I confess reading this article made me more cynical about the impact of feminism on society. It sounds like there wasn't necessarily any period where society had a rational, wise debate about whether gender roles are useful or not. Instead, the change was driven by
* fashion ("our own decision no longer to accept *outmoded* roles", emphasis mine)
* deception and lies ("editors selectively cherry-picked letters that were more progressive, open-minded and modern! Surveys were also manipulated. Even when the majority of respondents said they were opposed to role-change goals, published articles tend to emphasise support!")
* crass commercialism ("Polletta and colleagues suggest that commercial imperatives may have encouraged pro-feminist content, as magazines sought to convince advertisers that their readers were open-minded, sophisticated, and with major purchasing power.")
Is it any surprise that women's happiness has decreased in the decades following "women's liberation"? Seems like this change was more of an accident of history than some sort of enlightened wisdom.
Has it actually gone well? Why is it that so few are willing to defend it directly on its own merits, as opposed to accusing critics of being "outmoded" and similar (there's that fashion dynamic again)?
I'm definitely open to the possibility that it's been positive, but that doesn't seem obvious...
Feminism was about more than just gender roles. It was about the right to employment, the right to property, the right to banking, and the right to bodily autonomy.
These freedoms are valuable for their own sake, obviously. They don't derive their value from their contribution to happiness. In any event, your sudden concern with women's happiness is obviously insincere.
While I can't say I agree with your conclusions, I do agree fully with the underlying propositions.
There can't be a responsible (and widely promoted) conversation around women's roles and rights in society while the basic functioning of the same market imperatives that constrain the range of permissible dialogue keeps wage differentials (not just between genders) entrenched as an exhaust valve for variable exploitation.
The system-compatible, hollowed-out corporate model of women's liberation can feed on the social tension it brings in tow, conveniently reinforcing the consumer impulse and its own reflection as growth potential via market segmentation. This can at least partly account, though more mechanically than in reality, for the fashion and marketing dynamics.
I think despite these shortcomings, that the positive developments are vital for our social future. At the very least, rhetorical commitments to equality in popular and professional culture have become ingrained to an extent that many among our younger generations consider it to be non-negotiable. These generations are also overburdened by multiple interlocking systemic crises and the social contradictions they produce, so it's bound to be a messy process. But the only way out is through.
It's in the process of learning from failures and successes in struggling for a course correction that lessons and experience gained can meet with new opportunities for application and higher development. The wellbeing of humankind as a whole is bound up with the necessity for women's equality, but the prospects for liberation clash head-on with baser presumptions of liberal market ideology. These contradictions will continue to bring new collisions and ruptures, the outcomes of which I can only hope will point the way to a brighter path.
Fantastic article - is it just me, or do most of the contrary comments seem to come from men? Just sayin'.
I found this a particularly salient observation:
". . .entire communities consumed similar magazines and television shows, they tended to stay on the same page. This encouraged more broad-based cultural change."
Our country has changed since this was true, and not for the better imo.
IMO another substantial driver was the sharp decline in the wage-value of physical strength. A lot of blue-collar work was automated to the degree that the worker controlled a motor rather than moving mass himself. Once the jobs that can be done by women start to resemble the jobs that can be done by men, economic forces tend to break down a social system with a sharp gender divide.
This isn't fully deterministic, though. I grew up in a small town with a small college circa 1970, with my father being a professor and my mother being a homemaker. The convention then was that women didn't have paid employment (though there were exceptions and there wasn't much sanction against it). Of course, that was due to cultural convention far more than economic reality, but broad-brush economic realities tend to drive social norms, which make the effects of economic forces broader than what economics determines. But it meant that a husband who was a professor could afford one of the nice houses (Victorian or Queen Anne, circa 1910) in town, because all the competing buyers were similar families.
