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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 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.
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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