Meet the New Feminism – Same as the Old Feminism

We must then make up our minds in accepting Women’s Rights to surrender our Bibles, and have an atheistic Government. And especially must we expect to have, presiding over every home and rearing every group of future citizens, that most abhorrent of all phenomena, an infidel woman; for of course that sex, having received the precious boon of their enfranchisement only by means of the overthrow of the Bible, must be foremost in trampling upon this their old oppressor and enemy. Its restoration to authority is necessarily their “re-enslavement,” to speak the language of their party.

This suggests a third consequence, which some of the advocates of the movement even already are bold enough to foreshadow. “Women’s Rights” mean the abolition of all permanent marriage ties. We are told that Mrs. Cady Stanton avowed this result, proclaiming it at the invitation of the Young Men’s Christian Association of New York. She holds that woman’s bondage is not truly dissolved until the marriage bond is annulled. She is thoroughly consistent.

R.L. Dabney, Women’s Rights Women, 1872

Perhaps one of the strongest, most enduring misconceptions ever to come down the pike regarding the infamous 19th Amendment – of “female emancipation” and its predictable disastrous aftermath – is the idea that the original “suffragettes” were “conservative” in their overall world and life view, and had altogether, or at least mostly, pure intentions and motives in mind when a few of them first organized to meet in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19-20, 1848. A modern iteration of the point may readily be found in the following exchange between two (silly) American women who count themselves among the leadership ranks of today’s “conservative women” and who came together to discuss the topic as such on a post-2020 election Heritage Foundation-sponsored podcast ironically named Problematic Women. To wit (beginning @ 11:09):

Problematic Host: I know, I’m … such a nerd; I … love the House Freedom Caucus, and,… I just can’t wait for the day where… – We do conversations with conservatives at the Daily Signal and with the Heritage Foundation, and that’s where the … House Freedom Caucus comes into a press conference – …and I just can’t wait till the day I show up and it’s … half women, half men, and women are represented there; it’s just going to be such a, uh, I dunno, a proud lady moment for me.

Problematic Guest: A “proud lady moment,” I mean, that’s an awesome way to think about it, right! Conservative women are … resolute, and it seems like we’ve finally come to the other side of the, y’know, the very harsh and extreme feminist movement of the last thirty years, and we’re ready to reclaim the original type of feminism that started in Seneca Falls and take it back for conservative women, and be what it’s really supposed to be about, which is providing opportunity, umm, and advancement for all women, not just a specific type of women, and I think that’s why so many people are so excited about Justice Barrett, about these thirteen new [female] House members, …

As may be gleaned from my opening paragraph above, what I’m most concerned with and aim to address in this and possible future essays on the topic is what the guest in the above exchange referred to as “the original type of feminism that started in Seneca Falls.” The silliness of the two of them otherwise (e.g., the “proud lady moment” remark that ultimately became the title of the episode in question – go figure, etc.) notwithstanding. It will come as no surprise to ID readers that I’m in full agreement with Dr. Dabney when, in 1872, he declared the movement he dubbed Women’s Rights Women to have been infused with, and a natural product of, (Northern) radicalism from its very inception.

Below the fold is one man’s attempt to explode the false notion that “first-wave feminism,” or, its “original type” (to borrow from our Problematic Woman above-quoted) was anything but a radical movement from the get-go; that to embrace and to “reclaim” and reassert its (apparent) slightly less “harsh and extreme” manifestation for our day and age is to, in a very best of possible outcomes scenario, leave the seeds of feminist fanaticism in the fertile soil of emancipated, “independent” current-day womanhood, to grow to maturity and produce precisely the same “harsh and extreme” fruit it has been producing for the last thirty years one hundred and fifty years at a later date. And that’s in a very best-case scenario, if you catch my drift; the far greater likelihood is that it won’t need much time at all to regroup and reorganize as a more radical version than what it is at this moment in time, even if “conservative women” manage to “retake” it for a time and a season.

In many (most, actually) ways, in point of fact, the early suffragists were as “harsh and extreme” and fanatical as their modern spiritual sisters ever thought of being, which I shall demonstrate by way of citing their own words and actions below. Let’s get to it.

