As I understand it, the Women’s Rights movement has had three phases, or “waves” (Note: after I started this, I noticed there is a claimed “Fourth Wave”, but since the third one cannot be properly defined, as I will discuss, I will leave it out.)
In the first wave, women demanded basic legal rights, which amounted to full political and legal investiture. People forget women did not get the right to vote everywhere in the United States until 1920. This history is interesting.
I will note that, in principle at least, if not always in reality, black men were granted the right to vote 50 years before women, in 1870.
And in my understanding, there were a host of petty laws which made life for women harder. In divorce I don’t think they did as well. There were restrictions on inheritance and the property they could own in many places.
The goal was, ultimately, to, simply add women to the list of “right holders”.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. ‘
As we now know, he was more than a bit of a misogynist, but women wanted to be equal too. This was historically strange, I will say, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, but logically implied in the language and ideas underlying the language of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Men and women are different. They have different emotional needs, different ways of expressing power, and thus differing objectives. But asking for a seat at the table of power was always solidly within the Enlightenment tradition of the West.
As I understand it, the Second Wave of Feminism was about respect. It was about not being treated as inferior socially, about not being looked down on, at being allowed by men to do all the things men took it for granted were men things to do.
This too was a reasonable demand. We really DO all benefit from a diversity of opinions and approaches. Women have always had much to offer, but it was usually offered to their husbands, in the privacy of homes. All nations have always lived with the results of women’s private counsel, even if most men have not wanted to admit it.
But still, that is not open power. That is not having a voice in public, and a platform from which to speak. That is not BEING the boss. That is having the boss wrapped around your finger, sometimes, but not always and not necessarily.
The point I will make here, though, is that all these demands were about ACCESS, about opportunities. About having fuller, richer, more independent and consciously chosen lives, rather than being assigned the task of wife and mother, cook and housekeeper, and always living in the shadows.
I feel reasonably confident saying that most effective people, who live happy and productive lives, had good mothers. If it was not their actual mother, it was a female who provided emotional support and strength when it was needed. In Winston Churchill’s case, it may well have been his nanny, since he rarely saw either of his parents.
So this role is vitally important for society. And it is a noble role. But it is also perfectly understandable that not all women WANT that role, that they chafe at it, and want more freedom.
I think of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”. All creative work requires time and a space of one’s own, both of which usually require money and a freedom from other responsibilities. And the URGE some women have to pursue those things needs to be supported socially. Practically, the men in their lives had to be supportive back then.
All of this is very complex. I just read a review of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and will quote from the Wiki on it:
Friedan recalls her own decision to conform to society’s expectations by giving up her promising career in psychology to raise children, and shows that other young women still struggled with the same kind of decision. Many women dropped out of school early to marry, afraid that if they waited too long or became too educated, they would not be able to attract a husband. Friedan argues at the end of the chapter that although theorists discuss how men need to find their identity, women are expected to be autonomous. She states, “Anatomy is woman’s destiny, say the theorists of femininity; the identity of woman is determined by her biology.” Friedan goes on to argue that the problem is women needing to mature and find their human identity. She argues, “In a sense that goes beyond any woman’s life, I think this is a crisis of women growing up—a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity.”
The “Feminine Mystique”, so called, is a perhaps ironic term which describes the pervasive sense particularly in the 1950’s that women could be naturally contented with lives that would drive most men crazy. Her point was that it was driving a lot of WOMEN crazy too.
In my own view, individuation, or growth to her “full human identity” really is THE main point of life. So Second Wave Feminism might be summarized, and no doubt somewhat or perhaps grossly oversimplified, as the demand that women be allowed to mature, to grow into full adulthood, and to undergo all the strains and stresses that come along with that important work. They had made progress in all that in the 1930’s and 1940’s, only to more or less be shoved back into the kitchen and laundry room.
Men and women, marching arm in arm as coconspirators and fellow soldiers, into the Search for Meaning. It’s an attractive image, to me at least.
But then something happened. The politics devolved into a renewed descent into immaturity and loss of meaning. The whole dialogue began to center around a search for victimhood, around alleged “oppression”, and it became angry and in my view childish. The quest for “full human identity” stopped. Anger replaced reason, and emotionality stood in for mature empowerment. This trend was general, and not just for so-called “Third Wave” feminists, who lacked a truly reasonable voice, because they didn’t know what they wanted. From Wikipedia: “confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature.”
Most people seem to date the beginning of all this with the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, who may or may not have sexually harassed Anita Hill, but who clearly did not do a fraction of the things Martin Luther King, Jr did, or JFK, or any of a long list of most of the men of the past hundred years.
