A Gender-Neutral Society?

What are manly virtues and can they survive?*

by Patricia Lança

Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield, 2006, Yale University Press

Professor Mansfield seems a very agreeable man: understanding of women’s problems, erudite and persuasive. Above all, perhaps, patient: excessively so with the academic feminists he aims to convert to some appreciation of manly virtues. This he tries to do by proposing to allocate manliness between the sexes, not quite equally but in part. He concedes that some men are not notable for manliness and that some women are. He believes that manliness has come into disrepute, that society, or at least that part of it which sets fashions, now prefers males to aspire to something called “sensitivity” rather than manliness. He thinks we are now living in what he calls a gender-neutral society, a state brought about by the campaigns of the radical feminists, especially in academia. They managed this, he says, by peaceful means; by 'consciousness-raising', by words rather than violent action. And they were astonishingly successful. Their adversaries caved in all around them and they managed to change practices by changing the language, making any kind of verbal 'sexism'—a word they themselves popularized—unacceptable among decent people. And the new dispensation was achieved with extraordinary rapidity, which Professor Harvey confesses causes him surprise and some puzzlement. He says he is still unable to explain feminists’ easy victory. So easy indeed, that manliness is now deprecated and men feminized Not that the author calls the process of sensitization by that name. But many others have and there may be some truth in it.

In measured and often witty argument he examines the concept of manliness in all its manifestations, practical and literary, historical and philosophical. No reader will be surprised at his citing Achilles or John Wayne; most will find the mention of Nietzche less consensual, unless uber-menschism can be construed as manliness. But Professor Harvey readily admits that not all manliness is commendable. However, its core characteristics certainly are and the feminists are mistaken to decry it. If only they were to accept society’s (and women’s) need of manliness in men they would lose nothing and strengthen their case.

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Professor Mansfield’s ideas in this regard are generally unexceptionable. The trouble lies with the feminist framework he appears to accept. There are a number of points he might have questioned. First, while academia may be a gender-neutral space, it is doubtful that this is true of society as a whole. Or even desirable. Secondly, the accession of women to full citizenship (something feminists call 'women’s liberation') cannot really be ascribed to the last three or four decades of radical feminist activism. The realization of sexual equality, still uncompleted in many areas and especially on the domestic front, owed itself to other causes and would have come about regardless of the activities or arguments of people like Greer, Friedan, Butler and their ilk. It can even be argued that most women—and society as a whole—might today be better off without the ranting of the radical feminists.

It is likely that the appearance of these figures in the first place was because new spaces had for a long time been opening up to women and those self-appointed spokeswomen for the female sex simply took advantage of their opportunities. Like the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia the feminists assaulted a crumbling citadel and captured it with remarkable ease.

Professor Mansfield, however, leaves the premises of radical feminism untouched,. Refuting feminism is not his objective. He does not even talk about the ravages it has caused in terms of sexual harassment legislation, quarrels over quotas and affirmative action, the bitterness of the so-called culture wars, fatherless homes, mounting domestic violence, intellectual and moral obscurantism, the breaking down of civility and the coarsening of manners. What he wants is to put in a plea for men. He does so eloquently and with some elegance. But it is doubtful that he will get a hearing from either side.

Instead of looking to biology, anthropology, history and economics for the sources of women’s subordination, without which it is impossible to find the right solutions, radical feminism has been largely based on the Marxist theory of class war, discredited notions about primitive communism and what Engels called 'the overthrow of mother-right' in those halcyon days when savages were noble and there was no class exploitation.

One of the curious things about this book is that its author, who is a Professor of Government at Harvard, in over 280 pages scarcely mentions economics. What he is concerned with are philosophical ideas. It is as though he had been dazzled by radical feminism’s forays into the dismal labyrinths of post-modernism and had decided that philosophy would be the area in which he was most likely to impress his word-drunk feminist readers.

