The Abolition Of Women

Yeesterday I brought up one cause of the 1980s day care Satanism panic, the underlying social tension resulting from wives and mothers working outside the home. This is actually one factor in the amorphous populist rebellion represented by Trumpism, the fact that middle-class incomes have been stagnant since the 1970s. The economic need for two-income households has been a direct result, and one source of Trump's support was his advocacy of policies that would raise middle-class incomes.

In fact, I recall a Wall Street Journal editorial in the 1970s recognizing the issue in a backhanded way, patting the US economy on the back for its ability to grow at all, given the numbers of women it had sudddely had to absorb into the workforce. But was this because women suddenly chose en masse to take outside jobs, or because they had to? And if the latter, why? The Journal didn't go into this, and given its contemporary never-Trump posture, will not now.

Women entering the job market in significant numbers has been a phenomenon since World War II. Before then, as a family friend explained it to me decades ago, "Nice girls didn't work in offices". Well, since then, nice girls do lots of things. This has had unintended consequences, none of them good for women. The most recent is the ability of men to identify as women and at least try to assert what in the past would have been regarded as female privilege. The incoming administration has officially endorsed this trend in the person of Dr Rachel Levine. Just a generation ago, this was a comedy routine.

I think the aspirational end point of this trend is some sort of recognition that women, if they aren't completely unnecessary, can be placed in a permanently subordinate role, because, with surgical, hormonal, and cosmetic enhancements, men can take over all their functions save reproduction (and they're working on that one). The highly preceptive TV series Fringe foresaw this with the all-male technologically enhanced race of humanoids from the future, the "observers". However they actually did it, it's plain from the show that only a father was involved.

It's a matter of great interest to me that the almost-forgotten 20th century commentator Ferdinand Lundberg had something to say about this, as far back as 1947. I want to stress again my view that Lundberg is a literary performer, not a sociologist -- but John Milton as a pamphleteer was a writer, not a social theorist, and the same applies to Solzhenitsyn, who was neither a historian nor a reporter in The Gulag Archipelago. With Marynia F Farnham, a psychiatrist, Lundberg wrote Modern Woman: The Lost Sex:

Lundberg and Farnham conclude that once women are forced out of the home by male aggression and advancing technology, women are emotionally and psychologically susceptible to neurosis. Once women leave the home, they lose their sense of emotional security, their ability to readjust to changing environments, and their ownership of femininity and sexuality. This confusion and instability is magnified by the "irreconcilable" demands of industrial society - capitalism, Communism, Fascism, democracy, and other political forces expect different reactions from women and become "both cause and effect...of widespread modern unhappiness."

More specifically, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex focuses on the effect of unhappiness and neurosis on female sexuality, approaches to motherhood and childbearing, and the development of modern feminism.

According to the Wikipedia entry at the link, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex was a bestseller at the time and highly influential, to the extent that it inspired Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique in opposition to it. However, the Wkipedia entry here incorrectly describes Lundberg as a sociologist. His own entry describes him as a journalist and author and, in his later years, a professor. He collaborated here with a psychiatrist, which would have been desirable, since he was trying to outline the causes of what he saw as psychological dysfunction, but unfortunately, Farnham was a Freudian, which is now a largely discredited school of psychiatry.

But of course, Lundberg in 1947 was also writing a generation before hormonal birth control, whose availability has only served further to separate women from a biological reproductive function. The trend, which neither he nor Farnham could foresee, will be to continue removing female privilege -- separate men's and women's toilet and shower facilities benefit women, not men, as do women's sports programs. The current mainstream Democrat agenda is to eliminate both.

Such trends must certainly be driving the current forces of panic and hysteria, in both directions.