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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
I think there were a lot of factors. Most of the rest of this comment is going to discuss first-wave feminism because I think the conditions there are more legible.
On the economic side, before we can have women doing (outside the home, waged) work the economy needs to have a demand for women's labor and women need to have the capacity and desire to engage in that labor. Other comments have noted the increased mechanization of labor as a factor in the increase of demand for women's work. Decreasing the capacity gap between men and women makes them more interchangeable as workers. On the capacity side, the rise of labor saving devices in the home and public schooling gave women the capacity do engage in this work. The primary tasks that women spent most of their time doing were substantially reduced, freeing them up to use the time on other tasks. This gives us an explanation for how women could start participating more in work outside the home. Why did they want to? For this I think we have to turn to social factors.
On the social side, I suspect women wanted an income for the same reasons anyone wants one. Existing in our society requires money. The more money you have the more in control you are of your own life. Women probably wanted to engage in waged work to be more independent, autonomous, and in control of their own lives. There is no shortage of contemporary stories of women ending up in awful relationships due to lacking much by way of alternatives.
Another factor here, I suspect, is status. Our communities, both local and global, award status almost entirely on individuals who do work outside the home (then and now). If you are scientist you can get international recognition in the form of the Nobel Prize or various other science prizes. If you're a rich philanthropist your name can be a watchword for the arts, sciences, and all kind of international causes. By contrast if you're a home maker what kind of recognition or acclaim can you acquire? Sure people talk a lot about the importance of being a good wife and keeping a good home but where is the broader recognition of individuals? It's entirely absent. Women (and only women) are supposed to be satisfied with the status of merely being a good housewife to her husband while it's fine for him to seek international acclaim by one avenue or another.
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Links to a couple of relevant comments of mine on the topic of feminism from the last Reddit CW thread that got buried.
I think what is lacking in this comment thread is an acknowledgement of male outgroup bias and female ingroup bias (there are quite a large number of studies that measure the core phenomenon, it's highly reproducible). Men are very strange in being perhaps the only (innate/biologically defined) social group to not have a ingroup bias. Men have a more favourable perception of women than they do of other men. While it's possible this is simply a consequence of modern gender ideology, this finding largely holds in cross-cultural studies, including in illiberal, "patriarchal" cultures. There's also circumstantial evidence from history, e.g. chivalric codes and courtly love. Men have an innate psychological need to want to protect, provide and care for women. To put it, men have a predisposition towards "simping" for women. This can manifest in different ways, such as extreme paternalism towards women, or liberalism towards women, depending on the circumstances.
The counterbalance to this effect was essentially nature. The world was a very dangerous place (and still is in many parts of the world), and the danger and the risks present in the world would naturally limit the roles and activity of women, from childbirth to hunting to political leadership. Security is preferred over liberty for women, by both men and women. As my linked comments and other commenters have already mentioned, modern technology, medicine, industrialisation and modernity generally changed this balance and there was no longer a natural counterbalance to men's innate desire to provide for women, and they began to do so in a maladaptive way. After modernity also destroyed the female role, women began feeling empty and resentful, blaming men of course, who were have always to provide for them, tend to their emotional needs and fix issues. If something is wrong, it's men's fault one way or another! Men lacking an ingroup bias means that most men were pretty content to go along with the demonisation of men too. Thus you have all the ingredients for feminism.
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I think you're halfway there. I think the other part is the fact that women at a population level are massively more neurotic than men. And that colors the outcomes of any sort of "women's movement". It's hard for me to look at feminism over the course of my life, think of a what movement fundamentally driven by neuroticism might look like, and not go "Yeah, I guess that pretty much squares."
So because women are more neurotic than men, they are better able to organize and respond to potential problems that may occur in the future?
I suppose that makes some sense, although it would imply that the rhetoric involving freedom and equality was not the true goal of the movement, right?
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The social driver is that it is the attractive ideology. It is the attractive ideology because it is reinforced in media, education, and pop culture. Some of this is due to Democrat campaigns, some due to critical theorists, some due to tropes, some just due to capitalism.
A person doesn’t need to have a well-thought or personal motive for holding an ideology distinct from that it is the most socially attractive (cool, reputable) belief to hold.
It’s arguably still necessary, from the standpoint of obtaining maximal societal health, for more women to become homemakers. Our fertility rate means we trend toward ruin; we increasingly face diseases related to poor homemaking (diabetes, psychiatric disorder) and maternal stress (think of the 3% autism rate in some parts of the US, now remember it’s increasing); and it’s not even obvious that the expenses used to train women in education are of greater total utilitarian value than if they raised great healthy children.
The equality discourse pretty much bans this line of thinking, but women should be out of any stressful occupation for at least three years per birth, due to the additional benefits of breastfeeding and maintaining the mother-child bond. That’s 7 years total for three children (implying you have them one after another). If you’re a woman who has the potential to be a doctor, you’re the exact kind of person who should have 3-5 children (you are healthy and intelligent). Taking a woman who can raise 5 children and teaching her Anesthesiology and she winds up having one child at 35 is a net negative for the longterm good of society. My go-to example of this is Charles Darwin’s wife, who raised like 8 kids and three of them wound up being amazing scientists. And Darwin’s wife was trained to be a homemaker, so when he fell sick and despondent (as he often did) he was taken care of.
I made a variation of this argument to my wife after her MD/PhD. She's now a SAHM with our 4 children.
I applaud you! Hope you’re all happy and thriving.