What follows is not intended to diminish the significance of ideas or their influence in human affairs. Of course, these are immensely important. But Professor Mansfield’s mistake is to forget that ideas only gain influence in an appropriate environment. Ideas which don’t catch on because they are ahead of their time or out of context are quickly forgotten. Plato, in the IVth century BC, had a great deal to say about the role of women in the communist society described in The Republic. And Professor Mansfield gives Plato frequent mention. Before the scientific revolution of the XVIIth century and the Enlightenment of the XVIIIth century, Plato’s social projects could not but remain a dead letter. And although what came to be known as “the woman question” began to come into the foreground in the nineteenth century it was not until the twentieth that matters really came to a head. It was the industrial revolution and accelerating technological advance that set the scene for women’s emancipation which could not have taken place without them.

The radical feminists are quite mistaken in their theories about the patriarchy being the source of women’s subordinate status. The unwelcome truth of the matter is that until modern technology could produce efficient means of contraception on the one hand and on the other multiple labour-saving devices, women and children—the human race, in fact—could not survive at all without the protection of the male sex. Radical feminists forget that young humans need their mothers because they have a very long childhood, required for learning language and other exclusively human skills. Men, as the necessary protectors of women, had manliness thrust upon them by Nature and this was reinforced by culture; their reward was honour and the status of leadership in the home and outside it. Some exercised their power magnanimously, others were tyrants. But women could not avoid dependence until technology freed females from annual childbirth and both sexes from back-breaking labour.

It is an extraordinary commentary on the obtuseness (not to say scientific illiteracy) of some female academics that they continue to mythologize patriarchy as an evil imposed from outside of nature, and insist that “gender” is a social construction. Schools may no longer provide adequate teaching of biology or zoology but our television screens and newspaper columns are filled daily with studies of animal behaviour, the courting rituals of alpha males, programmes about genetics and the role of mitrochondrial DNA in heredity, X and Y chromosomes, testosterone and the rest. Everything indicates that the males of mammalian species are hard-wired for masculinity (manliness). During 99.99 per cent of the human and pre-human past men had to go hunting and kill animals for food, and some of the attributes of manliness are associated with this activity—boldness, aggressiveness, stoicism, etc., while associated cultural traditions account for most of the rest. But feminists have preferred to learn from a crackpot male philosopher, Michel Foucault who thought heterosexuality had been imposed on society by the bourgeoisie. They have made him one of their most significant intellectual icons. But this is not really surprising if they are misguided enough to dismiss science as a male enterprise: part of phallogocentrism condemned by Foucault..

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However, rather than persist in beating that dead horse, it is more to the point to mention once again just a few of the many factors that brought about women’s emancipation and in which the radical feminists had no hand at all. It should also be borne in mind that those phenomena which helped to liberate women had the inevitable tendency of making many masculine attributes redundant. These phenomena are to be found in the history of transport, production, technology and education.

Take transport. The advent of the motor car at the end of the nineteenth century had far-reaching social repercussions. When the first members of the upper classes bought motor cars and reserved their horses for the hunt, it really was the beginning of the end of chivalry in every sense. It ushered in the possibility of freedom of movement for women as well as men, and with no muscular exertion. Not only could people get from place to place rapidly, safely and dry: chaperones could be dispensed with. In southern Europe where the chaperone was ubiquitous and middle and upper-class women were not allowed to go out alone, a driving licence became a woman’s access to freedom of movement and escape from the home. The Saudi Islamic fundamentalists know what they are doing when they ban women from driving cars.

More or less simultaneous with the appearance on the market of motor-cars was that of the condom. Whether or not the latter was first thought of as a prophylactic its use as a contraceptive soon became widespread and from that time onwards the size of families among the educated classes dropped dramatically. The path was opened for separating sex from reproduction and women were set for biological freedom.

Long before the First World War sent droves of women into the factories to replace men who had departed for the armed forces, growing mechanization during the previous century had already lured working women into industry. The sewing machine needed female operatives at home and in the workplace. As capitalism developed so did its concomitant service industries. In offices everywhere the typewriter became ubiquitous and with it the female typist. Employers had been quick to see the advantages of lower-paid female labour and there were simply not enough men to fulfil the growing need for clerical workers. Of course, women had never been absent from economic life. Throughout history peasant women had worked long and hard in the fields and villages, even though some of their tasks might have been lighter than those of men. But with the advent of machinery, agriculture needed less and less manpower and the exodus of whole families to the towns provided expanding industry and commerce with the human beings needed as producers and consumers.