I still have family there, and fast-forward to today. A lot of the faculty families have both spouses employed at professor-level pay, so now many of the bidders for the fixed supply of nice houses have that level of income. At that point, my widowed mother exclaimed that a family *had* to have two working spouses to afford a house. But of course, that was simply because there *were* a considerable number of two-income families now.
In re attitudes toward sex, The Pill came out in 1960 but the big shift didn't come until the late 1960s. IMO, Guttentag & Secord's "The Sex Ratio Question" convincingly showed that that the main cause was the sharp shift in the effective sex ratio when the Baby Boomers came of age.
*"Humans are much more likely to accept new ideas if they perceive them as supported by their peers and heroes"....."People will believe what the media tell them they believe" (widely believed to be a George Orwell quote; although others say it is apocryphal)
*"Had ‘socially constructed gender’ theorising entered directly into the public mainstream, it would have been met with the widespread derision that it richly deserved. Or had it remained hermetically sealed in its esoteric ivory tower, no great harm to our culture need have resulted......
..... ‘Radical’ feminism has probably always left the average Western woman – anyone not part of the intelligentsia - somewhat indifferent at best. To most normal, largely apolitical women, its finger-wagging modus operandi will – in so far as they have encountered it – have seemed a case of throwing the Vive la Difference baby out with the bathwater. In its diluted form though, it has become the default correctthink in the entire civic, educational and mass media environment that we inhabit. Its version of sexual equality is now pervasive in mainstream journalism and in tv drama – and is what young people are taught in schools and colleges." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-androgyny-syndrome
It’s very interesting. I’m a man in my 60s. I think the same holds for how racial tolerance was normalized in the 70s and 80s through kids cartoons, TV shows and the like. Though it seems fraught now, racism as a murderous movement died out, reduced it to nudging the edges of “reverse discrimination “. I’m not saying this tolerance couldn’t itself be reversed. But we should watch the pop culture for signs.
I'm fascinated by how women's magazines have both led and followed trends over the years. I wrote about the impact of 1950s women's magazines a while ago, which were very home- and family-focused, after finding my mum's vintage Modern Woman magazines at her house after she died. In the '70s I was looking to women's magazines myself for guidance and inspiration as I grew up. In the 1980s I worked on Just Seventeen magazine in the UK and it's great looking back at what an impact that had on teenage girls. They shed a spotlight on social history.
Feminist was supported to reduce natalism. The Kissinger Report already raised that question in late 1970. Thats lead to support by elite lobbies groups, including the Rockefellers.
At that time, It was believed that the world has a population limit (Maltus) and overpassing that limit jeopardized the prosperity.
Hence, the elite started supporting affirmative action for women both at the University and at home.
This combined with the oíl crisis of the 70, and the globalisation policies that put men (the only workers at that time) under unenployed. Suddently, It was not necessary to have more babies: on the other way around, It was good to have less.
But they failed.
And in 2005 the gender gaps in favour of males ware amazing. The payment gender gap has even widen in 2023, and basically in 2000 didnt evolved since 1980.
Women still wanted babies.
So, the elites decided to start the 3rd wave with the MeeToo etc. All that was carefully planned. The intention was to make fertility rates even lower in most countries (not only in the US).
Feminism is linked to reproduction.
If the elites want to reduce population, they support feminism and reduce male economic status through DEI programmes and affirmative action and mass media narratives.
In the mesntime, the high class has benefited a lot:
Middoe class is destroyed.
You substitute male industries in the US by chesper labor work in China and abroad.
You import people from 3rd countries that are cheaper and (at the same time) raises the cost of housing and consume more goods.
Now, nobody can afford starting a family, even if they want.
Political division is the last stage of this eugenesic programme.
In the mesntime, this has proven to be a failure. China will Kill feminism. Why?
Because suddenlt, Western élites have discovered that the Chinise elite are surpassing them.
If you repatriate Jobs to the US and. Europe (export tarifas), then, you suddently need more men to work.
