by John Young
http://www.westernvoices.com/audio/john_young/babies2of3.mp3
Welcome to Western Voices, I’m John Young of European Americans United. During the previous podcast in this series, we examined the impact of living standards, workplace expectations and division of labor between spouses on the birthrates of European-Americans. Today we are going to explore another aspect of this issue: radical feminism.
Few topics engender stronger reactions among our folk both pro and con. Because of the strength of those reactions, the topic is a minefield. Nevertheless, because of the profound influence of this ideology on the daily lives of our people, no reasonable analyst who intends that our people survive can avoid it forever. After all, radical feminism has been instrumental in moving forward both Marxist agendas and global-corporatist agendas; with ordinary men, women and children paying a terrible price. So I’m going to address this issue, understanding that most people who would be listening to this podcast, whether they are men or women, are plenty smart enough to know the difference between a human-made ideology (such as capitalism, objectivism or feminism) and a definable group of people (such as men, women or Europeans); and they realize that a human-made ideology can be questioned without any ill intentions being focused on any person or group.
By criticizing “radical feminism” we aren’t advocating a “barefoot and pregnant” scenario, which was itself a propaganda invention in the first place. European social systems have historically considered women as integral participants in society, with rights and responsibilities far greater than any other civilization’s gender relations models. Western women have long taken leading roles in politics, religion and business, and oppression of women is, to a large degree, the result of outside influences. Look at the many heroines our people have given us: from Boudica to Senator Rebecca Latimer Felton, and Queen Isabella of Castile and Leon to Amelia Earhart, white women have been leaders and pioneers, the equals of their male contemporaries.The “radical feminism” we’re talking about truly has little to do with women’s rights and freedoms, and rather is a function of cultural distortion that gained steam with the influence of various “postmodernists,” “identity politics” and political correctness that aimed to undermine, and overthrow, Western cultural norms and, by extension, Western culture as well. We see the same kind of thinking at work in the so-called “gay rights” movement, as well as with various nonwhite ethnic groups, from the NAACP to La Raza. We even see this in such spheres as “advocacy” for disabled people, where special interests in areas like the pharmaceutical world, “special education” groups and others use the issues surrounding the disabled to mask their own agendas.
This kind of intentional atomizing also exists in marketing, where the entertainment industry has manufactured whole “subcultures” based on music and style to create a false sense of identity in pursuit of selling records. One example is punk music, where the concept of “anarchism” was used to publicize the Sex Pistols, yet three decades later fans still think that the anarchist marketing gimmick actually has political value. Hence the circled “A”s on the expensive jackets of teens across the Western World.
So what we call “radical feminism” is not geared towards helping women but rather towards destroying Western civilization. Leveraging some real inequities and injustices, the radicals who presume to “speak for women” have added a whole politically correct leftist agenda of their own, something some feminists themselves have realized. Camille Paglia is one such feminist who has found value in the Western culture that made feminism even possible. Another is VDare’s Brenda Walker, who has realized the fact that “radical feminism”‘s politically correct agenda actually ENDANGERS women. Open borders Third World immigration has caused a wave of sexual abuse of women, and brought Third World gender norms, like genital mutilation, to our homelands. Spousal abuse of Muslim women by their husbands has essentially made legal in Germany, for example, while leaders like the head of the Church of England have declared that woman-hating Sharia law has a place in the United Kingdom.
Polygamy, a primitive and exploitative practice never before widespread in Western history, has reared its ugly head, while veiled women are to be seen in many large municipalities. Yet what do the old line “radical feminists” say about this kind of thing? Hating the West and our values MORE than they love the women they pretend to speak for, “radical feminism” has found itself on the other side of the line, standing mute about these abuses and their causes.
Even worse, many of these women actually fight in FAVOR of such outrages as the public veiling of women. In Denmark, the so-called Feminist Forum shamefully upheld the demands of an Islamist for gender segregation and the veiling of women. But the courageous Women for Freedom, who are part of the new wave of women’s rights, spoke out forcefully against what they called an “insult to both Danish and Muslim women.” In the United States, the leading “feminist” groups stand in favor of open borders, ignoring the pleas of abandoned wives in Mexico, whose husbands have illegally gone north. Even such horrific crimes as sexual slavery of women by illegal alien gangs goes unmentioned. Why? Again, because “radical feminism” is not about women, it’s about atomizing and destroying our civilization.
So when I speak of feminism, I am speaking of radical feminism. Feminism exists in myriad forms that can be differentiated by intent. It ranges all the way from the hyper-individualistic (yet fair) Wendy McElroy of iFeminists fame all the way through the clearly collectivist/Marxist inspired Gloria Steinem and others. With all of this having been said, let me therefore define what I am NOT speaking about when I speak of radical feminism.
European-derived peoples, men and women alike, have a certain drive to create and produce; as well as a drive to exercise control over their own destiny. While men and women may manifest these drives in different forms, they exist equally for both. For hundreds of years in the Western world, women were, in many ways, accorded the status of second-class citizens. As a result, women were restricted from the exercise of their innate creativity and desire to produce, their occupational choices were artificially limited, their education was abbreviated, their protections under law were sub-standard and their exercise of influence in governance was restricted. These are simple facts, and anyone who cares to do a little research will discover their truth. When I speak of “radical feminism,” I am absolutely NOT speaking of efforts to abolish these injustices against European-derived women. True freedom cannot exist among our people so long as half of us are subject to artificial limitations imposed and enforced by the state.
I am also not speaking of women’s suffrage, or the valiant struggles of women with vision like Elizabeth Blackwell who completed medical school in 1849.
You see, there is a big difference between the women’s suffrage movement and what I’m talking about when I speak of radical feminism; and it can be described through drawing an important distinction between natural rights and civil rights.
Natural rights are a precondition for human beings to exercise their full humanity. They require NOTHING from other people, save that person exercising those rights be left alone. Natural rights hurt nobody else, and require nobody else to give anything up. When women sought, in the late 1800’s through mid 1900’s the right to vote, or to enter the workplace in the same professions as men and under the same standards of competence, or to receive an education under the same conditions, or the right to own property and to correct so many injustices … they weren’t asking for anyone — man, woman or child — to give up anything they already had or to be harmed in any way. These women — and, in all fairness, I should point out a great many men — were simply seeking the recognition of the natural rights inherent in their humanity.
