Because we
live in a day and age where bad hair dye jobs have caught up with feminist
sensibilities, we tend to think that earlier waves of feminists were more reasonable,
and more sensible.
But no, the
first wave feminists were not the saner feminists. As Helen Kendrick Johnson
writes in the 1890’s:
“I
copy from the "Salt Lake Herald" a few sentences taken from an
interview with Mrs. Cannon, State Senator elect. When asked if she was a strong
believer in woman suffrage, she answered: "Of course I am. It will help
women, and it will purify politics. Women are better than men. Slaves are
always better than their masters." "Do you refer to polygamy?"
was asked. "Indeed I do not," she answered. "I believe in
polygamy. My father and mother were Mormons, and I am a Mormon…. A plural wife
isn't half as much of a slave as a single wife. If her husband has four wives,
she has three weeks of freedom every single month…. Of course it is all at an
end now, but I think the women of Utah think, with me, that we were better off
in polygamy…. Sixty per cent. of the voters of this State are women. We control
the State…. What am I going to do with my children while I am making the laws
for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have been practicing
medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal…. Some day there will
be a law compelling people to have no more than a certain amount of children,
and the mothers of the land can live as they ought to live." This is the
character and opinion presented by the highest State official that woman suffrage
has as yet given to the United States. Comment upon it seems unnecessary, so
far as it would be needed to express the disgust of the majority of American
women at such sentiments and such a situation.”
From Woman
and the Republic, Helen Kendrick Johnson.
Insanity was
always a mark of feminism.
There are many
things that I could draw out from this short passage quoted here, but this
stands out the most for me, “What am I going to do with my children while I am
making the laws for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have
been practicing medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal….” Why
do you think Paul said that older women need to teach younger women “to love
their husbands, to love their children” (Titus 2:4)? Because, if they are not
taught this women will quickly abandon their children to follow their careers
and desires. Paul saw this in his day, we see it in our day, this woman brags
about doing this.
Feminism was
always an attack on the family. It is dyscivilisational. It is to individualism
what petrol is to a grass fire on a hot day, an extremely dangerous accelerant. People were already
selfish, sinful, and given to going their own way, this is a part of the sinful
human nature, the flesh corrupts our approach to life. But feminism took that
and supercharged it, for women and men. Now, we live in a hyper-individualistic
culture that sees any containment by gender roles and duty as oppression. But
the individual is not the basic unity of society, the family is. Feminism was
always, from the very start, simply a means for bad women to seek to sunder themselves
from their God-given roles and responsibilities and also be given the chance to
bring many other women along with them.
Now, we live
in a day where so many men and women live adrift in a broken culture, and this
ideology is one of the core reasons for that.
