The Roots of Feminism?

The fact that women feel oppressed is no indication that they are. The Germans who voted in Hitler felt oppressed too. The South Africans who created apartheid felt oppressed too. The Southerners in the US who fought the Civil War to preserve slavery and who fought civil rights for blacks felt oppressed too.

In fact, throughout history, the loudest complaints of oppression seem to be heard not from the genuinely oppressed, who are by the nature of things usually cowed into silence, but from privileged groups who lose some part of their privilege. The Germans long saw themselves as a master race, from their history of storming through and “civilizing” Poland and the Baltic. Through the later nineteenth century they were the great power on everyone’s horizon, the country of the future. Rather like China is today, only more so. Losing the Great War was a terrible, an unacceptable shock.

The South Africans too were used to seeing themselves as a master race, “civilizing” the African natives and land. Despite a remarkably strong showing, they were conquered by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. They could not accept being a colonized race instead of the colonizers.

The southerners in the US—in particular perhaps the Virginians—were used to seeing themselves as an aristocracy, the nation’s leaders and founders. After all, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Monroe, were all Southerners. Virginia was settled before those rabble on the Mayflower. The Northerners were largely more recent immigrants.

But the North industrialized and grew rapidly in population while they languished. This must have been threatening even without the slavery issue. Losing the Civil War, they were all the more inclined to feel threatened.

Women, I think, have gone through a similar process. Traditionally put on a pedestal, they saw themselves as the “civilizers” of men.

They then found their claim to dominance badly damaged by the introduction of “labour-saving devices” over the last century or so, and especially in the postwar years.

For the first time, it became practical for men to contemplate getting along without a wife: Hugh Hefner claims to have invented the concept of a “bachelor pad” in the 1950s, and I think he is probably right. Before the postwar years, that would have been impractical: he would have had to live with his parents, or in a boarding house, or have a live-in maid or butler if he were wealthy. There was too much to do in keeping a house.

So women saw the slats kicked out of their role: their position was obsolete. Men no longer needed nor necessarily heeded them, any more than a bicycle needs a fish. The more so when people started complaining the world was overpopulated anyway.

It seems to me that feminism is the strong reaction to this threat, just as was Fascism, and apartheid, and Jim Crow, for similar groups feeling similarly threatened in similar circumstances.