally domestic and maternal. Lots of people badly want to believe this. Gress assures them it's true. Her arguments for it are terrible but her audience isn't too picky on that front.
I suppose you could give her this much at least: there are plenty of other women eager to claim that platform, and she was more successful than most. But to the people who saw that same platform, were offered some of those same opportunities, and declined them for principled and truth-based reasons, Gress is not an impressive figure. If you read a measure of scorn in some of her critics, those are the reasons.
I agree that we need to "see where this act of self-defeat is coming from." To that end though, you might need to consider that sometimes, antifeminism is very little more than a servicing of male resentment.
There’s no such thing as Christian feminism (I’m posting this comment before reading the article; might comment after, too).
So, I skimmed through the article and got the general gist of it, but I think a big problem with discourse around feminism that no one can answer the question “what is feminism?” You mention your sex-realist feminist friends, but there are plenty of feminists who would say your friends aren’t feminists.
I go back to the foundation of feminism to assess what it is, and the foundation isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft, who I’m sure had some good ideas, but Percy Shelley, her daughter’s husband (only because Percy abandoned his first wife). Shelley gave us the foundational myth of feminism, which reinterprets the Garden of Eden story as a story about Eve and the serpent rebelling together against the “unjust” and “oppressive” authority of both God and Adam. Anything that follows in the spirit of this myth is feminism, and anything that breaks with or rejects this myth, even if it calls itself feminism, isn’t.
I would also propose that we didn’t need feminism to get some of the good things mentioned. The education of women was already on the rise - that is why feminist authors existed in the first place. Who taught them to read and write? Who taught them how to engage with the popular, enlightenment philosophy of the day and adapt it to peculiarly female issues? They didn’t just stumble into this; they had an education. Domestic violence and rape were already illegal and communities punished them more harshly back then (stockade, hanging, exile, etc, even mob justice) than we do today. Even if we wanted, as we probably should have and do have now, more formalized systems for dealing with these crimes, we did not have to embrace the evil ideology called feminism in order to obtain them. In fact, these issues were the trojan horse feminism used in order to go mainstream, because their core ideas about female nature never would have flown, and are anti-christian.
I don't see who could possibly be in a position to adjudicate what qualifies as "real" feminism. And why would that conversation even be interesting? This is one reason I generally haven't bothered to argue about whether or not I qualify as a "feminist" (who cares?), though the sex-realist feminists have put me in a bind that way, insofar as I am inclined to identify with them. (Can you be a sex-realist feminist without being a feminist? Hmm.)
I'm not totally uninterested in historical "what might have been" hypotheticals but it does seem fairly unrealistic to me to suppose that a super-harmonious, "everyone feels great about this every stage of the way" social change was ever at all likely. Social change is hard. The questions on the table here are complicated and potentially socially disruptive. None of that should be seen as a justification for evils like abortion, but if the implication is that even the first-wave feminists were making a fuss over nothing (because any existing injustices were well on their way to being gently and organically resolved)... yeah, no. Color me unpersuaded.
I didn't say that the first wave feminists were making a fuss over nothing, but that they could have made a fuss over the right things without embracing the evil ideology of feminism.
We have the historical record available to us. First wave feminists were occultists, not Christians, and they did not like Christianity.
What of the alleged "assignments"? Neither maternity nor paternity is assigned or imposed on female and male--it's natural, true, and facilitating such a human good, so necessary to human flourishing, is more important than teaching literacy. The encouragement, facilitation means much. 1. Of course it will be expected that women become familiar with work that allows for pregnancy and proximity to babies soon therafter. 2. Of course it's more important for the male to play an equal role in the household which requires that he do more of the acquisition further from the house. 3. Finally--and this is missed--friendship. There is a big need for single-sex conversations, intimacy, so in a fishing community, the boy who really would prefer to sit and tend the nets, and not go out with the fathers all day is properly encouraged to suck it up, and so too with the girl who'd prefer to fish and not tend nets. This last "encouragement" is difficult, and maybe unfair, but it's not an arbitrary imposition. I'm glad we have more freedom as to 3--largely caused by a diverse and freer market.
I could quibble here and there, but it mostly seems to me like you're just filling out some of the context for how "social assignment" tends to work.
And insofar as your reply is, "OK, but in that case, social assignment is natural, organic, and not bad," I will simply agree that yes, it's pretty natural, and not always bad. But the human race is fallen. Natural, organic arrangements can still incorporate certain mistakes, false ideas, and injustices. Sometimes it's worth trying to correct those.
I see nothing here I can disagree with. I'm disappointed. :)
To David and Jared—cultural assumptions are pretty powerful. It’s not that women were such wimps before second-wave feminism, but truly, women were largely relegated to secretary, teacher or nurse. And, John Wayne style(remember, he often spanked his love interest), men were expected to rule the roost. Reality was softer, sure, but it was a restrictive time for women. As I argue above, second-wave feminists were pretty militant, but perhaps they had to be to be noticed. In combination with the sexual revolution, we’ve had some pretty disastrous results, especially for children and families. There’s a lot to correct, but I would not go back.
