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If by 'last' you mean 'the 19th', sure, I'll grant that. At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians); for minorities, at no point in Boomer living memory (post-childhood, so 13+: someone born in '45 would be post-Brown v. Board at that age) were they really oppressed.
It's something their parents and grandparents had reason to take seriously; what we're seeing now is the echoes and turbulence of a once-truth so widely held industry sprung up around it reaching its sell-by date. (This is also why, if LGB organizations did not embrace and pump up T, they'd have faded away like MADD did: their original grievances don't exist any more, hence the lie that they do must be defended ever harder.)
Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable. Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?
What's the evidence? Progressives used to like bringing up Valium and the like, but drug consumption among women has, if anything, only gone up since.
Because society requires active maintenance and not just mere inertia, and propaganda based around sowing resentment towards specific subgroups is quite effective.
“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).
The actual problem was exactly what I said: the suburbs were deeply deracinated and undermined two of women’s deepest sources of stability and happiness: connection to their (non-atomic) families and to a strong network of peer women, especially including older ones. Those connections provide material support for the primary duty of childcare and serve as a stabilizing factor for emotional distress, as well as being simple entertainment and fulfillment. Being locked down more to her husband made a woman more fragile and increased the aspects of her life which she required from him in particular, proportionally lowering her own self-reliance and alienating him (as the demands put upon him grew ever more conflicting and severe). In the edge cases the relationship fractured in some dimension or another, and this fracture in turn alienated daughters from their mothers’ way of life. The most determined and hot-tempered became feminists and started changing the tradition from the top down.
Properly big-c Conservative cultures give women the strong same-sex support groups they need, typically through something as simple as a village gathering or an extended family.
I don't have an issue with everything else you said (other than it being a theory, rather than evidence), but I don't know how to process the last decade or so of my life, without "mind control works" being somewhere in the top conclusions. It's not just women, though. Men have proven themselves to be at least as susceptible.
Ideas spreading is not like mind control. I don't know how you would arrive to that conclusion. A lot of factors have facilitated the spread of ideas that did not exist before the last few decades. I would like to read a more elaborate post from you on this topic too.
It's simple - the "entry points" through which these ideas are spreading through society are centralized in the hands of a relative few. Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
I don't think it matters what entry points an idea comes from. New ideas being able to originate from a few people and being spread to everyone is a good thing in my opinion. I would consider it mind control if there were restrictions to people encountering other ideas, especially ones that oppose the original, like how terrorists brainwash suicide bombers.
Control over these relatively few entry points means you can control what ideas will be spread.
How does that address anything I said?
Ok, this is exactly what we have now.
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