Recently a feminist informed me that the reason that women have not made more discoveries and inventions throughout human history is that they were too busy taking care of children and cleaning the house. It’s a line I’ve heard many times before; if only those mean old men hadn’t kept women chained to the stove, barefoot and pregnant, women would have written the Summa Theologica and split the atom.
I have to wonder what these feminists imagine that men were doing while women were cooking dinner. Lolling about reading Greek philosophy in preparation for their own great work, perhaps, or messing about with chemicals in their private laboratories until they discovered gunpowder or something.
The reality is that for nearly all of human history, drudgery has been the lot of almost everyone, male and female. Really, that hasn’t changed, except that the many technological advances men have made have made the drudgery less onerous. Nowadays instead of twelve hours breaking their backs in coal mines or wheat fields, most men have eight hours of being bored in cubicles staring at a computer screen.
Furthermore, men’s work has always been more grueling than women’s, because men are the stronger sex. Mining, farming, building, smithing. Most Americans have visited those “living museums” where people wearing Colonial garb demonstrate how people used to weave, spin their own thread, or pound horseshoes into shape by hand. The first two are tedious; the third is arduous, and the idea of a woman doing it is ludicrous. It was hard enough for men. In addition to the hours of lifting a heavy hammer over and over and over again, there was the sweltering heat necessary to smelt iron. Women weren’t kept out of the smithy by selfish men who were forcing them to stay home with the spinning wheels. Rather, men sacrificed their health and spent their entire lives doing the work that was beyond the capabilities of women.
Men’s work has also been more dangerous. Women weren’t expected to defend the country from invaders (or do the invading, for that matter) or hunt wild animals. While men were being shot, stabbed, run through, gored, and trampled, their poor oppressed wives were stuck at home, safe and sound.
So over the centuries, very few men have had the leisure to create any more than women have. But there has usually been a leisured class, the ruling class who can afford to spend some of their time thinking and tinkering. This applies to the women of those classes as well. They had servants to cook and sew and take care of their children. Now, this class has usually produced many thinkers and scientists, because this class had the time to do so. But while men of this class often used their leisure for study or research, their women nearly always frittered it away in parties and gossip. The evidence for this is how many books the men as opposed to the women wrote over the centuries, and how few discoveries and inventions are credited to women, even among those women who had the leisure and money for such pursuits had they cared to follow them.
I can’t remember which of the masculinist books I have reviewed gave this example, but I consider it a very telling one: for thousands of years, delivering babies was women’s work. Men did not interfere with women’s entry to the midwife profession or tell them how to go about practicing it. No midwife invented the forceps. Then, a few centuries ago, some rich decadent women decided to have male doctors deliver their babies instead of midwives. Within a century, one of these men had invented the forceps, which have saved untold lives. Women can do something for hundreds of generations without innovating. As soon as men turn their hands to a pursuit, they are devising ways to improve it.
If you start to point any of this out to a feminist, she will usually insist that men were encouraged to achieve while women weren’t. To women, this argument makes sense, because women are deeply dependent on the approval of those around them. Standing alone is a male practice. There are women who can do it, but they are far, far rarer than men who can. But consider the hostility which every man who invented or discovered anything new has been greeted – Galileo put under house arrest, Socrates sentenced to drink poison, Martin Luther excommunicated, Darwin hounded by people who didn’t want to be descended from apes, Theodor Herzl driven into an early grave, Wilhelm Reich ordered by the FDA to stop selling orgone accumulators, Jesus Christ nailed to a tree. In the 18th century, there was a smallpox epidemic in Boston. A male doctor inoculated many people, saving their lives. Religious leaders had him arrested on the grounds that the epidemic was punishment from God, and the roused rabble set fire to his house. Where was the encouragement for these men?
But for this argument to hold up, women given encouragement and equal opportunity should make achievements every bit as impressive as those of men. For the last four decades, millions of dollars – many of them from the taxpayers – have been poured into programs to “encourage” girls to achieve in nontraditional fields. Feminists completely dominate the teaching profession and have done so for decades; if the encouragement they gave was the deciding factor, by now they could have given us a generation of male social workers and female engineers. They haven’t.
There are a few women who have made worthwhile scientific achievements. I recently read Against Depression by Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). He cites two women who made important advances in the scientific understanding of how depression affects the brain: Elizabeth Gould and Grazyna Rajkowska… but he also cites about a dozen male scientists. And of course, it was men who invented the microscope and the X-ray and the MRI and the various chemical processes which have made all of the discoveries in the book possible. Right now I’m looking around my apartment at the things which were invented during my lifetime, after the beginning of feminism. The laptop computer, the DVD player, the CD player, the DVR, the microwave oven, the cell phone. All invented by men. Female contributions to science remain fairly obscure ones known only to specialists in their fields.
As Guy White put it, “The whining that we get from feminists is that 200 years ago when men were farming or 80 years ago when men worked on assembly lines in sweat shops, women weren’t given the opportunity to be social workers and Women’s Studies Professors. I am sorry, but how many men were given those opportunities?”
Let’s stop blaming men for imaginary oppression and instead thank them for all that they have given to us.