In truth the long, slow movement towards female emancipation ran parallel with the growth of capitalism. As did education to fill the need for a more educated workforce. None of these needs or their satisfaction grew at an even pace. As usual it was the political sphere that lagged behind and this was the arena where conflicting interests met and policies were hammered out. Hence there were women physicians before there were women members of parliament, women writers before there were women cabinet ministers. Family law was one of the last bastions to give way but now, for good or ill, an entire generation of women has grown up into a world of easy divorce, contraception and abortion. The United Kingdom even got itself a woman prime minister and she was certainly no product of radical feminism. And now all over the developed world there are more women university graduates than men.

Why then the remarkable rancorousness of feminist discourse? Why does even a man as urbane as Professor Mansfield make so much rueful mention of the domestic battle to get husbands to share the housework so that their wives might have careers. Why did Betty Freidan’s unremarkable book The Feminine Mystique have such success that it is now regarded among feminists much as The Communist Manifesto among socialists? The answer is simple: the educated woman’s boredom with housework. A glance at the pace of female emancipation in places like southern Europe, Latin America or India tells it all. Surprising as it might seem it is much easier for an educated woman to combine marriage, motherhood and a career in poorer countries than in rich ones. Where there is still a large peasant population but the cities are approaching Western standards, there is no shortage of domestic servants to staff the more spacious southern or non-western homes of professional women and at much lower wages than those of the European or American nanny. Husbands have little to lose from their wives’ pursuit of careers. No doubt this state of affairs will not last for ever, but while it does, the middle-class women it benefits will be freer to enter politics than their Anglo sisters. And with notably less friction in the home with their men-folk. All this, of course, is to leave out the special case of Islam, but that is an altogether different story.

Against this backdrop we need to take a further look at Professor Mansfield’s book and his concern with manliness. There can be little doubt that modern life does indeed threaten traditional ideas of manliness. The multiple social and economic factors which were crucial to the emancipation of women have also been significant in creating a deficit of manliness in men. This is observably so where muscular aspects of manliness are concerned. Who needs muscle when you’ve got machines? Even the horny-handed sons of toil have mostly disappeared to be replaced by clean, neatly overalled technicians. There are, of course, still enclaves where brawn and endurance are needed, and the fork-lift truck and bull-dozer are not always the complete answer. But even extractive industries, abattoirs, or fishing vessels are easier places to work in than they once were. As for the legions of office-workers, where is there scope here for old-style manliness? What scope does exist is on the streets and playing fields where much male aggression stubbornly persists to everybody’s inconvenience.

Much as all normal women appreciate manly men, and normal men prefer womanly women, it really does seem time to get rid of these words, certainly of their use as nouns. What we want today is character in both sexes and this is something that western education systems have been remiss in developing. If educators, professors, school-teachers and those who run their institutions, can pull themselves together and set about this task a good many of our troubles would be over.

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*First published in The Salisbury Review, London, Autumn, 2006

Gender feminism unmasked*

Illusions and dangers of militant feminism

By Patrícia Lança

The number of women in higher education has increased so remarkably since the Second World War that today in many western countries women university students are more numerous than men students. As everybody knows, but as the young need to be reminded, entry to Oxbridge for women was at one time only for the outstanding few. Women’s entry to English medical schools was often limited to a small percentage and successful candidates often had to be doctors’ daughters. Then growing demands of the labour market began to erode discriminatory conditions at least in teaching and the social sciences, areas where they had, in any case, not been as severe.

As has often been pointed out by both the old and the new feminists, to succeed in a man’s world in the days before ‘women’s lib’ women had to be, and knew they had to be, just that much better in their qualifications and at their jobs. In some areas this continues to be the case. However, one instance where it is not so is that of entry to and continuance at university. If the quality of male students at entry and the quality of post-graduate males and male dons is likely nowadays to be considerably lower than it was three or four decades ago, the general quality of their female counterparts contrasts even more unfavourably now with that of their pioneering predecessors who really had to be good.

