Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs America
Why hasn’t feminism done better? It’s a movement that represents approximately half the world, and yet – as is driven home by the miniseries Mrs America, currently on iPlayer — its cultural force and legislative success arguably peaked well before the end of the twentieth century. Mrs America dramatises the battle by US feminists to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and at the end of the first episode everything is going great. It’s 1972, the Senate has just voted in favour of the ERA by a landslide, and the women’s movement gathers in an office to toast their incipient success. They have the numbers.
We know they will fail. We know, furthermore, that half a century later, the country they believe they are remaking will still have no paid maternity leave. Women’s earnings will still lag behind men’s. Men will still be raping and killing women. Pornography will be more pervasive than ever, and more misogynistic too. The abortion rights established by Roe vs. Wade will have been rolled back, state by state. The USA will still not have had a female vice-president, never mind president. It will, however, have put its first self-confessed groper to the White House.
But back in 1972, Republican activist Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks) clinks a mug of bourbon with Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), the Democrat congresswoman who was both the first black and the first female candidate to seek the presidential nomination. “Mother of the movement” Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) smiles at rising feminist celebrity Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne). The ERA seems assured. Legalised abortion is within reach. Sisterhood is powerful. One joyful moment of bipartisan, intersectional unity, before the long slide begins.
There are other frustrations besides that of the ERA. We see Chisholm’s run end in expected defeat, compounded by betrayals and recrimination. The black caucus refuses to back a woman, while the women’s movement peels away to press its demands on the successful (and uninterested) McGovern campaign. Across the aisle, Ruckelshaus watches her party leave her behind and give itself over to the culture wars. In fact, of all the details in Mrs America that feel quaintly historical, from the incessant smoking to the idea of magazines having popular currency, nothing seems so strange as the fact that there was ever such a thing as a pro-choice, feminist, mainstream Republican.
What’s coming to eat Ruckelhaus’s lunch? Anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, portrayed with powerhouse iciness by Cate Blanchett. It’s fair to say that without Schlafly’s efforts, the ERA would be law by now. It’s arguable that without her, American politics would never have taken the savagely partisan turn it did over gender and sexuality. And it’s fascinating to see that, as portrayed in Mrs America, the great homemaker’s first interest was never women.
Schlafly’s subject is defence, on which she’s ultra-hawkish. Her problem is getting men to listen to her when their default assumption is that any woman in the room must be there to fetch coffee and make notes. When Schlafly reinvents herself as the leader of the STOP ERA lobby group, though, she immediately becomes someone men pay attention to and other women obey. Her campaign might rest heavily on scaremongering about the ERA forcing women into the draft against their natures, but Schlafly is, you can sense, a born general.
Yet the women’s movement underestimates her. Informed that there’s a cohort of housewives out to frustrate reform, the feminists’ first impulse is dismissive. “Revolutions are messy,” says the Steinem character. “People get left behind.” It’s a moment that lays out one of feminism’s most intractable contradictions — a movement for all women that, ultimately, has to tell some women they’re doing it wrong. And who has ever been converted to a political cause by the news that their life is a mistake?
Committing yourself to what Schlafly called the “privileges” of life as a housewife means committing yourself to dependency on a man. He might be a good man, or he might be the sort of man to stymie your ambitions and cut you off from friends and rape you when he feels like it: the trouble is, without a safety net, you won’t know which until it’s too late to get out. The women of the Schlafly persuasion get the message that feminism isn’t for women like them, when women like them have as much need of it as anybody.
The same is true now as it was then, although today feminism finds itself at odds with the women of porn culture as much as it does with the women of the moral majority. What answer is feminism able to give to the woman who avers that she loves her “kink” of being choked and beaten and it’s her right to pursue it, just as much as Schlafly’s army swore down that they loved being the breadmakers to their breadwinners and it was their right to stay that way? Truly, there isn’t much you can say, beyond: we’ll try to be here when you need us.
And this is why feminism hasn’t done better. When a group is as large as 50% of the population, there will always be more conflicting interests than one movement can reconcile, and greater individual rewards for breaking rank. In Mrs America, the black feminists hear that their racial struggles can come later; Black Panther women talk about ditching the lesbians, because the Black Panther men won’t have it; and Friedan’s commitment to the cause never can quite reconcile her to Steinem’s precedence.
Easier for Schlafly: her movement exists in the service of a particular kind of woman only. With its demographic clearly defined, and its leadership unambiguous, STOP ERA could push on without the strain of sustaining a fractious coalition. Feminism in the twenty-first century has been recast as a kind of all-purpose social justice movement, the correct demand that it be for all women twisted into a requirement that it barely be about women at all. It has become too big to succeed, and if there’s any lesson in the failure of the ERA, it’s that politics is more than a numbers game.
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SubscribeWhat’s this about the first groper in the White House? JFK certainly groped (or worse) a fair few women, as did Bill Clinton. Or is it that they were the right kind of groper?
And so, allegedly, did Joe Biden with regard to Tara Reade. But the MSM doesn’t mention that. Watch Paul Joseph Watson’s super-creepy video featuring Biden stroking young girls.
For a Democrat President it’s a legitimate perk of the job.
She said “self-confessed” 😉
Is it “groping” when his description was of it being consensual?
Perhaps “hanky-panky”, would be a better term?
Moving up to ” botty bandit” for graver offences?
He didn’t confess, he was caught on tape. And even if he had confessed, would that make it worse than if he’d simply been found out?
If you’d ever heard the whole tape you’d know that Trump was merely observing that celebrity culture was so absurd/extreme that women would just throw themselves at him.
