What Should Still Be the Desire of Women!

What is amazing about all this [history of the late 1940s through the 1950s] is that the 1950s still had plenty of structure. Marriage and motherhood were considered the main destiny of young women—with teaching and nursing considered their only “acceptable” careers—and magazines such as Seventeen or Mademoiselle or popular books such as Mary McGee Williams’s On Becoming a Woman all operated under this assumption. “It’s Not Too Soon to Dream of Marriage” ran a typical chapter title in Williams’s book.

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg.681

Abortion: Advancing Women’s Rights?!?

Humanity sees abortion as an advancement of women’s rights, but in actuality, it ultimately leads to the devaluation of both women and human life by eliminating the true philosophical foundation of where our equality comes from Scripture, specifically, the Trinity. While men, women, and children may not be positionally equal they are by nature equal.  Just as the Father occupies a greater position than the Son, and the Father and Son occupy a greater position than the Holy Spirit, they possess the same nature and are co-equal, co-eternal and co-powerful by nature. Humanity’s attempt at creating an egalitarian society ­– as now defined by progressives ­– will only lead to tyranny. Again, if our rights and laws are not determined by God they will be arbitrarily determined by man.

Stephanie A. Potts, “How Do We Enslave Ourselves to the Law?”

Feminist “Choices”

Campus feminists talk a big game about choice, and about respecting all women. But they lack patience for women whose choices include building a family, or who don’t share their left-leaning political views.

No Safe Spaces, edited by Dennis Prager and Mark Joseph, pg.61

The Culture That the Socialist Left Has Wrought

The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of those concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same cliches, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not the authors but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves.

The grand design, its supported say, should be implemented at all cost because it is believed to bring with itself freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other liberal-democratic treasures. Therefore, all barriers that block its coming can and must be broken down, also for the benefit of those who put up these barriers. If abortion means freedom, then we should raise the consciousness of those who think differently; force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. If political correctness is a necessity of life in the liberal-democratic society, then imposing it is, after all, nothing else but a measure of its emancipation for all.  The groups that managed to capture this liberal phraseology and the logic that underlies it—such as homosexuals and feminists—have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government to the extent that the state institutions, including the courts, have taken upon themselves the task of breaking the resistance of less conscious and more stubborn groups—that is, of coercing them to freedom.

Today, those who write and speak not only face more limitations than they used to, but all the institutions and communities that traditionally stood in the way of this “coercion to freedom” are being dismantled. As in all utopias, so in a liberal democracy it is believed that the irrational residues of the past should be removed.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.66-67

What Feminism Hath Wrought

Nowadays young men can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex. Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forego other women forever. Female sex partners are available without all that. . . . Sex has become free and easy. This is today’s version of the opiate of the (male) masses. . . .  Climbing the corporate ladder for its own sake may still hold some appeal, but undoubtedly it was more compelling when it was vital for obtaining sex.

Kathleen Vohs, Sexual Economics, pg. 523. Cited by Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.149

The Danger of the “#MeToo” Movement

The #MeToo movement has uncovered real abuses of power. But the solution to those abuses is not to replace valid measures of achievement with irrelevancies like gender and race. Ironically, the best solution to sexual predation is not more feminism, but less. By denying the differences between men and women, and by ridiculing the manly virtues of gentlemanliness and chivalry and the female virtues of modesty and prudence, feminism dissolved the civilizational restraints on the male libido. The boorish behavior that pervades society today would have been unthinkable in the past, when a traditional understanding of sexual propriety prevailed. Now, however, with the idea of “ladies and gentlemen” discredited and out of favor, boorishness is increasingly the rule.

Heather MacDonald, “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement”

A Problem of Women in the Labor Force

One of the reasons that the real earnings of working-class men in the United States have been stagnant for forty years is the mass exodus of women from the home and the neighborhood and into the labor force.  That has also had the strange effect of driving up housing costs, and of segregating white-collar professionals from everybody else, as now a doctor will marry a lawyer or a bank executive will marry a professor.  Then the double income goes to support one family with one or two children, rather than each separate income supporting a family with four or five children.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.143

Feminist Spite

We must rid ourselves of the feminist spite that pretends to despise the woman of many talents and many tasks in the home, preferring the specialist who amputates and cauterizes and does one thing well, for herself primarily and sometimes even at the expense of the family.  I said “pretends to despise” advisedly; envies would have been nearer the mark.  Women themselves can testify to this; they know the looks they receive from a certain sort of woman as they mount the steps of the bus with three small children skipping along after.  Imagine the most human place in your experience, the one that is warmest in heart and soul and mind.  It isn’t an office, is it?  We have plenty of second-rate men in our world.  Our whole late capitalist bureaucratic human-resource drudging economy consumes second-rate men as fuel.  We don’t need any more.  We need first-rate women.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.127-128

The Making of a Woman?