It is in the academic world that the feminist lobby is the most strident and the most effective. To succeed today in that world a woman no longer needs to be ‘just that much better than a man’: what she needs is to be more aggressive, more accusatory, more ruthless and fully equipped with the weapons taken from the modern armoury of militant feminism. Woe to those women who rely on the earlier criteria and eschew the later! They are likely to be favoured neither by their male nor their female colleagues.

The legacy of Marxism

The rise of militant feminism and its elaboration of ideological trappings and political strategies deriving directly from Marxism, coincide to a notable degree with the growth in numbers of women at all levels in the universities. Perhaps more did not necessarily have to mean worse, nor more women students have to mean worse women students, though it often looks like it. There is nothing in principle to indicate that standards had to deteriorate. Had the process of expansion in higher education been carried out with greater forethought rather than short-term political considerations, perhaps things might have been different. What is apparent, however, is that the crude ahistorical verbiage that passes for feminist scholarship could never have encountered the audience it now enjoys without the presence of a very large number of ill-educated young men and women. One consequence of declining standards is that today’s young and even middle-aged adults frequently have very hazy ideas about what daily life was like for humankind during most of its history. Ignorance has always provided a fertile seed-bed for revolutionary doctrines and modern feminist ideology is no exception. It crudely transposes to the domain of the family and relations between the sexes concepts borrowed from theories of class warfare. Oppression, exploitation, conspiracy, false consciousness: all these are taken wholesale from the Marxist lexicon and applied arbitrarily to the history of women and the family throughout the ages. With one big difference: the villain in the historical drama is no longer simply capitalism but also, and chiefly, the male—and, of course, the ‘bourgeois’ family through which he exercises his tyranny.

Like all revolutionary doctrines, feminism is highly fissionable and abounds in factions, heresies and excommunications. It has soft and hard forms. At its most extreme it regards the male as expendable and lesbianism as the logical conclusion. Such esoteric aspects need not concern us here. What is important is to pinpoint and examine the five basic premises which make feminism’s tenets persuasive for the uninformed young.

The first is that women’s historic exclusion from public life and confinement to the domestic tasks of wife and mother constituted a deprivation of rights and were imposed by men on their unwilling female victims through a process of discrimination and violence.

Secondly, the subordination of women to a paterfamilias and her secondary status before the law were simply the juridical formalization of the male tendency to oppress and exploit.

Thirdly, insistence on premarital virginity for the female was a taboo developed by and in the interest of the male sex as part of its view of women as procreative chattels whose generative capacities must remain within the strict control of the male so that men might be certain about the paternity of their heirs.

Fourthly, in order to ensure female acceptance of life-long minority, male-dominated society has developed an almost infinite array of stratagems through which to indoctrinate women in their ‘gender role’, i.e. to cause her to accept her inferior status.

Finally, and the crowning offence of the male against the female, is the alleged exclusion of women from history.

The first three points were elaborated explicitly by Friedrich Engels in what came to be one of the great Marxist classics. (Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). Although Engels based himself on the long discredited findings of the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, his conclusions continued to form part of the Marxist canon and it was here that the radical feminists came to drink the first heady draughts of revolutionary theory.

The overthrow of mother-right was the defeat of the female sex, an event affecting the history of the world. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enslaved, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for the breeding of children.

That was how Engels described the allegedly universal move from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society which, it is held, we find celebrated in classical drama in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. And if anyone should still be in doubt about the ‘class character’ of the relation between the sexes, Engels quoted from a work he and Marx wrote in 1845-6.

The first division of labour is that between man and woman for child-breeding. And today I can add: the first class antagonism which appears in history coincide with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.

To apply the term ‘division of labour’, a category applicable to economics, to the sexual method of reproduction, which belongs to the realm of biology, makes as much sense as to look for class conflict in monogamous or any other kind of marriage. However, the incoherence of Engels’s thought and its paranoid preoccupation with conflict is not a characteristic only of Marxism generally but also of its sub-product, modern radical feminism.

