Angry Feminism Hits A Wall

By the time I went to college, feminism was entering a truly vile period. Gone was the talk about equality, respect and giving women “choices.” In its place was the hateful agenda of identity politics: affirmative action, squeals for equality of outcome, groupthink, suppression of opponents, and nasty misandry. At the time, this seemed to be the future of feminism. But three recent statistics tell me this version of feminism has played out.

I don’t think doctrinaire feminism was ever what it pretended to be. It claimed to want equality of opportunity and respect, but like many such 1960s movements, its leaders had a different agenda. Indeed, under the guise of equality of opportunity feminists soon began pushing for equality of result. This was particularly true in the economic sphere in the 1970s where they pushed things like the ERA, which sought not only to award equal pay within a profession, but identical pay across professions based on leftist notions of labor comparability.

Moreover, the harder-core adherents quickly devolved into man-hating. For example, feminist academics began writing papers claiming that our entire history was nothing more than a male plot to oppress women and that all sex is rape because women, lacking economic power, can never consent -- an identical argument made for why blacks "can't be racist." They also demanded the erection of gender studies departments in colleges, the appointment of women to positions for which they weren’t qualified, and the removal of gender references from the language.

By the late 1980s, this twisted view became feminist doctrine. Thus, sensible ideas like “no means no” were twisted into “no means no, even when it isn't said until after the fact.” Colleges started having rape awareness nights where everyone was supposed to walk around in the dark to protest a rape epidemic that didn’t exist -- we were told for every real rape, ten somehow go unreported and we heard ludicrous statistics like “one in four women will be raped.” College professorettes started doing things like demanding “Herstory” departments to counter “History” departments, they designed re-education programs, and they tried replacing the generic "he" with "she" in textbooks (which is a dead giveaway about their mindset because they claimed the use of "he" was oppressive; in other words, rather than looking for a gender neutral word, they simply wanted to become oppressors). They also took the stance that if there weren't enough women's sports teams, then schools had to eliminate men's sports teams. Meanwhile, extremely unkempt girls started showing up in literature and history classes talking about “male oppression,” claiming that all the female characters were lesbians, and whining that our very language keeps them down boo hoo hoo (fyi, "unkempt" because grooming standards were male attempts to oppress. . . seriously, there's feminist theory on this). And angry girls went to law school, where they would proudly (and unethically) proclaim that they would only represent “womyn.” This is what feminism became.

This version of feminism had three main planks that it pushed: (1) the forcing of women into “power professions,” (2) unchecked abortion, and (3) the destruction of marriage.

The power profession thing was easily the most interesting. Feminists kept talking about giving women “choices,” but that was a lie. What they really wanted was to force women into occupations that feminists believed would let them oppress others. This meant that any woman who chose to stay home and raise a family would be ridiculed by feminists -- even Hillary Clinton stumbled into this when she denigrated cookie making, which was common jargon among feminists at the time as a way to insult stay-at-home mothers. Moreover, women who chose “inferior careers,” i.e. traditional female occupations, were typically branded with the bimbo label. Basically, the only "allowable" choice for women was to go into politics, law or finance.

The abortion thing resulted from the realization by feminists that so long as women cared more about their children, they weren’t going to be as successful as men in the power professions. This meant women had to be kept childless so they could climb the career ladder, which meant breaking the motherhood bond. Thus, in the 1990s, you saw an assault of studies claiming that children actually benefited from being abandoned by their mothers, and you saw a strong push to ensure ideological rigidity on the abortion issue, with feminists uniformly portraying all women as being pro-abortion and portraying abortion opponents as creepy, male religious freaks intent on enslaving women. There was even a study claiming that having an abortion made women healthier.

Finally, the destruction of marriage was key because women who marry tend to drop out of the workforce. Thus, feminists pushed the idea of no-fault divorce, and single motherhood was glorified. But what really became a big issue for feminists in the 1990s was whether or not women should take their mate’s last names if they married. Indeed, if you read any feminist-infused magazine from the period, you will see that it was assumed that all women would (and did) keep their own names and the only question was whether or not to add the husband's name as a hyphenated name. Women who didn’t toe this line were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned and usually religious zealots.

Well, now things are falling apart for feminists. Every month I get bar journals from various states. Last month, I came across a very shrill article by one veteran feminist who was horrified that the number of women entering law school has been dropping for several years now. In the 1990s, when the number of women exceeded the number of men, feminists proclaimed that one day women would run the legal profession, and thereby the world. Apparently not. The number of women is now below the male number again and falling fast. The woman who wrote this article bemoaned the failure of young women to go to law school and openly feared that this will result in the oppression of women. . . no, I’m not kidding. The number of women in politics seems to have petered out too. And what’s worse, many are the “wrong kind” of woman, i.e. conservatives.

Then I came upon an article that talked about marriage rates and how marriage rates in the US are on the rise and people are no longer divorcing at nearly the rate they used to. Almost the next day came a study lamenting that the number of women keeping their own name in marriage (in any form) peaked in the 1990s at 23% (far less than the nearly 100% figure portrayed in the media) and has been falling steadily since. It is currently 18%.

Now, we hear from Gallup (which has a consistent left-ward bent) that only 27% of people believe abortion should be legal under “any circumstances,” i.e. the feminist position.

What this tells me is that "feminism" peaked in the 1990s and has been in steady decline ever since. What seems to have stopped it is the emergence of vocal conservative women who demanded that feminism actually be about choices as advertised. When this group of women demanded that feminists stop denigrating stay-at-home mothers, the end was near for modern feminism because that undercut the entire purpose of radical feminism.

Does this mean radical/angry feminism is dead? No. It lives on and it always will. But like Marxism or cults, its appeal is now limited to an ever shrinking fringe. The question now is: how do we use this lesson to take the radical out of other worthwhile movements that have gone astray, e.g. environmentalism?