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If you want an explanation, you can't just give one for why it is reinforced (modern popularity alone would explain that), but rather why it was enforced initially, back when it wasn't popular. You can't use "Democrat campaigns" or "critical theorists" to explain why Republicans outvoted Democrats in favor of the Republican-introduced Nineteenth Amendment before critical theory was developed, "tropes" is a category of explanation not an explanation, and "capitalism" just goes where the money is, so especially in a pre-"long tail" world it was another trailing indicator of popularity, not a leading indicator.
On the other hand, you seem to have given a pretty good explanation by accident:
We have four amazing scientists directly credited to Emma Darwin ... and yet I struggle to justify using the word "credited" to describe a paragraph where she still doesn't merit being directly named! With the status of homemakers that low, is it any wonder that people in search of status (to some extent, pretty much everybody even a little neurotypical) look for it elsewhere? The anesthesiologist might end up less contributory to and even more forgotten by history, but at least in the meantime she gets a title (edit: and an excuse to keep her surname with it) and a white coat and a big paycheck and deference from patients and underlings.
The bigger problem isn't even the loss of the opportunity to gain status imo.
It's the risk of losing status if the man tosses you overboard. Now you don't have that youth and fertility (since you "wasted" it on a bad match) and you don't have the wealth and security to compensate.
There is a solution to this, but it's a more feminist alimony/spousal support systems so that just leads us back to where we ended up.
And now I feel stupid, for not mentioning that myself. It's not far off from what a then-girlfriend specifically told me was the reason for her high-intensity education+career trajectory: not having her economic future out of her control.
Is there? Alimony can't fix status issues. Even in a world where "taking care of high-status man" and especially "taking care of successful kids" aren't given nearly the status they deserve, "dumped by high-status man, plus the state ruled that you can't take care of yourself without his ongoing compelled assistance" is irreparably worse.
Alimony is already good enough to handle most economic security issues ensuing from divorce ... but in my ex's case being divorced wasn't the concern, having a husband unexpectedly disabled/burned-out/whatever was. IIRC (though it was long ago so I may be completely misremembering here) her parents had fallen into that trap, with her mother suddenly having to start a mid-life career when her father had health problems, and even if it had worked out okay for them in the end, she thought it would be much safer to get a head start while she still had slack in her life.
It doesn't have to. We don't tend to create such complicated structures to only alleviate status concerns, AFAICT
The status concerns are especially trenchant because they're tied to serious economic concerns, like spending 20 years in a marriage and then not being able to support yourself. If that economic element was removed (e.g. everyone had enough money through a very generous UBI or parental program) I think the relevant importance of the status loss would change
The reason Western societies have infrastructure for alimony and child support is that the economic considerations are seen as so important as to mandate it, not cause women/men lost status (if anything they've made it easier for them to lose status via no-fault divorce)
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You have done a much better job wording my objections than I could have. I feel like the op and many other people responding fail to grasp what the question is, and that is probably my fault for not wording the post in a manner that this community is used to. Nevertheless I would like to continue learning, and I think any content, even if it isn't up to the usual standard of quality, will be helpful as the site tries to get off the ground.
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I mean...this doesn't actually get us to an answer.
Feminism was once the unattractive ideology. We may have to look back at the sufragettes or alleged bra-burners but it was a thing.
The question is how they won and became the attractive ideology?
Ah, but that's the problem: if this woman actually wants to be a doctor she has an incentive to not only work, but to push other women to work. Otherwise women as a class may be (rightly) seen as less reliable workers since they have to drop out for pregnancy, which would harm her career prospects.
Since feminism, like everything else, is influenced by the interests of more upper class women this may explain why its focus is on stuff that helps working women like provisions for daycare as opposed to...paying a woman per child and letting her just have that child and stay at home to raise it.
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A bunch of suburban, socially isolated, well-off, middle-class women decided that their husbands, for no good reason, basically have it better in life than themselves. This simple sentiment was the main driver behind it, I think.
Husbands? The rank and file maybe, but a large majority of the thought leaders were shrewish spinsters
That's entirely possible, I don't know. But for most of them, I assume it all originated from the sentiment that their husbands had it better. All they knew was that they leave for work in the morning, come back in the evening, and every month they get a big paycheck. Surely they must be doing all sorts of interesting stuff all day! Plus, they get paid!
I think technology played a huge role too. Once you have a dishwasher, toaster, microwave, fridge, stove, laundry machine, grocery delivery, baby formula, birth control etc etc it’s actually rather easy to run a household and it becomes pretty boring. Those who complain about how hard it is to parent now really have no idea how good they have it compared to prior eras. So there’s a ton of idle time spent feeling bored so that’s what drove women to want to work, the tedium of sitting at home with nothing to do. Granted now they know that that’s actually a pretty awesome deal, and it’s not unusual to hear women today complain about wishing they could be home makers if only they could find a rich guy to commit to them (good luck with that ladies)
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This is a sentiment that is often expressed, including by both by feminists themselves who want to engage no-true-scotsmanning, and by some non-feminists who want to lay the blame squarely on 'third wave feminism' (and occasionally second wave as well). I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
There's really only two movements that can be described as distinct movements or schools of thought of feminism - liberal feminism and radical feminism. They are also mutually exclusive - belief in one necessarily precludes belief in the other.
Liberal feminism is essentially just liberalism or liberal thought applied to women. For this reason, I'm hesitant to even call it 'liberal feminism', as this implies a level of philosophical kinship with radical feminism that doesn't exist. 'Liberal feminism' doesn't have a distinct philosophical tradition or prominent philosophers either, instead relying heavily on liberal philosophers from Locke to Mills to Rawls generally, with lesser scholars basically just transposing their ideas onto women and gender, with the possible exception of Wollstonecraft. However, I must point out that even Mills assumed that women were subjugated by men Liberal feminism is what the average person is thinking of when they think positively about feminism, but this is actually just reflection of a positive view of liberalism generally.
