Scott Kamps
The best way to honor/celebrate women is confronting feminism’s destructive lies.
A fundamental tenet of feminism is for women to be just like men, who have it so good. The envy that feminists have – and promote – of men is based on their perception that men can have sex without consequences, have adventurous jobs, and avoid the drudgery of home life.
Feminism argues men and women have an equal right to pursue their separate careers. While I’m not advocating women can’t work outside the home, I recognize the basic reality of differences between men and women – and women are designed for domesticity.
The roots of the feminist contention mentioned above started with ideas like Mary Wollstonecraft’s, who argued females shouldn’t be seen as women, but “human creatures.” Percy Shelley furthered her ideas claiming sex differences were “detestable distinctions” needing to be abolished.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed and popularized this concept even more. Engels was actually the first to use the word “patriarchy” negatively, redefining patriarchy as a male system of power used to control women. He argued through patriarchy, women were degraded and reduced to servitude, becoming “mere instruments for the production of children.”
Marxist philosophy – because of the importance placed on work – viewed men and women as interchangeable: sending women out to the workforce, collecting children into government care and providing abortions to ensure work wasn’t interrupted. Women who chose to have babies were rushed back to the workforce as quickly as possible.
Marxist thought was that women would only truly be free when they enter the paid workforce. This view of women was progress away from “patriarchy” in the eyes of American feminists.
In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan wrote “the emancipation of woman and their equality with men are impossible and must remain so as long as women are excluded from socially productive work and restricted to house work,” with the same logic as Marx/Engels.
She goes on to compare homemaking with being a concentration camp prisoner!
In her excellent book The End of Woman, Carrie Gress says of Friedan’s analogy, “It’s hard to wrap one’s head around how over wrought this comparison is. What the starved, gassed, lice-infested, raped, brutalized, tortured, and ultimately exterminated people in real concentration camps would have given to live like the most privileged women in human history.”
Since most women didn’t want to leave the domestic sphere, Friedan preached a gospel of discontent/envy to entice women out of the home. The feminist mantra was proclaimed far and wide: domestic life is enslavement, work will set you free.
Not only is that motto a lie from the pits of hell, but it was also – ironically – the slogan over the gate entering into Auschwitz (“Arbeit Macht Frei”).
Women have been bamboozled: they take on a second job and are then unable to get their husbands to help much with the first one (laundry, cooking, etc).
The one who benefits from feminism is the self-centered male: now profiting from two paychecks instead of one.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.