And I would like to place the issue of abortion into this context. The ability to give birth is, I think most people would agree, the most sacred and beautiful thing about being a woman. All men and all women pass through a women to come into this life. There are no exceptions, at least yet (and let us hope there never are).
Children are beautiful. They are enchanting. I never felt love until I had children. And one of my proudest life moments was when one of my kids, who would have been about four, told me “you look like my daddy but you are really my mommy.” Men definitely can be nurturing. But she had a good mother too. I want to emphasize that. She did a very good job at creating an ordered, stable, and emotionally safe (most of the time) home. I left relatively early, but we coparented well.
Here is my point: third and fourth wave feminists are long on the demands they want to make. They are long on their list of rights. But at the heart of it all it feels emotionally empty to me. They are not asking for the right to live their own lives their own way. That is a reasonable demand. They have made DEMANDS the sole point and purpose of their lives, and that is emotionally weak. It is no basis for a good life, and the ANGER that defines these people, this relentless, continual, never ending RAGE in the midst of BOTH freedom and plenty, makes that clear.
And abortion is one of these demands. Gone is the women cursed with an abusive husband forced into a pregnancy she doesn’t want; or a sexually abused young women forced into a dangerous back alley abortion. Gone is the need to hide a pregnancy out of wedlock by sending some young girl out of state (as happened with a relation of my ex-father in law).
No the demand is the demand. The FORCE and VIOLENCE is the POINT. They are not trying to protect women. Limiting abortions to the first trimester is sufficient for that. After six weeks any reasonably intelligent woman knows she is pregnant, and for that matter cheap, quick, and easy tests are available within six blocks in just about every city in America. If you miss your period, you can know if you are pregnant in an hour for less than the cost of a pizza.
This is the reason that many women WHO DONT WANT CHILDREN IN ANY EVENT, and many of whom are lesbians, not least out of political conviction, are so energized to prevent ANY restrictions on abortion, even up to the moment of delivery. National level Democrats support full term abortions, and seem to be in the majority. Full term abortions are legal in some States now, like Oregon (as I understand it).
Thus, rather than using the hard fought freedom that their forebears won at much cost of heartache and pain to learn to live their best lives, to grow as individuals, to nurture their unique talents into maturity, it has retrogressed into what emotionally amounts to grade school bullying.
There is nothing transcendent in this. Nothing healthy. Nothing TRULY empowering. How could anyone be empowered who spends every waking moment looking for reasons to feel victimized, and who views the only solution as changing EVERYTHING?
Freedom to live your own life is one thing. Freedom from every possible nuisance, bad idea, ignorant comment, or emotional complication and pain is another. In important respects, I would argue we NEED difficulty to grow emotionally, so demanding that all difficulty be removed from life amounts to a demand to be a perennial child, who both makes demands of the parents, and yet still clings to them like a leech, with the parent here, of course, being mostly government.
Ultimately, yes, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from philosophy, and more deeply, a FELT SENSE of life. If you feel life has a meaning and a purpose for you, then you will embrace one sort of politics, if you get into politics at all. If you feel life LACKS meaning, then the game of life becomes one of continual deflection, undirected hostility, and ultimately a deep sense of helpless dependence on forces beyond your control, which was the precise evil ALL of Feminism evolved to combat and grow beyond.
The precise problem of Postmodernism is that it lacks the language and tools for emotional clarity. It lacks a language of growth, of maturity, of wisdom, and of personal empowerment in a healthy way.
All of the Fifty Shades of Grey have found their way onto Target bookshelves. All of them sold HUGE amounts. And they were written by a women, for women. Is this really where we would be at if women were fulfilling the hopes of Second Wave Feminism? I have not read them, but have read some summaries, and it seems as of the female “heroine” is more or less reduced to a role not that different from that of the immature female Friedan referenced with the term “Feminine Mystique”. All that work, to return to square one.
It should be added that many, many people, men and women alike, are failing, in larger and larger numbers, to achieve basic psychological maturity and individuation. It might almost be said we have not just returned to the Feminine Mystique, but added a Male Mystique, such that everyone is lost, everyone is unhappy, and everyone is searching and not finding.
In such a world, anger and outrage are a simple home, and that is where far too many of us are choosing to live.
As should be obvious, I view my own work as trying to find and provide better answers than I am seeing out there in our cultural landscape at present, and for the foreseeable future. If anything, our public discourse is getting meaner and dumber.
I am a dreamer. It’s what I do. But I am also a pragmatist, and all hope needs a plan, and all plans need to define their purpose and their method, and what success looks like, and what failure looks like.