Radical feminism is the other feminism and is arguably just 'feminism'. What makes radical feminism distinct is its core focus on patriarchy or patriarchy theory. This is a Marxian theory which defines men and women in terms of oppressive power dynamics, man as oppressor and women as oppressed, and that radical reform (revolution of some kind) is needed to end this 'patriarchy' and oppression. Virtually every prominent feminist scholar has been a radical feminist, from Millet and McKinnon to bell hooks. Even supposedly liberal feminists like Gloria Steinem were actually radical feminists, and I believe were more so labelled liberal feminists for their presentability. Ideologically they still subscribed to patriarchy theory and a radical deconstruction of society ('patriarchy'). Radical feminism is arguably just as old or even older than liberal feminism, with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention's Declaration of Sentiments essentially laying out a form of proto-radical feminism/patriarchy theory (though there are some elements of liberal feminism there too).
Liberal feminism was a flash in the pan. Women gained legal equality extremely quickly, with the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, before feminism had even really began in full swing. What are now regarded as seminal or foundational (radical) feminist texts, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in 1970, were yet to be published. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, often called the book that started the so called 'second wave' of feminism, was published in 1963, only a year before the Civil Rights Act. Of course, the underlying feminist sentiment existed before that, but my point is that liberal feminism or 'women's rights' were mainstreamed incredibly quickly and pretty painlessly too. With the primary goals of liberal feminism achieved so quickly, much of the liberal activist energy behind it dissipated, leaving behind mostly (though not exclusively) radical feminist activists, who still had a bone to pick. Many liberal feminists who stayed would eventually be excluded and pushed out, such as Warren Farrell and Karen DeCrow. It would be these radical feminist activists who would go on to fulfil the majority of feminist leadership roles, professorships in 'gender studies' and social sciences generally, and advocacy/lobby groups. Radical feminism has become orthodoxy, and the only active form of feminism.
The distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism strongly mirrors the split in the black civil rights movement, between Martin Luther King Jr's liberal approach vs the black liberationist (i.e. Marxian) approach represented by Malcolm X or the Black Panthers and similar groups. However, while most people can distinguish between movements represented by MLK Jr and Malcolm X, the same does not seems to be true for liberal feminism and radical feminism, which are often conflated with each other or seen as part of the same tradition. I'm not completely sure why this is the case, it may just be because women's rights were relatively less of a contentious issue and people, including men as per a comment of mine above, were happy to go along and not question it much. It could have also been a deliberate tactic of obfuscation on the part of the radical feminists, deliberately linking themselves to and hiding behind the positive connotations of liberal feminism for gain. They have been pretty successful if this is the case, as radical feminism has completely supplanted any liberal notions of the relationship between the sexes. Patriarchy theory has become the default position in the public cultural continuousness, even those who would (mis)label themselves as liberal feminists. The idea that maybe women weren't essentially slaves to men in the past - and instead that liberalism towards women is a natural moral development due to changing social conditions/modernity - is verboten now.
There are some different groups within radical feminism, perhaps the most obvious being the contemporary conflict between intersectional feminism and the TERFs. But I wouldn't call these movements wholly different schools of thought, they are both radical feminist ideologies at their core. A comparison I would make is to Marxism. There are a whole range of different sub-movements within Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc. that all do get into conflict with each other for one reason or another. But at the core they are still all Marxist and adopted the same core ideological thought and framing. The same is true for radical feminism. You can make legitimate blanket criticisms of (radical) feminism the same way you can of Marxism and its derivatives.
I think the idea not to criticise feminism too broadly is purely necessary for optics, or strategic reasons as you put it. As might be obvious, I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time reading both feminist history and theory. I'm not convinced the level of granularity you're suggesting is justified on the actual philosophical level. To repeat myself, it's perfectly reasonable to make broad criticisms of Marxism, which includes the granularity of all its derivatives, because it's the same core philosophy/ideology. But I must concede I may be just as vulnerable to outgroup homogeneity bias as anyone else, even though I don't think it refutes my arguments here.
I will say that I do very much agree with the general point of your original comment, my criticisms is more levelled at you describing this this is only a contemporary issue. What you were describing has always existed in feminism, at least as far back as 1848.
For the most part, yes. The suffragette movement (i.e. all pre-interwar feminism) was always an elite movement, made up exclusively of high class, wealthy women. The suffragettes weren't advocating for universal suffrage, but rather extending the right to vote from wealthy men to wealthy men and women.
It's hard to say say whether it involved signalling opportunities for elite men. The main issue with this idea is that the suffragette movement was (despite contemporary historical revisionism on the subject) largely unpopular for much of its existence, especially among women. Men were generally more in favour of women's suffrage than women were themselves. Here is a link if you want to know more about this topic. So as a purely political signal, elite men supporting women's suffrage wouldn't be that effective, at least until the early 20th century, but even then women's suffrage wasn't that popular when it actually passed either. You might argue that that the success women's suffrage was mere historical fluke caused by the mass killing of young men in the First World War which provided strong pressures for women to be involved in political affairs. The vast majority of states only passed women's suffrage after WW1, those that did it earlier were mostly limited to extremely sparsely populated basically colonial states or territories that probably had different reasons for doing so. And often when women's suffrage was passed, it was initially limited land-owning women, such as in the UK. It's also not like there was never any instance of women voting prior to the 19th/20th century either, there are numerous instances throughout history where women could and did vote.
