Familism or Feminism: a nation's choice

This blog and the next are a follow-up from the last piece on Restoring the Pro-family state.

               It comes as a surprise to many that what we now call “feminism” has not always been so anti-male and anti-family. In fact in its traditional form, lasting until about WW1, so-called "social", or "domestic", or "maternal" feminism (scorned today as a sell-out by radical feminists) aggressively promoted femininity, motherhood, and family, and of course, the main-provider role of fathers. It was not feminism as we think of it now, but “familism.” In fact the majority of activist women, even until the 196O's had in common a desire to redress the political, economic and moral imbalances of a commercial society in which they were convinced women and children – but in the end the whole family unit – should have legal and economic protections but were not often getting them. They were extremely successful. So much so that, as many have observed, today's activists, ironically, are busily undoing the finest social achievement of the nineteenth century, which was to help women and children get off the streets, out of the factories, and into the homes of the nation, from whence their children could be nurtured, fed, schooled, and above all sheltered from the heartlessness of a market order only too willing to recruit mothers and their children into the work force. And there is more of interest: contrary to popular belief, it was not “chauvinist” males who resisted the idea of giving the vote to women. For in the emergent western democracies very few men got the vote initially. At first it was allowed only to propertied males; then to males with property and/or a decent job; then gradually to all males, except criminals. But even the basic the idea of an “equal” voting right for men was considered so bizarre in England (I mean the idea that one vote by an ignoramus would cancel one vote by a wise man) that until the early 1900s well-educated English men actually had a “plural” vote – up to six each). Then, eventually women became included. It must also be said that a strong argument then against the female vote was that no one could imagine a husband or wife voting against each other, and so to add millions of identical women’s votes to the rolls seemed a waste of time and money for no difference in the outcome. In this vein, a recent study by Susan E. Marshall on "anti-suffrage" politics found that it was actually pro-family women who constituted the overwhelming majority of the movement against the female vote, for much deeper reasons: they were devoted to the ideal of the family as a haven. They feared that the chain leading from the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” ethic at work with men outside the family, if given the slightest opportunity would financially entice young single women and mothers into commercial work, and from there they would be drawn into political life just like men, thus further undermining the family as the basis of society. This would mean a total invasion of family by commercialism and politics. This former familism therefore insisted that society must be structured to protect and promote the flourishing of women and children inside the home, whereas the feminism we have today promotes the opposite: it has all but ignored children (give them government daycare! is the cry) and has attempted to structure society to promote the success of women outside the home.  One consequence is that a lot of children now have to fend for themselves in daycare centers where they are but one of many, or as latch-key children wandering home from school to empty houses. The sorry result is that millions of children today – many from low-income homes whose mothers would give anything to have a financially supportive father around rather than to work all day outside the home - have no full-time advocate.