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It should be stated at the outset that, although infused with radicalism from its earliest days, as above-stated, it nevertheless took time for the full fruition of the feminist movement’s true and underlying nature to come to bear and to manifest itself in full ugly relief. This is just and simply the natural order of things; it’s nature taking her course in her “own sweet time.” By way of analogy, when I write that the federal principle was destroyed by the Yankees in 1861, readers should know it is not my intention therein, or thereby, to imply that remnants of the federal principle altogether disappeared from American governance at that very instant, or even within the first few years or decades afterward; it is in the nature of such things that they … take time, sometimes many decades, to come to full fruition. But come to full fruition they most assuredly will, given enough time. This is what the original opponents of suffrage such as Dr. Dabney were warning about; it is what many of us have warned about regarding homosexual “marriage” and that sort of thing. Which, by the way, could never have happened in the so called “United States” without female suffrage.

Similarly, and to cite a climatological example, we all know that the longest day of the year (Summer Solstice) in the northern hemisphere comes late in the third week of June. Year-in, year-out, without fail. By direct contrast, the shortest day of the year in the same hemisphere comes precisely six months later – late in the third week of December. However, both the hottest and the coldest days and weeks of the year come in the months of August and February respectively, fully two months after or following the longest (most heat) and shortest (least heat) days of the year. Why the delay? I trust that with a little pointed reflection upon the matter this intelligent readership will come to the correct answer, both individually and collectively.

The point in any case is that the radicalism inherent to feminism as such took time to come to full fruition and to manifest itself in full relief as we know it today. In other words, the Gloria Steinems of modern feminism are not perversions of the “original type;” they are in fact the very epitome and full manifestations of the original type. And this shall ever be the case, so long as the disease of feminism infects the minds of modern “Women’s Rights Women.”

The screenshots of the items you see above and below-posted could certainly be multiplied many times over; I could literally “pluck” from any part of the (massive) selection “at random” to show the same spirit of liberated (or, soon to be liberated) female radicalism at work. And this, several years before the infamous 19th Amendment was debated and ratified in Congress. Indeed, I challenge you, dear reader, to put the preceding assertion to the test. Download and read (selected at random, if you like) e.g. the articles in The Progressive Woman magazine above-depicted. Certainly do not take my word for it; read it for yourself. What you will find is that the only real difference between the rhetoric of “first-wave” feminism vs. the feminist rhetoric of our times, is that the pre-1920 suffragists (publicly) kept their language relatively clean and respectable-sounding; whereas today, well, I mean…

(My recollection is that the image immediately above is from 2012, but I could be wrong about the exact date. It was on the front page of the Tulsa World newspaper on the date in question.)

Mindful of my original promise to demonstrate my point about the early suffragettes, “by way of citing their own words and actions,” allow me to close this article out by honoring that commitment with a few of the quotes of feminist leaders of the era:

I do not expect I have changed any minds one way or the other as to the subject of this article. Religious fervor for a thing is powerful, and is very often the source of madness of one sort or another, “borne of a refusal to be wrong.” Indeed, I have an elder preacher-cousin who once told me, while discussing differing interpretations of a point of doctrine that, “I am so convinced that I am right about this, that if Jesus himself came down this very moment and told me I was wrong, I could not accept it.” I trust I needn’t explain how shocking it was to me to hear those words come out of his mouth. Suffice to say that saying I was “taken aback” by it is a huge understatement.

Whatever the case may be with individual readers regarding the subject of this article, I originally asked the question of a commenter in this thread, of whether or not she is [mentally and spiritually] prepared to accept that, contrary to popular opinion in certain “conservative” circles, first-wave feminism was made of the stuff of, and “blazed a trail” for, the “harsh and extreme” feminism we are all subjected to today, if I could show it to her “in their own words and acts.” Rest assured, dear reader, that I have barely exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg above in honoring that commitment. And that is really the question, when you boil it all down – are you mentally and spiritually prepared to accept those facts for what they truly are and what they expose, as opposed to what you would like them to be and to expose? That is a question each individual has to answer for himself or herself, of course.

But now, what will be the character of the children reared under such a domestic organization as this? … when the mother shall have found another sphere than her home for her energies; when she shall have exchanged the sweet charities of domestic love and sympathy for the fierce passions of the hustings; when families shall be disrupted at the caprice of either party, and the children scattered as foundlings from their hearthstone.—it requires no wisdom to see that a race of sons will be reared nearer akin to devils than to men.

R.L. Dabney, Women’s Rights Women

Next up: The feminist movement’s Card Index blackmail system that forced the “federal” Suffrage Amendment – forerunner to J. Edgar Hoover’s more well-known system, and of modern “doxxing” and “cancel culture.”

Catch y’all on the flipside.