In my opinion, what is more likely is that elite men were doing what men do best, and listening to the complaints of women and jumping to solve the issue and accommodate them. As I pointed out earlier, men are predisposed to such behaviour as protectors and providers.
This question is basically about rhetoric and how to win a debate/online argument. I'm not sure I have the best advice here. But some general things I've picked up:
First, remember you're arguing more to convince other readers (the audience) than you are necessarily are to convince your debate opponent. There's a good chance your debate opponent is a committed ideologue and you're not going to convince them no matter what you say. But if you make convincing arguments other readers may be convinced. Generally speaking, if you have provided credible sources and quotes from figures, and your opponent responds with some variation of 'well they're not MY preferred sources', it doesn't look good for them.
Second, most feminists you meet online (and even in person for that matter) are going to be woefully underinformed about their own topic. Part of the reason they are so dead set on their one specific source is because it's probably the only thing they have read, or was assigned reading on their gender studies subject. In particular is bell hooks. Seriously, probably three-quarters of the time the only source online feminists use is bell hooks, the prominent intersectional feminist. She's the one that always gets recommended for those who "don't understand feminism." You can pre-empt them by quoting (to refute) hooks yourself. Storming the motte before they even have a chance to occupy it.
Third, as much as this is a logical fallacy (we're talking about rhetoric here, your debate opponent is probably not acting in good faith), but just appeal to authority. Hopefully you do it in a clever and crafty way. To be slightly less fallacious, you can appeal to the relative prominence they have and therefore their outsized influence on the feminist movement as a whole, e.g. "it doesn't matter what you or some obscure minor feminist thinker no one cares about, I'm referring to the feminist who hold senior professorships at major colleges, or have written the foundational texts that are taught everywhere, or are senior members of prominent feminist organisations and advocacy groups." Essentially just name drop all the prominent, influential feminists, their importance and their positions. It's really hard for your opponent to not look silly when you're talking about Millet, Walby and hooks and they're talking about Feminist McNobody.
Funny you should say that, because she's not a feminist academic I would say!
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I was more referring to the historical movements, I feel like the modern one has sort of run out of meaningful change to make (in the west, anyway).
Also, this seems to be a common confusion, perhaps I should have said societal driver rather than social? The reasons an individual would join any political movement are not a mystery to me. I was more referring to the large scale adoption of feminist politics in industrialized nations. Usually politics at scale are reactionary, something bad happens and people scramble to fix it, but in this case feminist politics seem like a pre-emptive solution. We never actually saw the consequences of the old social systems that optimize for reproduction, clashing with greatly decreased mortality rates.
You are right, but it is always disappointing to find what seems like an interesting phenomenon, and the answer to "why?" turns out to be: "no reason".
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This really strikes me in the #MeToo debates. Especially on the low-end, with cases that don't really rise to violence/coercion and a woman could theoretically have solved by being more circumspect (e.g. the Aziz Ansari case)
If feminism was about aligning men and women's standards we would treat these women the way we treat men: you're responsible for this, learn and don't do it again. But that's apparently misogynist - victim blaming (someone else will have to explain how sexual crimes against women are the one place where mentioning how to use your agency is a sin)
If feminism kept old standards we would have their family get involved to help with the "cad" (which is what men who "took advantage" of good women were; immoral but not rapists. We seem to have lost this distinction since now everything falls under "sexual misconduct" or "problematic").
But that is also misogynist. So now people draw on the entire internet to perform the vigilante acts necessary to defend a woman's sexual honor - hidden in moralistic tones cause no one wants to admit that's happening . Given that these people have no personal stake in either side (not even having to see them around the county) and so they have no costs to moderate their behavior, it's not a surprise their behavior is deranged.
Indeed. I wouldn't even mind if we could come to some sort of coherent stance here. Are women the same as men or do they require extra protection where we have sex differences? There's good evolutionary and feminist reasons for the latter (sex is costlier for women) but feminists responded to the problem of evolution by just...rejecting it utterly and deciding it was the province of misogynists so we have to totally ignore that there are differences, while acting like we aren't ignoring that there are differences.
There's no shortage of stories where the victim has been using her agency and it was not enough. Usually a list of precautions and safety measures that those women take but men [in the audience] would never even consider is also provided. When put like that, it is at the very least supremely tactless to act as if the woman did not know to not go into dark alleys with strange shady men.
Yes, that was the original line and it convinced me at the time. There's just two or three issues for it:
No feminist I've ever followed has ever said "so-and-so didn't take those precautions so it's okay what happened". In fact: the argument is "'even if she didn't take precautions this should never have happened and even stating that she should have taken those precautions is now verboten".
There's no evidence that the woman in the Ansari story (or the stories it's proxy for) took extreme precautions - if she had it may have never gotten to the very sex she found so distressing. The story was also not one of being raped in an alley but a sexual experience that was unpleasant but probably legal by most standards. This matters, because there's the question of just what the heck we are supposed to do about it that doesn't exist for straight up rape. For crimes we go to the criminal system. For affronts to your sexual honor you typically go to your parents. How much of a role should the rest of society have here? There's no clear answer since half the time you're told society has no business in someone's bedroom...until something unfun happens.
Finally even if the original intent was good and was aimed at a world where women did take every reasonable precaution I'm not convinced that it can't still have the effect of promoting a certain mentality towards bad sex - i.e. it's not your responsibility, it's the fault of patriarchy or the avatar of patriarchy you had sex with- that is markedly different from the attitude inculcated in men, all at the same time we're insisting on female sexual agency being equal (or even identical) to that of males.