The fourth point, about ‘gender role’, and the fifth, regarding the exclusion of women from history, each act as artifices to shore up the theory enunciated in the first three premises. If women have been excluded from history by a male conspiracy to denigrate them, then there is no point in the opponent of feminism going to history to look for arguments. Equally, if there are women (or, indeed, men) who oppose feminism, their arguments can safely be ignored because they are the consequences of indoctrination into a gender role. Here we have two prime examples of what characterizes non-scientific theories, as explained by Popper: they are theories formulated in such a way that they cannot be falsified.

‘Gender’, once a word used exclusively in a grammatical sense, is much favoured by feminists of both sexes, but controversy rages about its significance and scope. There are those who believe that apart from a little extra tissue here and there, there is no essential difference between male and female that an ‘improper’ education will not correct; on the other hand, more and more feminists hold that the female is essentially different from and superior to the male and that this is the liberated gender role she should assume. The whole concept of ‘gender roles into which a person is indoctrinated’ requires examination. It is in fact inseparable from the other four tenets of feminist thought and necessary in order to hold them together.

The theoretical structures developed by the radical feminists are unoriginal and take their inspiration from the delirious productions of the New Left and so-called Literary Theory. Whether early human societies were matriarchal, and what can be meant by that expression, is of as little relevance to modern social problems as what cannibalism among primitive peoples may have to tell us about contemporary diet. What is deserving of our attention is the way in which radical feminists, like other revolutionaries before them, seek refuge in esoteric argument in order to avoid confronting quite clear questions which are much closer to home.

What radical feminists, like other Marxists, try to do is first to declare war on moral discourse by an appeal to cultural relativism and then to recoup for themselves a monopoly of moral concern by finding an enemy against whom to direct moral indignation. This is the classical process so well described by Michael Polanyi as ‘dynamo-objective coupling.’ Alleged scientific assertions, which are accepted as such because they satisfy moral passions, will excite these passions further, and thus lend increased persuasive power to the scientific affirmations in question—and so on, indefinitely. Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings. Each of the two components, the dynamic and the objective, takes it in turn to draw attention away from the other when it is under attack.

Feminist discourse as we have heard it over the last four decades proceeds as though modern technology, modern medicine and the modern labor market had existed from time immemorial instead of being achievements of the last 200 years. The feminists seize upon the epiphenomena consequent upon the age-old female tie to the household and make these the central points at issue, stating quite explicitly that men have subjugated women against their will throughout the ages solely out of a perverse drive for power, (sometimes called phallogocentricity) in the same way that they have indulged in enslavement of subject peoples and in the capitalist exploitation of the working class. In much feminist talk about men vs. women, parallels are drawn with white vs. black or capitalist vs. worker, as though there were some equivalence between these pairs. What finally emerges is a demonization of the male and his identification with the exploiter, while women are sanctified as victims and martyrs.

Five basics
That most of this is a farrago of nonsense is reasonably obvious to a balanced mind; but it is equally evident that it is in fact taking in a lot of people. The Clinton regime in the U.S., and its sympathizers in Britain and elsewhere, have nailed the magic words ‘quotas’ and ‘affirmative action’ to their masts, and the European Parliament’s women’s organizations follow suit. So it seems that this is one area, at least, in which the call for a ‘back to basics’ approach is appropriate.

1. It cannot be repeated too often that it is an immensely long human infancy and childhood that has made possible the development of human language, intellect, personality and, in the long run, society itself. Helpless young humans required their mothers’ presence even more in the past than is the case now. Nursing mothers, in charge often of several children, were hardly in a position to defend themselves, let alone engage in warfare or hunting. They needed men to defend them against other men and wild beasts. This ‘division of labour’ referred to by the founding fathers of Marxism, (and which might be better described as a division of social function), is to be encountered today among many animal species. The heavier, more robust build of the male animal and his frequently protective behaviour towards females and young, can hardly be ascribed to some mysterious indoctrination into a ‘gender role’.

2. Some animal species are monogamous and some are promiscuous. Only the human female is liable to sexual arousal at all times. How this came about and what family arrangements prevailed among the various branches of the human race in the long pre-history of homo sapiens up to ten thousand years ago, we do not at present know, and no theory about the family can be based on what amounts to mere conjecture.