So nothing to confess at all.
When droumpf says something beneficial about himself, he’s a liar and hyperbolic exaggerating braggadocchio. When he says something about himself that gives the leftos a win, he is suddenly a coherent purveyor of measured truth”which is of course what his hot mic’ed private conversation with Billy Bush was: a pure, unexaggerated, totally believable account of how he treats women, by just walking up to them and grabbing their genitalia.
Being on the Left, and thus morally and ethically superior to the rest of us, absolves one from such grubby accusations.
Expect a lot of them did. I’m glad the ERA failed-I oppose anti-private discrimination laws on principle and it would have been a lawyers’ pasradise.Neither Shirley Chisholm not George McGovern had a cat in hell’s chance of the White House-thank God!
Andrew, correct. And Trump’s comments were an indictment of the gropees, not the groper, in that they would allow it only if you were rich. Duh. As for “self-confessed,” strictly speaking he didn’t say he did it, only that they would let you. But thanks to the author for signalling at the outset that the article would be garbage (whoops, fingers slipped, meant “highly biased”).
Time makes all the difference. In the case of JFK, the media turned a blind eye.
Indeed. In fairness has Trump stuck his cigar into any interns?
The imagery! breathtaking
Boys will be boys : )
Not everyone, men included, wants to be a CEO, a human rights’ QC etc. Many women love being mothers. Many women love men and want to look after them and be looked after by them without making it into some insane power struggle. Tenderness. Children. This is almost always ignored at best and ridiculed at worst by so called feminists.
Both Ms Friedan and Ms Schlafly understood this.
I was a househusband (if that’s the word) for some years, when my late wife’s earning capacity exceeded mine. We swapped roles about as it suited us. Later, I was able to earn more and she became disabled, so roles reversed again. The greatest prejudice I experienced as a male “homemaker” (another awful term) was from women in the same role. We didn’t care: the life we made was for US, not them. We were a team.
I fully empathise, Robert. I work from home 3 days/week (normally, pre-lockdown) and do school runs etc those days. I’m usually the only man in sight, and very much excluded from any and all contact – my wife enjoys no such stigma on the 2 days/week she does this. She’s been asked before now how she copes with a husband who doesn’t contribute… She was smug to inform about my 2 jobs and 70+hours a week that I combine with childcare! (Sleep? Yeah, I heard of it…)
Away from “news” articles, modern feminism has no real bearing in most women’s lives today. It’s arguing about micro-aggressions whilst many are more concerned about keeping their kids fed and safe, same as mothers since the dawn of time.
Try joining the parents’ choir (if there is one). I did that, was the only male in it other than a couple of teachers, and had a thoroughly good time. Suddenly mums would greet me warmly when I was picking up my son, or even in the supermarket. I think it was because as a singer, I had a role which was different from theirs and necessarily male, whereas as an attentive parent, I was intruding into what they instinctively felt should be their domain. Which probably ““ and understandably ““ creeped them out a bit.
It’s a sadly undervalued role, in society, to raise children. I hired my brother in a small tech business venture, and we did well for about 7 years, in which time he could work from home, and did, and was around as ‘home dad’, doing cooking, etc. Many years later he thanked me for that time, the time we never get back, and that he got to spend it in the formative years of his children.
No, Tamara. You’ve just internalized your oppression. Why don’t you move aside and let the big girls and their groveling militia of simps tell you what you should be interested in.
Thank you Tamara. Well said.
“It’s a movement that represents approximately half the world”
Maybe it would do better if it represented more than half the world. One of the fatal flaws of feminism is it literally does not include men (except as ‘allies’, but not as men), when that is what the vast majority of women want. Feminism wants what is good for women while women who see clearly want what is good for women AND men. Women and men need each other on a fundamental level, which is not the case for other groups seeking justice in society, who don’t ‘need’ the biological symbiosis of anyone else. It is this denial, this severing of the evolutionary bond wrought by feminism, that will, or should be, its downfall.
Feminism is and has always been about the liberation of women for patriarchy. Sex is a hierarchy. Yes, men need women, but the reverse is not necessarily true. And until men stop feeling and acting entitled to speak *for* us, men will not even be allies.
And I would add it doesn’t even “represent half the world”. My wife, and many, many other women I have talked to, do not feel that the post-modern version of “feminism” speaks for them in any way. In fact, they disavow it wholeheartedly and consider it toxic and divisive. Modern feminists claim to speak for half the population, but were never democratically elected to do so.
Yes, for sure. My thought was if they didn’t actively see men as the enemy, more women might feel represented.
“Why hasn’t feminism done better? “
Because it is only interested in the advancement of middle class women.
Ask your cleaner (I’m sure that you have one) what she would like you to do for her.
What makes you think you know whether I have a cleaner or not? Do I detect some inverted snobbery here?
I do not have a cleaner, thank you very much. If I make the mess then I will clear it up.
The feminist movement was led by upper-class, urban white women – many of whom were intellectual Jews (Friedan, Steinem, Abzug,etc). They had no clue about the lives of middle or lower class women – much like the Democrat Party today : )
Schlafly’s daughter has said that the T.V. series has taken liberties with her mothers story and misrepresented her and her position which is what you can expect from a ‘drama’.
But what comes across from the author of this piece is yet again another feminist who cannot accept that there are pro-life women, and Camille Paglia has said that the one thing feminism has not dealth with is ‘motherhood’.
Yes, it should be noted that the article speaks scathingly of bad husbands, but has nothing to say about the large number of the fifty percent of the population feminism supposedly speaks for being women who presumably want the best for their sons as well as their daughters.
