I have already briefly spoken to a quite appalling opinion piece by a noted feminist, but because of more pressing engagements – the celebration of my 30th wedding anniversary – I was rightly pulled away from a proper assessment of the article.
So now I want to spend a bit more time on it, and demonstrate just how ugly the face of feminism can get. I refer to the January 22 Age article by arch-feminist Anne Summers. She is an Australian feminist who has been around for decades, spewing her angry diatribes against men, marriage, family and common sense.
I recall many years ago hearing a radio interview with her. She was asked what her greatest achievement was. She said she loved hearing from women who had walked out on their marriages, thanks to what Summers had written. So in her eyes, the greatest thing she accomplished was to destroy marriages, or at least ‘empower’ women to see that as a high and noble calling.
So in true ugly feminist fashion, she is no friend at all of marriage and family. And she is certainly no friend of the unborn. Her Age article is one long attack on those feminists who are in fact pro-life. She informs us that it is impossible to be a feminist and pro-life.
This would certainly surprise a lot of important feminists. Contrary to the baloney Summers is trying to pass off here, the truth is this: the early feminists – the founding mothers of the contemporary feminist movement – were overwhelmingly pro-life. One simply has to read their many writings on this. Let me offer just a few quotes:
“Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned…Is there no remedy for all this ante-natal child murder?…Perhaps there will come a time when…an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood…and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with.” – Sarah Norton
“The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.” – Victoria Woodhull
“Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!” – Susan B. Anthony
“Women becoming, consequently, weaker…than they ought to be…have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection…either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast if off when born. Nature in every thing demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.” – Mary Wollstonecraft
“Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.” –Alice Paul
So who do we believe here? The early suffragettes, or the likes of Summers? Just who are the true feminists? Indeed, given the quotes I have just offered above, consider this quote from Summers – perhaps the most hideous statement found in her article: “the ultimate assault on a woman’s body: requiring her to carry a child she has decided she cannot have”.
Incredible. Carrying a baby is “the ultimate assault on a woman’s body”! And please take note her language here: “a child she has decided she cannot have”. What she means of course is “does not want to have”. That is the real issue here.
Women have been sold the bill of goods which tells them that they are master over their own children in the womb, and somehow have the right to kill them if they are seen as inconvenient or unwanted. Just where in the world did such a right to kill come from?
There are many people in our lives who are inconvenient and unwanted – all of us would know of such people, both as family members or close friends: those who may have become too old, or too wearisome, or too expensive to care for, or too disagreeable. Should we then just bump these people off?
The only assault going on in a woman’s body is when the cold, hard metal instruments go in to rip a living baby to shreds, or extracts the burnt, dismembered pieces of an unborn child. Abortion is certainly the ultimate assault here. And the result is a dead baby.
Consider also this remark: “There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.”
Wow, what an acidic patch of ideological verbiage. Feminists like Summers demand independence; normal people recognise quite the opposite: we are made for relationship and community, and we need each other. There is no such thing as the fully independent person. Or as has been said elsewhere, no man is an island.
We need each other, and we are meant to live in interdependent relationships. But all the feminists are interested in it seems are barren power trips where women are cut completely adrift from the complementarity of others. That is some vision of a brave new world.
I recall speaking to a group of rather angry single mums some years ago. I was the only male in the room, and I knew I would be treading on some slippery ground. I tried to make the case that just as it takes two to marry, so it takes two to divorce. I mentioned that relationships involve sacrifice, give and take, forgiveness, and willingness to go the second mile.
None of this impressed my audience. They were power feminists who believed that having power and superiority over men was the way to go. It is not surprising that their marriages did not go the distance with that kind of attitude. I even had some great resources for single parents from Focus on the Family available. Hardly anyone looked at them, and none bought any.
They were angry, they were militant, and they were in no mood to hear about how relationships demand giving, not taking. They demand softness, not power trips. They demand forgiveness, not grudge-bearing. But the modern feminist ideology seems to know nothing of what makes for true, lasting heterosexual relationships. Summers is a perfect illustration of this.
And her other hallmark of a real woman? The ability to kill her own offspring. What sort of monstrous and ugly logic is this? The truly free and independent woman is the woman who can utterly resist her own maternal instincts and actually kill her own baby in her own womb? That is independence?
If this is the best that modern-day feminism can dish up, then it is time to close up shop – and real fast. This is not liberation. This is not freedom. This is not independence. This is the death of womanhood and the death of humanity. It is the ugly face of feminism.
G.K. Chesterton, writing of the first feminist movement, said that “twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to’: and proceeded to become stenographers”. Modern feminists demanded to be freed from every limitation and every moral boundary. All they proceeded to do was sink into bondage and moral darkness.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-prolife-feminist-20120121-1qba0.html
http://www.feministsforlife.org/history/foremoth.htm
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