So women who met this profile are not the radical feminists of whom I speak, and their philosophy is not what truly defines radical feminism.
The radical feminists of whom I speak, however, pursue so-called “civil rights” that can never promote equal treatment under the law, because they depend at their core on taking something away from one group in order to advantage another. An example is affirmative action for women, which allows an objectively less qualified woman to take a job in government or slot in law school that a more qualified man would otherwise receive. It should be enough to have qualifications reviewed objectively in as gender-blind a fashion as practicable — which is simple human fairness. But feminists aren’t satisfied with that because fairness is not their true objective.
In the United States, the term “feminism” didn’t even exist until the late 1960’s. Along with all of the other Marxist-based radicalism of that era, it’s purpose was to exploit and amplify whatever injustices existed at the time in order to destroy bonds such as those of family that held precedence over bonds of class so as to pave the way for a communist future. Furthermore, in the wake of the Third Reich, the Marxist theorists added a new priority to their social goals: that of making sure future generations would be hostile to any form of authoritarianism — other than that imposed by communism/socialism and one-world government, of course. This goal, and the methods, were spelled out quite explicitly in the book “The Authoritarian Personality.” This book was written by a psychologist named Theodore Adorno who was part of the Frankfurt School. This book essentially spells out the necessity of removing men as authority figures from the home in order to “break the cycle of fascism.”
The Frankfurt School for Social Research is covered extensively by Patrick Buchanan in “Death of the West” and by Kevin MacDonald in “Culture of Critique,” so I won’t stray from our discussion today to explore the Frankfurt School in depth. The gist is that the Frankfurt School was founded originally in Frankfurt, Germany somewhat before 1930 with the explicit purpose of applying Antonio Gramsci’s critical theory and other neo-Marxist techniques to undermine every aspect of German society in order to implement a communist revolution and “dictatorship of the proletariat” in that country. When Hitler came to power, they fled to the United States where they were quickly established in prestigious universities. They used those positions very effectively to train the next generation of public school teachers, and to promulgate the theoretical basis for what would become movements – radical feminism included among them — that would simultaneously stop right-wing thinking while moving us toward a neo-Marxist new world.
This is where the roots of radical feminism post-WWII lie. Like all such divisive philosophies, it promulgates a distorted view of history that focuses on setting up one definable group of people as the “victims” and another group of people as the “oppressors.” Furthermore, radical feminism seeks to re-write history in such a way as to both exaggerate the wrongs that were done to women and – most importantly – to cast that suffering as unique and extraordinarily egregious. As the same group of individuals who elevated observance of the Holocaust to a national religion are largely the same individuals who brought us radical feminism, the commonality of technique is expected.
Having established such a past history of victimization, this history is then used to inculcate modern people, who are suffering from no such wrongs and if anything act from a position of privilege, with a sense of shared victim-hood with a group of people that is set apart from the rest of society, and is seen to have interests that diverge from those of the rest of society, by virtue of this past history of victimization. This technique is used again and again for every conceivable group of people in order to atomize and rip apart society to make room for a “divide and rule” strategy. Then all these various people who self-identify with various victim-classes come together in coalitions to support candidates and causes who will act contrary to the best interests of society at large in order to advantage each constituency of the coalition. In this way, society becomes disjointed and unfriendly – and poisoned from within.
This victimology serves, as well, to justify a unique sort of life-boat ethics in which any affront, no matter how small or how well-intended, is seen as a prelude to the re-establishment of the victimizations of the past. In this way, severe punishments that go far beyond the acts they intend to punish, are justified. Thus, we were presented with Harvard president Larry Summers being forced to resign for making a statement that is backed up by a tremendous amount of research; namely, that the relative capacities of men and women differ – on average — in various fields of endeavor. (See, for example, the book “Brain Sex” by Moir and Jessel.) Summers certainly wasn’t advocating excluding women in any way, and was, in fact, responsible for all sorts of preferences for women. After all, the fact that men and women may differ in certain arenas on average doesn’t say anything about any particular man or woman; but what it DOES do, is explain why, in the face of preferential treatment at every level, men would outnumber women in certain fields and vice versa.
But radical feminism, like all of the philosophies issuing from the sordid underbelly of leftist radicals, isn’t interested in truth or open debate. Even statements of proven fact, or simply suggesting that research contrary to their claims exists, are greeted with calls for the most severe sanctions, including the loss of one’s livelihood or even freedom.
If this sequence of events seems familiar, it should. You need look no further than the State of Israel as a model for this sort of behavior. Every Israeli child is taught early about a past history of victimization, so that even a bunch of Palestinian kids throwing rocks is seen as a prelude to a second Holocaust and justification for the most severe of responses, including infanticide. While the content of this situation certainly differs from the content of the peculiar ethics of radical feminism; the all-important structure which defines it is the same.
A history of past victimization is then used to establish a justification for policy proposals that go much further than righting injustices by guaranteeing the natural rights of the allegedly victimized class, but exacts retributive justice in various forms against the alleged oppressing class.
So just as German children whose parents weren’t even born yet at the time of the Holocaust find themselves beholden to pay “reparations” to Israel for crimes committed by a small subset of their ancestors; today’s boys and men are penalized and held accountable for not just real wrongs that really happened in the past, but for imaginary or exaggerated wrongs as well. Thus, a young man of today finds himself with fewer educational opportunities and fewer employment opportunities than he would otherwise find; because it is necessary to punish him, as a member of a class, for wrongs he never personally committed.
This is the dirty little secret behind all of the various victim classes: they ultimate seek to direct harm against people who never did anything wrong solely on the basis of their race, sex, or other attribute. So one might be harmed a hundred different ways both overtly and covertly for being born white, for being born heterosexual, for being born male, for being born intelligent – and the list goes on. Ultimately, in the cult of victimology, nobody is spared. That is because, in spite of attempts to tear us apart; the European-American folk are one people, and anything that hurts a subset of our Folk will ultimately harm ALL of our folk.
