After proclaiming my dislike for Betty Friedan’s ideas, I will likely be met with the rebuke that I must be thankful to feminists. Where would I be without them? Master’s degree? Forget about it! Personal credit card? Not a chance! How could I ever question the obvious benefits of the feminist regime?
Reading a deranged feminist introduction to “Madame Bovary” earlier this month, I found this gem from a leading first-wave feminist:
Lucy Stone, writing in 1855, a full century before Friedan, said, “In education, in marriage, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart—until she bows down to it no longer.”
There is a reason we call it “blind rage.” Someone who descends to bitterness and self-pity of the level Stone describes can no longer see clearly. A woman infected with the idea that a phalanx of patriarchal men has conspired to oppress her and make her life more difficult at every turn will likely struggle to see her husband as fully human. He is an agent of the enemy, one who does not want what is best for her.
For evidence of this, consider the online brand of aggrieved wife and mother Paige Connell. In video after video, Connell bemoans how little her husband does around the house, how difficult her life is, and how often she sees example of male incompetence and malicious oppression of mothers in public.
Connell’s videos are especially amusing when you consider information shared by cultural commentator Matt Walsh. From publicly available interviews, it appears that Connell, a mother of four married for almost two decades, does not need to work but chooses to for her own personal fulfillment. And what does her lazy lout of a husband do? He is a lineman, only one of the most dangerous professions there is. While his wife blabs ceaselessly on the internet, he gets to come home to be henpecked into making dinner and doing the dishes just the way she likes.
Do not believe Connell. It does not take “six months” of “mental load” to schedule a pediatrician appointment. It’s quite easy. Your husband can figure out what size your kids’ shoes are or the two of you can decide to let the tyke go about like a ragamuffin if no one in the household cares strongly about personal attire.
As deranged as this ranting blog post may seem, my point is that there is a clear through-line from the anger of Lucy Stone, an anger that she wished to press into the heart of every wife and mother to let it fester and destroy, the ravings of that esteemed fairy godmother of the modern feminist movement, Betty Friedan, and the constant complaints of contemporary feminist voices like Paige Connell. I am not grateful for all that unnecessary emotional turmoil inflicted on our collective culture. I do not think we can necessarily attribute “advancements” in the status of women in our society (debatable: consider Alice Von Hildebrand’s “The Privilege of Being a Woman” as a counterargument) to the bitterness and contempt of feminists. And I do not see how they can be described as other than bitter and contemptuous.
The means do not, after all, justify the ends. If feminism requires women to be miserable and ungrateful, I find it fundamentally flawed and reject it.