From Erika Bachiochi's article that I posted Wednesday:
In Bradwell, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote for the Court: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood."
That's an American judge in 1873, infamously upholding a state statute prohibiting married women from practicing law. So clearly many people believed things like this, right? We don't have to endorse caricatured narratives with brutal, barbaric men and terrified, cowering women to look at that and say, "Well, that's rather a problematic view. Some correction was merited there."
"In a conversation touching the case and his opinion, while this paper was in course of preparation, Justice Bradley playfully remarked that he was the better satisfied with it because it had the approbation of his wife, who, on having the question presented to her, expressed her views very decidedly and emphatically against the idea of women becoming or practicing as lawyers; and declared that it was abhorrent to all the finer feelings of delicacy that ought to characterize every pure and respectable woman. He looked upon these utterances, he said, as the spontaneous expression of womanhood, and for that reason he thought them of value." It is blinkered ideology that immediately concludes that Bradley was a monster, Mrs. Bradley an idiot, etc. And it's even more blinkered to think that the Bradleys' view was uncontroversial at the time. Six years later COngress--males all--voted that any woman admitted to the bar of any state could be admitted to the Supreme Court bar.
I didn't call anyone a monster or idiot, but I do think this is a problematic view reflecting a false understanding of woman's nature. Yep, standing behind that.
As a matter of faith and some experience, I believe that man is corrupt, that there was no golden era after the Fall, and also that degeneration and decline is still to be expected, as both the Old and New Testament indicate. My main objection is to an overly dark view of America, 1600-1968, a caricature that means that tradition is presumptively wicked.. Incidentally, a year ago I listed to Chrstopher Caldwell's book, which is pretty reactionary--but he has an interesting account of America, 1945-1964. He says the culture became absurdly dominated by the tastes and opinions of male WWII veterans. And I think that John Wayne stuff and its culture reflected that excess--and was not truly "traditional."
Oh, I agree with you on this mostly. Those times were not exactly the bad old days, but some aspects needed improvement. See my long post above if you are interested.
However, I believe the characterization of the Christian west, and espeically Christian American history, that so often finds its way in feminist discourse, is largely false. So many claims imputed to our traditional customs (e.g., violence in marriage was lawful, men denied that women had intelligence) are not supported by the evidence. Even more so, the alleged terror and stupidity of our great-grandmothers is simply belied by spending some time with what we have of their own writings.
There is an incompatibility between number 1 and 3. The argument from traditoin--what has been passed down--proceed from a belief that on average and in general, fathers do give their sons food wihen they ask for bread or fish, and not useless thing or even poisonous things (stones, serpents). According to number 3, until very recently (and gosh, it's the 70s for so many) our forefathers unjustly and brutally oppressed our foremothers, and our foremothers were too scared or stupid to resist. If the latter is true, then tradition is at best stupid, if not wicked--nothing but cycles of abuse and evil until that singular group--the feminists--noted for their superior intelligence and martial virtue (vir--almost manly!), came and started shouting. If that's how things get better, then louder, more radical, more vulgar women--they are our saviors, and not our evil and stupid ancestors.
This strikes me as a fairly aggressive caricature of what I said. I didn't rail against "unjust and brutal oppression" or call anyone "scared and stupid." I guess you can argue that the sort of organic social role assignment I described is best seen as "cycles of abuse and evil" but that doesn't seem true to me. I mean, fallen humans are often unjust, even evil, and social arrangements do tend to facilitate those injustices in various ways, but I haven't suggested that older ones were dramatically more unjust than what we've got now. In fact, I've bent over backwards to stress the reverse.
What I actually said contextualized the under-appreciation of female potentiality within a larger general truth: That people tend to over-read the extent to which "nature" rather than "contingency" explains existing social arrangements, which in turn can lead to mistakes in their understanding of what other people are really like. This is not just a Mars/Venus thing. We see similar patterns in class distinctions, ethnic distinctions, the assumptions people make about other professions or nationalities. We have a tendency to over-read nature! It makes the world feel more comfortable and more just. This is not necessarily brutally unjust or evil, but it does give rise to mistakes sometimes, and when that happens we should be open to correcting them and increasing our understanding of the truth.
Women aren't the only people, by the way, whose talents have been chronically underestimated. The same is surely true of peasants. The poor. In specific historical contexts, often particular ethnic or cultural groups. It's actually pretty extraordinary how complex and diverse humans are; it's unsurprising that we don't always successfully appreciate their real potentialities. Because the male-female difference is more categorical than, say, class difference, "the story of sexism" might seem more singular or dramatic than these others, but in my understanding at least it's really more garden-variety human behavior, not necessarily involving brutal oppression or pervasive feminine terror. If you read it that way, that might actually say more about your desire to see male-female differences as categorical in ways that are necessarily deeply defining of social realities.
