The Roots of Modern Feminism

As we contemplate the current political world, its ecology and demographics, and note that the most powerful ideological movement afoot in our times is feminism, and also pause to reflect on its beginnings (in its current manifestation) in the '60s, the question arises: What brought about the '60s? All effects have a cause in this world, what was it in this case?

I would hazard that the cause of the sixties was WWII, and particularly its end at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Large numbers of men were placed in harm's way, a particularly propitious manner in which to induce creativity, they were exposed to human actions on a particularly grand scale, and they saw innovation after innovation, all of which were aimed at the annihilation of men. This culminated in a bomb of such proportions that it could level a city of great size in a moment. It must have occurred to many that, if this could be done, would it not be possible, by continuing this line of experimentation to end life on Earth?

Another interesting feature of this, in the Pacific theater, was the confrontation of Western masculinist values with Eastern feminist values. Many men, on leave or R and R, would have found themselves in the company of Easterners, on the various Pacific islands, and wondered at their emphasis on feelings and relationships and their lack of interest in the pursuit of creativity. They would have noted that this seemed to produce a much less intense sort of life.

Taking these two experiences together and imagining these same men, as they came home and tried to integrate this understanding with the ordinary competition they confronted every day, the expectation would be that they would immediately father children, and that they would relate their experiences of life in many explicit and subtle ways to those children. They would explicitly ruminate on the horrors of war and particularly nuclear bombs and implicitly try to emulate the more relaxed orientation towards life they had experienced in the bars and brothels of the Far East and written about by Michener in "Tales of the South Pacific".

These children, having been raised on a very different ideological diet than their ancestors, hearing human creativity represented as dangerous to the continued existence of life on this planet, hearing Western competition discussed in disparaging terms, as in the novel, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit", would have arrived at adulthood in a very different frame of mind than their predecessors. They would have been inclined to question the wisdom of Western Culture, particularly at its fountainhead, the universities.

On top of this, another problem had developed. In the past, creativity had been used, particularly in the form of technological invention, as a pathway to a future represented as a Utopia, free from want. Now, technological innovation was exposed as perhaps too dangerous to pursue any further and many of these same children will have been looking for some other path to follow. As with all children they idealistically wanted a harmless ideology, even an ideology that held out the promise of ameliorating the all too obvious problems, Native American genocide for example, that attended the ideology they had inherited.

And, at that moment, fortuitously, along came a war that seemed to place in relief all of the disturbing qualities of that inherited ideology. A particularly backward and agrarian people were to be subjected to high technology warfare so that the West could repress an ideology that denied the roots of Western ideology and therefore the source of its wealth. It appeared to be the sacrifice of innocents to save the luxurious life style prevalent in the West.

These same children, having been taught that a more relaxed view of life, a less "uptight" view was more desirable, found they could not rationalize discipline and particularly repression of their own desires with that attitude.

So, they rebelled. And they took the most direct approach to resolving the most obvious problems they saw in their own country. They saw people disturbed by sexual repression most clearly, so they decided that sexual repression should henceforth be discarded. They saw laws they didn't understand, particularly the one against pot. So, they ignored it. They found a new music that appealed to everything Western culture tried to repress, so they reveled in it. They saw White Europeans discriminating against others, so they determined to fight it. They saw men exploiting women, so they idealized femininity and attacked the institutions that sanctioned that exploitation.

Finally, why did this event crystallize into feminist ideology? Because in the end, there are only two ideologies, masculinism, the ideology of the West, and feminism, the ideology of the East. If you rebel against one, there is nowhere to go but to the other.