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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?
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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