In the case of feminism, the victims are alleged to be women, and the oppressors are alleged to be men. The retributive justice takes on many forms, only some of which I’ll cover today, and creates an effective rift in the family and diminishes the level of trust between men and women. Like all of the weapons of our enemies, it thrives by appealing to the most base and least noble aspects of our character while failing to truly uplift or remove the stigma of victimization from the class of victims it defines. As I described in the previous podcast, the family is the basic unit of our Folk, and the smallest unit capable of propagating itself. Anything that damages our ability to form effective families that propagate our Folk is, ipso facto, genocidal. Radical feminism, as I have defined it, then, is a philosophy of genocide against our folk.
Now, I have just made a very strong statement, and I’ll stand behind it. But don’t take intellectual shortcuts by taking that statement out of context, either. There are a whole host of things that I have defined NOT to fall in the category of radical feminism that I have condemned; and that would include most things that ordinary people associate with feminism. That’s because, like most pernicious evil, the Marxist leaders of feminist movements have been very careful to use ideas with which any rational person agrees as a cover to cloak their true advocacies.
That having been said, let’s explore the historical record. We have to do this in order to debunk the underlying notion put forth by radical feminism of unique and egregious victimization. As we discuss the historical record, though, there are two ideas I want you to keep in mind. The first is that the events of a particular chapter of history cannot be judged by using today’s moral ideas. Everything that occurs historically occurs within a particular context, which includes the available technology, the dominant religious ideas, environmental or disease factors and the interests of the rulers of the day. The culture at a given point in history often reflects necessities for survival that do not exist today. For example, in a world without antibiotics or vaccinations, if you are a settler on the prairie whose wife is the only source of food for a nursing infant, you don’t send her out to do something highly risky because the potential price — the life of both mother AND child — is just too high.
The second is that there are, on average, substantive differences between men and women physically, emotionally and psychologically. Anyone who doesn’t realize this has never been married or never had a child whose sex is the opposite of his or her own. In the modern era we have all sorts of surpluses, training and technology available that render many of those differences much less important — or even completely unimportant in many areas — so we can afford to re-examine prior orthodoxies and traditions. But in the past, these surpluses and technology didn’t exist, so the consequences of failure would have been much higher. For example, in the modern era with excellent training, weapons-retention holsters, TASERs and pepper spray available, men and women are both suited for police work; whereas in prior times when a peace officer’s only option short of employing a gun was to use his hands or a stick, the differences in upper body strength between men and women were much more important to the job.
Given these ideas, then, I have already stated that the historical record, overall, with regard to the treatment of European-derived women was shameful. While I might argue that there was a compelling reason at the time why women shouldn’t have been peace officers, I’ve been able to find NO historically compelling justification why women should ever have been excluded from employment generally or from having a say in their government particularly. The women’s suffrage movement was, in that respect, a great boon to our people in righting these injustices. Remember, an injustice against our women is an injustice against all of us; just as an injustice against men is an injustice against all of us.
At the same time, much of the substance of the historical record is distorted both by the traditionalists AND by the radical feminists. In the case of the traditionalists, they want us to believe that women have always been barefoot and pregnant while stirring dinner with one hand and nursing an infant with the other, and that up until women’s suffrage they were quite happy with that circumstance. Not only were women supposedly under such constraints and happy with them, but it was even a manifestation of the will of a deity — and for women to be employed outside the home was somehow sinful and therefore automatically resulted in evil consequences. The radical feminists want us to believe pretty much the same thing in terms of the circumstances, except that women were being brutalized and oppressed. They vastly exaggerate the wrongs, take them out of context, and even add a few that never occurred in order to establish a victim status for women as a whole.
So let’s look at women voting in this country. In the U.S. Constitution, only two groups of people are explicitly excluded from voting or serving in Congress outside of age and citizenship constraints; and those groups comprise slaves and indentured servants. Neither is defined by sex. Most assuredly, this latter class included European-American women, but it also included men. And indentured servitude was no small practice: fully HALF of all immigrants to the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries were indentured servants.(1) Indentures, though originally limited in scope, were often extended to cover a person’s entire lifetime through various machinations, and one professor notes that “… the large number of servants who ran away or committed suicide suggests that the conditions of life during the period of bondage may not have been so different for the servant and the slave.”(2)
Simply on the basis of indentured servitude, large blocks of the European-American population, male and female alike, were constitutionally prohibited from voting. The institution of indentured servitude was not abolished in this country until AFTER the franchise was extended to women.
Our Constitution left the details of voting requirements up to the states, and they all restricted the franchise to people who owned property exceeding a certain value. As a result, roughly 70% of white men who weren’t indentured were not allowed to vote. Most of these disenfranchised men lived in the urban Northeast. Those property requirements were dropped by 1850, but were quickly followed in states like Massachusetts and Connecticut with literacy tests adopted by 1855. These tests were designed and intended to prevent Irish Catholics from voting.
The point I am making here is that during the first 100 years of America’s existence as a nation, franchise restrictions were extremely common. While women, as a class, were generally (though not always) excluded from voting by state laws, their case was in no way unique. Slaves of both sexes couldn’t vote, and a large population of indentured servants of both sexes couldn’t vote. Poor people of both sexes couldn’t vote, and Irish Catholics of either sex who couldn’t pass a literacy test couldn’t vote. The injustice experienced by women in that era regarding the right to vote was not qualitatively different from that of as many as 70% of men, depending upon the locale and decade. This doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t justify it — but it DOES indicate that the claims of radical feminists of a form of unique victimization that exalted white males — as a class and in particular — as oppressors is factually incorrect. Most white men were every bit as disenfranchised as white women. When this was the case, attempts to redefine that dynamic as being “men versus women” are factually incorrect and thus disingenuous at best.
Speaking of property requirements, radical feminists have often expressed three allegations regarding the treatment of women in past ages in America for which there is either no factual basis, or the facts have been taken out of context. The first is that women were considered to be property, the second is that women were not allowed to own property, and the third is that they were legally constrained from pursuing professions. The impression that the radical feminists seek to portray through these allegations is that women were no better off than African slaves. Obviously, both white women AND white men who were indentured servants were in a tough situation. And, certainly, white folks of either sex who were impoverished suffered from abbreviated rights. But for women who were of a social standing such that the men in their family had freedom of franchise, the situation was nowhere near as stark as the professors of “Women’s Studies” departments would have us believe.
