This is really fascinating and is more or less what I had been saying on here albeit nowhere near as articulately. Feminists and more particularly American second wave feminists are very quick to claim the credit in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
FEMINISMS PAST AND PRESENT
Some of today's feminist dissatisfaction is due to the lack of adequate recognition of the immense contribution women have made to Western culture. That is changing, but, oddly enough, it is the feminists who continue to denigrate the role women played in the past.
There was a time, of course, when feminism had real tasks to accomplish, real inequities to overcome. Feminism achieved major victories in the last century and the first part of this one. Though they take the credit, feminists, radical or otherwise, actually had little to do with the progress of women in the latter half of this century. The trends that would of themselves produce today's results were in place at least by the early 1960s. Once such things as the right to vote and the right of wives to hold property in their own names had been won, the difference in the opportunities open to women has been largely due to technology. I am old enough to remember my grandmother washing work clothes on a scrub board, mashing potatoes by hand, and emptying the water tray from the bottom of the ice box. There was simply no possibility that she could have had both a family and a career. Were she young today, she would find that shopping, food preparation, laundering and much else have been made dramatically easier so that she could, if she wished, become a lawyer or a doctor or virtually anything that appealed to her.
Many people suppose that feminism today is a continuation of the reform movement of the past. They occasionally notice a ranting Bella Abzug or an icy Gloria Steinem but imagine them to be merely the froth of extremism on an otherwise sensible movement. That is not the case; the extremists are the movement. What the moderate academic feminists Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge write about radical feminism in the universities is true of the movement as a whole. Today's radical feminism is not merely about equal rights for women.... Feminism aspires to be much more than this. It bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of its ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism. Feminist theory provides a doctrine of original sin: The world's evils originate in male supremacy.
(6)
Carol Iannone was drawn into feminism in graduate school in the mid-Seventies. "I enjoyed, revelled in the utterly systematic property feminism takes on when used as a tool of analysis, especially when to the exclusion of all others. Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women."
(7)
Feminists call their grand theory the "
gender perspective." "
Gender" is a code word in the feminist lexicon. The enormous importance the
radicals place on that term became apparent during the preparation for and conduct of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September, 1995. (The Beijing conference will be mentioned frequently because it demonstrated most of feminism's least attractive features and its worldwide aspirations.) The object was to debate and adopt a set of proposals relating to women (the Platform for Action), which the various nations would, presumably, be under a moral duty to implement. Each nation sent an official delegation, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), accredited by the United Nations to lobby the delegates, were present. The Beijing conference revealed the political and cultural agenda of the movement as a whole. At a preparatory session in New York, Bella Abzug, the head of a major NGO, denounced "retrogressive" developments:
- The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word "gender" from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word "sex" is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us and to block further progress.
We will not be forced back into the "biology is destiny" concept that seeks to define, confine and reduce women and girls to their physical sexual characteristics. (8)
This heated oratory may seem puzzling - referring to men and women as sexes, would not seem to "reduce" either to their "physical sexual characteristics. "What seemed to be nitpicking, however, is part of a larger feminist strategy. In feminist jargon, "sex" is merely biological while "gender" refers to roles and is claimed to be "socially constructed," which means that everything about men and women, other than their reproductive organs, can be altered by changes in the social and cultural environment. One of the major implications of this view is that human sexuality has no natural form but is culturally conditioned.
Radical feminists concede that there are two sexes, but they usually claim there are five genders. Though the list varies somewhat, a common classification is men, women, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Thus, heterosexuality, being socially constructed, is no more "natural" or desirable than homosexuality. It is not surprising, then, that one of the most active groups preparing for Beijing was the Lesbian Caucus.
Changes in the social and cultural environment to make the roles of men and women identical are what the feminists intend. This explains the Platform's incessant harping on "gender." While I am not sure of the final count, at one point there were 216 references to it. Unfortunately, many people who would dislike the
radical feminists' project assume that "gender" and "sex" have the same meaning. They do not. Their attempt at Beijing was to incorporate the "gender perspective" into an internationally accepted document that would impose at least moral obligations on the governments of the world.
The gender perspective of radical feminism is easy to ridicule but it must be taken seriously. It attacks not only men but the institution of the family, it is hostile to traditional religion, it demands quotas in every field for women, and it engages in serious misrepresentations of facts. Worst of all, it inflicts great damage on persons and essential institutions in a reckless attempt to remake human beings and create a world that can never exist.
