Puerilities
February 17, 2010
STARTING WITH THIS ENTRY, I will post statements by history’s famous feminists on a regular basis. These false or misleading appraisals of human nature, biological fact, spiritual truths, and common sense take the breath away. Feminism is rife with ridiculous assertions. I call these statements “puerilities” because they are so often child-like.
Here is the psychologically unstable Charlotte Perkins Gilman writing in The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture, published in 1911:
The inextricable confusion of politics and warfare is part of the stumbling block in the minds of men. As they see it, a nation is primarily a fighting organization; and its principle business is offensive and defensive warfare; therefore the ultimatum with which they oppose the demand for political equality – “women cannot fight, therefore they cannot vote.”
Fighting, when all is said, is to them the real business of life; not to be able to fight is to be quite out of the running; and ability to solve our growing mass of public problems; questions of health, of education, of morals, of economics; weighs naught against the ability to kill.
This naive assumption of supreme value in a process never of the first importance; and increasingly injurious as society progresses, would be laughable if it were not for its evil effects. It acts and reacts upon us to our hurt. Positively, we see the ill effects already touched on, the evils not only of active war, but of the apirit and methods of war; idealized, inculcated, and practiced in other social processes….
The ultimate resort is still to arms. The will of the majority is only respected on account of the guns of the majority. We have but a partial civilization, heavily modified to sex – the male sex.
— Comments —
Rita writes:
I noticed in Wikipedia that Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide when she got sick with cancer. I sympathize with her cancer but it sounds like she just didn’t have a lot of courage.
Laura writes:
By the time of her suicide in 1935, Gilman was widely considered too radical by most women activists and had come to be ignored. She was later taken up as a standard bearer of modern feminism, admired for her complete rejection of a woman’s traditional role.