I don't mean to caricature it--and here's why I went there: "feminism as the main reason women can now be doctors and lawyer, get university degrees, run for office. It’s the reason women can now take over the family farm or business when their husbands unexpectedly die, instead of being placed under the guardianship of some distant cousin. Are we now… opposed to those things?" What is feminism--a new, modern thing, I suspect, and advanced by a minority--which is to say that the majority of our ancestros, traditions, would have opposed women's education, opportunities, etc. I think it's unfair to our American tradition to suggest such dependence on some few radicals. Rather, all these changes resulted from more wealth, more leisure time, more general opportunities that came about rather readily without violence, and where opposition was not some monstous injustice but a misunderstanding, mistake, and yes, perhaps a not-reasonable fear that it would harm the household.
A couple of things that are odd to me about that complaint. First, you make it sound as though I've been zealously canonizing historical feminists, but I really haven't at all, here or anywhere so far as I can remember. The only one I've even mentioned was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her primarily in the context of characterizing today's feminist/antifeminist debate. I did say, in a broad-brush sense, that the feminists were right about some things. Weren't they?
The other oddity is that this comment makes it sound as though the integration of women into our public life was a bruising, deeply polarizing experience, a source of national trauma. One we get to the 70s, maybe. When abortion becomes part of the picture, that's another ball game. But before that... was it really all that bruising? I'm not saying the suffragettes were perfect, again I haven't ever moved to canonize them, but they don't seem to have been all that scary to me. I guess Frances Willard was famous for smashing up pubs to get the drunkards home to their families, but apart from a few broken bottles, was there really that much violence or serious aggression?
I'm not a huge enthusiast for social causes, but you know. Social change does generally involve some angst, opposition etc. If the women's movements we got weren't gentle enough for you, I have to wonder whether your expectations were realistic.
I haven't demonized Most Of History for not giving women more opportunities. There were some non-ridiculous reasons! I've bent over backwards to agree to this! But... they didn't always give women a lot of opportunities, you know? I'm not sure a non-violent women's movement, involving marches, sashes etc etc, can fairly be dismissed as a wild overreaction to historical circumstances.
I read this line in a certain way: "you’ll see feminism as the main reason women can now be doctors and lawyer, get university degrees, run for office," and I assumed by "feminism" you meant a certain definition of feminism, akin to what I think the vast majority of self-described "feminists" think of: a martial and revolutionary cause championed by a minority of rather smart and spirited women on behalf of the sisterhood. I think the real reason is democratization, technological liberation--the more stunning change to the peasantry, male as well as female, and the suffrage, equal education, came about rather seamlessly--and very quickly in America. I find both the American tradition (#1) and the third development (#3) to be largely harmonious.
Right, I see where you're going with this, and I definitely wouldn't agree to any theory along the lines of, "But for Susan B. Anthony, women would still be unable to vote or inherit property!" No, that seems almost certainly untrue. You're also clearly correct that feminist activism worked only because a great many men agreed that the greater inclusion of women was beneficial and just! That's *why* we never had a Feminist Weather Underground, or at least one reason. That all matters.
At the same time. I find *in general* that there is at least *very substantial overlap* between 1) people who view feminism as abhorrent, and 2) people who *even now* don't really think women should have broad professional opportunities, or even the franchise or the ability to inherit property. Usually, of course, people don't have fully cohesive ideas about all this. They just figure that feminism is bad and if you press them for specifics you might get a range of answers, and sometimes a frank admission that "I'm not sure whether giving women the franchise was good or not," or whatever. Fine, I'm not trying to strong-arm anyone into saying The Correct Thing, but the point is, however we understand the precise historical process by which these things happened, they are *even still* associated with feminism. It's not just me who connects "female franchise" and "feminism"; that's what almost everyone thinks. The definition of feminism is fuzzy. But if you think "female franchise" isn't a central part of it, you're the outlier here.
And, finally, it does seem to me that some form of activism probably was at least *a* necessary component of the relevant social change. It wasn't going to happen *absolutely* organically. If not Susan B. Anthony, perhaps someone else. Maybe someone wiser! How should I know? But this was enough of a break *historically* that someone had to push for it. It's ungenerous not to give those people at least a little bit of credit. And normally, we call them "feminists." "I support the female franchise but feminism was terrible" really is kind of a weird view. That's what most normies think early feminism *did*, and really, they're not wrong.
I'm now laughing imagining one of those silly alternative history videos (because my kids love those) with a feminist Weather Underground blowing things up, to the soundtrack of "Well done, Sister Suffragette!"
Pretty sure they never actually did stuff like that.