The truth comes out about role of feminism
WE WERE once told feminism was all about equality, creating a level playing field where women could take their rightful place in the world. I happily called myself a “feminist” after reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, ironically while working a university vacation job as a Hertz Rent-a-car girl, dressed in my bright yellow cap and mini skirt and flirting with American tourists.
But then the current male bashing culture took hold, with men as the punching bag, and women shamelessly promoted and idealised. Feminism had gone off the rails, I concluded.
It’s turned out that was wrong. The truth about feminist history is being revealed by the formidable Janice Fiamengo, using videos based on a powerful body of scholarship that shows feminism was never about equality. Fiamengo’s deep dive into feminist history leaves this normally calm, measured scholar seething with indignation.
Listen to Fiamengo’s passionate serve in a recent video interview: “Feminism was never sane. It was never without deep rancour and bitterness against men, never free from the claim that women were absolute victims of male predation, never uninterested in destroying the family, never accurate in its claims about women’s social situation, never unwilling to slander men in the most vicious and unpitying ways.
“And it never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women in the laws that had been made or social instruments that had been developed over time. It was always a deeply misandrist, man-hating, manblaming kind of movement.”
Strong words from this rather reserved former professor of English from the University of Ottawa, a solid academic with a slew of books and scholarly journal articles in her name. Fiamengo’s feminist education started when she found herself on university promotions committees witnessing increasing discrimination against male scholars.
She speaks on the truth about feminism. Like it matters that our society has been indoctrinated to believe in a version of our social history that is totally wrong.
Like the notion that the women’s movement rescued women from the tyranny of a patriarchal society where men denied women the vote, were free to rape their wives, seize their property and earnings and assert their privilege to keep women firmly under their thumb.
The reality was very different, as Fiamengo explained in recent correspondence with me: “Men and women in earlier centuries lived interdependent lives in which the fragility of life and the presence of disease, the high infant mortality rate, the lack of a social safety net and the complexities of housekeeping and childrearing meant that most women and men divided their prodigious labours into separate spheres of domestic and public.”
Yet we find, in the most revealing document of the early 19th century American women’s movement, Declaration of Sentiments, the claim that the “history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
This declaration, written mainly by feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was full of fire-breathing allegations about the brutality of male treatment of women and blatant misrepresentation of women’s situation. Mistruths such as men denied women’s right to vote.
“This is simply not true,” Fiamengo explains. In fact, at that time most men could not vote in national elections – only rich men with property. The declaration also wrongly stated that men could seize a wife’s property and wages but a Married Women’s Property Act had already been passed, a fact the feminists conveniently ignored.
It was WWI that decided the matter of suffrage, with women’s service on the home front — their work in munitions factories and farms — which changed public attitudes towards women and, in 1917, a vote sailed through British Parliament to extend the franchise to servicemen who had previously been voteless and to women aged 30 and above.
Could men rape their wives in the 19th century? Well, a man could not be criminally prosecuted for this act but it certainly wasn’t true that marital rape was accepted or that its harms were ignored, says Fiamengo, detailing the legal history whereby a wife at that time was understood to give consent to sexual relations just as men had contractual obligations including being responsible for all his wife’s debts, even if that landed him in prison.
The moral harm of marital rape was in fact widely acknowledged.
It’s a real step forward that this scholar will have the opportunity to enlighten a larger audience about what she has discovered. Fiamengo, through her videos and Substack blogs, is doing her best to end the whitewashing of feminist history.