A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Feminism is a heresy January 19, 2012

According to author Donna Steichen, writing at Crisis Magazine.  It’s a long post – a lengthy excerpt below, but there is much more at the link:

A brief historical review helps to explain how Feminism was transformed from an eccentric opinion held by a few highly educated and discontented women to an ideology that revolutionized society’s views about how to found families and how to live in them.

Make no mistake: Feminism has had that kind of power. And it has sought it. The leading “mainstream” feminist group in America, the National Organization for Women (NOW) said in its 1966 statement of goals that it would settle for nothing less than

a sex role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: childrearing, education, marriage and the family, medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of the race.[i]

Where did feminists get the idea that family life needed a “revolution”? From those specialists in revolution, the Marxists (see Chapter 13). In his 1884 treatise, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Karl Marx’s best friend and co-author, Frederich Engels, asserted that the “bourgeois” family with its division of labor—men working, women raising children—was one of the greatest obstacles to the achievement of a socialist society. [Most of the terrible collapse in morals in the last century has been engineered, to one degree or another, by marxists in academia and other “elite” circles.  Our culture has been degraded to an almost unimaginable degree by marxism/leftism, which has pushed “class struggles” by women, the sexually perverese, immigrants, etc.  It is amazing how much of that rhetoric and belief has seeped into the Church] Engels argued that this barrier should be dismantled by encouraging women to see themselves as an oppressed class, like exploited factory workers, who must engage in Marxist “class warfare” against their fathers and husbands. Of course, “class warfare” in the workplace has been condemned by numerous popes, including Leo XIII and Pius XI.[ii] Applying that socialist principle to the intimate relations of the family is even more destructive: women who accept such a principle cease to see the family as a unit joined by common goals, and instead feel morally justified in seeking their own selfish interests—at the expense not just of their husbands but of their children. [Is the epidemic in divorce aided and advanced by this feminist mentality?  So much of the damage to marriage and the family as institutions can be traced to divorce, and yet most divorcees do not report being happier after their divorce, they just feel a different kind of unhappiness.  What price have we paid, as a culture, for this twisted, marxist form of “empowerment?”] If a woman’s own children can be her enemies, it is no wonder that feminists came to endorse first contraception and then abortion as central requirements for the progress of women in society.

From Class Struggle to Contraception

It is true, as “pro-life feminists” like to say, that early feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton accepted the belief, common in their era, that abortion is a barbaric crime committed by selfish men against women victims. Most nineteenth century suffragists thought that women voters, with their presumably nobler morality, would heal a world wounded by male selfishness.[These women had a very high view of themselves] But their fundamental premise—that women were an oppressed social class, a “domestic proletariat”— eventually eroded the wholesome social principles they had inherited from a deeply Christian society. Today there is not a single major feminist organization that does not support government-funded contraception and abortion on demand. Opposing either of those demands gets women drummed out of such organizations, just as pro-life female candidates for office find themselves opposed by such high-powered feminist fundraising groups as Emily’s List—whose litmus test is support for Roe v. Wade.

Even in its Victorian stages, Feminism’s implicit assumption, that wives and husbands are opponents locked in a power struggle, was corrosive of society. The words of suffragist leaders reveal that, like Engels and Marx, they wanted to do away with traditional family roles. The suffragists did not call on society to value woman’s distinctive and irreplaceable contributions as mothers and teachers of young people—who sometimes, out of necessity, had to work outside the home. Instead, they called on women to reject their natural vocation in order to live like men. In 1868, suffragist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, herself a married mother of seven, advocated birth control and equated traditional marriage with prostitution. She went on to say:

Our idea is that every woman of sound mind and body, with brains and two hands, is more noble, virtuous, and happy in supporting herself. [Why would one say this?  Because they were so unhappy?  But why assume other women were?  Anyone can make themselves miserable in any situation] So long as a woman is dependent on a man, her relation to him will be a false one, either in marriage or out of it; she will despise herself and hate him whose desires she gratifies for the necessities of life; the children of such unions must needs be unloved and deserted.[This is one of the most pompous, false, and asinine statements I’ve ever read.  I pity Stanton’s children, apparently she did not care for them very much] [iii]

 A libertarian might suppose Feminism to be merely a strategy to give women more options, enabling those not called to motherhood to achieve other highly valued positions in society. Alas, no. For women who don’t embrace their agenda, feminists tend to advocate coercion instead of liberty. Simone de Beauvoir, author of the pioneering feminist work The Second Sex, admitted as much in 1975:

[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will  will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

It is easy to discern how totalitarian all these utopian movements become.  The psychologies that bought into and created this mythology of feminism are certainly, ah……….interesting. 

There is tons more at the link.  It’s a very long article, but well worth reading.