First, do not expect gentleness from young women brought up on the female form of pornography, the sleazy and mind-emptying “romance.”  Do not expect it from them if they are taught to swear like sailors, without the know-how and the risk to life and limb and the rough camaraderie that make the sailor’s roughness pardonable.  Do not expect it if they place before their eyes the glossy magazines that slash the soul like steel knives. Do not expect it fi they are trained up in catfights.  …

Second, you might ask exactly how it helps a girl when a parent, usually the father, presses her into competitive sports, when the team or platoon or ship’s crew is not the pattern of female cooperation, when she knows that she will never be able to compete against her male counterparts at the same level, and when the development of her growing body is directed towards child-bearing, not towards loping across the savannah in pursuit of gazelle or hurling a harpoon to spear seals.  … They could be developing all kinds of beautiful and useful skills that would eventually bring sweetness and grace and health to their families and forge real social bonds among neighbors, but they are too busy learning to hit a softball in a field no bigger than the Little League stadium at Williamsport before a few other girls while the boys are off doing something else.  What, ultimately, is the aim?  Yes, there will always be tomboys, and I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball.  I do desire to tell girls that they should not be pushing softball upon them.

Third, how can a girl become a woman like Dickens’s Esther Summerson if she cannot do anything?  Consider what a mass of contradictions we are.  If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop.  If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living—if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town—we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent.  If a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall.  But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents.  Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.126-127

What Makes a Bad Woman

The question remains.  What does it mean to be a woman?

I hear the answer, mainly from a certain kind of woman, “It means whatever you want it to mean.”  Sorry, but that is equivalent to saying that it means nothing.  Women, in my experience, prefer their nihilism to be dressed up in perky relativist clothing.  Relativism is nihilism for girls.

If we are to believe the women’s magazines on sale at groceries and drug stores, a woman is obsessed with her body, eager to learn new sex tricks, always on the watch for dirty revelations about pop-culture celebrities, prone to consulting horoscopes, ready to shell out a lot of money for new fashions, all-in for “safe” gay men who destroy one another’s lives rather than women’s lives, and firmly committed to “women’s health,” which depends on contraceptives and abortions and everything else that is meant not to restore healthy function to a diseased organ but to thwart the natural action of a healthy one.

If we are to take as evidence women’s political shows, a woman is loud, vulgar, screeching, ignorant of history, morbidly touchy, vindictive, smug, voluble in slogans, impervious to the principles of any coherent political philosophy, and ready to see the world as the she-bear sees it when her cubs are restless and the food is scarce.   . . .

That is not what women are.  That is what bad women are.  It is what happens when you fail to cultivate the difficult virtue of womanliness, just as the thug and the lout are what you get when you fail to cultivate the companion virtue, manliness.  

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.118

What Feminists Have Done to the Family

Feminists have persuaded us to consider patriarchy to be evil and brutish, but wherever men retreat from leadership of their families and of their communities, things begin to fall apart.  Once the boy sees that he is much stronger than his mother, once he sees that he can shrug when she shouts and nothing will happen to him, all bets are off; he needs the strength of the father to command his respect for his mother.  What is the single condition of a boy’s life that correlates most strongly with whether he will turn criminal?  Not income, not by a long shot.  It is whether he grew up in the same home with his father.  Our prisons are full to bursting with fatherless boys who never became the men and fathers that God meant them to be.  The collapse of the black family has been most catastrophic, and what is the result?  What anyone not befuddled with feminist ideology would have predicted, from simple observation of nature and from the universal testimony of human cultures.  One out of every three black men between the ages of twenty and thirty will spend time in prison.  If we blame that on racism, then we had better explain why, in the days when blacks could not ride on certain seats in the bus and could not even play major league baseball, nowhere near as many of their men were in prison.  Family, first and last—the family is where you learn of God and man, good and evil, courtesy, diligence, honor, chastity, self-restraint, and true courage.  Give me poverty and the family as strong as iron and in one generation in America my family will be poor no longer.  That is not speculation or boasting.  It is the experience of millions of immigrants who came to the United States with nothing in their pockets, but with a great fund of moral capital; with faith in God, and firm loyalty to family.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.105

A Stay-at-Home Mom is NOT Wasting Talent

If a woman professionally arranges flowers, or cooks fine Italian meals, or plays violin for an orchestra, or gives singing lessons, she will be praised for engaging her gifts and “making something of herself,” even if she returns home from her day’s labors and is unwilling or unable to care for her children. But if a woman “well versed in all of the household arts” does all of these things for those whom she loves and cares about the most, “we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents” by staying at home.