See my comment above re: motherhood. Unmarried & childless, ‘Bunny’ Steinem had no interest in motherhood or family, nor did she deign to understand such concerns. Still doesn’t.
‘ a movement for all women that, ultimately, has to tell some women they’re doing it wrong.’
At least this article recognizes this statement as a problem even if it doesn’t seem to want to address it. Maybe if feminists focused on helping provide genuinely equal opportunities, instead of telling women what they ‘should’ do they might have maintained the momentum and have a broader base of support than they do now. No point in swapping a bunch of men telling a woman what to do for a bunch of women telling her what to do. Just help provide the conditions that allow her to choose and then stop castigating her if that doesn’t fit with your ideal.
This piece is just dripping with the arrogance, obtuseness, and outright lies that have been the hallmark of the feminist movement since at least the 70’s. Here’s the acid test for feminism…free, high quality child care. Full stop. That singe issue would provide unparalleled benefit to the most women across all income levels, ethnicities, and marital status. It would provide increased financial security for single women working low wage jobs, allowing them to improve their lot without a man (because we all know how much a fish needs a bicycle, amiright?)
Instead, feminists chose to march under the banner of abortion. Why deal with all that pesky child care stuff when we can just eliminate those inconvenient kids altogether? I haven’t seen the show being reviewed in this piece, but it sounds like feminism making excuses for the fact that it’s most enduring and visible endowment to women is the “freedom” for them to terminate a pregnancy.
Believe it or not, I’m pro-choice. But it’s this single-minded focus on an issue that most American women rightfully find to be distasteful that has stunted the gains of this movement. If feminism ever decides to have a fact-based discussion involving all women and their actual struggles, I’ll change my tune with a quickness.
The road to recovery is simple. Stop lying about the “patriarchy”, stop tossing out fake rape statistics, stop treating women as children, stop demonizing men and boys with your “toxic masculinity” claptrap, stop pretending you don’t know the real reason behind the gender wage gap, stop seeing children as nothing but an inconvenience, and, for the love of Pete, stop allying yourselves with Islamists.
Writing your name in for President.
US citizen, I hope
Ha! Yup, U.S. citizen. Do it! I’ll gladly return the favor.
Well said.
I agree with the sentiment of your comment.
However I would prefer that those single women who had low paid jobs and had children were able, if they chose, to stay home and look after their own children rather than creating yet another low paid job for another woman to look after their children. That is to say that we should value motherhood above low paid, soul destroying jobs.
This of course has been tried and seemed to lead to teenage girls getting pregnant to get tax payer funded homes which isn’t what benefits society as a whole. I struggle to find a solution, but I know that feminism in all its varieties forgot to promote motherhood.
As a teenager in the 70s no-one, not even my own mother, talked about motherhood as something wonderful, as something to aspire too. I actually grew up thinking it was something to be avoided at all costs.
well said Jennie
This is such a brilliant post. If, ‘free, high quality child care. Full stop’ were the slogan of feminism it would possibly level the playing field across sex and class categories more than anything that has been achieved in all history.
I can’t help but wonder if the privileged middle-class that characterises feminism conspires (knowingly or unknowingly) against the social levelling that this would bring poorer women as a means of maintaining their higher status.
Feminism = men are always wrong
Disagree with a women = misogynist
No thanks
After being raised In a family of women by a single mother I was taught that you treat people the way you wanted to be treated
But not for feminists because all men are…..
It failed because the majority of people are Egalitarian’s. We believe in equal rights and equal opportunities for men and women.
But we don’t believe in a fictional and frankly sexist concept of the patriarchy, we don’t believe women need to be told what the correct attitude a woman should hold on any number of issues is and we don’t think the fact that women disproportionately take career brakes when they start families, which is largely determined by the fact women on average marry men older and better off, not cultural gender rolls, means there is a pay gap. Compare women who didn’t start a family and men who never took a career break and the results are identical.
Egalitarians believe women can be anything they want to be. Feminists believe women should be what they tell them to be.
Who needs t’Guardian when we have UnHerd?
I wonder where those 180 ex-Guardian employees with go to look for a job!! ;P
I don’t know. But unless it’s Lidl or similar I certainly will not be paying for their output.
Tried reading the Telegraun recently?
I know what you mean. Really, there is nowhere to go these days except for some of the podcasts. Many of the most sensible of these podcasts are created by women of colour like jasmine contours and Candace Owens.
Worth reading for the comments at least.
All of them made by men so far. I think comments from women could be interesting, too.
Did you just assume everyone’s gender?!
You don’t have to mate, you just have to look at the names!
It’s dreadful article.
That’s just a quick response. I might pen a fuller one later, but really the comments I’ve read so far, which appear to have been written by men, some things up rather well in my opinion so I’m not sure I will have anything further to add.
As indeed are most articles
“the trouble is, without a safety net, you won’t know which until it’s too late to get out.”
Can you inform me where the feminist “safety net” was for the 20,000 or so “white-trash-only-good-for-one-thing” or, as we human beings refer to them: “vulnerable underage white girls”, who have been raped, tortured, fed drugs and in some cases murdered by marauding grooming gangs over the past decade?
Clearly feminists didn’t regard feminism as “being for girls” like them, either.
For I saw not one single hashtag offering solidarity with any of these traumatised victims from the feminist movement – in startling contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage in the media and on the social media devoted to the sexual abuse uncovered by the white middle-class #MeToo movement.
Clearly feminists are more interested in the ethnicity of the perpetrators than in the suffering of the victims hypocrites like the author purport to empathise with.
