Saturday, April 10, 2010
2:30 AM
What Have Women Sought?
It should be observed that true men have never feared greatness in women, even in the ones whom they have loved. While many devotees of theatre love the song, Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, a delightful tune whose charm springs from the spunky clash of the sexes, it does not in anyway capture the historical relationship between Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. On the contrary, Frank understood perfectly well that Annie was a prodigy and promoted her advancement in showmanship. He was hardly a ‘swollen-headed stiff.’
G. K. Chesterton drew this distinction between the woman glorified as a demi-goddess for her greatness and the grasping woman so often put down to being a shrew by ‘old fogeys’:
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the political woman; an entirely different thing…. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little longer and wider than is dignified--well, I only write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. (G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men: The Suffragette)
In the above excerpt one has an illustration of woman not competing with men, but being placed in a position of power and yielding to exercise it for the greater good. This is her duty and her glory, yet it is passive. What is the influence that woman may seek actively? The great religious educator, Mother Janet Erskine Stuart wrote of it thus:
The only way to govern is to love…this is a woman’s order and must be governed in a woman’s way—by the heart not by logic. The heart is the mainspring of a woman’s government. Therefore, anything that takes nearer to the heart of people is our great power. Unselfishness and love are our levers.
There are petty-minded, small men in this world that do feel threatened by women. These would be flawed men, but what member of humanity is not flawed? And are women without spiritual blemish? Hardly. This fact has shown itself in the way ‘Women’s Liberation’ has campaigned for its goals.
First, what have they demanded? Rights. Do they speak of duties? No. Yet, rights do not exist where there are no duties. A woman’s right to be respected necessitates a man’s duty to respect. However, feminists insisted on only half of this reality. Yes, they demanded rights and esteem with a hazy sort of logic, wishing to be put on what they saw as equal terms with men, arguing from commonality of species and brushing aside differences in gender. It never occurred to them to consider the reasons certain fences had been erected before tearing them down, or if differences in gender did sometimes entail differences in duties, and consequentially, in rights.
When suffragettes indecorously chained themselves to fence posts (not that being indecorous is always wrong), they did not stop to think what a vote even was or whether perhaps a married woman should be contented with her husband having one vote for the entire family.
‘But a woman is not a mute appendage of her husband!’ Rightfully so! However, is the vote merely an expression of one’s personal opinion? Is it really as trivial as preferring blue stripes to green, apples to oranges, or hiking to horseback-riding? Or is it as personal as religious affiliation, philosophical disposition, or artistic taste? By all means then, if a political vote is just an expression of one’s identity, then women ought to have it, and so should her children, too by the way. One cannot argue against completely universal suffrage, if the ability to take part in a ballot represents one’s dignity as a human being. The ill-informed, the criminal, and the extremely young ought to have a vote, as well, if the quality of humanity is the basis for this entitlement.
I am not a democrat by any means, but I at least concede that if a democracy is to work, then the ballot ought to be taken seriously. A nation’s people ought to have some say in the determination of their country, and this ought not to be a matter of personal prejudice but of a soul’s conviction of what is right.
A husband and wife may beg to differ on the superiority of Italian or Russian opera, but they should be united on the future they wish for their children. The more serious the issue, the more it determines the fate of their country, the more a man and his wife must be united if their household is to have any sort of unity and happiness. In such a case, having two votes is indeed superfluous. As to common, single women? Well, frankly, I’m not so sure that common, single men should even be able to vote. He that has no stake in a nation’s future is not likely to make sagacious choices.
Thus, a matter feminists confused for discrimination on the basis of gender, was actually the question of a form of government (true democracy) and its failure to succeed against the onslaught of another (mercantile aristocracy). Other issues for which women campaigned fail to bear the scrutiny of logic as well.
Second, just as Women’s Liberation proponents have not considered the full extent of what they demand, they have not thought of the rippling effects of getting what they want. E.g., they see that the other gender is able to copulate as it pleases without worrying about the burden of a child, and that it may often receive the approbation of other male peers after sexual exploits (never mind how the old societies looked down on such seducers). Infidelity on a man’s part seems easier as well, and civilization has often been more inclined to overlook it, or in the cases of polygamous societies, indulge it.
Without even considering the fact that women are more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases or that a woman’s heart is not easily polyandrous (as science can virtually demonstrate with its developing research on oxytocin), feminists declared that they wanted the same liberties as rakes and wanted them immediately. They only saw one stumbling block—the inconvenience of the miracle of life. Abortion and contraceptives then had to be requirements in their campaign, and the life of another human being was laid on the altar to female appetite.
Ironically, the sort of abusive males that created the ‘need’ for this sort of escape could not have been more pleased with this development. Males are frequently the ones dropping the mothers of their children off at abortion mills to ‘have it taken care of.’ Males also engineered the pill, and sacrificed women’s lives via experimentation to do so. An equivalent of the birth control pill for men was tested, with the effect of shrinking the subject’s maleness; experiments here ceased immediately. Did such doctors evince any concern for women’s welfare here?
In a patriarchal system, a father is at least held to accountability, yet instead of declaring war on the behaviour that demeaned women and striving to revive chivalry and paternity, feminists actually chose to imitate the men that had abused them. Instead of insisting on premarital abstinence and that husbands strive for fidelity, they lobbied for the means to behave in the same way. It didn’t matter how many lives got in the way, or even whether those lives were female. The death toll is still mounting by the tens of millions, and due to the widespread .practice of gender selective abortion, most of those victims are female.
Summarising the problems of the Women’s Liberation movement thus far: first, women did not even understand the things they were demanding. Second, they evinced extreme selfishness in not giving a mongrel’s bark for the consequences of the revolution they were bringing on. Now for the third, 'Woman’s Liberation' was in effect an act of treachery against mankind—mankind in the very literal sense that she declared war on men and women.
Note, I do not say war on males, but war on men. It was not that these women wished vile seducers and oppressors to be punished, but that they yearned for the ability to play the same games.
‘I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.’ _Maureen Reagan.
Well, Ms. Reagan, be glad and rejoice, for there isn’t much competence or compassion in the foremost women holding office at all. Instead of seeking to bring that which lacked in the masculine gender up to the standards of the feminine, feminists have laid us all low.
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About Me
- Jacobitess
- Warsaw, Poland
- Domine, spero quia mundum vicisti. Lord, I trust that Thou hast overcome the world. Panie, ufam, żeś pokonał świat.
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