Michael Bradley, “Out of the Ashes: Anthony Esolen's Clarion Call to Restore Culture, Faith, and Sanity”

The New Super-Woman?

We need to emphasize that the envisioners of a new society are also seeking to create a New Woman.  Their go is the complete elimination of the traditionally passive, quiet, sensitive, domestic woman.  The New Woman does not find her fulfillment in the home—she finds it in being as much like a man as possible, identical to men, even superior to them.

This New Woman is supposed to be strong, smart, tough, sophisticated, fully capable of fulfilling a man’s role in every sphere—in the factory, the office, or even on the battlefield.  According to this ideological ideal women are even being presented, increasingly, as superior to men—more sensitive, less egotistical, less violent, wiser, emotionally stronger.  For a super-woman such as this, domestic duties are a bore and child-raising is a nuisance.  The Nazis tried to create supermen, and their folly is now known to all.  How long will it be before the attempt to create super-women is likewise recognized as false, evil, destructive, impossible, and absurd?

The New Secular Man is supposed to accommodate this dream of unisex.  He sees himself as essentially no different from a woman, as obligated to defer to women and encourage, help, and support them in their drive to excel.  He must be gentle, sensitive, compassionate, avoid doing anything that offends women, and cater to their demands and expectations.  He must never impose on the woman’s total freedom to be or do whatever she wishes.

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg.436

Feminism Has Led to Matriarchy

Feminism has led to aggressiveness on the part of the wife, the mother.  She is setting herself up as an equal, and undermining the influence of the father in the minds of the children.  The unhappy result is the totally false and wrong approach to the whole question.  I do not say this in a spirit of criticism.  We are seeing this increasingly in this country [England], but to nothing like the extent to which they are see it in the United States of America.  There, you have what may more or less be called a matriarchal society, and the man is becoming increasingly regarded merely as the one to provide the dollars, the wage-earner, the man who brings in the necessary money.  The woman, the mother, is the cultured person, and the head of the home; and the children look to her.  This false unscriptural view of man and woman, and father and mother leads to a matriarchal society, which, it seems to me, is most dangerous.  The result is, of course, the growth of crime and all the terrible social problems with which they are grappling in that country.  Then, because they influence every other country through their films and in various other ways, this attitude is being spread throughout the entire world.  A matriarchal society with the woman as the head and centre of the home is a denial of the biblical teaching, and is, indeed, a repetition of the old sin of Eve.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Life in the Spirit in Marriage, Home & Work: An Exposition of Ephesians 5:18-6:9, pg. 113

Feminism Destroys Marriage

Examine the commonly held view of marriage, and of the marriage state and relationship.  You see it in the cartoons, you see it in the reports of the cases in the courts, you see it, I say again, in the popular jokes.  Why should it be thus?  How has this come to be so current?  It is because of this completely wrong view of what marriage really means.  Today the whole question has become aggravated because of the modern notions of equality between men and women resulting from the so-called feminist movement.  This has aggravated the whole problem; and it makes the subject we are dealing with particularly urgent at the present time.  There has been this modern movement of feminism which claims that men and women are equal in every respect, and that there should be no division or distinction at all, but complete equality.  Now while, on the one hand, there are aspects of that teaching with which any Christian man, leave alone any sane intelligent man, must agree with the whole of his being, on the other hand, taking it in general, and as a principle, it goes against the plain teaching of the Scripture at this point.  It is without any question the cause of much confusion, much trouble, and much damage, not only to the marriage state, but also to the family as a fundamental unit in life.  The result is that discipline has gone, order has gone, and children are not given a chance.  Why?  Because their parents are not in the right relationship to one another; and the child is bewildered at seeing this competition, this conflict, where there should be unity.  This modern feminist movement has tended to becloud the whole issue; and, alas! it seems even to be seeping into the thinking of many who call themselves evangelical, and who claim to believe in the Scripture as the infallible Word of God and our only authority.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Life in the Spirit in Marriage, Home & Work: An Exposition of Ephesians 5:18-6:9, pg.96-97

You Get What You Ask For

A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos, crime, violence, unrest, disorder...that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Family and Nation,” p.147