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Notes -
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
What do feminism and air conditioning have to do with each other? Is it a reference to how women purportedly like different temperatures in the office than men, or something else?
Lots of fairly educated middle-class women in comfortable air-conditioned suburbia with nothing to do, meant there was far more time to start reading Betty Friedan (or becoming her in the first place), because your house is comfortable, you have less housework to do, and there's no danger of ending up with six kids.
I think though, this is somewhat overrated - like OK, you hate modern feminism, fine. But, even the vast majority of tradcath mothers with six children in rural Iowa would find the America of say, 1970 insanely sexist. So, I'd say the conditions were ripe, especially in a society with the founding myth of equality America has.
If you said the vast majority of rural church attending stay at home moms you might be right(although it’s probably a close run thing in 1970. 1950, sure), but actual IRL tradcaths fit in pretty well with gender norms from… actually well prior to that.
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