This past weekend the Vatican issued a letter to the Roman Catholic
bishops which denounced feminism for preaching "conditions of
subordination in order to give rise to antagonism." According to the
Vatican letter, this belief has caused "immediate and lethal effects in
the structure of the family."
Strong words, indeed. So what is the genesis of the feminist attempt to
induce antagonism between men and women?
It can all be traced back to the feminist Creation Myth, which goes like
this:
Once upon a time, in a land far away, men and women lived in a state of
communal bliss. There were no sexual prohibitions, no division of labor,
no ownership of property, and most of all, no patriarchy. It was a pure
feminist utopia.
Over time, men and women began to pair off, babies were born, and
families began to emerge. The development of stable families gave rise
to a division of labor between the sexes: Men did the hunting and
fishing, and women did the gardening and child-raising.
But the pivotal point in history was the emergence of the concept of
private property. Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, which is
required reading in every Women's Studies program,
explains
it this way:
"Private property appears: master of slaves and of the earth, man
becomes the proprietor also of woman...Here we see the emergence of the
patriarchal family founded upon private property. In this type of
family, woman is subjugated."
You say, Where on earth did Beauvoir get these fantastic ideas? From
Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels.
And how did Marx and Engels come up with this crackpot theory? From an
obscure book called Ancient Society, written in 1877 by an American
anthropologist named Lewis Henry Morgan, who had spent a few weeks
studying the Iroquois Indians in upper New York State.
Subsequent anthropologists have
refuted Morgan's methods and conclusions. For example, the part about
primitive society being a sexual free-for-all - that can be credited
entirely to Morgan's wishful thinking.
But that didn't keep feminists from anointing Morgan as their patron
saint. After all, he served a useful purpose.
Radical feminists accept Morgan's fable as if it were the Revealed
Truth. Once we understand that, the rest of feminist theory begins to
make sense.
As feminists see it, the moral of Morgan's account is that once
patriarchy took over, women became the mere slaves of men, had no
rights, and endured unrelenting physical and sexual abuse.
That's what is known as the feminist Great Lie. This is how columnist
Wendy McElroy explains the Great
Lie: "Victims of men, of the class
structure, technology, government, the free market, the family, the
church, Western values...everywhere and always women are painted as
victims."
True, life may not have been easy for women, but men had their share of
problems, too. If women were in fact the object of untrammeled social
oppression, we would have expected women's life spans to have been
dramatically shorter than men's.
But the historical record tells a different story. According to research
conducted by Ingrid Waldron at the University of Pennsylvania, the life
expectancies of men and women over the past several centuries have
traced similar trajectories.
Suicide statistics also debunk the feminist enslavement theory. Public
health authorities in England and Wales first began to enumerate the
causes of death in the late 1800s. As early as 1890, it was found that
men's suicide rate was 2.9
times higher than women's. Judging by suicide
statistics, we might conclude that it was men, not women, who were more
confined by rigid social roles.
1960s-style feminism had the laudable goal of encouraging equal
opportunities for women. But now, feminism has morphed into an ugly
ideology of female empowerment and gender retribution.
Most fairy tales have a happy ending. But the Marxist-feminist fable has
set the stage for protracted gender conflict. And that, sad to say,
poses a grave threat to the timeless institution of marriage.
