Saturday, March 19, 2005

THE "LADIES AGAINST FEMINISM" ORGANIZATION NOTES WHAT FEMINISTS SAY

An excerpt from their website:

"As a woman, I do not understand how you can form a website based on such a disgraceful idea. Everyone is obviously entitled to their own opinion, but your opinion lacks intelligence and is solely based on ignorance. Feminism is not about shunning the idea of being a housewife, etc. In fact it has nothing to do with that. It is simply a choice. For whoever wrote the article I was reading, how can you say that feminists basically look down on women who are housewives? I have never in my research, schooling, etc. heard such a ridiculous comment and criticism of feminism. I suggest that your website educate itself more on what feminism is all about before you contain ignorant articles on your website".


The quote above comes from one of many "Scorching Rhetoric" notes we've received here at LAF. One complaint we often hear is that we know nothing about feminism and that what we claim feminism stands for (or has stood for in the past) is not true. As will be obvious to anyone who takes the time to carefully read this site (particularly our Theme Articles), we do not seek to lump all those who call themselves feminists into the same category. Even feminists disagree about what feminism means (see "What Is Feminism?"). You can no more stereotype feminists than you can stereotype all women. Just as there is no consensus within the Church about what constitutes a homemaker (sadly enough), there is no consensus within the feminist movement about what constitutes a true feminist. This can make it extremely difficult to nail down just what feminism is about and where the movement desires to take women and society in the future. But we can learn about the various objectives it has promoted and claimed as its own down through the decades.

Those who read widely and who have studied the feminist movement from its earliest roots to the present know that some of the most prominent women (and men) involved in the movement have been rabidly anti-homemaker. In fact, the more radical feminists of the 19th and 20th centuries wholeheartedly embraced Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, which called for women to be pushed out of the home and into factories, since the labor of men and women must be made "equal" while capitalism and private property were abolished. Engels wrote, "The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children" (The Origin of the Family, 1884). This view of the woman at home as some poor slave "reduced to servitude" and "a mere instrument for the production of children" is echoed over and over again in the writings of feminists who are now enshrined as patron saints of the women's movement. Let's allow them to speak for themselves:

"[The] housewife is a nobody, and [housework] is a dead-end job. It may actually have a deteriorating effect on her mind...rendering her incapable of prolonged concentration on any single task. [She] comes to seem dumb as well as dull. [B]eing a housewife makes women sick." ~ Sociologist Jessie Bernard in The Future of Marriage, 1982.

"Housewives [are] an endless array of 'horse-leech's' daughters, crying Give! Give! -- [a] parasite mate devouring even when she should most feed [and who has] the aspirations of an affectionate guinea pig." ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, 1898.

"A parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism...the [housewife's] labor does not even tend toward the creation of anything durable.... [W]oman's work within the home [is] not directly useful to society, produces nothing. [The housewife] is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. It is for their common welfare that the situation must be altered by prohibiting marriage as a 'career' for woman." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.

"[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry...not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self.... [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife." ~ Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.

"[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children...parasites." ~ Gloria Steinem, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win," Time, August 31, 1970.

"[The husband's work] provides for greater challenges and opportunities for growth than are available to his wife, [whose] horizons are inevitably limited by her relegation to domestic duties. [This] programs her for mediocrity and dulls her brain.... [Motherhood] can only be a temporary detour." ~ Nena O'Neill and George O'Neill, Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples, 1972.

"Women owe Frieden an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique.... Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life." ~ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, 1996.

"Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that." ~ Vivian Gornick, University of Illinois, "The Daily Illini," April 25, 1981.

"[As long as the woman] is the primary caretaker of childhood, she is prevented from being a free human being." ~ Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1969.

"[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.... No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma," Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

"Feminism was profoundly opposed to traditional conceptions of how families should be organized, [since] the very existence of full-time homemakers was incompatible with the women's movement.... [I]f even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are very young.... If women disproportionately take time off from their careers to have children, or if they work less hard than men at their careers while their children are young, this will put them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis men, particularly men whose wives do all the homemaking and child care.... This means that no matter how any individual feminist might feel about child care and housework, the movement as a whole had reasons to discourage full-time homemaking." ~ Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 1986.