No doubt, social and cultural prejudices erected enormous hurdles for women; nevertheless, if a white woman was of a class such that the men in her family met the requirements for voting, there was little she couldn’t do with persistence. Here are some notable women whose achievements prove that the barriers that existed were in no way comparable to those of slaves, and furthermore those barriers, to the extent that they existed, were predominantly cultural and lacked the state machinery necessary for oppression.
Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American woman who founded her own cosmetics company in the Mississippi Delta in 1905. She became this country’s first female African-American millionaire, and did it all before an amendment to the federal Constitution codified her right to vote as a woman. By the way, one million dollars in 1905 is about 80 million dollars in today’s money.
In 1766 Mary Goddard became the owner of the Providence Gazette, then became the Postmaster of Baltimore in 1775, and opened her own bookstore in 1789. The fact she could do this substantively contradicts the notion that women couldn’t own property or work jobs. Mary Kies filed for patent protection for a weaving technique she invented in 1809, establishing her ownership of intellectual property. Elizabeth Blackwell became a degreed Medical Doctor in 1849. Admittedly, she had to struggle against prevailing attitudes, but the fact she was even allowed to attend college first and then medical school indicates that there were no laws prohibiting it.
Arabella Mansfield was admitted to the Iowa bar in 1869, and in 1892 Myra Bradwell received her license to practice law before the Supreme Court. Back in 1868 she had already established The Chicago Legal news, a business that she owned. In 1869 she said something I think was extremely worthwhile when she wrote: “You ask us, how shall this great privilege (of voting) be obtained for women? We will tell you. Not by the class who term man ‘a tyrant’—but by the sensible and devoted mothers, wives and daughters of the state unifying together, we mean those who have the respect and love of their fathers, husbands and brothers, and asking them that they give to women the right to vote.” Far from being a feminist in the mold of today’s Marxist agitators who drive a wedge between men and women, Myra Bradwell had the insight to understand that both men and women would have to advance together in a state of mutual love and respect.
Meanwhile, in the world of politics, Susanna Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas in 1887; and Jeannette Rankin of Montana was elected to the United States Senate in 1916, before an amendment to the federal Constitution codified her right to vote. And long before this, of course, the Western world had seen many women as sovereigns, such as Queen Elizabeth and Queen Isabella.
All of the foregoing should indicate to you that even though circumstances for white women in this country were less than ideal, they fit neither the model of the traditionalists NOR the feminists. The idea that women were legally barred from professions is simply not true.
Of course, not all women were like the folks I’ve mentioned. The unfortunate reality was that prevailing perceptions among employers and others served to impose limitations on women that, in many cases, didn’t exist for men. These weren’t usually codified into law, but they were nevertheless problematic, and one of the most pernicious issues was a codification of Old Testament style headship in terms of women and property. While this did not apply to single women, when a woman was married everything she owned automatically became her husband’s in some states. Any money she earned also became her husband’s. If the couple divorced, the husband retained all of the assets and property automatically, and also retained full physical and legal custody to any children with no obligation to allow the mother to even see them. If the husband wished, he could disinherit his wife in his will without her knowledge, so that when he passed on, she would be surprised to find herself penniless.
Here is a case where radical feminists have distorted an injustice to make it seem more pervasive than it really was. Single women had no prohibitions on property ownership whatsoever. In the case of married women, in many states title DID pass to the husband; and that was undoubtedly a grave injustice. But widows could inherit property, and the overwhelming preponderance of husbands dealt equitably with their wives.
Luckily, the massive differential in legal power between a married man and his wife was seldom misused, but it happened often enough to create a certain environment of fear among many women, and to seriously discourage divorces that should have occurred. Thus the all-to-common cases of wives poisoning their husbands in the late 1800’s through early 1900’s. I have a book on forensic toxicology written in the 1920’s, and such poisoning was sufficiently common that anytime there was a shadow of a doubt, numerous tests for common poisons were performed. I think it’s pretty obvious that when the wife starts poisoning the husband, the couple ought to be divorced before someone gets hurt; but the legal situation was so skewed to the detriment of women in that regard that many chose to kill their husbands rather than face divorce.
With that having been said, it should also be noted that most women, particularly women of a class such that their husbands were eligible to vote, lived lives that were empowered beyond anything radical feminists would have us believe today.
But before I describe that, let me briefly describe the conditions that men were experiencing in that era.
The first hints came as early as the Whiskey Rebellion, but starting in earnest after the civil war, there was a concerted effort to crush and destroy the agrarian culture of the South and rural America. Up until that point, large portions of the American populace lived with a very high quality of life through their own production and trade, but seldom had much in the way of cash or currency, because it wasn’t needed. The destruction of home industry was initiated by government at the behest of business interests who were seeking, as usual, cheap labor. Using a variety of methods that took only a couple of generations, our people were deprived of their un-mortgaged property, put upon with cash requirements to pay taxes, when the only way they could obtain cash was through employment, and so forth. Their economic independence was taken away. A new model of manhood was put forth in the media of the day in which the husband and father leaving home every day to go work to make somebody else rich was seen as not merely noble — but a duty.
Men were forced into this workforce by the hundreds of thousands, with few choices and fewer protections. As a result, in 1913, which is the earliest year for which data is available, fully 23,000 men were killed on the job.(3) To put this in context for you, during WWI, approximately 27,000 American men died in battle on a yearly basis. In that era, there was little motivation to put the safety of working men first, as accidents were cheap. About half the time, the families of workers killed on the job recovered no compensation at all, and the rest of the time the families recovered about half a year’s pay.(4)
Many times — too many times — I have heard people, especially radical feminists, declare that the workplace was a source of empowerment for men, that income equated to political influence, and that the exclusion of women from such occupations as coal mining, steel work and smelting was some form of “oppression.” Income, of course, does not create political influence. Income enters one hand through service to an employer, and then leaves the other hand to pay for necessities. Only income that is retained and becomes wealth can buy influence. And these tens of thousands of dead men and hundreds of thousands of maimed and broken men, I can assure you, had precious little influence.
But I should point out, as well, that women weren’t excluded from the industrial workforce entirely. Starting in the 1820’s women known collectively as “mill girls” — and children as young as ten — made the trek to textile mills that lined the rivers in the Northeastern United States, where they worked for as long as 15 hours a day. While the safety of the conditions under which women and children worked was better than for men, it should be obvious that the early robber barons were “equal opportunity exploiters.” Working in the textile mill 15 hours a day was neither more, nor less, empowering than working in a coal mine for that same period.