On the other hand, "importing" inmigrantes is cusing social unrest and has proven to be a failure to allow élites to keep control. Also, there are less inmigrants now as economies like México are improving and having less kids. Shortfall of kids will be a problem all economies will face (except África).
Also, Maltus proved to be wrong. We have largely surpass Maltus limit and we are not in a climete catastroph.
Finally, public spending has proven ineficient. And women rely more on public spending.
Combine this with the need of more soldiers (Global war is a possibily).
This will likely lead to elite raising the economic status of men. I prefict that the Gener gap will widen in the US in the next two decade.
If this happens It will be because men will increase their economic outcomes. If this comes with a reduction in housing prices (less inmigrants) we may see a new baby boom in the US.
The pronataly policies are already in place in China and start to be a discussion in USA and Europe.
The new set is being putting in place. We will see a change in narrative in favour of family and fertility comming from the elites.
Countries will compete to have fertility.
Feminism will only be able to survive if women prove that they can create a system that empowers them while having babies. All measures have failed so far, and will likely fail.
Will we return to 1950? No, likely no. We Will return to 1970? Yes, more likely. women will continue working likely part time and I lower status works while having 2 kids. The father will become again the main provider.
As I was saying, this will happens in 5 to 20 years time.
Big Media Companies were allowed increasing control, rooting out individual voices and perspectives willing to challenge non-progressive, patriarchal values. The battle rages.
Why calling Republicans "weird" shouldn't have stopped during the 2024 election.
Why very shouty and angry leftist movements of the 2010s triggered a backlash.
The rule of progressive activism really needs to be "don't be angry and weird." Be relatable to average people, and act virtuous (actually virtuous without virtue signaling) so people might even aspire to emulate you.
I confess reading this article made me more cynical about the impact of feminism on society. It sounds like there wasn't necessarily any period where society had a rational, wise debate about whether gender roles are useful or not. Instead, the change was driven by
* fashion ("our own decision no longer to accept *outmoded* roles", emphasis mine)
* deception and lies ("editors selectively cherry-picked letters that were more progressive, open-minded and modern! Surveys were also manipulated. Even when the majority of respondents said they were opposed to role-change goals, published articles tend to emphasise support!")
* crass commercialism ("Polletta and colleagues suggest that commercial imperatives may have encouraged pro-feminist content, as magazines sought to convince advertisers that their readers were open-minded, sophisticated, and with major purchasing power.")
Is it any surprise that women's happiness has decreased in the decades following "women's liberation"? Seems like this change was more of an accident of history than some sort of enlightened wisdom.
Has it actually gone well? Why is it that so few are willing to defend it directly on its own merits, as opposed to accusing critics of being "outmoded" and similar (there's that fashion dynamic again)?
I'm definitely open to the possibility that it's been positive, but that doesn't seem obvious...
Feminism was about more than just gender roles. It was about the right to employment, the right to property, the right to banking, and the right to bodily autonomy.
What was the point of all those "freedoms" if so many women are miserable?
These freedoms are valuable for their own sake, obviously. They don't derive their value from their contribution to happiness. In any event, your sudden concern with women's happiness is obviously insincere.
Considering that I am the gender under discussion, it doesn't feel insincere.
While I can't say I agree with your conclusions, I do agree fully with the underlying propositions.
There can't be a responsible (and widely promoted) conversation around women's roles and rights in society while the basic functioning of the same market imperatives that constrain the range of permissible dialogue keeps wage differentials (not just between genders) entrenched as an exhaust valve for variable exploitation.
The system-compatible, hollowed-out corporate model of women's liberation can feed on the social tension it brings in tow, conveniently reinforcing the consumer impulse and its own reflection as growth potential via market segmentation. This can at least partly account, though more mechanically than in reality, for the fashion and marketing dynamics.
I think despite these shortcomings, that the positive developments are vital for our social future. At the very least, rhetorical commitments to equality in popular and professional culture have become ingrained to an extent that many among our younger generations consider it to be non-negotiable. These generations are also overburdened by multiple interlocking systemic crises and the social contradictions they produce, so it's bound to be a messy process. But the only way out is through.