Well said, though I believe the figure is more like 200,000 than 20,000… Yes you won’t hear a pip from these people where their ‘feminism’ contradicts the multiculturalist orthodoxy, mass marketed as Diversity / ‘anti-racism’. Thus feminists / homosexualists side with Islamic puritans against their shared foe: West/Christendom: the conditions of their own possibility. As the great truth-teller Rene Girard put it: ‘Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West’. Though in fairness to this author, whom I’ve noticed in the review pages a few times, if she dared voice an opinion contradicting the official orthodoxy she wouldn’t be published at all. In another article she was lauding a group in explicitly racial terms, whose music routinely refers to women in the most derogatory terms imaginable, on account of their music being s£xually explicit compared to that of uptight Europeans, i.e. the one culture where the cardinal sins of ‘s3xism’ / ‘racism’ aren’t socio-cultural norms!
From Rene Girard’s country, Françoise Giroud said total equality will come when an incompetent woman has a position of power. Done (quotas help)
priggish feminists still confused by the idea that all women don’t think in exactly the same way that they do, & that it might not be any more possible to abolish all crimes against women than it would be to abolish all crimes.
…..and don’t forget life expectancy, imprisonment, academic achievement and equal rights for fathers….no, wait……forget life expectancy, imprisonment, academic achievement and equal rights for fathers!
A very confused position, but no surprise. Feminism advocates for more rights for women. It avoids rights for men (and children), and avoids the recognition of responsibility all together. It has such a warped view of reality it can’t analyse how its aims can be achieved. In truth Schlafly was doing the same as feminists demanding a right for women, the right to have fewer responsibilities.
The difference is that Schlafly understood the world better then the feminist movement, she knew where the ERA would lead. She should have lost, but if she had we would now see feminists complaining about how some of the equalising of responsibilities, that would have come with the ERA, were “oppression.”
Emancipated from what exactly? Feminism is premised on the notion of women as a distinct political constituency uniformly oppressed in virtue of not being men. But it doesn’t bear scrutiny: no creature could be more naturally advantaged than a desirable female.
Arguably no condition is more hopeless or miserable than that of her undesirable counterpart. ‘Arguably’ only because most suicides are men, and what better index could there be of despair than desiring and accomplishing your own extinction?
Feminism has about as much truth value as ‘racism’: the idea that the most racially antagonistic group whose identity is invested in their appearance to a degree out of all proportion to any other are victims of someone else’s resentment more than their own.
HL Mencken reckoned no one ever lost money by underestimating public taste. The political capital latent in resentment is similarly bottomless, whether s3xual, racial, economic. Resentment / victimhood being the principal political commodity in our era, which the great truth-teller Rene Girard has characterised as “omnipresent victim”.
As he saw it, the “sacrificial resources” of Christianity, understood as source of membership, ritual and safety valve for primal antagonisms, having been exhausted practically anything could serve as a pretext for polarisation or “scapegoating”, where Christian sympathy for victims is turned against Christianity itself licensing persecution in the name of the victim for political advantage.
Where feminism is concerned the principal victims are women themselves. No one’s put it better than the mighty GK Chesterton: “Feminism is a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
In my own lifetime we’ve gone from home ownership on a single salary being the norm to single parents being commonplace and home ownership on two salaries out of reach for many. I didn’t now of one child at my school whose mother worked or whose family didn’t have their own home. But it’s good for “the economy”.
Yes Sean – and for “economy” you mean GDP or the size of the economy. It is funny that every politician knows that people want an improvement in their quality of life. But Governments are not prepared to do it for some reasons (see mass immigration, buidling houses everywhere, more traffic, more noise, less freedom, more spying on us, BLM and the destruction of our culture). Politicians have failed miserably … unless they are serving a different master …
“It’s a movement that represents approximately half the world” Feminism enjoys around 20-25% support among women. So that would be about 10% of the world.
Worse even than that: it only enjoys levels that “high” among Western women, who are themselves a tiny minority of the world’s women.
Fair enough, though I know Third World women who consider themselves Feminist because they think husbands shouldn’t be beating their wives with sticks, and would be horrified by the average Swedish Feminist. The meaning of terms is culurally mediated.
Wasn’t it 7% in the UK according to the feminist Fawcett society?
The assumption that it represents half the world is just that: an assumption. There are probably millions of women who have never even heard of it. The feminist movement was founded essentially by educated, white, middle class Western women. There is nothing wrong with being that, but women with different cultural backgrounds might well feel differently, and to be more successful the feminist movement (if there is such a thing: there seem to be many) must accommodate women who (for example) want to wear the hijab.
Yes, but 100% of everyone in Islington, and that’s the place that matters.
Indeed. No lack of women telling other women how they should lead their lives in Islington.
Trouble is they never damn listen.
If feminism has failed, it is because it defines success in traditional male terms: work, equal income, the glass ceiling, etc. It is beneath feminism’s dignity to consider raising children a worthy role. If the woman is not “out there”, she is somehow lesser. Maybe it needs to prepare a bigger tent and acknowledge that the criteria for success might be found in individualism rather than tribalism. No set of rigidly defined goals neatly encapsulates a creature that has been evolving, in a multiplicity of varied environments, for a few hundred thousand years.
Feminism is a sociologically morbid, and ideological factitious ideology. The generations of American women post “baby boom” did face a very real problem: the crisis of overproduction represented by the “baby boom” (’46 – ’56) along with the advances in automated industrial, agricultural production, housework and infant mortality, significantly reduced the value of her biological capital. As far as the eye could see there was no market for babies. She could no longer fully employ herself in the traditional role. But Feminism utterly disregarded this factum brutum, and chose instead, for strategic purposes, aping the truthful narrative of black oppression, the specious narrative of “male oppression” in order to qualify for affirmative action.