But, in the case of that class of women whose means were sufficient that they could afford to stay home, they didn’t sit idly by!
I stumbled onto this hidden and very important part of history when my wife brought home an old cookbook from Bermuda that had been published by an organization called the Daughters of the British Empire. I looked up their history on the Internet, and was pleasantly shocked to discover that these creative and hard-working women had, through numerous chapters in the United States, constructed homes for the aged all over the country, built and maintained a 2,300-acre Garden of Peace, provided incalculable humanitarian relief during both World Wars and raised millions of dollars to assist soldiers during those war efforts. Understanding that European-derived women are a very productive and hardy sort, I really shouldn’t have been surprised. So I started digging, because I was certain that if this one women’s organization had accomplished so much, there must have been others. Sure enough, there were dozens.
One of the most famous is the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The WCTU was originally formed to address issues pertaining to alcohol abuse that culminated in a Constitutional amendment, but these energetic women also turned their attention to labor issues, the abolition of prostitution, and public health and sanitation. The WCTU was a powerhouse that was instrumental in adopting laws that made workplaces safer, they established orphanages, 1,000 local unions, and got every state in the union to adopt temperance education in public schools. Today, the WCTU is pushing the Marriage Amendment, cracking down on tobacco use by children and working to eradicate illegal drugs.
Many famous landmarks in the United States were built by women’s organizations. For example, Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. was built by the Daughters of the American Revolution; and Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University was built by the Daughters of the Confederacy. From 1850 until 1950, practically every town big enough to have a road also had at least one women’s organization. If you have a monument in your town to war dead or celebrating a local hero, the odds are that this monument was erected by a women’s organization. These organizations wielded tremendous power and influence over the life in those towns because the industrial revolution brought that class of women something very important: leisure. Next to wealth, free time is another source of power and influence. People who are tied up constantly working simply don’t have time to devote to charity work and political change.
If you think about it, this explains how a woman was able to become a United States Senator in an era when only men could vote. And the fact that the men actually voted for her, as well, says something about the mindset of the majority of white men eligible to vote as well — and what it says … contradicts the history of oppression and victimization that the radical feminists in Women’s Studies departments are anxious to shove down our children’s throats.
Meanwhile, by the time World War II rolled around, the inequities in divorce laws had been largely eliminated so that our soldiers in WWII experienced — by the tens of thousands — something that our soldiers in World War I had not: Dear John letters. This was, paradoxically, a very beneficial development as the introduction of fairness into our divorce laws saw a dramatic decline in the number of men dying in emergency rooms from poisoning.
If you stop to think about the incredible achievements of European people over history, it isn’t exactly shocking when we confront just how supremely capable our women really are. This should be a source of pride. European-derived men and European-derived women are true complementary equals. Yes, most certainly, there are differences between us both in ability in various fields AND in inclination or areas of interest. This is just a natural product of evolution, and should be embraced and understood rather than denied or swept under the rug like the so-called “National Organization for Women” would dictate. By embracing and understanding these differences, we can learn to build stronger families and a stronger people. But embracing the provable fact of differences between the sexes of our Folk cannot be suffered to be prescriptive or proscriptive. We are a proud and free people — and that means ALL of our people — men and women alike — must have the same freedoms and responsibilities. Men and women are not equal in the sense that 2+2=4. They are NOT identical. When I speak of equality of men and women, I speak in terms of their complementary nature, and the equality of regard with which they, and their unique place among our people, should be held.
Either way, the foregoing indicates that the idea of women buckling down and working hard side-by-side with men is not a recent invention for which communists like Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem can take credit. European women have been working hard and achieving great things for all of our history, and they didn’t need the pernicious “help” of Marxist infiltrators calling themselves “feminists” to do it, either — thank you very much.
When we look at the history of our country, it is evident that huge segments of the European-American population were disenfranchised for reasons of insufficient wealth, indenture or having been born Irish. This applied to men and women alike. Coming through the early industrial revolution, hours were long, protections were few, and injuries and deaths occurred at a level many times greater than had ever occurred among slaves while on this continent. There were inequities that were directed against women, yet many women strove quite successfully to overcome them. Ultimately, men — who were the only voters — voted to right these wrongs. There could, quite literally, be thousands of pages written on just the history of those times. Because my treatment of the matter is necessarily abbreviated, I have left out many chapters. What I have attempted to do in lieu of presenting everybody’s pet peeve in mind-numbing detail, is present a fair and balanced view of the history of those times that challenges everybody’s views of history, not just those of the Gloria Steinem crowd.
And, speaking of the Gloria Steinem crowd — let’s now look at how that group of destroyers has managed to lower our birthrates.
The first is that, according to self-identified feminist author Daphne Patai “the efforts of some feminists — members of … the ‘sexual harassment industry’ — have created an environment that stifles healthy and natural interactions between the sexes. The tremendous growth of sexual harassment legislation represents feminism’s greatest contemporary success. But this victory has dubious consequences — a world where kindergarten boys face legal action for kissing female classmates and men are sued by coworkers for offenses such as unwanted hugs, uninvited compliments, or glances that last too long.”(5) Professor Patai notes that the creators of this unhealthy environment possess a “pathological aversion to men…and antipathy to heterosexuality.”
The biggest problem with sexual harassment laws lies in the fact that unlike laws pertaining to sexual discrimination, murder or theft, the legal definition of sexual harassment is sufficiently ambiguous that it depends on no objectively definable action whatsoever, and depends instead on the subjective impression of the alleged victim of feelings such as “discomfort.” The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination provides the following guidance: “The legal definition of sexual harassment is broad and in addition to the above examples, other sexually oriented conduct, whether it is intended or not, that is unwelcome and has the effect of creating a work place environment that is hostile, offensive, intimidating, or humiliating to male or female workers may also constitute sexual harassment.”
Yet, Professor Patai duly notes:
“The world is a place in which expressions of sexual interest are ever present, sometimes inappropriately, most often not; in which sex is an enjoyable part of life, not a constant threat; and in which women are as likely as men to experience sexual interest and attraction, enjoy sexual banter, bring sexual alertness into the workplace and classroom, and are aware that the sexual dimension in human relations adds zest to life even when not acted upon; and it usually is not.”
