Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which inspired a flood of commemorative essays everywhere from Slate to the New York Times.
It also inspired what I think is one of the most hilariously dumb sentences I’ve ever read on The Spearhead. In a post talking about Friedan’s “youthful Bolshevik activism” – she spent a number of years as a labor journalist – Spearhead head boy W.F. Price offers this assessment of the book that jumpstarted feminism’s second wave:
Although I haven’t read the book, it apparently stresses the need for women to engage in work outside the home, which is a basic Communist tenet.
Yeah, that’s why most women work. Not to pay the bills, but because they are pawns of the worldwide communist conspiracy.
Weirdly, Price is well aware that he’s full of shit here, and that most women throughout history have worked, not because of Communism but because of economic necessity. Indeed, he even points this out in his post. But he follows this acknowledgement with more thoughts on Friedan’s evil commie ways:
[I]t looks as though Betty Friedan was one of the many dedicated Communists who caused so many problems immediately after WWII. I once looked up a list of known Communist front groups in the US, and noticed that quite a few of them were women’s groups. Combined with accounts I’ve read from former Cheka agents, it makes for pretty convincing evidence that feminism was deliberately fostered in the US by Soviet agents. It makes sense to use women in that manner, because authorities are not as suspicious of women, and they can operate under the radar far more easily than men. Women also make excellent spies.
Although I’m sure resurgent feminism would have emerged in one form or another with or without Betty Friedan, it is interesting to note second wave feminism’s Cold War origins in Marxist infiltration of US society. …
It turns out she was little more than a loyal Bolshevik pawn who suddenly stumbled onto success by writing a thinly-veiled Marxist critique of American capitalist society from a woman’s perspective.
In the comments, TheTruthishere enthusiastically agreed with Price’s feminism-was-a-Soviet-plot thesis:
You are right a read the same thing on another site … feminism was thought up in a russian thinktank to basically destroy the family as the states smallest cell. Basically so communism could be introduced in the western world. Well, it worked, it just took them longer than expected. By the way the Rockafellas are involved in this as well
RockEfellers. Not RockAfellAs. Or even RockAfellERs.
Uncle Elmer gave us this weird socio-sexual fantasy:
Speaking of Freudian, all feminists have a major clit-boner for “1963”, though it was not technically part of the mythic “50s”. Based on their persistent mention of that era, it’s clear they would gladly trade in their Birkenstocks for a chance to be slapped and rogured by Ward Cleaver.
They didn’t call him “The Cleaver” for nothing.
And Towgunner, for some odd reason, used the opportunity to express his disdain for “female” – in quotes – music composers.
I have a lot of classical music as my pandora stations, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, etc. So, guess what gets inter-mixed with the play sets from time to time…yep, the token “female” composer. I’m usually doing something else while listening and this never fails – I always know its a female composer because it, well, is bad music. Also, all of the female composers I’ve heard basically sound the same. All things aside, forget I’m an MRA, it has very little aesthetic value for anyone, except for those who think talent is the same thing as “social justice”. female composers create music that is akin to cold coffee left over from breakfast and now its 2:00 PM. And its not after a few minutes, I can tell a female composer in the first few seconds…that too never fails. Many of them painfully subject their listeners to simple scales and scattered and disagreeable harmonies…kind of like the background music for greys autonomy or any chick flick. Above all, it’s not, even in the slightest, original…frankly female composers are a perfect case study in that you can hear the innate female tendency towards conformity.
By the way, here are some songs by female composers – sorry, “female” composers. I’m not sensing a lot of conformity here.
That’s the weird thing about Price; he actually, from time to rare time, shows a glimmer of awareness, of actually understanding something, but it only lasts a moment before he goes back to his insistence that women would be happy to be below men (hypergamy, anyone?), that even the simplest things like women’s education are totalitarian evils (look at his screed on “authoritarianism and feminism,” he pretty much says exactly that when you look at his quotes), and his pretensions of his own ancient wisdom and historical perspective in a stupid modern world.
There’s actually the occasion that he says something sensible, something that I, at least, wouldn’t really oppose in the abstract. But then he immediately, often in the same article (like here), and sometimes at the same time, goes back to the misogyny and crankery that makes the MRM what it is. And, in a sense, this makes him even worse than much of the consistently stupid and hateful commenters.
Kiwi girl, I was kind of agreeing with you but expanding on it to say that no one can point to one thing and call it the cause of the change from extended families to nuclear families. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.
