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One of the most poisonous feminist fabrications over the
past thirty years concerns our recent History. For example, for almost
two whole generations now, our children have been fed the deceitful
propaganda that marriage is a mechanism whereby men have oppressed
women and, somehow, forced them to remain in the home, while they
themselves ventured outside into the liberating world of work -
presumably for fun, frolics, fulfillment and independence.
The deceit herein is that, in reality, the world of work
has been, for the most part, an extremely unpleasant world in which to
live - until quite recently.
The majority of men in recent History were working in
terrible conditions - down filthy, dangerous mines - in the hot,
unwholesome, poisonous construction industries of ship and house
building, and in arduous heavy engineering projects such as building
roads and bridges - in tedious, sweaty factories, labouring for 16
hours non-stop, day after day - in the military, sent away from home,
sometimes for years, to the most inhospitable and hostile of conditions
and climates, to face disease, damage, death, and war - in agriculture,
where men toiled and tilled without the advanced machinery of today -
and even in the new offices, where rows upon rows of clerks spent their
hours laboriously copying out, by hand, the mountains of information
that needed to be documented.
In the world of work, men were being 'oppressed' far more
so than were their women at home. They were at the beck and call of
their bosses, and were given little in the way of rights, safety,
security or decent pay.
For the most part, therefore, the jobs of the past were
mostly soul destroying, if not downright dangerous and debilitating,
and it is men who did most of them in order to provide for their women
and children.
The world of work was not a pleasant place to be. And it
was not somewhere where most women, then, or nowadays, would choose to
have been.
When feminists give the impression to our younger folk
that working for a living in the recent past was invigorating,
cathartic or therapeutic in some way, they are lying.
In more recent times, technological advancements have
removed much of the worst aspects of 'work', and, further, other huge
industries requiring less odious forms of work have sprung up; e.g.
media, computer, financial.
And it is in these far more benign circumstances that
today's women are continually indoctrinated with the view that some
glorious world of 'work' was somehow denied to them in the past.
The truth is that they were not denied it.
They were saved from it.
5/1/02
USA In 1900, only 6 percent of married women worked outside
the home, usually when their blue-collar husbands were unemployed.
Among wives with children at home, very few worked at all. Almost half
of single women held jobs, but they usually stopped working when they
married or, at the latest, when they got pregnant, and most never
worked for pay again. About a third of widowed and divorced women
worked, typically out of economic necessity. Never-married women with
children were virtually unknown. Only 6% eh? Now that's interesting! ... ... And so is
this ... In 1936, a Gallup poll asked a national
sample, “Should a married woman earn money if she has a husband capable
of supporting her?” By OVERWHELMING majorities, both men and women said that she should not.
Here is an extract
from David Thomas' book Not Guilty ...
The desire to
free oneself from work was common to all classes and both sexes. Dr
Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College, London, has studied the diaries of
5,000 women who lived between 1860 and 1930. During that period, the
proportion of women in paid employment dropped from 75 per cent to 10
per cent. This was regarded as a huge step forward for womankind, an
opinion shared by the women whose writings Dr Bourke researched. Freed
from mills and factories, they created a new power base for themselves
at home. This was, claims Dr Bourke, "a deliberate choice. . . and a
choice that gave great pleasure."
And now, study
closely the words of one of the most powerful and influential women the
world as ever known.
"I love peace
and quiet, I hate politics and turmoil. We women are not made for
governing, and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine
occupations. There are times which force one to take interest in them,
and I do, of course intensely"
" I am most
anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking
this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant
horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense
of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good
whipping. Were woman to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with
men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of
beings, and would surely perish without male protection."
Queen Victoria 1870
And when today's
vindictive men-hating feminists purposefully distort the whole of our
history in order to make you hate men, by telling you that men have
always tried to hold women back, and were only, finally, defeated in
this heinous operation by the feminists of the 60s and the 70s, please
take on board the fact that it was WOMEN - influential
women like Queen Victoria - who, rightly or wrongly, promoted whatever
views of men and women people had in those earlier days.
And so, for
example, if women did not go out to work in greater numbers in those
days it was because both men AND WOMEN thought that this was the best
way to handle the circumstances in which they lived.
So, when you listen
to the media feminists, and to those who lecture on Women's Studies
courses, take note on whether or not they EVER point out to you that,
in recent history, the circumstances of women were CHOSEN as much by
women as by men.
And if they do not
point this out to you, or if they even try to deny the huge influence
that women have had in the past, then ask yourself why they do
this.
Is it because they
wish to continue to engender hatred toward men by distorting the truth?
Or are they just plain stupid?
Ask them also, what
jobs there were, realistically speaking, that were actually available,
even fifty years ago, that women actually wanted to do, but were
prevented from doing.
There were some,
yes. It was very difficult for a woman to become a doctor or a lawyer.
But, firstly, how many women were actually affected by this? Very few
indeed! There were not many such jobs around in those days. And,
secondly, for the most part, only the well-heeled well-connected men
near the top of the food chain could actually get such jobs. For 98% of
men these jobs were just as unavailable as they were for women.
In fact, it was mostly
men, not women, who were actually discriminated against when they were
turned down for such jobs.
Finally, feminists,
with tiresome frequency, like to point out that women, even fifty years
ago, were often forced to retire from their jobs to make way for the
men if they became pregnant. And feminists have used this fact for 30
years as an example of oppression and discrimination.
But it was
absolutely the right thing to do.
Can you imagine
what would have happened to society - and to its women!
- if millions of unemployed men had been roaming the streets with
nothing to do, with nowhere to go, with no money to pay for the bills
for their families, their children and their sweethearts, while, among
their very own neighbours, there were husbands and wives who BOTH had
jobs and were doing very well thank you.