Yet, the places where, in the modern world, single men and women are MOST likely to meet potential mates who share their interests and values — at school and the workplace — are the places where sexual harassment laws are most visible. In most states, now, employers are required to provide sexual harassment training to employees on a yearly basis, so the potential hazards associated with asking a co-worker or fellow student out on a date are ever-present in their minds.
This effect is exacerbated when that system of laws — written so ambiguously as to practically encourage abuse — is abused to harm the innocent. One commentator notes:
“A woman can make a false accusation of sexual harassment against a colleague or employer at any time, and even if her accusation is proved to be untrue, the damage it has on the career of the accused is enormous. Statistics from an EEOC study performed in 1991 revealed that out of the 2,119 cases of sexual harassment that were investigated, 59% had no cause. A year later that figure had risen to 64% and false accusations also increased sharply.
The reputation of the accused is usually defamed to the point that they lose employment, find difficulty in obtaining a job in the future, and endure a large amount of financial loss due to cost of legal proceedings. Such an ordeal can lead to the development of chronic depression and anxiety. The female accuser tends to benefit from filing such a claim, as the company will pay her a financial settlement to end the issue. If her accusation is proved to be fraudulent, she is given legal impunity.”(6)
Even though the actual laws are written in a gender-neutral language, 98% of sexual harassment suits are brought by women, and as of 2006, 47.5% of these suits were found to have no basis in fact.(7) Now, that doesn’t mean that the remaining 52.5% were valid reasons for suing someone, either; because remember how broadly the law is construed.
And, it should be noted, that as the above definition demonstrates, all that is required for sexual harassment laws to become operative is for someone to find a particular word, gesture or glance to be offensive. And the offended person need not even be the recipient of the behavior! Even if the recipient of a compliment (for example) is perfectly agreeable, if someone just passing by considers the behavior to be “offensive,” then all hell breaks loose. This has an incalculable chilling effect on what Professor Patai calls “healthy and natural interactions between the sexes.”
Realizing that employment has become increasingly demanding of one’s energy and time both on and off the clock, sexual harassment laws have effectively kept an unknown number of people from meeting their mates. And that is, of course, the entire point — because the entire system of sexual harassment laws was spawned by a group of feminists that a Professor of Women’s Studies even described as possessing “pathological aversion to men…and antipathy to heterosexuality.”
All the above is not to say that serious sexual harassment — of both men AND women — by superiors was never a problem. There have certainly been instances where this was the case. But the overwhelming preponderance of lawsuits on the books do not involve true sexual harassment, but rather involve someone who feels — or merely claims to feel either uncomfortable or offended.
The next area where feminism has harmed the birthrate of our people is in college.
Colleges have become bastions of political correctness, as one would expect of largely Marxist institutions. But, beyond even that … the anti-male discrimination throughout our educational system has become so pronounced that men — and that includes all of the non-European-American men — only account now for 35% of enrollment in four-year colleges and universities.(8)(9) This doesn’t bode well for the future, as under-educated European-American males are not economically viable, and thus will not be marriageable in the future. The causes of this disparity stem from attitudes and techniques employed from Kindergarten all the way through college, but explicit anti-male bias in colleges makes the college environment hostile to men, who thus avoid it.
Speaking of the prevailing attitudes on college campuses, two researchers noted: “The programs may have fostered an environment in which the very presence of males on campus is a threat to a world view that sees things only in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. Deliberate misinformation about men and gender issues are an integral part of modern campus culture.”(10)
College occurs during our peak years of fertility, when the children we create will be the healthiest and least likely to suffer from birth defects. White women are attending college, but white men — due to a dominant radical feminist agenda — are not. These men then go on to earn only about HALF of what they would otherwise earn(11), thereby exacerbating the problem of being unable to afford offspring. But the biggest problem, and the one least quantifiable, is the attitudes that are instilled in students of both sexes as a result of deliberate misinformation that is specifically intended to create distrust and barriers to the formation of sound families.
Another thing to consider is that, with white women outnumbering white men at colleges and universities, it’s a game of musical chairs where some women will necessarily be left out of the dating pool who would otherwise have men from which to choose, unless — of course — they choose non-white men. The same thing happens to men, but in reverse. The men who are not in college face a shortage of women and are therefore left out of the dating pool unless they choose non-white women.
So the disparity in college attendance caused by the hostility of the college environment to men causes a loss of male income — meaning a loss of ability to afford children, an increase in inter-racial sexual unions, and worst of all the indoctrination of far too many women with a false impression of their own victim hood and an irrational fear of men combined with men being indoctrinated into not just white guilt, but white male guilt as well that serves to sabotage healthy marital relationships down the road.
Before I leave the topic of education, we also need to consider what the impact of radical feminism has been in educational settings prior to college: elementary and secondary schools. Boys now comprise 80% of discipline problems in schools, get 70% of all grades of “D” or “F” and comprise 70% of all children with diagnosed learning disabilities. Meanwhile 80% of all school children being drugged with Ritalin and similar psycho-pharmaceuticals are boys: a whopping five million of them as of 2004. Boys are, on average, a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing skills. With this sort of situation, it should be no surprise that 80% of high school dropouts are boys. (12)
This is not shocking if one is paying attention to the trends in our society. Even former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch has noted that schools favor girls in teaching style, curriculum material choices and behavioral requirements.(13)
Christine Hoff Sommers with the American Enterprise Institute wrote in 2000: “In the view that has prevailed in American education over the past decade, boys are resented, both as the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls. This perspective is promoted in schools of education, and many a teacher now feels that girls need and deserve special indemnifying consideration.”
