The Roots of Feminism
July 18, 2011
CARLA writes:
Reading your blog makes me wonder. If older generations were happy with the traditional role of women in society, why was feminism embraced by the later generation? Maybe you think it was propaganda, but why did the propaganda take hold? Were women discontent with their role to begin with? Was feminism offering something women thought they were lacking? And most important, if feminism is making women so unhappy why are women not embracing traditional role more?… Just curious. I think is a fascinating topic.
Laura writes:
Good question.
First, it’s simplistic to simply say older generations were “happy.” We live in a time of social breakdown and disorder. When we look to the past we can see relative order and beauty, but we cannot say it was a sea of happiness.
Women have always had cause to be dissatisfied. Life is filled with suffering. When feminists said that men brutalized women, that women were excluded from certain satisfying forms of work, that women felt confined in the home and that raising children was very difficult, there was truth to that. Of course, some men were brutal, some women suffered because they were excluded, and some women were unsuited to motherhood and domesticity (particularly the female eunuchs who wrote feminist books.) Raising children is difficult and demanding. The traditionalist would say it is difficult because of what is being attempted and that our final rewards lie in another realm. The feminist, who has the secret key to all of history, would say it is difficult because women are oppressed.
One might ask a similar question to the one you ask of Communism. Were the Russian people so unhappy with inequalities in wealth and class warfare before the advent of Communism that they wanted the obliteration of private property, tyranny, demographic decline and a radical transformation of society? Many people had difficult lives and certainly there was suffering. But as a system of reform, Communism made things worse not better and brought about complete social breakdown. And yet people cooperated with it. They believed in its promises.
Communism was based on certain principles that first inspired an intellectual elite and then captivated the masses. What was at the root of these principles? The desire to seek salvation from suffering through a systematic scheme of reform. Communism, like feminism, is what the thinker Eric Voegelin called an ersatz religion and a gnostic movement. The gnostic believes in salvation through knowledge. The Communist has the secret to salvation in his breast. All of history is dead in light of his knowledge. He knows the meaning of suffering and the way out of it.
The Communist view of human suffering is entirely different from the Christian view, and from that of Jewish and Classical thinkers who did not deny the wickedness in creation but believed in a fixed order that was good. The philosopher, the lover of wisdom, must understand this preordained order, however incompletely, before anything important about life on earth can be known. The Christian and Platonic philosopher knew in light of eternal truths. The Communist and feminist (yes, even the Christian feminist) knew in a closed-off universe subject to human will.
Since we live in a time when such hubris is common, it is hard for us to fully appreciate the monstrous intellectual arrogance that lies at the heart of modern liberalism. Voegelin described Marx as “an intellectual swindler.” The same can be said of many of the intellectual supermen (and women) of the modern era who have consciously prohibited discussion of certain aspects of reality (in the case of Communism, that inequality of conditions is inherent in human nature) in order to propagate their vision of world revolution.
The gnostic believes in salvation through knowledge. The feminist has that key to history: women are oppressed. In order for feminist ideas to be adopted by large numbers of people, the intellectual hubris which seeks to transform the world through a scheme of social and political action had to develop first in the minds of a small group of thinkers. Feminists adamantly denied that sex roles were rooted in human nature and that people found fulfillment, as well as suffering, in traditional masculinity and femininity. The fervor of feminists silenced the discussion. It especially silenced discussion of female imperfectibility. We also stopped hearing about the fulfillment that comes from self-sacrifice, of the love and devotion of the normal husband and father, of the satisfaction to be found in feminine ways of being, and of the unchanging moral and spiritual needs of the young.
The material conditions of modernity played their part too, with rapid technological change creating the illusion of unstoppable progress.
The idea that patriarchy is evil must be countered with the question: Compared to what? Is it possible to lighten the duties and moral obligations of parents without institutionalizing child neglect? Is it possible for marriage to be fair in the sense that each spouse does the same thing? Is it possible to disparage the needs of the next generation and not bring about social breakdown? Is it possible for the average woman to be happy as a man, and for the average man to love her as such?
Feminist elites were able to convince people that salvation is possible on earth. It is a very tempting idea. That’s why it took hold. The promises of the gnostic can only take root where the soil is fertile. Said Voegelin in his essay, “The Murder of God“:
In order… that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense, the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated; the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being – the murder of God.
I’m sorry to sound so serious. But the roots of feminism lie in the depths of the soul.
[FOR COMMENTS ON THIS POST, GO HERE.]