3. In pre-industrial economies with rudimentary technology the only productive work women could engage in that was compatible with child-bearing and rearing was, with few exceptions, in the home and the fields around the home.

4. The glory-associated activities of hunting and war were dangerous and required superior physical strength and the development of special skills and characteristics. Only a group bent on tribal suicide would send its mothers into battle or permit them to roam far afield.

5. Had the pre-marital virginity taboo not been virtually universal, young females could not have been protected from predatory and irresponsible males.

What is also conveniently forgotten is that it is only in the present century that the world faces the danger of over-population, and it was only in the beginning of the nineteenth that Malthus drew attention to that possibility. Before that time the human race often faced serious threats to its very survival.

Have feminists not heard of the extermination of populations caused by the plague in the Middle Ages? With manual labour the only means of production it is hardly surprising that there should have developed not only taboos against homicide (belief in the sanctity of human life), but also against all forms of infanticide including abortion. Indeed it is precisely in the Christian West that these taboos have been most highly developed.

Women as ‘a protected species’
But need we really go back as far as primitive, ancient or medieval society to recognize the fallacies in feminist arguments? All we need do is contemplate the lot of women in, say, Jane Austen’s time, before the advent of the much-traduced Victorian age. Rubber had not yet been discovered in Brazil and, though recourse was sometimes had to various other materials, condoms and other contraceptives were not generally available. A healthy, fertile, sexually active woman was likely to have a pregnancy in each year—if she did not die in childbirth, of miscarriage or any of the other multiple ills that beset people before medicine began to make its spectacular advances.

Let us be anachronistic for a moment and imagine the lot of a girl of any class who ‘dropped out’ of the accepted pattern and defied convention. If parents accepted a pregnant, unmarried daughter they would have extra mouths to feed instead of the prospect of a son-in-law. If they turned her out, where could she go except on to the streets? It was therefore perfectly natural that families should regard an extra-marital pregnancy as an unmitigated disaster and regard pre-marital virginity as the only safeguard available: hence the taboo inculcated into the young of both sexes, a taboo that for evident reasons was not symmetrical in its application. Dependent as they were, the immense majority were in no position to question the taboo. There were few employment possibilities for women outside domestic service. Indeed, what is strikingly absent from feminist thought is awareness that until the advent of a modern economy, employment possibilities off the land were precious few for anybody, women or men, and hence dependence on the family as an economic unit was almost total. Work available for the male sex was rough, dirty and often dangerous. Always it meant long hours usually at subsistence-level wages. Life for most was indeed nasty, brutish and short. Is it surprising that chastity for an unmarried woman was regarded as a safeguard rather than a burden? Or any less surprising that life in a convent often presented itself as a haven of refuge from a hostile world?

Moreover there was the universal dread of sickness. Puritanism followed hard on the heels of syphilis in Europe—northern Europe, let it be stressed, where the manifestations of this disease were more virulent than in the south, as were the manifestations of Puritanism, Far from being the malefic invention of frustrated or perverted clerics, as fashionable orthodoxy would have it, or of possessive males as the feminists pretend, pre-marital chastity for both sexes and fidelity in marriage were, quite literally, the only guarantees of immunity from a disease, then untreatable, whose course was quite as horrific as that of AIDS.

Seen against the background of real history, and not of some imagined idyll, the confinement of women to the home—a general feature of every civilization until this century—seems to have been a necessary state of affairs if the family and human culture were to flourish. Such confinement would tend to be accentuated the higher the social level. Women were a ‘protected species’ and this protection was necessarily paid for in economic dependence.

Apart from the very lowest classes in society, the life of women was immeasurably less dangerous and more secure than that of men. These were the ones who had to go to war to defend hearth and home. They were the warriors, the navigators, the adventurers and necessarily so. The cult of honour and glory provided a stimulus to manliness, and cowardice was regarded as a womanish weakness. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the public life of politics or art, both requiring single-minded dedication, should have been largely monopolized by men. Nor is it surprising that the images men and women cultivated of themselves and of each other should have developed so as to reinforce functions seen as necessary for society’s survival.