She goes on to state in “The War Against Boys:”
“The widening gender gap in academic achievement is real. It threatens the future of millions of American boys. Boys do not need to be rescued from their masculinity. But they are not getting the help they need. In the climate of disapproval in which boys now exist, programs designed to aid them have a very low priority. This must change. We should repudiate the partisanship that currently clouds the issues surrounding sex differences in the schools. We should call for balance, objective information, fair treatment, and a concerted national effort to get boys back on track. That means we can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules.”(14)
Let me re-state the situation. Boys and girls, overall, manifest substantial psychological differences, and among these differences are the environments and styles in which they are best-suited to learning. (15) Boys and girls manifest differences in hearing and, research demonstrates conclusively that “Best practices for teaching math differ significantly for girls and boys.”(16) No matter the subject, contextualizing information and role-playing work well for girls, but leave boys disengaged.(17) In fact, sex-based differences in learning are so profound that numerous studies indicate that providing opportunities for single-sex education for children improves both the depth and breadth of learning for both sexes. (18)
Now, when you consider these facts, and combine them with what Christine Hoff Sommers has described in terms of the attitudes manifested in our educational system regarding boys, it is no wonder the statistics about our boys are so horrendous.
So the educational situation brought about by radical feminism is quite serious and means that, because of very real educational and class differences between white boys and white girls, both lower birth rates and stratospheric miscegenation are on the way.
But in the present, it is with marriage that radical feminists have dealt their most deadly blow.
I mentioned earlier that early divorce laws in America were modeled after an Old Testament headship principle in which women were treated extremely unfairly. While this prevented frivolous divorce, it also prevented a good many divorces that really SHOULD have occurred as well. By the 1940’s, though, the major inequities in that system had been abolished and for the most part, it worked fairly well. The fact that those inequities had been addressed were evidenced in tens of thousands of “Dear John” letters received by our fighting men in WWII and a declining rate of husbands dying from poisons.
But radical feminists aren’t really interested in equality or justice. Keeping in mind that they are merely an extension of the Frankfurt School Marxist agenda, their goal is to destroy. Thus, they took a page right out of the Bolshevik revolution. Wikipedia notes:
“No-fault divorce was pioneered by the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Before the Revolution churches, mosques, and synagogues defined family life. It was the ecclesiastical law of the various denominations that controlled the family, marriage, and divorce. For example, the official registration of birth, death, marriage, and divorce was the responsibility of the church parish. Under these non-secular laws, divorce was highly restricted.
The 1918 Decree on Divorce eliminated the religious marriage and the underlying ecclesiastical law, by replacing them with civil marriage sanctioned by the state. Divorce was obtained by filing a mutual consent document with the Russian Registry Office, or by the unilateral request of one party to the court.”(19)
Most certainly, the lack of ability to dissolve a marriage by mutual consent was a problem in this country as couples who wanted a divorce and should have been able to obtain one could only do so through the creation of a “legal fiction.” Generally, the husband and wife would carefully arrange for one to catch the other in a pre-planned act of adultery, so that a divorce could be obtained.(20) Certainly, no reasonable person would argue that in a case where both spouses earnestly desire a divorce, that they should be forced to engage in such slight-of-hand.
Unfortunately, what radical feminist lawyers pushed through legislatures with the help of left-leaning bar associations(21) was NOT the allowance of divorce in cases of mutual consent, but rather a system of punitive justice based upon a fictionalized history of oppression that manifested in a massive power differential between men and women, with women having by far the upper-hand. They created a system in which unilateral no-fault divorce could be pursued, and in which even in contested cases, women won custody of children 90% of the time along with punitive amounts of child support.
Just like in the bad old days when the power differential was the other way around, a certain percentage of women didn’t take advantage of that power and insisted on fairness instead. Unfortunately, though, too many of today’s men and women have been through the indoctrination into victimhood status, and have a sense of entitlement. When this is combined with a near-guaranteed favorable outcome in terms of child custody, the result is that between 60% and 70% of divorces are initiated by women.
Most certainly, some of these filings are quite legitimate, as men are more likely than women to have serious problems with alcohol or drug abuse(22), for example. Nevertheless, the role played by the legal climate in women’s decision to divorce is demonstrably significant, as repeated studies have shown that in states where “shared custody” is the default condition, women file substantially fewer divorces.(23) Let me repeat this, because it is significant. In states where “shared custody” — otherwise known as simple fairness – is the default result of divorces, women file substantially fewer divorces.
This is a case where the enemies of our people have advanced the Marxist-motivated destruction of our families by appealing to our worst traits. Power corrupts, and when combined with victim-status and even outright incentives, unsuspecting men and women are essentially being induced to file divorces under circumstances where, if a fair system of divorce prevailed, they would instead work to save their marriages. And, in fact, no-fault divorce DOES harm women. Thirty six years too late, when radical Marxist feminists initiated a move to bring unilateral no-fault divorce to the last state without it, the New York State chapter of the National Organization for Women put forth surprising resistance: “We have looked down on societies in which all a husband has to do is say, “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you” to his wife and they are divorced. Should anyone be able to do this? Is unilateral no-fault any different?”(24)
I am not going to spend time going into all of the brutal statistics of the matter. Instead, I’m going to cut right to the chase and let you know that the utter brutality of our current mis-named family court system in this country to children AND to men has resulted in a bona-fide strike by men against marriage and reproduction. This strike is not a conscious thing, but it is more pervasive than you think, as the quotation from Wendy McElroy at the beginning of the first podcast in this series suggests. A fairly long quote from Dianna Thompson and Glen Sacks reveals how serious this problem is:
“Katherine is attractive, successful, witty, and educated. She also can’t find a husband. Why? Because most of the men this thirtysomething software analyst dates do not want to get married. These men have Peter Pan syndrome: They refuse to commit, refuse to settle down, and refuse to “grow up.”
However, given the family court policies and divorce trends of today, Peter Pan is no naive boy, but instead a wise man.
“Why should I get married and have kids when I could lose those kids and most of what I’ve worked for at a moment’s notice?” asks Dan, a 31-year-old power plant technician who says he will never marry. “I’ve seen it happen to many of my friends. I know guys who came home one day to an empty house or apartment – wife gone, kids gone. They never saw it coming. Some of them were never able to see their kids regularly again.”
Census figures suggest that the marriage rate in the United States has dipped 40 percent during the last four decades to its lowest point since the rate was measured. There are many plausible explanations for this trend, but one of the least mentioned is that American men, in the face of a family court system hopelessly stacked against them, have subconsciously launched a “marriage strike.”