(As I said: I'm not even opposed to having "double" standards. But you have to bite the bullet)
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Simple economics!
Women achieved productive parity with men somewhere around 1900 due to the near-total mechanization of society at that time. The means of producing food and primary goods (mining) was, for the first time in human history, automated to the extent that physical strength (the primary advantage of men as a class) was rendered mostly to completely irrelevant for the average profession of the time. The impact of mechanization was so great that even elementary-age children could drive a combine, thread an industrial loom, or press a switch as well as a grown woman or man, which is the reason even they were part of the labor force at that time.
With productive parity comes economic parity, and with economic parity comes social parity, hence suffrage in every industrialized nation before the 1920s were over.
(And then, after those nations became great or bombed themselves/each other back into the Stone Age, the bottom fell out/was removed from the labor pool; child labor was the first to go for specialization reasons, and then most unskilled/nominally-lower-class labor got shipped to Asian countries for the same reason. The effect is the same- sociopolitical [and to a lesser extent, economic] consequences for these two groups have been substantial.)
Automation is part of it, but what everyone seems to forget is that women and children did work down mines alongside men and much of the reforms were passed because it was felt that this was not fitting with women's social role (not alone to be homemakers but to be modest, chaste, etc.) Women and children then moved on, as you point out, to the factories.
The social driver for feminism was capitalism. While the suffragettes and others were looking for votes for women, and for women to have equal rights with men (and I think we tend to forget the great imbalance legally as regards women and men within marriage and other spheres), there was a limited source of employment for women. Women were dependent on marriage to keep them out of poverty. So broadening the type of work that women could have access to was both a feminist project, to give women economic independence, and an employers' project, to have access to a greater labour force than men alone.
Employing women meant that jobs could be less skilled and more importantly paid less. Now we have modern society where it is expected that you will be a two-income family if you want a mortgage or any other rung on the ladder of achievement (unless you are in a very well-paying job where one person can be the sole breadwinner). Alongside the usual stuff about equality and opportunity and the rest of it, is the admission that having women working helps to grow the economy. I think we're at a point where we're dependent on constant growth or else the bubble will burst and there will be a lot of fallout.
Buried down in this piece is another reference to this:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/female-labor-force-participation-gender-gap-pandemic/
So once all the talk about "gender wage gaps" and so forth is stripped away, the underlying skeleton is that every warm body that can work is needed in order to keep the plates of the economy spinning. Taking time out to have children is a career-killer, if you have a career, and hurts your income if you're working jobs (not employed in a career) since you're more likely to have to work part-time hours in order to run the home as well.
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This is an excellent point that I had not considered. Thank you!
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I was thinking about this earlier. Both World Wars saw a lot of women in America and Britain flooding into factories to make ammo, and with this natural experiment proving that a woman could exist in a "hard" domain...well, that's something that's not easy to forget, so what followed probably wasn't too great a surprise in hindsight.
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To me the simplest answer seems to be the correct one. Large numbers of women, and men who sympathized, decided, on the heels of previous emancipatory movements (directed towards commoners or slaves and others) decided that women should be extended the rights and privileges formerly restricted to men. Once you've declared all men are created equal and have inalienable rights, etc. it's not a big leap to all people are created equal and have the same inalienable rights etc. They pushed for these changes in whatever ways they could, including, as others have noted, the patronage of wealthy supporters. Unlike some other commenters I see no reason to believe it was some sort of ploy to splinter the family or create a pliant voting bloc. Unless there is ample reason to believe otherwise, the simplest answer would be that wealthy supporters gave money to the cause because they believed in it.
So, do you think it was coincidence that this lined up with the reduced mortality caused by medicine?
I assumed the speed at which feminism was adopted implied some intent, but I suppose that isn't necessarily the case. It is the simplest explanation, although I can't help but feel a bit disappointed whenever an interesting outlier turns out to be just chance.
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The entrance of "equality" into voting politics (later the flagship suffragette cause) came with slavery, where the non-personhood of slaves was constantly justified on grounds of moral inferiority. This is disanalogous to whatever sense of equality played a role in gender matters because it was never the dominant belief that women were not human or morally less-than, unlike the slave. They were seen as infantile and in need of wardenship under a man's discretion, for similar reasons as children. Children who, it bears repeating, retain all such restrictions without ideas about their in-equality (or really any protest around their unequal treatment) being remotely widespread. The critical point is that distinctions were essentially role ethics -- and that moral equality would have implied role equality was not really a given as it was with black slaves, and isn't today. Equivocating the two was suffragette rhetoric, and this view is just the consequence that suffragettes created by victory; there isn't a strong reason to think causation went the other way around, especially when many other more daily and tangible gender-based role demands persisted long after the suffragettes won.
So, of course, taking the simplifying assumption that a certain conception which was a product of successful political activity was always the dominant view makes said activity seem inevitable and obvious. But thinking that contentious, loaded ambiguities don't change in use over 100s of years isn't a reasonable way to think about history.
I appreciate whenever people see assumptions and point them out. Especially when they simply explain the assumption and don't use it as an opportunity to discredit the original idea. It is rarely obvious when one makes an assumption. That being said, you seen knowledgeable on the subject. Do you have an alternative explanation for the speed at which suffragettes were able to change the dominant view? or were you only correcting a mistake when you saw it?
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Utilitarian systems or practice styles seem to survive the longest in a competitive environment so even with no active intent that's what we end up with?
You are obviously uneducated too but I do not see how that is relevant to our conversation now. ( I jest dramanaut. )
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I'm sure feminists themselves were not considering such higher order effects, they were just collectively extorting economic power for their group in the short term. This probably couldn't have occurred in a civilisation without modern standards of living though.