It's in the process of learning from failures and successes in struggling for a course correction that lessons and experience gained can meet with new opportunities for application and higher development. The wellbeing of humankind as a whole is bound up with the necessity for women's equality, but the prospects for liberation clash head-on with baser presumptions of liberal market ideology. These contradictions will continue to bring new collisions and ruptures, the outcomes of which I can only hope will point the way to a brighter path.
Feminism have defend their own on their own merit.
Not that I have seen.
How?
I have not seen feminists defend their own on their own merit.
I have
The only person I can think of working on her merits argued against the ERA.
Fantastic article - is it just me, or do most of the contrary comments seem to come from men? Just sayin'.
I found this a particularly salient observation:
". . .entire communities consumed similar magazines and television shows, they tended to stay on the same page. This encouraged more broad-based cultural change."
Our country has changed since this was true, and not for the better imo.
IMO another substantial driver was the sharp decline in the wage-value of physical strength. A lot of blue-collar work was automated to the degree that the worker controlled a motor rather than moving mass himself. Once the jobs that can be done by women start to resemble the jobs that can be done by men, economic forces tend to break down a social system with a sharp gender divide.
This isn't fully deterministic, though. I grew up in a small town with a small college circa 1970, with my father being a professor and my mother being a homemaker. The convention then was that women didn't have paid employment (though there were exceptions and there wasn't much sanction against it). Of course, that was due to cultural convention far more than economic reality, but broad-brush economic realities tend to drive social norms, which make the effects of economic forces broader than what economics determines. But it meant that a husband who was a professor could afford one of the nice houses (Victorian or Queen Anne, circa 1910) in town, because all the competing buyers were similar families.
I still have family there, and fast-forward to today. A lot of the faculty families have both spouses employed at professor-level pay, so now many of the bidders for the fixed supply of nice houses have that level of income. At that point, my widowed mother exclaimed that a family *had* to have two working spouses to afford a house. But of course, that was simply because there *were* a considerable number of two-income families now.
As I recall, the Pill had a major role in changing attitudes toward sex, and the media took notice ("sex sells!").
In re attitudes toward sex, The Pill came out in 1960 but the big shift didn't come until the late 1960s. IMO, Guttentag & Secord's "The Sex Ratio Question" convincingly showed that that the main cause was the sharp shift in the effective sex ratio when the Baby Boomers came of age.
Thoughts on this post:
*"Humans are much more likely to accept new ideas if they perceive them as supported by their peers and heroes"....."People will believe what the media tell them they believe" (widely believed to be a George Orwell quote; although others say it is apocryphal)
*"Had ‘socially constructed gender’ theorising entered directly into the public mainstream, it would have been met with the widespread derision that it richly deserved. Or had it remained hermetically sealed in its esoteric ivory tower, no great harm to our culture need have resulted......
..... ‘Radical’ feminism has probably always left the average Western woman – anyone not part of the intelligentsia - somewhat indifferent at best. To most normal, largely apolitical women, its finger-wagging modus operandi will – in so far as they have encountered it – have seemed a case of throwing the Vive la Difference baby out with the bathwater. In its diluted form though, it has become the default correctthink in the entire civic, educational and mass media environment that we inhabit. Its version of sexual equality is now pervasive in mainstream journalism and in tv drama – and is what young people are taught in schools and colleges." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-androgyny-syndrome
It’s very interesting. I’m a man in my 60s. I think the same holds for how racial tolerance was normalized in the 70s and 80s through kids cartoons, TV shows and the like. Though it seems fraught now, racism as a murderous movement died out, reduced it to nudging the edges of “reverse discrimination “. I’m not saying this tolerance couldn’t itself be reversed. But we should watch the pop culture for signs.
I also enjoyed “Good Girls Revolt”!