It is not difficult to see why. Let’s say that Dan defies Peter Pan, marries Katherine, and has two children. There is a 50 percent likelihood that this marriage will end in divorce within eight years, and if it does, the odds are 2-1 it will be Katherine, not Dan, who initiates the divorce. It may not matter that Dan was a decent husband. Studies show that few divorces are initiated over abuse or because the man has already abandoned the family. Nor is adultery cited as a factor by divorcing women appreciably more than by divorcing men.
While the courts may grant Dan and Katherine joint legal custody, the odds are overwhelming that it is Katherine, not Dan, who will win physical custody. Overnight, Dan, accustomed to seeing his kids every day and being an integral part of their lives, will become a “14 percent dad” – a father who is allowed to spend only one out of every seven days with his own children.
Once Katherine and Dan are divorced, odds are at least even that Katherine will interfere with Dan’s visitation rights. Three-quarters of divorced men surveyed say their ex-wives have interfered with their visitation, and 40 percent of mothers studied admitted that they had done so, and that they had generally acted out of spite or in order to punish their exes.
Katherine will keep the house and most of the couple’s assets. Dan will need to set up a new residence and pay at least a third of his take-home pay to Katherine in child support.
As bad as all of this is, it would still make Dan one of the lucky ones. After all, he could be one of those fathers who cannot see his children at all because his ex has made a false accusation of domestic violence, child abuse, or child molestation. Or a father who can only see his own children under supervised visitation or in nightmarish visitation centers where dads are treated like criminals.”(25)
Pretty intimidating, isn’t it? When you think about it, the marriage strike isn’t much different than the men who are avoiding colleges. Colleges have become an environment that is hostile to men, and men are avoiding them. Marriage and reproduction have become institutions that are hostile to men, and men are avoiding them. And thus, our birthrate continues to plummet.
And now, just one example of how radical feminism has nothing to do with empowering women as women, and everything to do with advancing a left-wing agenda.
Take a look at Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice as his Vice Presidential running mate. While we did NOT endorse McCain or Palin in the previous election, we find the attacks that self-described feminists have leveled against Sarah Palin to be instructive. Sarah Palin, in many respects — at least from her public persona — reminds many men of the best aspects of their wives. She works hard, has a good sense of humor, and is extremely capable as a governor. She seems like the kind of woman who can kill and field dress a moose in the morning and still be perfectly at home going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant that evening. She has five kids, is pro-life, and espouses conservative principles. By any measure, coming from Idaho State rather than Harvard or Yale, her success in fields as diverse as running a fleet of fishing boats to governing America’s largest State should impress women who value the progress of women in the workplace.
Yet, feminists have attacked her with a level of venom that is quite unseemly.
Noted feminist comedienne Sandra Bernhardt’s latest show contained some choice comments regarding Ms. Palin. According to one observer:
“In fact, the play wears its politically VERY correct heart on its sleeve with its indictment of America as “A Man’s World, It’s a White Man’s World, It’s a F–ked Up White Man’s Racist World” and can only be suggested to be racist in its content if one is hell-bent on protecting White Folk for Sandra’s blistering indictment. When Sandra warns Sarah Palin not to come into Manhattan lest she get gang-raped by some of Sandra’s big black brothers …”(26)
While Berhardt’s comments were among the most extreme, other main-line feminists like Gloria Steinem, have also hit Palin hard. In case you didn’t know, both before and after her position with the National Organization for Women, Steinem was a major communist organizer. And, I mean, quite literally communist. The organization dedicated to spreading communism worldwide is known as The Socialist Internationale, and Ms. Steinem proudly sits on its board of directors. For some reason, when this flaming communist writes a guest editorial in the paper, that fact is never reported in the byline. Anyway, Ms. Steinem attacked Sarah Palin with a rather nasty editorial published in the Los Angeles Times on September 4th, characterizing her as a cruel and inhumane person completely out of touch with the real needs of women.
Feminist Sarah Seltzer said: “I was on the elliptical trainer, and my rage propelled me to the most furious workout I’ve had in a while … a lot of feminists out there are appalled by the cynicism and condescension inherent in this choice … It’s no rare thing for the right wing to use prominent women to keep the rest of us down. But just because Sarah Palin is a woman doesn’t mean she’s good for women.”(27)
You see, these self-described feminists oppose Palin because, for example, she favors a woman’s right to choose whether or not she should be armed to defend herself against violent assault. Radical feminist, of course, believe that women shouldn’t have that right. They oppose Palin because Palin has some moral qualms about allowing 13 year old girls — who can’t even legally buy a cigarette to smoke after sex – to obtain abortion on demand without parental notification or consent. Now, EAU has no official position on the abortion issue, but Sarah Palin’s opinions on the matter certainly don’t merit the sort of hateful reaction she is receiving.
But that’s the whole point. When feminists see Sarah Palin, they don’t see what ordinary people see: a successful, sassy, intelligent woman with a touch of class who has climbed further on her own guts and resolve than most people of either sex will ever reach. Instead, they judge her strictly on the basis of the compliance of her politics with far-left extremist positions.
That’s because, at their core, radical feminists don’t really want women empowered with guns and a right of self-defense, because that would not only shut down their victimization industry; but it would also stand as a barrier to the dictatorship of the proletariat and endless human misery they truly favor.
Finally, as part of this discussion, I want to talk a bit about the truth regarding spousal abuse.
Everybody has heard of wife-beaters and battered women’s shelters, but few have heard of husband-beaters or battered men’s shelters. From looking around our media culture, one would assume that men are downright dangerous to women on average and that women almost never hit men. Because of this media cocoon, the actual truth of matters is pretty shocking; but if you compare what I’m about to reveal to what you’ve seen with your own eyes, you’ll realize it is the truth.
Any person familiar with the facts of domestic violence realizes that men and women are equally likely to be victims, as a 2007 study(28) conducted by the Harvard Medical School reported. In fact, in 70% of cases of unilateral violence, women are the aggressors. Another peer-reviewed study(29) in the American Journal of Public Health confirms this.
Overall, 24% of heterosexual relationships report some degree of violence. Within that group, 50% of all domestic violence is reciprocal; and in cases of reciprocal violence, the woman is usually the first to strike, and the man is more likely to be physically injured. In cases of unilateral violence, 70% are initiated by women, and 30% by men; though, due to men’s greater physical strength, women sustain 6% more injuries.
The rest of this article, including the 30 footnotes, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6370