Welcome to the oxytocin dreamworld of the “natural” woman. Don a muslin dress with gathered bodice accentuating your swelling breasts, at which the babe suckles and coos. The odor of fresh baked bread trails you from kitchen to crib and back. Sunlight streams through the open window of your cottage of eternal lactation.
Yes. Time’s come round again – as it has over and over throughout modern history – to argue about whether it is female “nature” to nurture, or whether the supposed female urge to nurture is more a function of nurture than nature.
The feminists of the 1960s fought for the right of girls and women to choose how they wanted to live – single or married, mothering or childless, working or supported. In a matter of a decade, they led American women out from under de facto male control, won the right to have bank accounts in their name, to more easily divorce, to charge a man with marital rape, and to work in jobs other than secretary, nurse or teacher.
Modern medicine moved the project along with the invention of hormonal birth control. For the first time in human history, women have a CHOICE about whether to have kids and stay home or to go out in the world as unencumbered and self-reliant humans.
A half century on, the having of that choice is deeply resented by the manosphere and their auxiliary on the right. MAGA thought leaders argue that choosing not to have children, or to have children and work outside the home, are against female “nature.” Their logic suggests that they feel having a choice is itself an ideological assault on stay-at-home motherhood.
“I think more women want a soft life, a beautiful life, than feeling all this pressure to do all these things,” Brittany Hugoboom, editor of the “right wing Cosmo” Evie Magazine, anti birth control entrepreneur, and the woman we have to thank for the revival of the milkmaid dress, told the New York Times recently.
Who exactly is “feeling all this pressure to do all these things” though?
Everyone who has had a child knows the first months alone with a helpless baby is life-altering. The outside world and its cares and pleasures shrink away from the perspective of a nursery at 3 a.m. But in my experience, plenty of women who gave up careers and stayed home after having children eventually wondered if they made the right call – and chose to go back to work. Mommy-bliss has a way of dissipating after the kids get to a certain age, often replaced with an itch of FOMO. Is boredom with housewifery and a personal desire for a professional life “pressure to do all these things”? Or does the mere existence of such a choice lead some who don’t want it to feel judged?
Last week, everyone was talking about conservative writer Helen Andrews’ ridiculous but provocative essay “The Great Feminization.” Andrews blames women – specifically the new majorities of women in educational institutions and professions – for cancel culture, and by extension, the dreaded wokening of America. Her reasoning is flimsy and relies on cherry-picked anecdotes, but no matter. The response has been fast and furious, as you can see here and here.
Andrews herself works in media. She has published a book lambasting generation Boomer and publishes regularly in right-wing journals. She is also a mother of three sons. On a recent podcast she said “Phyllis Schlafly is respected in our household.” Might she think differently with a daughter? Or would she dress her in a pinafore and teach her to embroider, as the extreme right is now doing to girls in its weird closed communities?
The premise of The Great Feminization is that majority female companies and institutions have “become hostile to men” – and, as she said on a recent podcast, also “to women who flourished when men controlled the institutions.” (Andrews might be thinking of herself – she started her career at William Buckley’s National Review.)
But what is most intriguing to me is that Andrews – who does work, who does want public influence, who does not stay home, who does not appear to wear the milkmaid costume – shares with the odious misogynist and bodybuilder Bronze Age Pervert and other thought leaders in Trumpworld a conviction about supposedly natural male and female traits. The prevailing ideology from DC to Claremont is that women are naturally more emotional and more “agreeable” – in the Big Five psychology sense. They are also believed less inclined to face open conflict, preferring to subversively stew and scheme and never forgive, while men will fight it out and “get over it.”
It is true that hand to hand conflict with men does not turn out well for women. Most men can kill most women with their bare hands, a fact that certainly shaped women’s lives and psyches since before our ancestors discovered fire. But countless wars have been started and waged by overly emotional men since before recorded history. Most murders are committed by men.
And as for getting over past slights I give you Exhibit A: Our American president lives to scheme for revenge and has never forgotten an offense or insult.
The emotional woman/rational man paradigm is built on utter nonsense. Last night, we binge-watched the Netflix series Adolescence, which offers a chilling look into the inability of boys and men to regulate their emotions and their tendency toward explosive violence.
Civilization arguably exists to restrain and control raging male – not female emotions. To argue otherwise and to now blame women’s newish modicum of independence and access to bodily and lifestyle choice for all society’s ills is just rightwing cool-girl blather.
Like the spoiled anti-vaxxers with no living memory of childhood diseases that killed or weakened generations, Andrews and her ilk have no experience of – and apparently no imagination for – life as women without alternatives in matters of marriage and child birth, subject to de facto male economic guardianship, with limited education and career options. The argument that hormonal birth control and economically self-reliant women are not “natural” is just another strategy in support of an outgrown social structure. Neither modern dentistry, nor MRIs, nor bridges, nor the wheel are “natural” – but we live quite happily with those advances.
As I’ve written before, Second Wave feminism, a movement that successfully challenged eons of patriarchy with the help of the birth control pill, and that made American women first class citizens for the first time, really, in female history, seems to have perversely culminated in the empowerment of women like Helen Andrews, who are willing to take an intellectual machete to those achievements. Others of her ilk are serving arguably the rapiest White House in modern history, spending countless hours on jets and in offices, away from husband and kids, clad in pant suits — just like that symbol of feminist witchery HRC — with the milkmaid dress gathering dust at home.
Substack Live this Thursday 10/30 at 2 PM ET
I will be discussing the phenomenon of empowered right wing anti-feminists and their hypocritical arguments against women’s empowerment with journalist Clara Bingham, author of The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973. Tune in this Thursday at 2 PM ET on Substack Live.
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Why does any woman vote for this? The GOP has masterfully influenced people to vote against their economic self interest for decades, but this?
Not to mention that the economy controlled by white privileged men have made it impossible for most families to survive on one income if they wanted to. Women working outside the home is a necessity for most. But right-wing men and their accomplices would like women to forever be held under glass ceilings in low paid working conditions (and prevented from competing with entitled white men). Educating women with control over their bodies and their lives is anathema to them.