I don't think there is an easy way to simplify the forces driving this other than to the too-simple self-interest, which drives everything. I don't think society naturally drifts towards freedom. More competition creates opportunities for collusion, and more collusion creates opportunities for defection.
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To take a unorthodox (and decidedly un-feminist) perspective on the matter: elite men.
Feminism is a product of industrial civilization. It is inherently bourgeoise in origin: look up the lists of suffragettes and their ranks are plucked mostly from the emerging middle-class. In this general atmosphere of awakening political consciousness, a small group of women desired to have the political rights of rich men. Keep in mind that universal male suffrage was in the process of rolling out around the world: female suffrage was only a natural evolution of this if you subscribe to Whig history!
The anti-suffragettes (cut out of the historical narrative) correctly saw this as dividing the vote of a household, of fragmenting the family unit, and bringing politics into the realm of the home. And the first legislative policy that could be said to laid at the feet of these suffragette organizations in America? Prohibition.
There are always those who scheme of changing the nature of the electorate to accomplish their policy goals - rather than convincing the existing demos of the necessity for change. The further a woman is 'liberated' from structures of faith, tribe, and family, the more energy can be devoted to political endeavors. A politician could hardly care that his female constituents are unhappy or are childless - in the atomized, liberal worldview, she is only as valuable as her vote, and as a foot soldier for the causes of the day. The women who would form the base of community and social life are instead cannibalized into the great Molochian machine of modernity, a bonfire of social capital.
It is ultimately a project to alienate woman from loving their families, their neighbors, the people they live with. And for what? To throw them into a cosmic conflict against a perverse scapegoat of the hated masculine - a struggle that is eternal as it is unwinnable. And it is supported in the west because it creates a potent voting bloc to hammer plebian men into submission. It is not elite women who are living lives of independence from men: they get married as quickly as possible and raise their children with all the resources that they can bring to bear. By supporting ever further Hobbesian freedom into insanity, elite men gain a patina of virtue. They promulgate values that they do not personally practice: in addition to gaining a harem of strivers from the middle-class of which he can casually discard at a whim.
Since liberalism/politics serves the economic end/capitalism I would focus more on the economic benefits of convincing a set of women that working for their family was being tyrannized while pouring your life into whatever endeavor some business owner had was, in fact, freedom.
But the end is the same. The atomized woman's energies can be redirected.
Given the rise of #MeToo I would argue that feminism functions to actually make it hard to discard these women at your whim. That's a quick way to an unfalsifiable accusation of "misconduct" - that dreadfully vague word that now encompasses everything from being a Victorian-era cad (who had sex with women by promising commitment he had no intention of providing) to an actual serial rapist like Weinstein.
This is why I think the benefit to elite men is oversold. Feminism is primarily a means for middle class and above women to compete with men of their economic class. That involves elite men; those attempts to "diversify the boardroom" have to throw some old white male overboard.
Yes, the majority of people being so killed are middle-class and upper-middle class men with seniority (that NYT reporter who got canned for saying the wrong thing on a trip with woke elite teenagers is the prototype) but they do get men who are higher up too.
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Sorry, I'm not well versed in these things. What you said seems kind of disconnected with the original question.
Are you saying that elite male poiliticians forsaw overpopulation as a problem, and manipulated women into demanding rights under the guise of freedom to solve it, and that this is a bad thing?
Don't give them too much credit.
The attention once given to family and children has been re-invested into politics and labor. That's the logic of bourgeoise democracy: every possible constituency must be broken up and dissolved into its smallest parts, so that they may be set against each other in the war of all versus all.
Women are just such a potent bloc that it is impossible to leave them politically inactive. As the largest part of a potential demos that can be activated, elites around the world came to the same conclusion independently: it was expedient to support feminism in support of their aims.
But it is a gamble that has increasingly diminishing returns. You can say that every wave of feminism is an attempt to increase the radicalization of women and increase their engagement with politics and the work force. But there is only so much you can socially engineer - and so much consciousness you can dump into an overloaded mind - before the birth rates plummet for good.
Because of political expediency, women were not so much freed from the home as pushed out of it, and now it is impossible for blue and white collar women to start a family with any sort of timeliness. It was not to their benefit, or to society's benefit: and the same geniuses behind these sociological schemes now seek to outsource birthing to the third world to make up for their own injuries to women as a sex.
It will not end well.
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I tend to see feminism as a logical outgrowth of classical liberalism. Most ideologies since 1789 seem to involve people building off the ideas the French Revolution set loose from the salons to their natural conclusions. Once the Declaration of the Rights of Man became the civic religion, abolitionism was inevitable, as was universal male suffrage, as were nationstates, and then eventually female suffrage and the end of the patriarchy, whatever that means. Plus socialism. The whole thing has just taken centuries to play out. We are still adapting to the adaptations to the adaptations to the adaptations, with no one sure when we will settle into a new equilibrium.
I suspect we have knocked down a few very important Chesterson's fences along the way, and the manosphere will write your ear off on all the ways modern gender roles are making people dysfunctional and unhappy. Naively speaking, if you look at the fertility rates, where things end up in 2100 is a race between memetic feminism and genetic traditionalism. Personally? I'd say we will probably reinvent the social contract in a way no one can yet expect, as the dominoes continue to tumble.
To restore fertility rates, you will have to put the genie of the sexual revolution back in the bottle, and I wonder how easy that will be? How, do you think, will you encourage men as well as women not to seek sex outside of marriage, not to seek cohabitation without marriage, not to be serial monogamists, not to put off childbearing, and when they do have children two is the maximum upper limit?