The trouble is the historical truth was too recent and too well known. The supposed classic period of patriarchal oppression saw the overwhelming majority of men working in factories, mines, mills, fields, and military camp 12 hours a day, seven days a week in extremely dirty, dangerous, and physically exhausting conditions, while she cared for baby, family and home. Her labor was less onerous, much more emotionally rewarding, and her life expectancy 30 to 60% longer. And it was never “a man’s wage”, but a family wage.
So you’re saying it wasn’t a patriarchy, more a partnership for men and women to work together and emerge from grinding poverty.
Too logical and too common sense.
That idea will go nowhere these days.
Kinda disagree with the whole premise here.
Feminism has absolutely succeeded and without the artifice of an “amendment.”
Woman have shown they can equal men in all areas. They can freely and openly be as loud, obnoxious, drunk, sexually promiscuous, be successful and paid equally or better if they avoid having kids and generally be as disgusting as men in all aspects of life.
Congrats ladies, you’ve come a long way!
Yes, I’m afraid this seems to be where we have arrived. I wish it were not so.
Hey, what’s with the all aspersions cast at men? What are you, some kind of feminist? 😉
Exactly. I have always called for women to be put in positions of authority and wealth etc so that they can be seen to be just as corrupt and/or useless as men. Or, alternatively, to be seen to demonstrate the same high levels of integrity and competence as men.
I find this a silly, trite account of the early days of Women’s Lib( as you might have called it then).
Schlafly might appear as your demon,Sarah. But was nothing of the kind.
She had intellect, experience and the good life as far as she( and so many others at the time) thought it.
She was politically astute, effective and fearsomely intelligent. And well able to target the hypocrisies, the ultimate consequences as well as the miseries and unhappiness that was so apparent in her female opponents . The men certainly learned early on not to patronise her, the women never did. And paid the price..
These casual rewrites of liberal aspirational history are inevitably partial, wrong headed and fail to teach today’s women what exactly the truth was. And so they remain hopelessly unable to discern the truth today.
Germaine Greer was a fearsome intellect who brought us all great truth. Yet look how she has ended up.
Sarah needs to read up a bit more, back the JK Rowling’s and Julie Bindels and stop sucking up to the trans lobbies and what Islam means to women’s equality.
I think Clinton was less of a groper than Joe Biden, he just screwed interns and violated them with cigars….fact check.
Well put! I grew up in the 70’s and remember my mother often making disparaging remarks about the “Women’s Lib” movement. She was a highly educated, career woman who chose to stay home and rear her children. Once my brother and I were old enough to be in school, she then did volunteer service at our school and she’s still involved with that work today! THAT was her idea of a good and fulfilling life. She had no use for the “self actualization” that feminism promised her.
She was already self actualized through her good life choices and marrying a good man who provided well for his family. My dad offered her true freedom of choice – the freedom to not be enslaved by a career when you’d rather be rearing your children. It’s a real shame she never realized what an “oppressive” arrangement this all was for her.
Seriously? No, really. Is this a serious piece?
So it’s all about what men should do for women? Not what they should do for themselves?
Why should your employer eat the cost of your pregnancy?
Women lag behind in earnings? Well work longer and harder you lazy gits.
Better still start your own companies and bury the male competition as women are supposed to be 30% cheaper than men.
Considering companies go to the wall over margins of 2%. You will clean up.
You are supposed to be a journo, yet this piece reads like it was written by a teenager who didn’t spend 10 minutes on google looking at counter arguments.
Shoddy
Here’s the thing : most women have no interest in feminism. They want to get laid, married and pregnant, roughly in that order. Most know, from observing their own parents, that if they shack up with a male they’ll probably end up wearing the trousers and having the final say in the most important household decisions. Feminism offers no advance on this.
Gosh there seem to be an awful lot of quite angry men commenting on this post. I was a 70s feminist. There were some major gains. Equal pay fir equal work. Abortion law giving women the right to choose. (Although few of us realised till we got pregnant ourselves that this wasn’t a back up form of contraception. ) but Paglia is right. We neglected the thing women are built for- motherhood. We acted as if men’s’ lives were the goal. We let our children down. I know I did. We should have been fighting for equal parenthood and against the marginalisation of childcare. And for straight women, anything that might make men find them less attractive was going to be a no no. And men didn’t like feminist partners. It became embarrassing to call yourself one however badly you wanted equal treatment.
Odd that back then we were trying to make people see that a female body did not dictate personality. There were as many ways of inhabiting that body as there were women in the world. I could like football, debating ideas, the company of men, wearing trousers. Nowadays bring a woman is supposedly a feeling. An imprisoning stereotype that leaves women like me who are mums and grandmothers feeling we no longer have the right to call ourselves women. We need feminism more than ever to defend us against men who claim to be more us than we are.
“Men who claim to be more us than we are”
U mean transgenders?
If so , I agree.
When feminism became “male bashing”, somehow it turned men off.
Can’t imagine why.
I’m as old school as you get. Growing up I always thought that women were slightly further along the evolutionary trail as men. On a higher plane if you will.
Being a man …. wait… checking …. yep, still there, I can say that (with many exceptions) the baseline is “men are pigs.” This is not really an insult, just a fact as anyone ever in a locker room or on a sports team can testify.
Woman can bring out the best of us, the “human”
part of us or they can literally destroy us.
