Outing the Feminist Great Lie
August 4, 2004
by Carey Roberts
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.” (www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debeauv3.htm)
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.
Carey Roberts
Carey Roberts is a researcher and consultant who tracks gender
bias in the mainstream media.