Status Updates From The Rights of Women: Reclai...

So interesting

We're picking this up again.

If much historical injustice and prejudice against women has been corrected in our time, the culturally essential work of families and family-supporting communities—practiced and handed down over the ages—has been sorely neglected. Without a substantive account of human freedom, and it’s proper end, human excellence, the essential human goods of children, family, and community, so necessary for authentic (cont)

At their best, families, and the communities that support them, provide the surest protection against the ever-encroaching market mentality, helping persons, in Glendon’s words, “to develop an internalized willingness to view others with genuine respect and concern, rather than as objects, means, or obstacles.”

“Let us stimulate the free market is the greatest device that human beings have discovered for unleashing economic energy and creativity, for utilizing resources, and for responding to human needs…Nevertheless, those who do not want to see any interference with market forces in the form of family policy or labor policy need to think again…The market, like our democratic experiment, requires a certain kind(cont)

Previous generations of women’s rights advocates sought to protect the culturally essential work of caregiving from the erosion of an ever-encroaching market and its materialistic economic principles. A woman’s movement that regards abortion rights as *equal citizenship rights* has surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of the market.

Dang.

“Having known oppression, we cannot stand by and allow the oppression of an entire class of weaker human beings. Having once been owned by our husbands, we cannot condone a position that says the unborn are owned by their mothers. Remembering a time when our value was determined by whether a man wanted us, we refuse to bow to the patriarchal attitude that says the unborn child’s value is determined (cont)

In the apt words of a southern academic at the time: “[Strict equality feminists] would free women from the rule of men only to make them greater slaves to the machines of industry.”

But when such principles are jettisoned and the pursuit of virtue is traded for power- and pleasure-seeking, those same asymmetrical sex differences can be the ground of a deep antagonism between men and women…

In this theory of “reverse gender polarity”..women are essentially nurturant; men aggressive. Women are always and everywhere innocent victims; men, lustful perpetrators. In its most radical (and ironic) form today, reason itself is understood as “masculine” and so is not to be trusted…

Bringing contemporary scientific research to bear on this complex insight, one might say that each man or woman lives out his or her body/soul union distinctively, with each person’s self-development affected by physiological sex differences in different ways. For instance, no two women are exactly alike, even as they share physiological traits…that differentiate them from all men.

Sexual difference, for Wollstonecraft, originated at the level of men’s and women’s distinctive bodies, manifested in their distinctive capacities for paternity and maternity…Others, following Rousseau, seemed to believe, by contrast, that men and women had entirely different natures that arose from their distinctive “masculine” or “feminine” souls. (Cont in comment below cause it’s so interesting)

“Insofar as suffragists following Stanton held onto the concept of virtue, it was of a Rousseauian variety, with a rhetorical tendency to bifurcate the specification of virtue into masculine and feminine, with praise, in this telling, for the superior “feminine” soul. Capturing the franchise was, on this account, a means to bring women’s superior soul to bear on base, male-dominated public affairs.” Ugh

..man’s arbitrary claims of power, heeding not the higher authority of God, were the source of every oppression, in Wollstonecraft’s view…[She articulated that] were there no higher standard of truth or virtue, human beings would base their actions on what is useful, pleasing, or convenient for them, and the weak would fall prey to the strong.

“”It will appear that the [American] people who have struggled so bravely against being enslaved themselves are ready enough to enslave others: the event which has raised my hopes of seeing a better state of human affairs will prove only as introduction to a new scene of aristocratical tyranny and human debasement…” The American founders obviously did not heed Price’s admonition.”