Summary: The following is a chapter from the book Anatomy of Female Power by Chinweizu Ibekwe. Written in 1990, it offers an interesting analysis of the conflicts of interest underlying modern feminism. Google the title to download the whole book as a PDF.
Feminism: A Revolt in Paradise
I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.
-- The "voice within women", as reported by Betty Friedan.
Women's liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about that.
-- Golda Meir
Despite woman's paradise of privileges -- privileges anchored on the womb, privileges of which most women are fully and happily aware -- feminists claim that women are powerless, and are oppressed by men. They have therefore demanded a reorganization of society on the basis of equality between men and women. They say they want a world without roles assigned by gender: a world in which women share power and work and status equally with men -- in the home and outside it, in the kitchen and in the office; in minding the mess and confusion of the children's play pen, and in managing the crises and disasters in the corridors of public power.
If indeed human society is basically matriarchal, despite its patriarchal facade; if woman is indeed man's boss; if most women know that their lives are quite privileged compared to the lives of their men, what then is one to make of feminism and its egalitarian programme?
To help us assess feminism, we ought to note that, in their attitudes to men, there are three basic types of women: the matriarchists, the tomboys and the termagants. A matriarchist is a woman who believes that a man's natural or god-ordained role in life is to serve some matriarch or married mother; and that the best way to get full service out of him is to make him think that he is his matriarch's boss. A tomboy is a woman who would rather be a man. A termagant is a woman, whether tomboy or quasi-matriarchist, who insists on showing her man that she, not he, is boss; she therefore takes sadistic pleasure in harassing and bossing men.
Most women, down through history, have been matriarchist. Tomboys there have always been, but most, at puberty, reconciled themselves to the matriarchist social arrangements which suited the overwhelming majority of women. Termagants, the man-hating, temperamental misfits in the matriarchist paradise, there have always been. Incensed by the facade of patriarchy, they would vent on the hapless men around them their resentment of the matriarchist requirement that women make believe that they are ruled by men.
Feminism is a movement of bored matriarchists, frustrated tomboys and natural termagants; each of these types has its reasons for being discontented in the matriarchist paradise that is woman's traditional world. Indeed, the career of post WWII feminism may be summarized as follows:
- Bored matriarchists (like Betty Friedan) and frustrated tomboys (like Simone de Beauvoir) kicked it off;
- Termagants (like Andrea Dworkin) made a public nuisance of it;
- Satisfied matriarchists (like Phyllis Schlafly) oppose it;
- Non-militant tomboys (the female yuppies) have quietly profited from it.
Friedanite feminism began by giving public voice to the craving by bored, wealthy, suburban American housewives for "something more than my husband and my children and my home." Much of feminism has been inspired by this desire for something better than the matriarchist paradise; however, feminists find it politically expedient to present their aggrandizing demands in the language of liberation from oppression. But it is hard, without standing the word "oppression" on its head, to fathom how their boredom, an affliction of the leisured and the idle rich, can be taken as a product of oppression. It takes Orwellian doublespeak to say that such a wife is oppressed by the husband whose income makes possible her leisured life. And if the idle rich are oppressed, then what are slaves, peons, and the like?
What Friedanite feminism proves is that what to most women is paradise, to some women is hell; that any paradise can bore some to rebellion. Such a rebellion is the subject of this bizarre story from Switzerland, which is aptly titled "Pampered Wife Wants Divorce":
A housewife has filed for divorce claiming her hubby made her miserable -- by doing too much work around the house!
The Zurich, Switzerland, woman -- identified only as Susan -- said she had absolutely nothing to do and was totally demoralized after six years of living with her husband Karl and being waited on hand and foot.
In court papers, she said her 42-year-old office worker husband returned from his job every day and started work all over again -- cleaning house, according to accounts in the Swiss newspaper Blick.
'As soon as Karl comes back from work the devil is loose at home,' the unhappy wife, 36, said. 'He takes the vacuum cleaner and runs it through the whole apartment, washes all the dishes, cooks and then puts the two kids to bed. Karl never said anything against my housework, but he came home and did it all over again. It really makes me feel dispensable.'
The couple have two children, aged 2 and 3, and until Susan moved out several months ago, they lived together in a comfortable suburban apartment. Susan, a former nurse, stayed home with the children while Karl went off to work every day.
