Evaluating Feminism

I grew up in the mid to late years of the last century while feminism was being established as a leading agenda in the USA and UK. It was tacitly supported by international politicians since it has been demonstrated that further and higher education causing delayed motherhood or singleness are very effective birth control mechanisms.

I passionately believe in education and equality of opportunity for women. I see the need to control the world's populations. However, it always has deeply disturbed me that femininity seems to have no role or importance in the Anglo American feminist agenda. How is "feminism" true to womanhood, with its special qualities, if there is no honoured place for femininity? Surely, without that, "feminism" for many feminine women turns out to be another means of inequality - due to expecting too much of them.

The advent of the pill and DNA testing made the notion that female chastity is equivalent to masculine courage and "virtu" redundant. Nowadays, men can find out who their children are by DNA testing. Some women, but certainly not all, want the same sexual license that some men, but not all, have granted themselves down the centuries.

Marriage is now not necessary, as it used to be, for a woman’s financial survival. The State has taken over the role of provider for many single mother. Nearly 50% of young women in the UK are now unmarried. Science and the manipulation of Nature in the Pill have rendered not only the basic qualities that defined "woman" over the centuries - purity, loyalty, care and love - undesirable but also unimpressive. A woman’s courage is no longer expressed in her sexual continence and faithfulness. Instead, an independent, financially viable woman who can do everything a man can do, earning as much or more than men, is the new model of a "real", modern woman. But is she? And what unbearable pressure does it put on "feminine" women?

I can only say what I feel, unfashionable as it is. This model is not for me what true and satisfying "womanhood" is about. This role model is someone alien to me, something being imposed by modern science and values that I do not subscribe to. For me, it is against the warp of Nature, as expressed in feminine women. As a result, we see widespread damaging confusion about the true identity of womanhood, which also affects the identity of men. There is real confusion in the minds of girls and young women (as well as boys) about how to behave, act and how to live. It is hardly surprising that some young women want to avoid the challenges of adulthood. How shocking it is to see young women either without self respect, wanting to shock or behaving like drunken adolescent boys, with the inevitable health and other tragic consequences.

For me, much of what 20th century thought was admirable about women was not "driven" by the majority of women themselves, but by science and the imitation of the wrong kind of maleness by a small number of women with their own agendas. Who knows if there were also others hidden agendas behind it? For me, it has also resulted in the sad demise of “the gentleman”, a breed which impressed the world. Finally now, with women heading for complete "liberation", we see that these choices are going to result in women doing "everything". Is that what they really wanted? To me, it seems neither fair, desirable, healthy or practical.

God made two sexes to complement, love and support each other, to steward the earth together. For me, one sad outcome seems to be acceptable public behaviours which are deeply unbecoming in both sexes e.g. vulgarity, coarseness and hardness in women and ungentlemanly, boorish, aggressive men. This is barbarism, not liberation. The social and cultural costs too are only too apparent. A society that has no special place for noble women of charity, chastity and honour is a culture with no inner "story".

There is a third way. That would mean going back to who women really are, without the imposition of external pressures and ideas born of resentment against men, or some other hidden agenda. What do I mean by that? Well, as an example, tackling the idea that being pleasing or charming without ulterior motive or pretence is unfashionable.

Being charming was always accepted as desirable in previous centuries. But women and men are no longer taught the inner aspiration to "charm from their soul" without pretence. I believe that result is the impoverishment of society and above all the destruction of many men and women's confidence simply to be their "true self"....