>>>BlackBloc, I’m leery of the way you’re using terms like liberal and conservative
Tough. I’m a Canadian anarcho-communist, so I use the terms as they’re defined historically worldwide and not in the idiosyncratic way they’ve evolved in late 20th/early 21st century USA.
So many weird assumptions here. First that communism can be assumed to be pure evil, second that since feminism is evil it must have been caused by something else evil, third that writing in this kind of language doesn’t make you sound completely batshit…
Also, “grey’s autonomy”. Oh no, not the autonomy! That was a hell of a Freudian slip.
@pecunium – I know. That “Uncle Elmer” dude apparently has never spoken to an actual feminist. Most of the (white) feminists that I know talk about the 1950s as a very bad time to be a woman (to say nothing of being a POC of any gender), not as something we would want to go back to, so I have no idea what he’s on about with this fantasy that feminists idealize the 1950s. If anything MRA fools and conservatives are the ones who fantasize about the “good old days.”
Feminists also like Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” published in 1792. In 1792, construction on Washington D.C. began and George Washington was elected to a second term. Therefore, feminists love America! We aren’t communist spies after all!
I’m only willing to be a spy if it comes with cool toys like it does for James Bond. Being a spy seems dangerous, so I’m going to need a car with an ejector seat and a pen that’s both a camera and a gun as compensation.
Washington D.C.? But that means feminists love the federal government! Which is the very teat we suck on! SO THAT PROVES EVERYTHING EVER.
MRAs win, everybody can go home.
Tough. I’m a Canadian anarcho-communist, so I use the terms as they’re defined historically worldwide and not in the idiosyncratic way they’ve evolved in late 20th/early 21st century USA.
O…kay. I’ll just be over here where apparently no-one else has ever redefined those terms, and I’ll remember not to engage you in discussions regarding politics and economics.
AARRGH. Damn you, blockquotes.
I have to admit I have never read The Feminine Mystique either although I am familiar with the points and criticisms that have been made of it over the years, and Friedan’s own troubled relationship with radical and lesbian feminists. I don’t think I need to read it now either even if some MRA references it. I’m still working on Mein Kampf…
@ellex24: If I used “Liberal”/”Conservative” instead of “liberal”/”conservative” you could certainly accuse me of being unclear. Fact remains that the name of political parties has little to do with the definition of words. The alternative to my method is to assume that Communism is about crony capitalism (China), Labour is about supporting imperialism (UK) and Liberal attitudes to immigration involves fascist dehumanisations (Australia).
I’m sorry, BlackBloc, I’m not going to discuss this. My opinion (and I’ll call it an opinion) doesn’t differ whether you capitalize the beginning of the words or not. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
I need to get more sleep – I read the post title as
Betty Crocker: Communist homewrecker?
Either that or I need chocolate frosting, stat!
Hey, it works. Pre-packaged cake mix cuts down on the time it takes to make a cake, which means that women are able to spend less time in the kitchen, which leads to communism, feminism, and the fall of America.
I have never encountered MRAs who are socialists. Right-wing libertarians, yes.
Increased levels of anxiety and uncertainty have definitely manifested in the lives of people living under late capitalism. Women have been forced to work more in order to make ends meet–different from work as a form of self-fulfilment and a genuine contribution to society.
I am familiar with Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, and the reality there was that women did in fact work outside the home, but misogynist attitudes still abounded.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Cold brew is amazing precisely because it’s NOT hot coffee that’s gone cold.
/barista
Commenting on a book without having read it is just like the way he once said that the Dalai Lama is not a feminist and that there were no female Lamas. Folks like this don’t know any better – willfully, deliberately. They don’t bother to find out before spouting off.
I love how “there were lots of communist women’s groups” suddenly becomes “All communists are Soviets and all feminists are communists and therefore feminism was a Soviet plot.”
Also, I’d like to know whose list of “known” communist groups he’s working from, since there were (and are) plenty of unreliable sources out there. The definition of “communism” in the US has always been…broad? Flexible? Batshit?
IDK why I’m even trying to engage with this argument,. Given that he starts from “I didn’t read it but…” I’ve probably already put more thought into this than he did.
If that’s true, it’s probably less a plot to destroy the family and more a case of everybody being expected to pull their own weight. “From each according to their ability”, right?
shitthatneverhappened.txt
I’m obliged to point out that the Communists were pretty pro natalist arent I? Ceausescu is the one that takes it to extremes, with banning abortion in 1966.
I think the best part of this MRA post was the very first line “Although I haven’t read the book…” – I giggled in the lunchroom!