I have yet to see where feminism whose goal has been to “equalize” with men has had one positive effect on the male population.
“Well, why should it?”, you say. It is about women not men after all.
Is it a zero sum game?
Evolving beyond our porcine origins has meant that men have tried to look after women, protect them if needed and possible, fought wars to save their families, became better fathers and husbands and just better people.
Has feminism at any time raised the bar for men or just lowered it for women.
I would find it much more difficult to even approach a woman these days as there are so many “rules”, so many tripwires and land mines that simply being courteous can be taken as an affront.
Other than that – hey, feminists are great – just stay over there so I can relax.
I think I know what you’re saying. Women have a civilizing effect on men, and without a positive feminine influence, there is no reason for men to better themselves, especially if women can do it all on their own. In this way men have become obsolete in the eyes of mainstream culture.
There is something rabidly toxic about how Feminism sets men up to be an oppressive enemy. Men are expected to give up all power to women without expecting anything in return. However, most women don’t respect powerless men, which is why even feminists tend to despise male feminist allies.
An alien reading this would think women have never had it so bad in any place or any time than in our oppressive contemporary West. If no credit is given to Western men for their unprecedented fighting for female rights over recent centuries, and at no time more than right now, then men will simply say “Screw you” and give up. Are you sure your ultimate aim is not just to be equal in your rights compared to men, but “more equal”?
Indeed, giving up is already happening, as in ‘men going their own way’ or taking a red pill. Men deciding to not let the feminist agenda define them.
The chasm between above and below the line opinion in the media generally mirrors that between officaldom and the populace. Nowhere more than here. But this is what’s now taught in our universities where the humanities have long been centres of political indoctrination. Many courses require adherence to the orthodoxy as a condition of entry, especially those relating to “culture” / “theory” / “gender”. Even when I was a student in the early 80s it was impossible to complete many courses if you thought to question their presuppositions. Back then No Platform for Racism of Sexism was confined to campus. Now it’s been nationalised, globalised even insofar as that equates to West, though Eastern Europe appears to retain some resistance having been immunised against Marxism by previous exposure.
Having #killallmen in your Twitter profile does not really appeal to mothers and grandmothers of males let alone wives so that might be one reason not all women are on board with modern feminism
“When a group is as large as 50% of the population, there will always be more conflicting interests than one movement can reconcile … .” This is simply not true. In systems with more representative forms of democracy than the UK’s FPTP system, governments coalition or single party generally have more than 50% of the vote. What happens is that people talk and form a consensus. Many feminists in contrast refuse to listen and instead tell other women that they are wrong and probably stupid. They then discredit themselves further by ignoring rape and other abuses if committed by intersectional allies. Finally they don’t even claim their victories. It is now almost universally accepted that men and women should be paid the same for doing the same job. This was a minority view 50 years ago. Now it is the law but listening to feminists you would never guess so.
Actually, it’s been 59 years since it has been illegal to pay differently based on sex. There is no pay gap. There is an earnings gap which exists because women only work 83% of the hours men work, and they tend to have much better working conditions- which is why 93% of those harmed in industrial accidents are men.
It doesn’t, though. It represents a tiny number of unrepresentative radicals who flatter themselves that they represent approximately half the world.
And here is the evidence for the previous point. Feminists consistently butt up against the problem that in reality, as opposed to their seminars, the majority of women do not wish to behave like feminists do. Many women do not want to be forced to subsidise other women’s paid maternity leave. Women earn less because they choose to care for their children, a choice that feminists cannot understand and therefore denigrate. Women are far less likely to be the victims of violence than men are. Increased access to pornography correlates strongly with reduced incidence of rape. Polls consistently show that women are far more opposed to abortion than men are, understandably because women are far more conscious of the unborn child as a life. Trump never “confessed” to groping, if you mean non-consensual molestation; he was talking about consensual acts.
Feminists urgently need to stop pretending to live in the world as they wish it was, and engage with the world as it is.
I’ve enjoyed the series. I was born in 1950 so it was very relevant to my life. Young women today take for granted what we had to speak up to get. But now when they are practically equal to men they can’t seem to deal with unwanted attention that we handled easily. I can assure them travelling on a train in school uniform made us magnets for weirdos but it hasn’t affected me mentally. An accidental elbow or heel on their toes saw most of them off.
The problem is 4th wave feminism does not “represent approximately half the world”. A surprising amount of very strong women have informed me so. And every time these feminists have a tantrum when women refuse to follow them, they turn people off more and more. This will hurt “approximately half the world” the most.
I haven’t seen the series but just wondering. After universal suffrage became a law, nobody expected everyone (e.g. all men) to have the same opinion. Why women?
What is miniseries? Do you mean mini-series?
The fundamental flaw of feminism is that it takes for granted that we are all clear about what ‘equality’ means. We know a few things it excludes but that is not enough.
It hasn’t “done better” because of you and your ilk Ms Ditum. My wife is a true “feminist” (whatever that really means). She and other real women don’t really care for you and your whiny ilk. Always complaining that you haven’t been “given” something. The “pay” shibboleth is just that. False. In the private sector you are paid what you can negotiate as your worth to the business. In the Marine Corps we were paid based upon our rank and time in service mostly (pilots received flight pay, but women pilots got the same amount) regardless of sex.
It is not my fault that you have two XX chromosomes. Blame that on your father. My daughters are members of the “real women” group and have succeeded on their own, through education and hard work all while fulfilling their biological role too. Not a whine out of them. Maybe, Ms Ditum, you could stop whining, crying and generally complaining and get on with it. Maybe then you too can succeed. At present you are a fail.