Society would have
lived its life completely enmeshed in crime, violence and mayhem.
There was no modern
police force in those days, no sophisticated communications technology,
no major welfare benefits to be had, and so, no real protection
whenever things went wrong.
One only has to
look at what happens in poorer sections of our own society to see what
happens when men are not occupied in gainful employment and the
children are not well looked after to see what would have happened to
the entire nation if both men and women had not accepted the solution
of giving men the priority when it came to allocating jobs.
But, for thirty
years, most of you will not have heard about any of this thanks to the
hatred that feminists want to keep heaping onto the heads of men by
preventing the truth from being told.
10/8/02
Aus The Primordialists, however, have their own
blind spots. They view the past through nostalgic, rose-coloured, and
usually male, spectacles. Forgotten is women's subordination. Their
utopian hope is to return to The Good Old Days and re-create the
patriarchal Christian family, when everything was nice, when women,
like obedient, grateful employees who appreciated the "benefits" of bad
bosses, put up with "bad husbands and fathers". Anne Manne
This is typical
feminist hate stirring.
1. If men were so
bad then why were women so keen to marry them?
2. The truth is
that most husbands in the past worked very hard all day in dreadful
jobs and then returned home exhausted - and mostly alienated from the
home setting. And it was mostly the women who ruled the roost at home;
as is pretty much true today.
3. The feminists of
the1850's right through to the 1960s were not complaining about
marriage as an institution of oppression. The evidence suggests that
the major complaint about marriage was about boredom - especially
once the children had grown up.
4. Women mostly did
not want to have the jobs that were on offer in the 1960s and
beforehand because they were mostly quite horrible.
5. Without marriage
and the responsibilities that went with it, women would have borne
children with no-one committed to help provide for them or themselves.
Do feminists think that women would have benefited from this,
particularly since there was not much in the way of free welfare to
speak of?
Current day
feminists should not be allowed to keep getting away with this notion
that husbands before the 1970s were continually mistreating their wives
- presumably with the tacit approval of everyone in the family and the
neighbourhood.
There is no
evidence for this that AH has ever seen (e.g. see AH's Feminism appears not so much dead as obsolete - where AH suggests that folk should inspect
any old film footage that happens to pop up on their TV screens for
signs that the women in it look any more 'oppressed' than the men).
Further, given that
the feminists of today are found so often to be extremely dishonest
about many issues pertaining to our society, there is no particular
reason to believe that those from the past behaved any differently!
Anyway. Here is an
example of women pulling their weight in a manner which would have been
unthinkable had they been truly oppressed ...
Women had been involved in the antislavery
movement from its beginning. Following the typical patterns of
early-nineteenth century social life, they participated primarily as
organizers and members of separate female anti-slavery societies,
beginning .n Philadelphia (1833), Boston (1833), and New York (1836),
spreading to other cities like Providence, RI and, Portland, Maine, and
quickly spreading through the countryside. By the late 1830s there were
female societies in communities as small as Boylston, Massachusetts,
with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. These local societies were in most
ways like the many THOUSANDS of other women’s voluntary organizations
that were emerging in Northern communities in the early nineteenth
century. They met, prayed, raised funds for state and national
activities, and circulated publications and information.
Oh yes, and look at
this ...
The changing character of male employment,
and the growing demand for female employees in the lace industry are
pointed to as an explanation of the marked preponderance of husbands
committed for domestic violence, and drunkenness, laziness and general
fecklessness. And while economic change is certainly a major context
for this phenomenon, it again does not explain why, within a strongly
patriarchal society, relatively large numbers of women were given and
took the authority and support of the state in order to control their
disorderly husbands. Nor does it explain the internal power
relationships within the household that allowed women to use these
opportunities as effectively as they seem to have done.
... Yep. That
was the Austrian Netherlands, circa 1770 - a full 200 years before the
vindictive feminists of the 1970's came on the scene.
Finally, given that
feminists have expended a great deal of their energy trying to engender
male hatred by brainwashing women into believing that their lack of
voting rights until the beginning of the last century is, somehow,
strong evidence of oppression, it is worth pointing out that
governments in those days hardly did anything!
There was nothing
much to vote for!
For example, ...
USA In
1914, federal spending totaled less than 2 percent of GNP. The top rate
of the recently enacted federal individual-income tax was 7 percent, on
income over $500,000, and 99 percent of the population owed no income
tax. The 402,000 federal civilian employees, most of whom worked for
the Post Office, constituted about 1 percent of the labor force. The
armed forces comprised fewer than 166,000 men on active duty. Although
the federal government meddled in a few areas of economic life,
prescribing railroad rates and bringing antitrust suits against a
handful of unlucky firms, it was for most citizens remote and
unimportant. Robert Higgs
Further, given that
it was men who, by and large, had to defend and fight for the country,
and that it was men, mostly, whose labours created the nation's wealth
and built all the physical structures within it, and that it was men,
mostly, who were expected to labour outside of the home in order to
support the enterprises of the government as well as their families, it
seems quite reasonable that men should have been the ones to decide the
direction in which the economy would develop and to determine what
governments could and could not do on their behalf.
For example, why
should women have had the right to determine whether or not men should
be conscripted to go and die or be maimed for their country in times of
war?
In the feminist movement's version of
history, women's changing economic position is explained by women's
being repressed by men until they began to be rescued in the 1960s by
the women's movement, anti-discrimination policies, and affirmative
action. Hard facts tell a very different story. Thomas Sowell
"Women received
34 percent of the bachelor's degrees in 1920 but only 24 percent in
1950."
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