Opinion & Commentary
Children pay the price of gender feminism war
For some radical feminists, males are patriarchal oppressors and the family is their torture chamber. Hence their taboo on men talking about the effects of feminism upon family life and the rearing of children. Yet feminists have dismissed the preferences of a great many women, gloried in the expulsion of men from the family, and made life harder for many children.
But first, an important distinction. There are two kinds of feminism: ‘liberal’ or equal opportunity feminism, and gender feminism. Liberal feminism has essentially won the battle for equal legal, political and property rights and for fair treatment in the workplace. Apart from a few sullen Neanderthals, men in general have endorsed (and often helped) these victories for women. Any remaining inequalities are less the result of unfair, systemic discrimination than the reflection of different choices arising from female and male preferences based, ultimately, in biological differences between the sexes. Which brings us to the essential thesis of gender feminism.
This is that biological differences between the sexes are of no significance in shaping the behaviour of men and women. “Gender” is entirely a social and political construct fashioned by men as an instrument with which to segregate, disenfranchise, and oppress women. Dependence on men, exclusion from the world, and banishment of women to the kitchen and the nursery, Betty Friedan declared, were the results. After asserting that women have the same needs as men for power and control, Friedan says: “When woman was denied access to satisfaction of those needs in society as a person in her own right, she made home and the family into a vehicle for her power and control, status and self-realisation….[which] then became her Frankenstein monster”.
Escape from the family “monster” became the centrepiece of the gender feminist agenda. This escape - if children were still to be born and cared for - could only be achieved if mothers entered the workforce en masse, preferably on a full-time basis and if family leave and child care were readily available. It meant men had to share equally in the tasks of rearing and domestic maintenance, that public support for dependent wives and children had to be reduced, that privileged access to promotion and public office through “affirmative action” programs needed to be routinely established, and that escape from marriage had to be made easier.
The struggle to implement this feminist agenda was reflected in public policy throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with success entrenched by the 1990s.
Escape from marriage was made easier by no-fault divorce. Demands for state-subsidised childcare were rapidly and extensively met. Pensions for sole parents (of whom about 90 per cent were women) removed responsibility from fathers and transferred it to the state (i.e. the taxpayer).
Concessions in the tax system for families with children were steadily whittled away. These moves, in combination with Friedan’s definition of women’s domesticity as no more than incarceration for idiots and “parasites”, attracted (or compelled) more and more mothers of infants into the workforce.
For such feminists, gender is entirely a malevolent social construction by men, without any connection to real, innate differences between the sexes. It follows that transformation of the social environment must become their political objective. In this are the seeds of a monstrous tyranny, because the only agency with the power to reach to the heart of civil society in a program of manipulation and social engineering is the state.
Logically, therefore, the state should take over the entire care and education of children. Otherwise, according to gender feminism, the inherently corrupt “patriarchal” family continues to do what it has always done – instruct its children and reproduce a male-dominated culture destined to oppress and subjugate women. As many women are coming to realise, the core proposition of gender feminism is that the institution of motherhood is the root cause of the oppression of women.
It is gender feminism’s contempt for the family that best explains why there is a backlash against it by women who accept the centrality of children and family as a cherished fulfillment for women – including women who also see maintaining a career or returning to work after children as desirable ends.
But the final irony is that feminist success has emancipated more men than women from family responsibilities. Men are freer, if not happier. In the end, the main casualties of gender feminism have been the children who don’t see their fathers – and less of their mothers.
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About the Author:
Barry Maley is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Family and Marriage in Australia, published by CIS.
