Nothing Is Asked Of Women Anymore
Men crawl through the sewers, work the oil rigs, and account for nearly nine in ten people killed on the job. Society demands this of them and offers no apology for it. So ask the reverse: what does society still require of a woman that it cannot get from anyone else? After 50 years of feminism, the honest answer is nothing. We told women they had finally been freed. What we did was excuse them from being needed at all.
Modern progressivism places individual autonomy and personal happiness at the foundation of its philosophy. A successful society for progressives would be filled with each person making choices that ultimately lead them to happiness. The flaw in such a system, as we have seen with leftism today, is that when the individual is all that matters, ultimate happiness can only come from serving oneself, oftentimes through material goods.
A hallmark of modern progress is feminism. The surface-level goal of feminism is to acquire equality between men and women. This goal necessarily requires an oppressor/oppressed dynamic, or in feminist language: a patriarchy and its victims. Certain second-wave feminists understood that in order for women to be truly free in the way they imagined, for the patriarchy to be truly destroyed, the nuclear family had to be destroyed. These radical feminists saw the role of housewife as something they had to convince women that they didn’t want, or as Simone de Beauvoir stated in a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Feminists such as de Beauvoir found discomfort when women chose motherhood freely. A movement that seemingly celebrates choice should not fear the choice that women most naturally gravitate toward.
Every civilization depends upon certain responsibilities being embraced whether or not they are personally fulfilling.
These feminists wanted women to suppress their most natural, basic instinct: to have and raise children. And it worked. Birth rates have been on the decline in the United States since 1960, with women only having an average of 1.6 children, which is below replacement rates. This is bad news for any society that values its population; if we can’t replace ourselves, then there will be no society to speak of. Feminism doesn’t recognize this as a problem, and the ideology lets women off the hook, since they don’t claim women have an intrinsic duty to have children. Every civilization depends upon certain responsibilities being embraced whether or not they are personally fulfilling.
Without the responsibility of bearing and raising children, women are left without any true duty in a feminist world. There is nothing that society demands uniquely from them. On the other hand, men are not excused from their unique duties. Men are protectors of a society; they enforce law, protect borders, and protect the people within the borders. They keep our society running, outperforming women in the dirtiest and most labor-intensive jobs. Men make up 95.5% of sewage waste disposal jobs, 96% of field-based oil drilling rig operations, 85% of the police force, 95% of firefighters, and 80% of the military. Almost 92% of workplace deaths were experienced by men. These jobs are often physically demanding, thankless, and dangerous, yet we depend on them every day. Women are not barred from these industries; they simply opt out of them en masse.
If instead of feminism there existed a movement convincing men that instead of fulfilling their duties they should pursue personal happiness above all else, society would soon collapse as we know it. Humans seek comfort; many men may prefer to stay home and pursue comfort and hedonism instead of labor and sacrifice. But they don’t. Society puts necessary expectations on them as they are the only group that can ultimately fulfill these needs. Though women make up a small percentage of these fields, the truth is that women aren’t needed in these fields; men are. The equivalent role for a woman is motherhood, the only duty that only a woman can fulfill. No serious society would celebrate a movement encouraging men to abandon protection, provision, or sacrifice in exchange for comfort and self-actualization. Yet feminism allows women to celebrate their withdrawal from uniquely female responsibilities.
Women have been tricked into thinking that the ideal lies in the man’s role: to lead, to provide, even if just for themselves. The role of mothering has been degraded into something oppressive, something unworthy of women today. They are left to serve nobody but themselves. And they aren’t even happy. Women’s happiness as it relates to themselves and to men has been on the decline for over 50 years. At a time when women experience the most freedoms, they are experiencing the lowest levels of happiness. In the process of feminist progressivism, women were taught to view dependence, caregiving, and sacrifice as signs of weakness rather than expressions of love. Yet the strongest relationships and societies are built upon those very virtues.
No serious society would celebrate a movement encouraging men to abandon protection, provision, or sacrifice in exchange for comfort and self-actualization.
Feminism encourages women to deny their biological imperatives and maternal instincts in favor of career ambitions and personal autonomy. Feminists want women to be more like men and elevate masculine traits as ones women should emulate. They put the male role on a pedestal while degrading the feminine roles of mother and caretaker. What good is a society without all its participants serving each other in their own distinctive ways? If we all excused ourselves from our unique duties, could we say each person or society is operating at its highest level?
Individual happiness and the ability to choose are weak foundations for a functioning society. These may instead be natural positive consequences of a society that functions as it should, in alignment with natural law, but they are not the greatest ends for people or society. Instead of asking, “What do I want?” individuals should ask “What is needed of me?” In a feminist society, nothing is needed of women that is unique to them; in other words: anyone can do the jobs women do in a feminist society. This doesn’t sound like a movement that uplifts women. It instead sounds like a movement that deeply misunderstands what women were made to do. A society flourishes when its members embrace responsibility before self-interest.
The tragedy of feminism is not that it asks women to do more, but that it increasingly tells them they owe less.