Radical Feminists Are the Real Cause of Women’s Suffering

A housewife holds an unbaked pie while looking at a wall clock in a kitchen. An unprepared roast chicken and potatoes sit on the counter. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Commentary

The dilemma of modern feminism is that its success in shaping contemporary values has, in writer Joan Price’s words, “cut women off from those aspects of life that are distinctly female desires, such as being a wife and raising children.”

The feminists who led the 1960s women’s movement regarded motherhood as so burdensome that it approached slavery. Such ideologues presented family life as a sort of prison for women and a working career on the outside as a form of women’s liberation.

However, these radicals neglected to inform people that most husbands did not go to work to find self-fulfillment. Husbands often undertook external work not because they lacked more enjoyable ways to occupy their time but because they loved their wives and children.

Some husbands made the ultimate sacrifice of taking truly appalling jobs because they felt obliged to provide for their wives and children. They worked long hours at terrible jobs that they absolutely hated, or at least barely tolerated for the sake of the income.

According to Kelley Ross, editor of the Proceedings of the Friesian School, “Few men were so fortunate as to be doing something fulfilling or interesting that paid the bills at the same time.”

The feminist agenda has taught people to put individualism first, and then go on to blame others for personal failures.

A woman holds a placard during a protest against gender violence and patriarchy in Pristina, Kosovo, on Sept. 23, 2020. (Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty Images)

The last decades have seen the proliferation of laws allowing the unilateral dissolution of marriage.

By making divorce easily available, the state transformed the institution of marriage into a weak legal absurdity that denies any form of personal accountability.

The Harm It Has Brought Upon Us

Of course, whenever and wherever a marriage breaks down the state will step in. Hence the gradual increase of the state’s jurisdiction over the family.

Feminists have been the most vocal group to demand easily available divorce to enable women to escape from the “oppression” of marriage.

This has left working-class families particularly vulnerable because the social and economic effects of “no-fault divorce” fall disproportionately on the less wealthy, less educated, and less powerful.

Even more tragically, the effects of easily available divorce fall particularly on the children of the working class.

Confronting studies in the United States reveal that in the 1980s, 60 percent of rapists grew up in fatherless homes, as did 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates.

The present system offers no support for the institution of marriage and has a particular bias against single-earning couple households. As a result, much of the care work for the old, the sick, and the young that used to be done within the family unit is now done by state-funded social services or child carers.

Australia has now one of the most family-unfriendly tax and benefit regimes in the developed world.

Some men are now convinced that caring and sacrificing for their wives and children is neither expected nor even virtuous. Fewer men are now willing to commit themselves to one woman in a monogamous relationship.

A couple signs marriage documents at Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., on Feb. 22, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Once, fathers and brothers passionately protected their women. This protection has been considerably lost due to the sexual revolution in the 1960s.

Of course, not every woman agrees with no-fault divorce coupled with the radical feminist agenda of sexual liberation.

Arguably, men are less the targets of radical feminists than are traditional wives and mothers, who do not subscribe to radical agendas.

Further, the mere existence of traditional women reminds us that radicals do not speak for all women, and it is traditional women, therefore, who have earned the enmity of radicals.

Not About the People, About Power

In a 1970 issue of Time magazine, Gloria Steinem castigated housewives as “inferior” and “dependent creatures who are still children.”

Helen Gurley Brown, founder of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan in 1965, denounced every housewife and full-time mother as “a parasite, a dependant, a scrounger, a sponger, and a bum.”

Characterising the housewife as a form of “parasite” is the worst kind of insult and betrayal of women’s solidarity.

In her critique of radical feminism, Carolyn Graglia, a self-described “lawyer by training and housewife by choice,” commented in her book “Domestic Tranquillity: A Brief Against Feminism”:

“Housewives, not men, were the prey in feminism’s sights when Kate Millet decreed in 1969 that the family must go. Men cannot know this unless we tell them how we feel about them, our children, and our role in the home. Men must understand that our feelings towards them and our children are derided by feminists and have earned us their enmity.”

A father captures his family's happiness during a picnic, circa 1960. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This is not an ideology that actually protects the rights of all women, but one that ridicules traditional women who refuse to embrace a certain radical agenda.

Where were the feminists when Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of the UK, was the victim of a vicious campaign that put the song “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” on a top UK singles chart on a Sunday evening prior to her funeral?

Ultimately, radical feminists are trying to increase their power over men and women. In so doing, they effectively deny women their basic right to make independent choices for themselves.

The late French feminist writer, Simone de Beauvoir, notoriously stated:

“No woman should be authorised to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

Above all, on the radical feminist agenda, Suzanne Venker writes that it “has never been about equal rights for women. It’s about power for the female Left.” In other words, radical feminism stems largely from a desire for more power and control.

It is the same desire which, throughout history, has driven people to oppress and subjugate others, especially women and children.

It is about time to reverse the serious damage caused in our society by such a destructive ideology.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.