But when Karl came home at night, the couple's normal family life took a bizarre twist. The energetic husband played housewife for hours, Susan said, and even brought her breakfast in bed.
'He even ironed my blouse', Susan testified. 'I told him to stop, but he said he did it to make me look better. I put up with this for five years, all this strange behaviour. But then Karl started learning to knit and it was just too much for me.'
Susan said her housekeeping hubby refused to switch places with her, so she could go out and work.
That's when she decided she needed a divorce.
Had this Swiss Susan been a true matriarchist, she would have been deliriously happy at having acquired a super-workaholic nest slave; she would have regarded herself as the blessed of the blest. Had she been an American Friendanite, she would have screamed that she was being oppressed; and instead of filing for a divorce and making her personal exit from a boring paradise, she would have declared that "the personal is political", and demonstrated for women's lib, and campaigned for the ERA.
Anyway, however dubious the "oppressed" status of Friendanite feminists was, once their banner was unfurled, tomboys and termagants were powerfully drawn to it. Under the banner of feminism, the militant tomboy, who would rather be a man, vents her frustration on men instead of appealing to god or the surgeon for a sex change. Under the banner of feminism, the non-militant tomboy goes on to become a yuppie, a business or political entrepreneur, glad for a social climate in which, when she plays male roles, she encounters less resistance than previous generations of tomboys did. She goes into previously all-male fields, and still uses to full advantage all the skills and weapons of female power.
The termagant (the shrew, scold and harridan of old) is a misandrous sadist whose greatest pleasures come from man-baiting and man-bashing. She resents the matriarchist code which would have her pretend that she is not boss to her man. Under the banner of feminism she can fully blossom. The termagant now carries on her man-harassing and man-bossing without restraint, battering a man's ears with blows from her tongue without fear of retaliation by blows from his fist. The termagant claims for herself a tyrant's absolute freedom of conduct, and would punish any reaction, however natural, she provokes from men. She is the type of woman who would wear a miniskirt without panties, a see-through blouse without bras, and swing her legs and wiggle her arse as she parades up and down the street, and yet insist that no man should get excited by her provocative sexual display. Any man who whistles at the sight is berated for male chauvinism. She would put out all male eyes with white-hot iron spits so they would not subject the naked female to "the male gaze". She is so outraged by male energy and exhuberance that she would have all males between 15 and 35 put in prison, just to spare women their attentions. If she flirts and teases and leads an adolescent boy on, well beyond the limits of his self-control, and he rapes her, she would demand that he be hanged. The only males she would have in the world are lobotomized robots and enervated poodles, all at her beck and call. Under the guise of "radical feminism", some termagants, in their utter misandry, have retreated into lesbian ghettos, and from there attack, as traitors to womankind, those other women who are heterosexual, and who do not totally refrain from social and sexual intercourse with men. Under the banner of feminism, all this is treated as legitimate human behaviour.
The matriarchist -- as the nest-queen who happily trains, rules and enjoys the income of the male head of her house -- is largely unpersuaded by feminist demands for an equality which would end her privileges. As the prime beneficiaries of the system which feminists would dismantle, the quiet army of satisfied matriarchists is the great immovable rock upon which the tidal wave of feminism spends its fury.
Though feminism parades itself as a revolt against the domination of women by men, it is in fact a revolt by some tomboys against some of women's privileges within the matriarchist paradise, and a revolt by termagants against the matriarchist restraints on their freedom to tyrannize males. However, despite basing their campaign on the principle of gender equality, only a few feminists, a rare few who recognize a need for consistency and fairness, go so far as to accept that the equality they demand must apply also in the trenches, battlefields, mines and other high risk and strenuous areas of life. For the rest, their egalitarian clamour is simply a ruse, and they scheme to head men off from insisting on its full scale implementation.
Most men did not see feminist egalitarianism as the ruse that it was. Of the few who did, a mere handful glimpsed that feminism was not a revolt against oppression by men, but a clamour for additional privileges and opportunities for women. Such men began that men's liberation movement which drew the ire of feminists like Carol Hanisch. However, lacking an analysis of female power, the men's liberation movement did not get very far. Most men, being machos, were thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that men rule women, that human societies are strictly patriarchal: they did not, therefore, take seriously the idea that men needed liberating. At best, they saw men's liberation as a practical joke to annoy feminists.
