Chapter 1
The Feminist Mistake
If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
--Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Relations between the sexes are ailing in our time. Hundreds of prominent men in fields from entertainment to sports to business to politics have been credibly accused of gross sexual harassment and other forms of boorishness. The louts span the political spectrum, from Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes on the right, to Al Franken and John Conyers Jr. on the left. And the toll continues to mount.
Young people hardly date much, but they feel pressured into hooking up. Some millennials are giving up on sex altogether. Eighteen-year-old Noah Patterson, a virgin, told the Washington Post that he preferred online porn to having a girlfriend. “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy.”1
Teenagers and even some preteens “sext” one another, and sometimes find themselves facing child pornography charges.2 The percentage of adults who have never been married is at a historic high (30 percent), and fewer than one-third of millennials say that having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things in life.”3 While many women proclaim themselves “single by choice,” others express frustration with the lack of marriageable men. In 2011, Kate Bolick described the proliferation of commitment-phobic men, which she believed had created a new “dating gap.” Marriage-minded women, she wrote, “are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players.”4 The so-called men’s rights movement thrives online, encouraging men to see themselves as victims of the sex wars and to luxuriate in misogyny.
The most talked about cultural products of the past few years only occasionally offer models of nobility or even basic integrity between men and women. They range from rampant adultery (Madmen) to incest and sex slavery (Game of Thrones). In HBO’s Girls, the protagonist’s “boyfriend” in the first few episodes is really not a boyfriend at all but a sex partner--and not a very nice one at that. Hannah drops by Adam’s apartment and is ordered to remove her clothes, to get on all fours, to stop talking, and to perform a variety of sex acts while he indulges the fantasy that she is a child with a “Cabbage Patch lunchbox.”
How did we become so estranged--and so strange? How did love and sex become battlegrounds where feminists decry “rape culture” while the “manosphere” hurls vicious insults at women in general?
Modern feminism, I submit, must take at least some of the blame.
Feminism deserves credit for helping women get the vote, securing equal pay, and obtaining full civil and political rights. Those are unmixed blessings. No reasonable person questions whether women should be treated as full legal equals to men--that is beyond debate. But did that full equality require the denigration of the nuclear family? Did it require the eager embrace of a sexual revolution that would dismantle the traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that have protected women for centuries? Was it essential to declare a war between the sexes, and to deem men the “enemy” of women? Was it necessary to seed our culture with bitterness that continues to this day?
Let’s start at the beginning. It is moving to read the pleas for women’s equality from Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century protofeminist, who argued that women could be rational creatures and deserved to be educated. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Wollstonecraft wrote, “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.”5
The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared in the 1869 that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other--is wrong itself, and is now one of the chief obstacles to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality that doesn’t allow any power or privilege on one side or disability on the other.”6
In his treatise “The Subjection of Women” (1869), Mill scoffed at the notion that women were less intelligent than men (a widely held view at the time) and rebutted those who protested that women had achieved little in the arts and sciences. Mill was scornful: “Our best novelists have mostly been women,” he wrote, mentioning in particular Madame de Staël and George Sand. Of the latter, he wrote that it would be impossible to find “[a] finer specimen of purely artistic excellence than the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts on the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart.”7
It was fully understandable that women had not achieved excellence in other fields, Mill noted, since they were denied the education men received, and he added that women had original ideas all the time but, lacking the wherewithal to publish or publicly demonstrate their insights, often passed along these ideas to husbands or other male relatives.8 Mill freely acknowledged that “a very large proportion indeed” of his ideas originated with the women in his life.
He also explained women’s comparatively less prodigious production of original works of art by noting that “very few women have time for them. . . . Even when the superintending of a household isn’t laborious in other ways, it’s a very heavy burden on the thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance, an eye that catches every detail, and it constantly presents inescapable problems to be solved.”9 Bravo, Mr. Mill. Too few men appreciate this core female competency.
