I came to this very interesting post thread a few days late, by way of Blue Skies by way of another Responder to both Blue Skies and MichaelBernard1 on the Iraq War exegesis as to "how we got here."
While I sympathize with this female academician and her illustrations greatly, based on her point of view, I have to either disagree or comment based on my own perspective.
historychic: My little corner of the working world might be the only place the where feminism has truly carried the day.
The 1920s American Suffragette movement focused on seductively persuading American men to bestow the right to vote to their womenfolk, their wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and other neighbors, friends and extended family members who happened to be female. Geman women already had the right to vote, a gentle European example that later elected Hitler to power. Hitler's Nazi Party carefully and assiduously cultivated the female vote, with their clever propaganda and cloying arguments. In America, the arguments were similarly gentle and seductive. Let's now call the result the "Samson and Delilah Effect" to cut now to the chase. Have you noticed nowadays, that the Feminist arguments do not similarly blandish American males for their support? American feminism today is far more dominant, demanding, confident, imperious, rich, politically saavy, and punishing. American men are far more "henpecked" today, than they ever were in the 1920s, when they finally acquiesced to the many historical arguments in favor of "giving" American women the right to vote. The interests of men vis-a-vis their women and their government have been "taking it on the chin" ever since. The American Democratic Party seems irredeemably "in bed" with feminism, and even the traditional Republican Party has "drunk the Kool Aide" of feminism, both in terms of domestic and now foreign affairs and policies. We have Americans overseas going to poor countries to sell the idea that educating girls takes priority over educating boys, in part because the payoff to society is bigger. Here at home in America, boys are definitely getting far worse education all up and down the educational process, from grade school through college level, if males even make it into college nowadays, a majority of college students and graduates being women currently. This suits academic administrators "to a 'T'" since females are far less adventurous academically and personally than males, hence more easily manageable in so many ways. Of course, should an academic adminstrator, say, the President of Harvard University named Larry, at a forum specifically dedicated to the topic of investigating this phenomenon in a seminar forum, even raise the possibility of "gender differences" the Cyclopsean feminist "call to arms" is trumpeted far and wide, first among those lemming like faculty members of Harvard University who behave fully like a dialectical Vanguard if anything, and then in a 2-stage process, infecting the local and national media and the Harvard student body at large, simultaneously. The President is eventually dismissed, and the posit of the Seminar topic remains unexplored. Any statistically perceived gender differences thereby remain safely within the purview of "gender discrimination" much as the proverbial "69 cents on the dollar" (now 80 cents on the dollar, apparently) that clearly illustrates the "bias" yet remaining in our American economy and society and academic departments with respect to women.
historychic: Wages have been lowered for reasons other than feminism. In fact, women still earn only 80% of what men do. Even in liberal academia, a majority of tenure track jobs go to men (only 17% of tenured history professors are women).
I dare you to name one male university administrator who will agree with me on this questioning of American feminist status quo liberalism.
historychic:
For instance, redeveloping a city block not only benefits the chain restaurant that moves in, but also the surrounding neighborhood, as more dollars will flow in after the new shopping center or stadium is built.
After I was able to persuade two critical members of the Portland (Maine) City Council to switch their votes, a nice public investment in a downtown Public Library was made, right next door to the local high school. Later, a high rise building next to Southern Maine University (the former Portland Plumbing Supply Company) was similarly rennovated into a nice, new academic Library, again using federal dollars. Linda Abramson was instrumental in making this happen, but it was my idea in the original.
When I first moved to Manchester, New Hampshire for an abortive federal job in 1990, the downtown area was struggling mightily and nearly defunct. In a 2-step process, I successfully persuaded local politicians 1) to build the Manchester Civic Center at its current location, downtown, where a Staples box store formerly stood; and 2) bring in an Airport expansion professional named Fred Testa (from T.F. Green Airport outside of Providence, Rhode Island) to be given political "carte blanche" to expand the Manchester Airport. Both of these public investments have provided excellent economic results and revitalization here in this community.
historychic: I would point to this blind faith in the free market, alongside other forces, like globalization and the shift to a service economy for declining wages. It has little to do with feminism.
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" I ask of the female academician. Did the decline of the American male gender in tandem with the rise of American feminism and feminist policies predate the decline of our American economy, middle class, federal balance sheets, and respect around the world, or not? As it seems to me, Japan's culture and economy seem to be thriving quite well, as are so many other examples around the World Globe today, without having incorporated American styled feminism into the mix. The contrast is quite frankly immensely startling to any observer who has eyes with which to see. To blame "globalism" for America's economic decline is a tortuous sophistry, since America until quite recently was the global economy. It was not "blind faith" in the free market, rather, "blind faith" in feminism, that has led America to it's current crisis.
historychic:
As for immigration, the need for immigration is hardly overblown. In all of our discussions of illegal immigrants, hardly ever do we mention the impact a deportation of immigrants would have. Namely, the social security system would go belly up if all the immigrants paying into fake social security numbers up and left. They pay into the system and never collect. They are doing us a huge favor by keeping social security relatively solvent.
