Feminist myth and misery
by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:
Two articles in the National Review caught my eye recently. The first, by Mona Charen, sets out the price women (and society) have paid for feminism. Despite feminism’s reported achievements, women are not just less happy than men but less happy than their mothers and grandmothers were at the same stage of life. She provides the proof.
The reason lies not with the feminine mystique but with the feminist myth. Feminism need not have rejected marriage and family stability to achieve greater market opportunities for women. Indeed these were happening anyway:
‘The trend of women entering the paid work force predated Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and arguably owed more to the shift toward an information economy than to the Sisterhood. Between 1940 and 1956, the number of women in the work force doubled from 15 to 30 per cent, and rose steadily thereafter. As sociologist Daniel Bell noted in 1956, women were to be found in nearly every field, from railroad trainmen, to baggage handlers, to glaziers, to auctioneers.’
But feminists jettisoned reason in favour of anger and ideology. Disastrously the myth they engendered of oppression, patriarchy and discrimination encouraged women to blame and turn their backs on marriage and motherhood, both deemed to be a block to women’s fulfilment, not an innate fulfilment to be valued.
But the collapse of marriage and the birthrate that followed has led not to great contentment, rather to greater unhappiness.
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