Many non-feminist women understood the ruse in the egalitarian campaign of the feminists. While they were, understandably, less than eager to join a campaign which could endanger their paradise of traditional privileges, it was also not in their interest to expose it. In fact, for so long as feminism brought new opportunities to women, but without endangering traditional female privileges, many women were sympathetic to it. But when it became clear that gender equality might threaten their traditional privileges (by, for example, requiring women to be drafted into infantry platoons), feminism lost many of its female sympathizers and fellow travellers.
In the USA, that threat emerged with the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution. Some elite matriarchs then decided to safeguard women's privileges from the ravages of feminism. Turning militant, they took to the streets and campaign trails and mobilized the matriarchist majority of women to defeat the ERA.
These militant matriarchists, these "right-wing women" (as Andrea Dworkin calls them), disagree profoundly with the feminist picture of women's lot. Some hold that women are "in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position". They opposed the ERA because, if it was passed, "girls would have to go to war", and ERA would force women "to take responsibility for decision making and for money". One of them told Andrea Dworkin that "pro-ERA women are ignorant and malicious," and that "pro-ERA feminists do not know what the interests of women are." She outlined them as "a strong home and strong laws protecting the family in which the man, not the state, protects the woman". What the anti-ERA women fought to protect was the traditional matriarchist arrangement where the husband takes responsibility for decision making, for earning the family income, and for the safety of his wife's nest. So many women wanted that arrangement preserved that they helped to stop the feminist tide at the gates of the ERA.
In the view of the aroused matriarchists, feminism is a revolt in paradise; and the feminist rebels jeopardise the ancient matriarchist privileges of all women. As a result, despite advertising itself as a movement for the liberation of women, feminism has provoked the opposition of the matriarchist majority of women, and has therefore remained a minority movement.
The triumph of the anti-ERA campaign was only partly due to matriarchist fears of losing traditional privileges. It also capitalized on the resentments felt by many women who deplored the changes which feminism had brought to their lives. This resentment can be encountered in many parts of the world. For example, a London upper-middle-class wife denounced feminism for making her lot worse than her mother's had been. Her mother had not been obliged to take a job and earn money; but she herself had to, since men of her class, well tutored by feminism, now expected their wives to work and earn money. As she and most matriarchists see it, that a husband now helped in the kitchen, or changed nappies, or pushed prams, is pitiful compensation for a wife's loss of the privilege to stay home, out of the rat race, and be supported by a man in the style to which she was accustomed.
Another London woman complained that feminism had killed off gallantry, and so a man no longer felt obliged to give up his seat on a crowded bus to a woman, however heavily laden she might be with briefcase, cosmetic handbag, and bulging grocery sacks.
Even some yuppie feminists, who have taken advantage of the new opportunities to rise in fields traditionally reserved for men, have become impatient with radical feminists, whose continuing clamour could provoke a male backlash and jeopardise their yuppie gains. They would therefore like to see radical feminism curbed or laid to rest. One of these, magazine editor Debbie Raymond, recently said:
Women today have never had it so good. We can stay at home and look after hubby and the kids. We can go out and get a job. It's all equal opportunity ... take our clothes off or keep them on, the world is a woman's oyster. So what the heck is the problem?
In growing despair at the declining support for their cause among women of all kinds, radical feminists (especially the lesbian luddites among them) have taken to denouncing non-feminist women (or those they feel are not feminist enough); they call them cowards, traitors, collaborators, subalterns and dupes of men!
However, despite losing momentum since the defeat of the ERA in the USA, feminism has succeeded, world wide, in enlarging women's opportunities without reducing their traditional privileges. Both in the home and outside it, the world has indeed become a woman's oyster. The matriarchist social system has been obliged to accomodate the aspirations of tomboys, and to legitimize the man-bashing propensities of termagants. And since no country has taken feminist egalitarian propaganda seriously enough to actually send boys and girls, side by side, into battlefields, women have improved their paradise without paying the price demanded by the feminist doctrine of gender equality.
However, the fears of the matriarchists who opposed the ERA still remain: whenever men take a full and clear-eyed stock of the results of feminism, they may still insist on gender equality in every field, including the battlefield. Most women, of course, dread that day.
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