I have to admit I only skimmed through the article (bookmarked for later), but one thing is clear... Magazine design was so much better in the past.
Really interesting analysis, thanks, Alice.
I'm fascinated by how women's magazines have both led and followed trends over the years. I wrote about the impact of 1950s women's magazines a while ago, which were very home- and family-focused, after finding my mum's vintage Modern Woman magazines at her house after she died. In the '70s I was looking to women's magazines myself for guidance and inspiration as I grew up. In the 1980s I worked on Just Seventeen magazine in the UK and it's great looking back at what an impact that had on teenage girls. They shed a spotlight on social history.
Feminist was supported to reduce natalism. The Kissinger Report already raised that question in late 1970. Thats lead to support by elite lobbies groups, including the Rockefellers.
At that time, It was believed that the world has a population limit (Maltus) and overpassing that limit jeopardized the prosperity.
Hence, the elite started supporting affirmative action for women both at the University and at home.
This combined with the oíl crisis of the 70, and the globalisation policies that put men (the only workers at that time) under unenployed. Suddently, It was not necessary to have more babies: on the other way around, It was good to have less.
But they failed.
And in 2005 the gender gaps in favour of males ware amazing. The payment gender gap has even widen in 2023, and basically in 2000 didnt evolved since 1980.
Women still wanted babies.
So, the elites decided to start the 3rd wave with the MeeToo etc. All that was carefully planned. The intention was to make fertility rates even lower in most countries (not only in the US).
Feminism is linked to reproduction.
If the elites want to reduce population, they support feminism and reduce male economic status through DEI programmes and affirmative action and mass media narratives.
In the mesntime, the high class has benefited a lot:
Middoe class is destroyed.
You substitute male industries in the US by chesper labor work in China and abroad.
You import people from 3rd countries that are cheaper and (at the same time) raises the cost of housing and consume more goods.
Now, nobody can afford starting a family, even if they want.
Political division is the last stage of this eugenesic programme.
In the mesntime, this has proven to be a failure. China will Kill feminism. Why?
Because suddenlt, Western élites have discovered that the Chinise elite are surpassing them.
If you repatriate Jobs to the US and. Europe (export tarifas), then, you suddently need more men to work.
On the other hand, "importing" inmigrantes is cusing social unrest and has proven to be a failure to allow élites to keep control. Also, there are less inmigrants now as economies like México are improving and having less kids. Shortfall of kids will be a problem all economies will face (except África).
Also, Maltus proved to be wrong. We have largely surpass Maltus limit and we are not in a climete catastroph.
Finally, public spending has proven ineficient. And women rely more on public spending.
Combine this with the need of more soldiers (Global war is a possibily).
This will likely lead to elite raising the economic status of men. I prefict that the Gener gap will widen in the US in the next two decade.
If this happens It will be because men will increase their economic outcomes. If this comes with a reduction in housing prices (less inmigrants) we may see a new baby boom in the US.
The pronataly policies are already in place in China and start to be a discussion in USA and Europe.
The new set is being putting in place. We will see a change in narrative in favour of family and fertility comming from the elites.
Countries will compete to have fertility.
Feminism will only be able to survive if women prove that they can create a system that empowers them while having babies. All measures have failed so far, and will likely fail.
Will we return to 1950? No, likely no. We Will return to 1970? Yes, more likely. women will continue working likely part time and I lower status works while having 2 kids. The father will become again the main provider.
As I was saying, this will happens in 5 to 20 years time.
Big Media Companies were allowed increasing control, rooting out individual voices and perspectives willing to challenge non-progressive, patriarchal values. The battle rages.
Why calling Republicans "weird" shouldn't have stopped during the 2024 election.
Why very shouty and angry leftist movements of the 2010s triggered a backlash.
The rule of progressive activism really needs to be "don't be angry and weird." Be relatable to average people, and act virtuous (actually virtuous without virtue signaling) so people might even aspire to emulate you.