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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?
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 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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