In the intervening centuries, women’s roles have changed dramatically. In our own time, we’ve been encouraged to believe that women’s history is one long tale of exploitation and denigration, oppressions that lifted only when feminism arrived to free us. But this narrative always seemed forced to me. Of course, some men have treated some women badly throughout human history. But declaring that all women have been oppressed by all men seems overly simplistic. Relations between the sexes, starting in families, are too complex to reduce to oppressors and victims.
The First Wave You’ve Never Heard Of
Feminism’s “first wave” is usually dated to the late nineteenth century’s suffrage movement, though some people agitated for equal rights before then. The suffragists are now included in the feminist pantheon. On the evening before the 2016 presidential election, feminists gathered at Susan B. Anthony’s grave, assuming that Hillary Clinton would become the first woman elected president. Anthony has been honored on the U.S. currency, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home is a National Park Service site. In April 2016, the Treasury Department announced that Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul will be featured on the ten-dollar bill to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which enfranchised women coast to coast.
These women may be the ones most often cited in textbooks, but as the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers has pointed out, Frances Willard and Hannah More were far more influential and popular with women during the nineteenth century. More (1745–1833), an English novelist, poet, political reformer, and pamphleteer, championed what Sommers calls “maternal feminism.” She didn’t deny differences between the sexes but urged women to use their special abilities to improve the world. Religiously inspired, she founded Sunday schools that taught poor children their ABCs, but also instilled thrift, sobriety, and piety. Her novels and pamphlets excoriated the rich for their amorality, for their hedonism, and for ignoring the needs of the poor.10
Frances Willard, who founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, spoke for many more women than the suffragists. We look back on Prohibition as an idealistic blunder, but women’s intensity about the question indicated that they were more concerned about what excessive drinking was doing to families than they were about the right to vote. As Sommers notes, the National American Woman Suffrage Association had only about seven thousand members, though the WCTU could boast one hundred fifty thousand. The women’s suffrage movement needed help from the WCTU before it could begin scoring political victories. Like More, Willard embraced women’s “separate sphere” while also believing that women had a duty to improve the world. In addition to temperance, the WCTU lobbied for prison reform, child welfare, and care for the disabled.11
The women reformers of that time, unlike those who would lead second-wave feminism some decades later, avoided grievance mongering. They saw women’s issues as being linked to men’s and children’s. Though the temperance movement highlighted the damage excessive alcohol use did to wives and children, it also focused on husbands and sons who drank.
Second-wave feminists, by contrast, would explicitly link women’s struggles with the cause of civil rights for African Americans. In 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan declared that “What we need is a political movement, a social movement like that of blacks.”12
In a 1969 piece for New York magazine titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” Gloria Steinem wrote, “Finally, women [recognized] their essential second-classness, forming women’s caucuses inside the Movement in much the same way Black Power groups had done. And once together[,] they made a lot of discoveries: that they shared more problems with women of different classes, for instance, than they did with men of their own.”13
This is overwrought, particularly when compared to the approach taken by the women leaders of the first wave. The women’s suffrage movement did share roots with the movement for abolition. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Angelina Emily Grimké, and Sarah Moore Grimké were prominent abolitionists who also campaigned for women’s rights. But suggesting that the condition of women could be compared to that of black slaves or black citizens is a huge leap.
It has become fashionable for various interest groups to hijack the vocabulary and moral standing of the civil rights movement. Women, Latinos, the handicapped, homosexuals, transgender individuals--all have sought to compare their situations with that of blacks. But no group in American history has suffered the kind of dehumanization, persecution, exclusion, terror, and discrimination that blacks were subjected to for more than three hundred years.
