Fifty-two years have passed since Betty Friedan with her book, The Feminine Mystique, jump-started the great feminist revolt against oppression, discrimination, and any other number of horrible things those bad, bad, creatures known as men have been doing to poor deluded women. Looking back, has women’s situation improved? Or has it deteriorated? Here are some of the facts:
* Today as ever, the higher one climbs on the slippery pole of power, richness and fame the fewer women one meets. Only about five percent of the world’s countries have female presidents or prime ministers. From the late Ms. Gandhi down, even many of those got their jobs mainly because they were the relatives of male ones. The percentage of top level female executives in Fortune 500 companies is considerably smaller still. The highest-paid female executive in America is Marillyn Rothblatt of United Therapeutics Corporation, ranks 20th on the relevant Fortune Magazine list. Interestingly enough, “she” was born a man.
* About two thirds of all working women in advanced countries are still employed in a small number of vast, low-paid, female ghettoes where there are few if any men: whether as teachers, nurses, social workers, communicators, administrators—the last two, euphemisms for what used to be called secretaries—or bank- and supermarket cashiers. As if to add insult to injury, many of those who head the relevant professional associations are men. A phenomenon sufficiently common to have acquired a name, “the glass elevator”.
* Starting as far back as the Roman Empire, and other things (beauty, sex appeal, education, etc.) equal, a female slave, owing to her lesser ability to do hard labor, has always been assessed at about two thirds of the price of a male one. In today’s developed countries, that is almost exactly the rate of female to male earnings.
* Most women, by joining the labor force, have failed to improve either their own economic situation or that of their families. That is because, as Senator (Massachusetts, D.) Elizabeth Warren in The Two Income Trap (2003) has shown, working mothers inevitably incur extra expenses. Such as an additional car; clothing; help in taking care of the household; and all kinds of people and organizations to look after the children either in the afternoon or during the holidays. As a result, and taking inflation into account, in many, perhaps most, cases their discretionary income, i.e. that part of it they are free to spend as they like, is actually less than it used to be.
* Another reason why going to work has failed to improve the economic situation of many, perhaps most, women is taxation. First, imagine a—much simplified, to be sure—situation where two women decide not to mind their own children. Instead they swap them and pay each other for doing what has to be done. As a result, both will start having to pay taxes. Second, many countries do not allow spouses to file separately. As a result, two incomes may well move a family into a higher tax bracket. Either way, the only winners are the statistics on one hand and that insatiable beast, the treasury, on the other. No wonder each time more women start working the lords of the latter boast of it as a feather in their cap.
* Interestingly enough, almost all of those who take the place of working women in any of the above capacities are themselves women. In other words, for every “successful” woman there are now several others whose “careers” consist of doing the kinds of work she no longer wants; such as cleaning, laundering, serving food, cooking, looking after children, and the like. Other women, mainly elderly family members, do the same work without pay. Either way, feminism has failed to liberate women from housework and childcare. Instead, what has happened is that “successful” women are exploiting less successful ones to an extent that has no precedent in history.
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* Before World War II, it was often thought that the ability of most married women not to work was “God’s gift” to them. Now, since most young men can no longer support a family on their own, most women have to work outside the home whether they want to or not. Losing their freedom, they have been turned into wage slaves” just as their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are. To say nothing about the famous “double burden;” which has resulted in any number of books that advise women how to manage their time to appearing on the best-seller lists.
* It is true that women are making gains in education. However, that is primarily a reflection of inflation in the field. As the number of students grew, the social prestige diplomas and degrees conferred on their holders went down. Especially since the start of the 2008 economic crisis, a situation has been created where a college education no longer necessarily translates into a good job. Meanwhile, thanks to their stronger bodies, blue collar men with considerably fewer years of school behind them can often make as much or more money as “pink collar” women who do have such an education. That indeed is one reason why more boys than girls are dropping out of school. Furthermore, at the highest levels men still dominate, and by a huge margin. Since Marie Currie early in the twentieth century there has not been one female scientist whose name has turned into a household word.
* Today as ever, the most “successful” women tend to be childless or, at any rate, have far fewer children than the rest. So much do they seem to hate themselves that they are waging war on their own genes! Many other “successful” women are postponing childbirth until it is too late. Indeed it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of the feminist revolution are not women, who have to fork out and undergo all kinds of unpleasant and often unsuccessful procedures, but adoption agencies on one hand and fertility clinics on the other.
* As the most cursory look at women’s magazines and department stores will confirm, feminist attempts to convince women to stop pandering to men by dropping high heels, cosmetic surgery, makeup, and every other kind of beauty aid supposedly forced on them by men have been a total failure. Women undergoing cosmetic surgery, always at the cost of money as well as some pain and suffering, also outnumber men by a huge margin. Now as ever, the Biblical saying applies: “unto your man your desire and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).
* Women’s attempts to make a significant impact on the military have been a miserable failure. Rather, what we got is a host of uniformed female medical personnel, public relations advisers, “organization experts” (who needs those?) and secretaries. As the fact that only about 2.5 percent of the casualties in America’s “war on terror” have been women shows, female combat soldiers remain as rare as water in the Sahara. Where there are bullets there are no women, and where there are women there are no bullets. And fortunately so; in all countries that tried to train women to male standards without exception, the outcome has been a very large number of injuries, some of them incapacitating.
* Finally, the first period in history when large numbers of women in Western countries started living longer than men was the early nineteenth century; precisely the period when the ideal of the non-working, stay-at-home woman was born. In both the US and Britain, the greatest gap in life expectancy between people of both sexes prevailed around 1975. Since then, as more and more women entered the labor force and took up what was long seen as a typical male activity, i.e. smoking, it has been cut by almost half. Feminism, in other words, is literally killing women.
Women, it is claimed, are as intelligent and as able to form their own opinions as men are. Therefore, how countless women around the world allow themselves to be led by the nose by a relatively small coterie of extreme feminists is by no means clear. But who cares? Certainly not I. If women, other than my wife of course, want to ruin their lives by trying to emulate men and become second-rate men, who am I to stand in their way?