The really ironic thing about anti-Christian feminist thinking is that it actually identifies deeply with the real oppressors of women.
The first feminist revolt occurred between 1790 and 1869, as a reaction against the repaganization of laws in Western Europe and the new United States. The chattel concept of the family and servants returned because the lawmakers were mining the ancient European folklore for tribal systems consistent with the Romantic idea of every landowner as little chief of a little kingdom, lord of all on his property. In the Medieval through Early Modern periods every individual had always had some rights, but when ownership became all, the rights of servants, women and boys under 21 as well as vagrants crumbled away slowly. Industrialization and the consolidation of land in a few hands finished the job of destroying most people’s, including overwhelmingly most women’s, human rights. It made it impossible even to strike out into the wild to live alone (unless one could make it across the Ohio Valley or into the hills somewhere to hide).
The second was a reaction against the sexual libertinism and drunkenness that led to much abuse of women and children during the post-Civil-War period. It lasted from about 1870 to the First World War. Feminism then was a movement toward chastity, gentleness and caring for the weak at all ages. Women in that movement said, “We will show men an example of decent conduct, given room to do so, and they should follow it.” It was a profoundly Christian movement. Getting the vote was supposed to civilize the rough and rude legislative process of the times.
WWI required men and women to devote themselves to the war effort, and left little time for other issues. Women naturally took up whatever work needed doing, and so did men.
After the war, people celebrated the freedom of peacetime and worked at making a living again. The terrible economic problems of the prewar and war years were over in most areas. The mood was relief and excitement.
American women got the right to vote in nationwide elections (states had granted statewide voting rights to women here and there in the USA since 1869), in 1920, too late to vote in that election cycle. Women celebrated urbanization and the independence it brought, the nationwide vote, and new economic prosperity. These things were seen as going together. The feminism of the 1920s was not a revolt against anything, but a pushing of rules by mostly well-off city “bachelor-girls” to find out just how independent and prosperous they could be. It didn’t mean much to the majority, who still struggled to get by. The style and slogans were youthful: referring to girls and boys, not women and men; formalwear based on earlier children’s evening clothes and playclothes.
The 1930s and WWII brought a situation much like that of the First World War: Women worked at men’s work and vice-versa out of necessity, not to make a political point. Everyone developed as many skills as time perrmitted, in case of need. The mood was responsible, practical, adult. No one worried about men vs. women.
The revolt after the Second World War didn’t begin until a half-generation had passed. Men had begun to act entitled to arrogant, unmannerly conduct, a burlesque show now and then, and a wife who acted as if she didn’t notice. The sexual revolution started in 1953. More and more men joined it until few intelligent women could stand it. A woman whose mother spoke four languages, and could change a tire, who had a year of college herself, was unlikely to feel fulfilled keeping a house that no longer needed keeping anyway, for a man who was never home and who was known to pinch ladies at the office. Some middle-class women rebelled.
It was, every step of the way, a reaction against the sexual revolution that was turning men increasingly rude, self-centered, unreliable and unadmirable. That was one side of it. The other aspect was a search for a use for the skills and talents they had spent the '30s and '40s building up.
Yet today, NOW and similar organizations treat the sexual revolution, the self-absorbed, self-referential thinking of the Romantic elites, and the anti-responsibility ethic of the 1960s as if these were the ultimate goods, to be protected no matter what. From a movement against abuse, the leaders of “feminism” have turned to choose sides with abusers. They will lose support among women as long as they amke that mistake. And they will continue to make that mistake right up until they recognize that chastity, decency and love are part of freedom; Christian ideals are beneficial to women; and the sexual revolutionaries are destroying woemn’s lives more than anyone else is.
I walk away.