Feminism got started around 1850 with the introduction of Married Women Property Acts to repeal the prior existing Coverture system; Coverture being the last time the United States and England had a stable family system; ever since the end of Coverture family life has been steadily deteriorating (at least until 2009; there being evidence that family life has actually been improving since 2009).
What happened around 1850 to get feminism and family decay started? I would say rapid income growth and urbanization as a result of the Industrial Revolution is the likely answer; this disrupting the “old way of doing things.”
Feminism is the empowerment of women. Patriarchy is men taking care of women. Feminism is women protecting and taking care of themselves. Patriarchy is men protecting and taking care of women. Feminism is based on the assumption that men are bad, that men cannot be trusted to take care of women and treat women properly. Patriarchy is based on the understanding that it is men’s duty and role under God to take care of and look after women’s best interests.
There is an interesting question to ponder however; what if men really are bad and can’t be trusted? Then the empowerment of women, men assigning to women unilateral independent power, makes sense. If a man is bad then he will not use his power as a man to serve women, instead he will use his power as a man to serve himself. In this case empowering the woman to protect herself is better as the woman will reliably use power that she independently possesses to serve her own interests as a woman. The interests of the woman comes first.
So how do you protect women if you are a bad man? The answer is that you assign to the woman independent power that she can use to protect herself and take care of herself even against your potential aggressive abusive behavior against her. This being essentially what feminism is. Feminism is the way that bad men protect women from their own badness as men.
The patriarchal ethic is that women must be protected and taken care of and that women’s interests come first. Protecting women, taking care of women, and placing women’s interests first comes from patriarchy. Feminism then is the way that women are protected, taken care of, and given priority in their well being in a world of bad men; women being empowered by men to enable women to take care of themselves rather than being dependent upon a man to take care of them and women being given preferential treatment and concern over men to maintain the ethic that women’s interests come first.
Patriarchy is men protecting women, men taking care of women, and men placing women’s interests first. Feminism then is the means by which women are protected, women are taken care of, and women’s interests are placed first in an environment of bad selfish men who can’t be trusted; who fundamentally don’t trust and don’t believe in themselves as men.
There is however a problem with empowering women to protect and take care of themselves as women, that problem being the man being driven away from the woman, the man abandoning the woman. If the woman is left to take care of herself then the man is not taking care of her; this being men abandoning their duty and their responsibility as men to take care of women.
The three hallmarks of feminism as far as social statistics are concerned is increase in divorce, increase in married women working, and increase in out-of-wedlock births. In the United States the divorce rate in 1870 was 3%; this rising to 50% by 1975. The proportion of white married women in the workforce was 2.2% in 1890; this rising to about 60% in the year 2000. In 1917 the out-of-wedlock birth ratio among whites was 1.3%; this rising to 29.3% in 2013.
All three of these indicators (divorce, married women working, and out-of-wedlock births) can be viewed as men abandoning women, as men refusing their duty and their role of taking care of women. This is what feminism is; feminism is men abandoning women. Assigning unilateral power to women so that women can take care of themselves is men abandoning women. The whole reason to empower women in the first place is to then justify abandoning the woman because now she can take care of herself as a strong independent woman now that you as the man have empowered her.
Many will object that it is women who promote feminism, it is women who are favored by feminism, it is women who initiate divorce most of the time, it is the woman who chooses to have a child out-of-wedlock, and it is the married woman herself who wants to work at a paid job. In other words, all this is the fault of women, not men.
As Dalrock put it in his recent post “The coward’s way out.”:
“The fiction that what we are witnessing is men abandoning their families, and not women ejecting the fathers from the homes, is the very foundation of conservative support for the destruction of traditional marriage. Lost in all of this are the millions of innocent children who grow up without their fathers because mom wanted freedom to bang other men, and cowardly men like Kevin Williamson couldn’t bear to speak, or even think the truth of the matter.”
Feminism is men assigning power to women so that women can take care of themselves and are responsible for their own lives so that men no longer have to take care of women or be responsible for women’s well being anymore. The woman then grabs onto the power men give to her and asserts this power to meet her needs in various ways; exactly as was intended by the men who gave her power in the first place. Is the woman then having power all the woman’s fault because the woman uses the power that was given to her by men for the purposes the men intended in the first place?
Feminism is men’s fault because men are the ones who chose to give power to women in the first place.
Feminism is a corrupted dysfunctional version of patriarchy where women are assigned the role of protecting and taking care of themselves rather than traditional patriarchy where the man provides for and protects women himself directly.
Men are more powerful than women, this being true regardless of the social circumstances a society may find itself in. The underlying social structure of the United States is still a patriarchy, feminism being a version of patriarchy rather than a refutation or a nullification of patriarchy. Women’s interests still come first, just as was the case under traditional patriarchy. Indeed the origin of the idea that women’s interests should come first is based on what traditional patriarchy taught and practiced.
In order for the problem of feminism to be solved men must become moral so that men directly providing for and protecting women themselves makes sense. Men must again believe in themselves as men based on the real and true virtue the man has developed within himself and then the man from that position of morality will be justified in asserting his rightful authority and dominance over women again.
The man becomes moral by surrendering himself in obedience to God; by taking on his God imposed responsibilities and duties as a man in service to women. Once the man places himself in submission to God that is when the man will be prepared to impose his right of dominance over a woman. When such rightful male dominance over women is restored that is when society overall and relationships between men and women will heal.