Infected by feminism

Yesterday I was attacked by occasional commenter, Medusa, who told me to get off my arse and get a real job, the implication being that staying home to raise my children is not worth my time and they turn out just fine if a woman works full-time.  In fact she went further and implied her children would turn out better than mine because she worked while they were growing up!  Anyway, Medusa's comment was incredibly catty and I responded in kind, but, it reminded me of this post that I wanted to write. Namely that feminism has influenced very deeply how most people see women in society and what little value is given to motherhood.

Marxism early on recognised the bourgeoisie mother at home as a real obstacle in achieving a socialist society and so worked on making all women think that they would be far more valuable working than staying home raising their children and looking after their families. In other words, becoming a generator of income rather than a raiser and teacher of children.  This way, the woman would be separated from her children and less able to influence them in order to pass on conservative family values and religion.

Several decades on from when working outside the home was mostly a choice, and something women did only because of necessity; now families rely on that second income, making the mother at home somewhat of an anachronism. What is wrong with a woman who stays home, people think. Well ... nothing actually. In a society where the absurd has become normalised, nothing at all.

So, here's a test for everyone reading this blog. Do you think you are a feminist, or have been infected by feminist thought without realising it? If you agree with any of the core feminist principles below, you are a feminist. If you also think you are a conservative, you might want to think again. Feminism and conservatism are not compatible - you are either one or the other.

At its core, Feminism teaches that:

• Men and women tend to behave differently because of social conditioning, not because there are innate biological and psychological differences between them.
• The chief reason women have been less often represented in the first ranks of public achievement in scholarship, the arts, politics, and war, is that in every human society of which we have evidence, throughout all of recorded history, they were repressed by a patriarchal power structure maintained through force and indoctrination.
• Because large numbers of children in a family constitute both a barrier to the advancement of women and a threat to our ecology, small families should be the cultural norm.
• It is unjust that the consequences of sexual behavior are biologically unequal for men and women. As much as possible, those consequences must be equalized through medical technology and reformed cultural attitudes.
• To find meaning in their lives, women should look first to their careers, rather than to their role as lifegivers, culture bearers, nurturers, and educators of the next generation of human beings.
• Women who regard themselves as mothers first are wasting their education and smothering their talents by staying home to raise their children.

I personally reject all the above core feminist ideas. They are all destructive and all contribute to the disintegration of society. The only way that this can be turned around is for parents to start living in way where they understand that they are the primary raisers of their children and to give that responsibility to other people is to court trouble. As Donna Steichen says:

The sole advantage of living in a lawless time is that you can refuse to be a child of your age. Almost everyone in this workers’ society is too preoccupied with his own place on the treadmill to pay much attention to your eccentricities. What devastated our culture was the flight of mothers from their homes. Society is drowning in the consequences, but nothing prevents you and your family from living your lives differently. Our culture will never be restored until women again take up rearing their children as their chief and indispensable task—and men make the sacrifices needed to support them in that decision. While aggressive forces continue to push the nation toward family disintegration, a healthy resistance movement is awake and growing. It is made up of uncompromising religious believers, pro-lifers, and homeschoolers, both organized and autonomous, along with back-to-the-land agrarians and Tea Party independents. One Virginia women’s organization summed things up in a bumper sticker reading “Be Countercultural: Raise Your Own Kids.”.

Related link : Is Feminism a Heresy? ~ Donna Steichen, Crisis Magazine