Another “fail” UnHerd. Racking up the failures Unherd.
After reading the article, it’s unclear why Ditum believes that feminism has failed. She lists a number of areas where she feels that feminism has not succeeded, but these seem to have little to do with female “emancipation”.
For example, she cites the fact that America has no paid maternity leave. This is true, but it also has no paid paternity leave. It could be argued that until both sexes have equal rights to take time to raise their children, females will bear the brunt of that task. Ironically, only by extending parental rights to men will women be able to pursue their careers on an equal footing. Women who never marry actually earn the same wages as men. But because feminists have never actually sought equal rights for men, the result is that women take more time from their careers, and so their life time earnings are less.
This is also part of the reason why females earn less- not because they’re paid less ( that’s been illegal for over 50 years), but because so many of them choose to work fewer hours than men. And exactly whose fault is that? The “patriarchy”? Why does the blame for female choice always fall on someone else’s shoulders?
Perhaps female’s lack of “emancipation” is because “men are still killing and raping women”? But then, females are also killing and raping men. Half of domestic violence is a result of females attacking their partners and children. The studies show that men are physically injured 38-45% of the time. As for rape, Ms Ditum might wish to acquaint herself with the facts: female teachers raping young boys has become widespread in the States and elsewhere- but being male, they don’t count as victims in the feminist narrative.
As for porn, as I have argued elsewhere in response to Ditum, porn continues to exist because females enjoy it as much as men, a fact feminists refuse to acknowledge.
It’s true that abortion rights are being rolled back- but the research shows that men support the right to choose equally with women. And women are pro-life to the same degree as men. Unless you’re willing to believe that females have no agency, it’s difficult to see why this issue should be laid at the feet of men exclusively.
And if the States have never had a female President or Vice President, who is to blame for that, given that females represent 51% of the voters? Everyone has an equal chance to run for office. If females won’t vote for females, who is to blame for that, the “patriarchy”? Why?
Sorry Sarah, but the feminist narrative of blaming the “patriarchy ” for the lack of female “emancipation” has pretty much run its course.
Asked my wife for her view on the above and below. Must I? No your are a free individual, I’m just interested. No you’re not! You are well aware that I’ve had enough of the continual whinging and moaning at work and that it is an all female team. Your being provocative. Sorry babes, go on have a look. Not bothered – I much prefer the company of men you know that! Yea but your views are important. She’s just threw a cushion at me and left the room.
“a movement that represents approximately half the world’. No, it claims to represent half the world BUT less than 20 % of Western women claim that they are feminists. Additionally feminists don’t give a rat’s a** about women in the third world. It is a movement by privileged Western women for privileged Western women, the rest of the world’s women can take a flying leap.
I have found Mrs America the most riveting series since Madmen. It may well be Cate Blanchet’s performance but I find the Schlafly character more genuine, consistent and committed than any of the others.
I have to say I don’t get the criticism of Phylis Schlafly. She was a well-educated, thinking person from a comfortable background that married a good guy who backed her. She was her own person and out to protect a way of life that worked for her and many other women and what’s wrong with that? She was evidently also better at campaigning than the pro-ERA woman.
It seems today that one has to always defend oneself in the face of some or other progressive narrative. In my view, the series portrays Schlafly as someone who was advocating for space for traditional beliefs in the face of a tidal wave of popular opinion.
Women are often their own worst enemies. Today’s young female millennials unknowingly adore and even worship Gloria Steinem when perhaps if they knew feminist history better they would think otherwise. In formulating the ERA platform it was the unmarried & childless Ms. Steinem who argued (successfully) with the far-more intellectual & brighter, mother-of three, and author of ‘The Feminine Mystique’, Betty Friedan against putting issues of ‘family & motherhood’ front and center – the issues that have always and will always need to be addressed if women are to make advancement in the work world. Steinem is hardly a heroine and it’s truly unfortunate that Friedan and her brilliance didn’t live longer to stand up for mother, children & the family.
Of course it’s probably true of the US, where the tide came in, left some flotsam and went out again.
I’d maintain, that in the UK, it’s made some major changes, mainly in expectations, as well as in gender issues.
My daughter is her husband’s boss and has risen to Head of Department in her Russell Group university.
More significantly 35% of her colleagues are women, and she has two children, one about to have her 2nd year at Bristol.
However much we like to think we’ve tamed the law of tooth and claw, it’s still there.
Possibly, positive discrimination has reduced, but it should have done to avoid male resentment at being discriminated against.
The big bugbear is child-rearing – both my two sons are hands-on Dad’s with their wives going out to work (as do they). But their involvement in child-rearing has had an depressing effect on their promotion in their professions.
Most of our close European neighbours trail the UK in promoting women in the workplace – honourable exceptions being Scandanavia.
This is a very poor article.
“Women’s earnings will still lag behind men’s.”
Not when you account for variables like number of hours worked and the types of jobs they do. This is a total canard.
“Men will still be raping and killing women.”
Well, yes, crime still exists: good luck solving that via activist politics. And men are the primary victims of male violence.
“Pornography will be more pervasive than ever, and more misogynistic too.”
Some women enjoy porn, even violent porn (witness the success of Fifty Shades of Grey). In any event, whatever one’s personal opinion of porn, its massive expansion via the internet has actually coincided with a reduction in the amount of rape.
“The USA will still not have had a female vice-president, never mind president.”
A woman ran for president last time and the voters rejected her (including a majority of women from her own racial group). This hardly seems like sexist injustice.