People are complaining about Roe versus Wade, and abortion has only been a 'right' for fifty years. You will be asking people whose parents and even grandparents grew up liberated by the Pill and with the idea that sex is for fun, first and foremost, and that having children is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, hence why abortion is necessary as a human right. Trying to convince them that the ideal is "get married in your early twenties, have four children, don't sleep around before or while married" is going to be an uphill struggle that makes Sisyphus in Hades look like a pleasant little ramble.
Do you know anyone that married before 30, has 4 children and regrets the sexual promiscuity, alcohol and a 16 - 26 rakish decade? I see one in the mirror everyday.
I don't think it'd be a Sisyphean as you describe. Sadly many of the societal tools to ensure a positive outcome have been blunted. Shaming is frequently seen an sexist, misogynist, anti-alaphabet people, etc. Realistic positive portrayals of women choosing to be mothers, wives and homemakers and family life are rare in popular culture.
Young men are in similar difficulty as evidenced by the popularity of 'Clean up your own room' and perceived lack of respect afforded to those choosing trades or technical training. The many that find themselves in online echo chambers and feedback loops is also unhelpful.
That current year, sexual liberation, leaning-in and girl bossing does not seem to make women very happy is evident in the volume of psychotropic medications consumed by this cohort. That they commiserate in their unhappiness is evident in the literature and media they frequently consume.
Get woke, go broke suggests to me the perception of a deep cultural shift may be unwarranted.
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Is that story about the trajectory of progress actually true, though?
I don't mean to pick on you; I don't really think that you're doing this in particular: I admit that the main reason this thought came to mind was because I misread a word in your post: instead of "abolitionism," I read "prohibitionism." Seemed a little out-of-place to call a failed movement inevitable – and you hadn't! But that got me wondering about the false starts that progress has taken over the years.
It's always possible to look back at the course of history, do some curve-fitting, and say that the main driver of social progress is – something. Say, “expanding circles of concern.” That will let you predict what's coming next – but will that prediction come true?
Suppose it doesn't. Then somebody else will look back, do some new curve-fitting, and come up with a different grand narrative about the direction of the march of progress. That in turn could get falsified and supplanted again.
All the failed explanations get either forgotten or dismissed as erroneous conclusions of less-enlightened ages-
-And nobody ever learns a thing.
Or, then again, maybe they do, and the newer narratives actually do hold ever-more predictive power. I guess we'll have to see.
I don't believe in the Whig view of history, no. There is chaos and contingency that spins history in the short duree. But I do have a theory of history rooted in historical idealism, and the ideologies that people hold do have — and yes, I'll use the dirty word — an inevitable influence on the sort of conflicts a society faces. Throughout the history of Catholic Europe there was a repeated rash of heresies that had to do with clerical poverty like Albigensianism or Hussitism; the reason we see social movements like this in 12th century Europe but not 2nd century Europe or 21st century Europe is that the ideology of the day was Christianity, and Christian dogma very obviously contradicted the political and economic reality. So people fought.
In the same way, it is inevitable that in a civilization where classical liberalism is the dominant ideology, the status of slaves, women, subject peoples, and the poor will be fought over in the form of Abolitionism, Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, and Socialism. How these movements articulate, and whether they succeed, is a historical crapshoot.
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I don't think society works that way. Socialism failed and so did fascism. Abolitionism wasn't inevitable, and it didn't happen because of some document from decades prior.
It's funny; two examples you highlighted are ones where the line of causality is fairly direct. Abolitionism came to the fore as the French constituent assembly debated the status of Free Colored and slaves in Saint-Domingue, with people pointing out that the Code Noir and slavery in general were illogical in light of the Assembly's liberal ideals. They ultimately eliminated the Code Noir and rubber stamped freeing the slaves (though the slaves did basically free themselves, first, the rebellion sparked by news of revolution at home). Then, a few years into the revolution, proto-socialists like the Enrages and Gracchus Babeu argued for the abolition of private property and social ownership of capital. They would ultimately lose the day, and uh, be killed; this drama of socialists emerging from the reeds after a liberal revolution to get smacked down would repeat in 1830 and 1848. There's a reason why Marx thought a liberal revolution was a necessary precondition of a socialist revolution.
Note: I'm saying classical liberalism, the ideology, naturally lead to feminism. The Declaration of the Rights of Man is just a convenient religious text to point to, embodying a larger movement, much like you point to the Book of Matthew to talk about the social phenomenon of Christianity, many of the participants of whom were illiterate and never read it.
If you fully absorb what people like John Locke claimed about moral ontology, the idea of keeping women in a subservient disenfranchised status is unsupportable. As is keeping slaves. But much like the Merovingian kings kept concubines for generations after converting to Christianity, it's taken generations for society to shed its traditions and let the logical consequences of classical liberalism seep in.
Except the idea that women existed in a state of subservient disenfranchisement is a both a normative and descriptive claim made by feminism. If you ask the anti-suffragettes, (who were mostly women and generally more popular than the suffragettes until at least the end of the 19th century), they certainly didn't believe that was the case (the anti-suffragette movement has been subjected to historical revisionism that strawmans their position). The more interesting question is why did this narrative about the supposed historic subjugation of women by men become the dominant one? Especially as I think the narrative is false, despite it being now being accepted as fact due to decades of feminist rhetoric and feminist 'scholarship'.
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Even before the French Revolution. If you look at the English Civil War and the emergence of radical groups, you see the same pattern, The Levellers and the Diggers were protesting during the reign of Charles I but came into prominence during the period when Cromwell and others were in ascension, Within the New Model Army, due to a mixture of religious dissent and social/political revolutionary views, many of the soldiers also had populist views which in the end Cromwell had to quash.