In classical antiquity it was generally felt that the greatest misfortune, one that could befall anybody, was to become a slave. By contrast, although it was felt that although no man could possibly want to be a woman, this was something that could not be changed and was in the nature of things. A freeman might be enslaved and a slave be freed but one’s sex, could not be changed.

Slavery, though not morally defensible, was regarded as a necessary evil without which the civilized life of cities such as Athens was not possible.

A person’sex did not fall into the same category. It was simply a fact of nature from which a number of ineluctable consequences flowed. It was when slavery no longer appeared necessary that it became possible to apply a moral standpoint and support its abolition. Only third worldists attempt to make part of humanity feel guilty about the role some of their ancestors may have played in slavery. Anybody with a knowledge of human history is well aware that the enslavement of other human beings has been practised at one time or another by every nation
and race.

It would perhaps be helpful to take a similar attitude to the woman question. Just as the ancients could not envisage a world so technologically altered as to make slavery both unnecessary and undesirable, neither could they envisage a world in which the survival of society did not depend upon the protection of women by men. They could imagine an individual’s circumstances changing in such a way that he became a slave or a freedman because they did not look on slavery as natural but as necessary.

The woman question fell into a different category. A woman’s position was subordinate by nature not only by necessity.

In our world, that of western civilization, that natural state of affairs which, as we have seen, necessitated the subordination of women has changed out of all recognition. For good or ill, sexual intercourse is no longer inevitably tied to procreation. Labour conditions and relations make it possible for women to do most jobs that were previously restricted to men. The expansion of market economies has caused women to emerge from the home and with that emergence they have claimed and been granted the full rights of citizenship. Justice demanded the change. Radical feminists, however, need to be reminded that when this process became incipient in the last century, the first to support female emancipation were men; as with slavery whose abolition was first demanded by the vilified white Anglo-Saxon protestants.

Does society need the family?
None of the foregoing is news. But it requires re-affirming because the present virulence of feminist militancy, at a time when the process of female emancipation has largely been completed (at least in the much-maligned West), raises questions vital for the future of free society. In spite of the fact that the resurgence of sexually transmitted disease, and especially the appearance of AIDS, might give us cause to reflect upon the wisdom for today of a number of traditional puritan values, we find that instead the feminist lobby is intensifying its attack on the family and precisely those traditional values.

Sociologists, when discussing the family, identify a number of its functions: the sexual, the reproductive, the economic and the socialization function as well as that of caring for the sick and the aged. However, any realistic appraisal of the family in late industrial societies shows that all these functions are now freely exercised outside the family. The only economic function that continues inside the family is that of consumption, not production. Even socialization and education have been taken over increasingly by agencies outside the family, to an extent where there are families who have to fight against the social services for their continued existence. And yet there are more and more serious sociological studies available which show that many of society’s current ills are directly attributable to the breakdown of the family.

When feminists, instead of supporting the protection of the family, and the restoration of some of its traditional functions, campaign for its further destruction, they are helping to bring about the totalitarianism with which we are threatened by the expansion of the various socialist sub-systems in Western society.

Every one of the radical feminists’ demands: quotas, unrealistic measures against discrimination and sexual harassment, institutionalized care of children, favouring the single parent—all these, if put into practice, will result in an immense extension of the ‘nanny state’ and its stranglehold on every sphere of life. This bureaucratic nightmare looms even closer with the threats presented by European federalism and the powerful feminist lobbies that exist in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Those who yearn for totalitarianism and mourn its breakdown in Eastern Europe are, of course, quite right in aiming their attack in this direction. It was, after all, the family which proved to be at the heart of resistance to the tyranny of ‘real socialism’. Perhaps this was so because the Soviets and their allies failed to take up the radical feminist agenda first mooted by Engels. The Left-Liberal Establishment of the 90s, however, seems set on correcting this failing, and its success in doing so constitutes a very real threat to a free society.

* First published in The Salisbury Review, London, June 1994. under the title 'Down with the Feminazis'