“It will, however, have put its first self-confessed groper to the White House.”
Ah yes, Trump is an unprecedented womaniser and sex pest, unlike Bill Clinton, JFK, etc..
Keep on dreaming …
Why on earth would I’ve to pay someone else’s wife?
Why should they ever become the same? On average, men are more competitive, more interested in status, and love money more. They are also less emotional and better in large scale collaborations. Most of all, they like working with things more than people and since this is easier to scale, thing work tends to pay better. If equal earnings is your goal you set yourself up for eternal disappointment. Or make sure the maternity leave pays incredibly well.
Highly exaggerated …
Why on earth is the p***s or lack of that relevant in a democracy? All adult women have the vote?
I hate defending T. but he never claimed to have groped women so this statement is patently false. He claimed that women let him grope them by the p***y because her is famous. He was explaining, in a private conversation, that when you’re famous some (many?) women to be quite open to having sex. Aka the groupy effect that is very well known, fame is a huge aphrodisiac for women. T. is afraid of germs so it is extremely unlikely he has ever been very gropy.
First, feminism is largely for long educated rich white women like the author. Many measures during my life were quite disadvantageous to working women that wanted to become mothers. The ERA wanted to make it completely impossible to make any distinction between men and women, which would’ve harmed many women. Since a lot of people do not know what the hoopla was all about, this was the whole amendment:
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Sec. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Sec. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
By the letter of the law, Mrs. Ditum’s maternity leave pay would’ve become impossible without also giving it to men. Women would have become eligible for the draft. And closing the earning gap would become even harder.
She does not represent Schlafly correctly. Schlafly realized men and women were fundamentally different and the law needed the flexibility to adjust for the many differences between men and women.
And it is not as if it worked out so badly for women. As far as I can see is the law quite equal, but any bias is in favor of women. I.e. family court, rape punishment, etc.
So much of the series is pure fiction- it’s a bit silly to be writing an article about it. The writers do not dispute that they made most of it up, including many of the prominent characters. Why not write about the real people and events?
My guess is because for feminism the narrative is more important than the truth. Stories that tell the ‘story’ they approve of are perfectly fine, better in fact.
“Easier for Schlafly: her movement exists in the service of a particular kind of woman only.” And from that observation we are to conclude that Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan are typical of the entire balance of the female population on the globe? Several of the tales that Betty Friedan related in the “Female Eunuch” were later proven to be false and she later refused to discuss the evidence. Gloria Steinem was given a graduate school grant from a CIA front company, that executed to the money transfer and then disappeared from existence. Are these more typical of the “successes” that the author wants to see in the world?
The really interesting figure for me was Bella Abzug, whom I just about remember in U.S. politics, the endless compromises she made with patriarchal power, the incremental advances and the terrible setbacks, the anger and the patience and the disappointment. And Margo Martindale, who would be a superstar if she were a man, but we have different requirements for female fame.
Looking at Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the requirements for fame seem to be the same: corruption, psychopathy and ruthlessness.
That might have been a funny joke, if you’d made it a few years ago, but amazingly, it turns out that plenty of people, happily cheerleading the most corrupt administration the U.S. has ever seen, actually believe the idiocies you oh-so-successfully parodied in your comment.
Neither a joke now nor 4 years ago. Trump has many failings as a person and as a politician. He has however questioned the endless wars fought by the US in this century. That he might actually act on this sentiment is why so many people want to destroy him. Clinton and Biden on the other hand have never encountered a war they didn’t like. Clinton in fact started her own war in Libya just to show her fellow psychopaths that she was ‘fit’ to be made President. In supporting her, you show your own psychopathy and indifference to suffering including the return of slavery to northern Africa. As for corruption, have you never heard of the Clinton Foundation or Clinton’s tampering with the judicial process? Not that she was out of place in the Obama administration. One that bailed out Wall Street but not the people the banks evicted from their homes. One that refused to give all Americans healthcare but instead subsidised private healthcare. A President who went to Flint, pretended to sip the poisoned water that residents were forced to drink and used that as justification for doing nothing. None of this – war, slavery, homelessness, premature death and illness – seems to matter to you as long as the President of the US has a vagina.
I agree that avoiding unnecessary wars is a major contribution.
Lol the comments! So many blokes (ie commenters with blokey names) got a view on this subject. Male fragility?
Well I identify as a female mechanic, Andrew so I guess I can have an opinion.
Do women ever opine on “toxic masculinity?”
Oh, yeah, they are the ONLY ones who do.
Female fragility?
Good for you!
Shocking! “commenters with blokey names” have a view on how history is represented? Because… history must only be discussed by women?
Interesting your attempt to respond to comments you disagree with is an attempt at “shaming” rather than refuting, I’m sure your take is very informative “Andrew.”
Just an observation really – you seem to illustrate the sensitivity to which I was referring. Would help you if I said my name was Andrew but I was a trans man? I’m not.
Well, let’s see…I have a mother, a wife, and 3 daughters. I am charged with their wellbeing, care, and protection. So yeah, you’re damn right, Andrew. I’ll march right on over to the women’s table, grab a chair, kick my feet up and have myself a big helping of informed opinion. To couch this as “male fragility” is just dumb.
Tell us, Andrew. Do you have any women in your life to whom you’re responsible? Or are you just another disposable “ally”?
I’ve a wife a mother and a daughter. They are all bar one adults with their own responsibilty. For one I am an attorney since she is demented. I am thus acutely aware of the difference. These are complex issues. To couch a one sentence comment as “dumb” is not just unnecessarily perjorative, but dumb.
Best.