Whenever there are periods of dissension and opposition, all kinds of splinter movements and extremists come forth and try to push their own views of what the new, reformed, society should be like. If the 'moderates' win out, there will still remain a strain of these views even as germs within the ideology, since you've already overturned the old ways and put your new, reformed society into place. It's just a matter of extension, thereafter.
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The line of causality is fairly direct ... in the first instance what we have are people doing two different things. To establish a line of causality here is like establishing a line of causality between my nightly shower and teeth-brushing. It is to say that my tooth-brushing is caused by my shower, was made inevitable by it, because the shower established the principle of hygiene and it would be formally invalid for me to shower yet also go to be with a dirty mouth. Obviously the real reason why I shower and brush my teeth is to be found elsewhere. And besides, I don't apply the principle of hygiene in many ways. I could meticulously clean out each of my finger and toe nails, I could trim all hair on my body, I could clean the inside of my posterior orifice, pluck my nose, put swabs in my ears ... I'm sure many hygiene purists with OCD do all of these things nightly. And of course if you ask me why I shower and brush my teeth I would say hygiene. But the reality is that this means something other than that I am allegiant to some abstract principle. So too did the old liberals fail to "liberate" women for over a century. The American ones were also slow to recognize the equality of the slave and this slowness curiously varied tightly with one's economic interest in slavery. Only recently have we discovered that liberty also applies to homosexuals and transsexuals. It seems also that despite NAMbLA's best efforts in the 70s the rest of society has still not discovered the formal necessity of pedosexual rights given the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nor have the furies been any luckier. Neither has it discovered the need for children's rights, or even 17.9 year old's rights -- public schools continue to be blatantly illiberal into the 21st century. Liberals decide what rights are formally valid as freely as they choose. We could easily enslave minorities, declare them 3/5ths human, get rid of women's suffrage, and ban LGBT and call ourselves liberal. We could even restrict none-property owning white men from voting, or simply restrict it to the top 6% of the population IQ wise, as in the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only white male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).. Party idea -- the American Liberal Party. Platform: All men are create equal. Nonwhites are 3/5ths of whites. Only white male property owners should be allowed to vote. Women must wear dresses and cannot vote. Sodomy is illegal. Marriage is between a man and a woman. The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. No immigration from nonwhite countries.
I don't think anyone's behavior is effected by reading John Locke's "moral ontology." We can model political behavior using behavior genetics. Let P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t be the phenotypes of the politically relevant at some time t. Then assuming these people are all equals we would roughly expect the culture at time t, C_t = E[P_i,t] ~= (P_1,t + P_2,t + ... + P_n,t)/n. Now from behavior genetics for a quantitative trait like whatever political phenotype is under consideration, P = G + E, so P_i,t = G_i,t + E_i,t, and C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[E_i,t]. So you can see that C_t will change as G_i,t and E_i,t change amongst the politically relevant. During the French Revolution, both G_i,t and E_i,t changed a lot, there was a huge influx of the new bourgeoisie with their economic environment and everything. Now the question is, where do books, documents, principles come into play? To keep it simple I'll avoid introducing a notion of hierarchy, where what superiors think is introduced into the phenotype's environment, drastically shaping it through mechanisms which probably have more to do with wanting stuff and status than they do with the formal consequences of Locke's moral ontology. We'll just assume P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t is sovereign, uncoordinated and equal. Any influence of ideas is purely intellectual. We'll even ignore the notion of political formula or noble lie and the competition for followers for now. Just let E_i,t = $_i,t , M_i,t, , T_i,t , and O_i,t for profit motives, ideas, technological environment, and everything else. Now C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[$_i,t] + E[M_i,t] + E[T_i,t] + E[O_i,t]. Is John Locke's moral ontology really the only changing factor among the politically relevant over time, or could their different behaviors over time be the result in changes of their genetic make up, their profit motives, their technological capabilities, and other things? When you add their suppression of HBD to the mix, are they really so influenced by information? How could they be when they censor information they don't like? If E[M_i,t] were so important we should expect affirmative action to be gone by now based on the findings of HBD, but it isn't, because belief in the blank slate never motivated it in the first place, it was genes, profit motive, etc.
But why do you have a nightly shower? Are you so dirty that you must wash every night? Are you engaged in strenuous or muddy labour?
It's not mere hygiene at work, since if you have a conventional office job, you're not exerting yourself physically enough to require constant washing. It's the ideal of hygiene. If you skipped a night without showering, would you miss it? Would you feel, somehow, 'dirty'? Isn't there, in a sense, a moral obligation to keep yourself clean according to how you were raised?
And if it were difficult for you to have that shower every night, if you didn't have access to a bathroom and heated water and convenient disposal of same, and easy to keep dry and warm afterwards, then would you shower every night? Increasing convenience, increasing access to what were once 'luxury' resources, increasing space, means that it becomes easier to copy the rich in their habits, and that builds up expectations thereafter, so that I doubt if you could get away today with building a house or apartment that had no shower.
So "poor people should have access to means of hygiene" does arise out of a particular political philosophy, and ends in you having a nightly shower as well as brushing your teeth, because 'this is just how it is done'.
I run over 3 miles almost daily and lift weights, and even if I don't do that I get greasy if I don't shower. I do it for purely physical reasons.
No, so if you took me from the woods and put me in a house my change in showering behavior would be explained by physical environment.
I think it's pretty clear increases in hygiene are due to changes in physical environment, not John Locke's moral ontology ...
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