All of this would be bad enough by itself, but the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s did not stop at verbal attacks against wives, homemakers, and mothers. They pushed relentlessly to change laws which both protected wives and mothers and which encouraged men to provide for their own families. They did not rest until they had triumphed through the elimination of the "family wage," the reduction of tax benefits for single-earner households, and the passage of "no-fault" divorce laws. Sociologist Jessie Bernard (quoted above), remarked that the "very deprivation of assured support as long as they live may be one of the best things that could happen to women" (The Future of Marriage, 1982). In other words, if men can walk away from marriage easily, leaving women with no support, women will be forced to take up careers whether or not they desire to do so. Carolyn Graglia explains this in her book, Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism (Spence Publishing, 1998):

"A primary factor contributing to the feminization of poverty has been the change to a system of no-fault divorce under which divorce is easily obtained, even when opposed by one of the parties, and men are often able to terminate marriages without providing adequate alimony or child support. The feminist quest for female fungibility with males has led the women's movement to support the invalidation of laws benefiting and protecting women. This was the thrust, for example, of litigation directed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and, often using male plaintiffs, secured invalidation of laws that favored women. The theory was that obliteration of all legal sex distinctions would ultimately be in the best interests of working women; those women, including homemakers, who wished to retain the benefits of protective legislation were never the women with whose rights the Project was concerned" (p. 295).


So, in the name of "all women," the feminist movement cavalierly did away with the very rights that guaranteed the wife peace of mind in her choice to remain at home and bring up her own children. Mary Ann Glendon, writing in Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (1987) states, "Divorce law in practice seems to be saying to parents, especially to mothers, that it is not safe to devote oneself primarily or exclusively to raising children." We don't need to recite long lists of statistics here, I trust, though they are readily available from the Census Bureau and other government entities, but in the past thirty years, divorce and abandonment have skyrocketed, leaving women the victims of poverty in far greater numbers than men. Instead of admitting culpability, feminists have moved on to push for taxpayer-funded daycare and greater welfare benefits for those mothers left in the lurch. Again, Carolyn Graglia:

"[F]eminists nevertheless often try to disclaim responsibility for no-fault's results. Liberationists of the 1970s blathered mindlessly about the oppressiveness of the family, exhorting women to break the chains of their confinement, to cease being parasites in their suburban havens, to cease holding husbands in marriages the men no longer wanted, and to set out on the road to true fulfillment and equality by finding some rewarding career. Yet, having been taken seriously by every state legislature in the country and with the divorce revolution accomplished, feminists seek to absolve themselves of blame, as if society should have known better than to listen to them. No longer concentrating on the oppressiveness of the home and family for women, feminists argue instead that, unfortunately, married mothers must remain in the work force to protect themselves from the very likely possibility of becoming single parents by divorce. This is a likelihood, they choose not to remember, their movement was highly instrumental in creating" (Domestic Tranquility, p. 296).


Now we live in a culture where the term "trophy wife" isn't just a joke and where men can abandon their wives and children as easily as they shuck off their dress shoes at the end of the day. Instead of deploring this development, women have been urged to become just as promiscuous and irresponsible as the men. Somehow, if we all descend to the lowest common denominator, we'll find happiness in the mess we've created. "There isn't a venerable history of women celebrating promiscuity;" writes columnist Frederica Mathewes-Green. "[I]f anything, women's wisdom over the ages taught that emotional security was the precondition for sex being fun, and a wedding ring was the best aphrodisiac. But again, what did stupid old housewives know? Men called them prudish, so that's what they were. Thirty years later women are still going morosely out into the night in dutiful pursuit of fun. And if it's not fun, she presumes, it must be because something is wrong with her." So now those of us who reject the doctrines of the sexual revolution (which had their roots in the "free love" movement of Marxism in the 1840s and in Margaret Sanger's writings in the early 20th century) are expected to just go along with the "brave new world" the radical feminists created in the name of all women. We are not supposed to protest when tax laws are changed to favor double-income households that use state-funded daycare or when laws protecting widows and orphans are obliterated in the name of "gender equality" and "fairness."



Group challenges CDC obesity claims: "Several well-established, incontrovertible, scientific studies conclude that the United States has the fattest people on Earth, with two-thirds of the population overweight or obese. Those same studies argue that obesity itself is a disease, a position so accepted that even Medicare pays for weight control plans. But one group, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Consumer Freedom argues those studies are not up to snuff. 'America is now suffering from an epidemic of obesity myths much more than an epidemic of obesity,' said CCF senior analyst Dan Mindus. Mindus authored a report that attempts to shatter 'obesity myths' and takes direct aim at what Mindus says is the principal culprit for obesity hysteria in America -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

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