Even leaving aside slavery, with its incalculable suffering, African Americans were the victims of thousands of lynchings, systematic torture, discrimination, and abuse. In the years between 1883 and 1927, more than three thousand blacks were lynched.14 As historians Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom note, these crimes were designed to terrorize all African Americans. “They were not usually the furtive work of masked men wearing sheets, as is sometimes thought. Rather they were highly public events; the perpetrators were not only known to the community but sometimes even posed for ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs in the local paper first with their victim and then with their victim’s corpse!”15
Now consider how Steinem described the “oppression” of women in her 1969 article: “[M]ore backstage work, more mimeographing, more secondary role playing around the revolutionary cells and apartment communes. And to be honest, more reluctance to leave the secondary role and lose male approval.”16
Steinem believed women deserved a revolution because “subtler, psychological punishments for stepping out of women’s traditional ‘service’ roles were considerable. (Being called ‘unfeminine,’ ‘a bad mother,’ ‘a castrating bitch,’ to name a traditional few.)”17
Or, as one New York woman complained during a consciousness-raising session in 1969, “I have to keep reminding myself that there’s nothing wrong with body hair, and no reason for one sex to scrape a razor over their legs.”18
Comparing women’s “plight” to what blacks experienced trivialized the true suffering of African Americans, yet feminist-influenced textbooks increasingly stressed this, maintaining that women have been ignored by a “patriarchal,” man-centered history. One widely used women’s studies textbook argued for “radical reconceptualizations” that would “overcome the bias that has been built into what has come to be known as ‘knowledge.’ ” Another insisted that “traditional systems of knowledge have ignored women altogether or frequently portrayed them in stereotypical or demeaning ways.”19
I was educated before this victim narrative took hold, and accordingly, I learned that American history (and world history, for that matter) is brimming with stories of women who were brilliant, brave, righteous, inventive, and worthy of emulation--as well as treacherous, greedy, cruel, lazy, and insipid. I could never escape the suspicion that women were human beings, with all the virtues and vices of the human condition.
But cringing victims bent under the weight of patriarchy? I don’t think so.
American women have been at the forefront of many of our country’s most momentous reform movements. Anne Hutchinson, a charismatic preacher (and mother of fifteen), provoked a schism among Puritans in seventeenth-century Boston. Harriet Beecher Stowe gave abolitionism its greatest weapon in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Harriet Tubman helped to run the Underground Railroad. As I’ve noted, the temperance movement and Prohibition were primarily the work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, led by Frances Willard. Dorothea Dix successfully campaigned to reform the treatment of the mentally ill. Mother Jones was an influential labor activist. Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science church, and Ida Tarbell was a crusading Progressive Era journalist. Jane Addams was a pioneer of urban reform. Rosa Parks helped ignite the struggle for civil rights, and Dorothy Day was a leader of the Catholic Worker Movement. Additionally, millions upon millions of unsung women married, bore children (without anesthesia until quite recently), kept households running, ran businesses, took in boarders, and were the anchors of stable and fulfilling family lives.
And every one of the male oppressors who are said to be women’s enemies had a mother, usually a wife, and often sisters and daughters and cousins and aunts and nieces and friends. Those women sometimes made the lives of their men miserable, but more often they made life worth living.
1. Tara Bahrampour, “ ‘There really isn’t anything magical about it.’ Why More Millennials Are Avoiding Sex,” Washington Post, Aug. 2, 2016.
2. Brian Alseth, “Sexting and the Law--Press Send to Turn Teenagers into Registered Sex Offenders,” ACLU-Washington, Sept. 24, 2010, aclu-wa.org/blog/sexting-and-law-press-send-turn-teenagers-registered-sex-offenders.
3. Stephanie Hanes, “Singles Nation: Why So Many Americans Are Unmarried,” Christian Science Monitor, June 14, 2015, csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0614/Singles-nation-Why-so-many-Americans-are-unmarried.
4. Kate Bolick, “All the Single Ladies,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2011.
5. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (CITY: PUBLISHER, YEAR), 103.
6. John Stuart Mill, “The Subjugation of Women,” 1869, earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mill1869.pdf.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Ibid., 42.
9. Ibid., 44.
10. Christina Hoff Sommers, Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2013), 20.
11. Ibid., 28.
12. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 461.
13. Gloria Steinem, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” New York magazine, April 4, 1969.
14. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 44.
15. Ibid., 45.
16. Steinem, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”
17. Ibid.
18. Sara Davidson, “An Oppressed Majority Demands Its Rights,” Life, Dec. 12, 1969.
19. Quoted in Christine Stolba, Lying in a Room of One’s Own (Arlington, VA: Independent Women’s Forum, 2002), 16.