As for birth control, I wouldn't argue that the pill hasn't changed the sexual lives of women. As a historian of sexuality, however, I would argue that family planning is nothing new and that since the late 19th century, people have been utilizing advances in reproductive technology to restrict family size. And then, like today, somebody naively claimed that the American family was under attack by immigrants and women's rights activists and worried that by using birth control we were committing "race suicide." This spawned more racism and hate in our country and gave rise to the eugenics movement.
So then, Ms. Professor, you are a Historian of Sexuality? Aren't we all? I took a class years ago at that University of Southern Maine aforementioned, called "Sociology of the Family" for which the instructor was a committed and rather beknighted academic with a penchant both for facts construed only valid in support of her pet paradigms, and for sweeping societal generalizations that were both political and futurist or otherwise predictive in their evident "group think" origins and extrapolations. It was all very interesting, and edifying up to a point of educational validity. But as I am a Roman Catholic and Italian American man here in America, you and my former instructor both will forgive me if I do not subscribe to your mutual attribution of the Eugenics Movement - genetic improvement of humankind by way of socially engineered breeding programs and concomitant population control policies and paradigms - are the fruits of the anti-abort or pro-natalist views of those who do not favor "utilizing advances in reproductive technology to restrict family size" as you put it. This revisit of an issue of profound import for American policies and programs, in all its permutations, may seem like a form of fundamentalism, or retrograde thinking, or hopelessly religious based or conservative thought, to many young people, high flying academicians such as yourself, and government and political operatives, save that the new biotechnology "technology" is already filling the sails of our future today, whether we put the rudder back on our ship of state, or not. Our policies of population control are well-rooted in the English ideas of Robert Malthus, who was as extreme a pamphleteer as Sam Adams in his day. Similarly, the misbegotten Planned Parenthood organization and all its kin - NARAL or National Abortion Rights Action League, Kate Michelman, the Democratic Party, all the "good cause" foundation money and private contributors, and all the modern American feminist "Group Think" machinery, owes its origins to a particular woman in New York City, who visited the crowded Italian ghetto neighborhoods and was appalled in a very profound and permanent way, call it a "reaction formation," to the ethnicity, the urban density, and the European character of the place. Today, whatever remains of Italian or other ethnic enclaves in our urban American centers, is prized and appreciated. I might add that these Italian and other "foreign" immigrants built much of what we think of today as America, including what remains of our families.
As such, the spawning of "racism and hate in our country" remains institutionalized in our feminist and pro-abort policies to this very day.
historychic:
If you want to find the decline you see, look not to feminists. Look to capitalists, neoliberals, and anybody who fights government intervention into the economy, specifically those who oppose wealth redistribution. Those are the enemies of the middle class family. Not feminists. Increased female autonomy has never injured anybody. Women, myself included, are still encouraged to get married- we just have more power to select our partners and shape our married lives.
You seem not to see the connection between government and capitalist business and social policies and prescriptions, and feminism. Whereas I see feminism as a direct outgrowth of both interests. Modern American feminism is a top-down phenomenon, in the person of Gloria Steinem, Hugh Hefner and others, and by no means has grassroots, or bottom-up origination. To the contrary, America had dynamic families, technological innovation, and democratic institutions of governance at every level, local, state and federal, before feminism, corporatism, and what I call "GIANTISM" in our federal U.S. Government took hold in tandem, and fairly recently at that. Young American students of our U.S. History should most certainly be taught about this fact, if they are to learn anything about American History at all. The Bush Presidency is about as far afield from the traditions, values and historical experience of America as you can get, but so is the Democratic Party, certainly in terms of the Democrats in our U.S. Senate. Sometimes, I wonder what long-serving Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia thinks of these changes, he who "wrote the book" on the U.S. Senate, in the well-worn tradition of the several and many great men who served there before him and with him.
Sometimes, I also wonder why any American man would ever consider marriage today, when a man and his wallet seems to serve as fair prey for feminist, corporate and governmental pillage if not respect. Just look at Michael Jordan, Paul McCartney, and Governor Spitzer of New York for the latest examples of a profound and permanently established cultural militant feminism that is as well-rooted into American and Anglo culture at home and abroad as any Queen of England could ever hope. Protestantism, indeed!
