Paul Gottfried recently penned an article for LewRockwell.Com on The Trouble with Feminism which serves, inadvertently, as a good introduction to the problems with traditionalist anti-feminism.
Unlike equity feminism, which argues that women deserve equal rights but is extremely critical of attempts by radical feminists to go beyond that, traditionalist anti-feminism is in large measure opposed entirely to the notion of men and women as roughly equal and able to participate in the public and private sphere on equal terms. For Gottfried the distinction between equity/individualist feminism and radical feminism is a false one — both views are equally radical.
Serious conservative scholars like Allan Carlson and F. Carolyn Graglia have maintained that the change of women?s role, from being primarily mothers to self-defined professionals, has been a social disaster that continues to take its toll on the family. Rather than being the culminating point of Western Christian gentility, the movement of women into commerce and politics may be seen as exactly the opposite, the descent by increasingly disconnected individuals into social chaos.
Even more importantly, the distinction between “moderate” and “radical” feminists, which is basic to [Kenneth] Minogue?s essay, is not a significant difference. That distinction is in fact based on what neocons are willing to absorb of the feminist movement, as opposed to what they dislike, at least for the moment. It is also without historical justification to focus on the sui generis character of the latest phase of feminism and to treat it as discontinuous from what preceded it. The arguments made by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique were pulled from a polemical arsenal that, as Mrs. Graglia demonstrates, went back to feminists of the early twentieth century. Already in the interwar years, female professionals were organizing to push through a predecessor of the ERA. It may be assumed from Minogue?s observations that it was ok for feminists to unite to break down gender barriers and to enlist the state on their side before Betty Friedan came on the scene.
Whereas equity/individualist feminism supports the right of women to enter the workplace (or stay home and take care of children for that matter) but oppose affirmative action and other forms of special treatment for women, for Gottfried the entry of women into the work place itself is a disaster.
The message is driven home through his inclusion of F. Carolyn Graglia as one of the “serious conservative scholars” who opposes feminism. Like Gottfried, Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism argues that feminism has been a disaster because it has encouraged women to enter the public sphere which simultaneously denigrated the traditional homemaker role of women, which Graglia seems to believe is the one true role that best fits women. Her book is filled with claims such as “when a woman lives too much in her mind, she finds it increasingly difficult to live through her body.”
Graglia endorses Andrea Dworkin’s view of heterosexual sex as an act of domination by men of women, with the main difference being that Graglia finds this to be a good thing. She goes so far on this line of thinking as to approve of the goal — though not the method — of genital mutilation in keeping women’s sexual assertiveness in control. When Cathy Young highlighted this tidbit in a review for Reason magazine, Graglia responded in a letter-to-the-editor saying,
My purpose is to suggest that the fact that some cultures felt so threatened by female sexual assertiveness that they would resort to such draconian measures to prevent it should give pause to those feminist sexual revolutionaries who promote such assertiveness as part of their sexual prescription.
In other words, the “serious conservative scholars” are just as bad as the radical feminists at making outrageous, illiberal claims.
Source:
The Trouble with Feminism. LewRockwell.Com,