A New York Times opinion columnist, Michelle Goldberg, considers the current backlash against the feminist movement.
“‘It’s true: We’re in trouble,’ writes Michelle Goldberg of the modern feminist movement. ‘One thing backlashes do is transform a culture’s common sense and horizons of possibility. A backlash isn’t just a political formation. It’s also a new structure of feeling that makes utopian social projects seem ridiculous’. It wouldn’t be fair to blame the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the ensuing wave of draconian abortion laws sweeping the nation on a failure of persuasion, or on a failure of the women’s movement. But signs of anti-feminist backlash are permeating American culture: Girlbosses have become figures of ridicule, Amber Heard’s testimony drew a fire hose of misogyny, and recent polling finds that younger generations — both men and women — are feeling ambivalent about whether feminism has helped or hurt women. A movement that has won so many victories in law, politics and public opinion is now defending its very existence”. -The Ezra Klein Show.
Middle-class educated young women were not liberated by feminism, they were pressured by public opinion and influenced through media and academia to feed the corporate mills in lieu of marriage.
Feminists can get as upset as they like, but it won’t undo the incredible societal damage that has been done by four decades of lowering working men’s wages and producing too few children.
In today’s political climate, it’s startling to remember that in 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek.
The bill failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek.
By the 1960s, American workers spent less time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
Between 1990 and 2000, however, the average annual work hours for employed Americans increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan — the former leader of the work pack — in the hours devoted to paid work.
Today, almost 40 percent of men in professional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter of men in middle-income occupations. Individuals in lower-income and less-skilled jobs work fewer hours, but they are more likely to experience frequent changes in shifts, mandatory overtime on short notice, and nonstandard hours. And many low-income workers are forced to work two jobs to get by.
When we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while almost 15 percent of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.
The reason "gender equality" stalled is because it is an economic impossibility. The reason the average hours worked is so much higher than in the more "sexist" 1960s is because primarily there are more women in the workforce.
While immigration also plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor. Unlike immigrants, they don't bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects.
The reason why hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is that that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.
One-third of working-class women have always worked. The change brought by feminism is that now middle-class and upper-middle-class married women work as well. And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don't work will have with their husbands who support them, because an increase in the supply of labor necessitates a decrease in the price of labor, demand remains constant.
And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.
This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:
- The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down. This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
- Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduce the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increase the divorce rate.
- The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.
Feminism's structural inability to sustain wage rates and birth rates spells the inevitable doom of every feminist society, as surely as the inability to calculate prices spells the doom of every socialist society. "Gender equality" hasn't stalled because it isn't being sufficiently enforced by the government, it has stalled because it is in the process of collapsing along with the society it has infested.
The impossibility of sexual equalitarian societies has nothing to do with fairness, traditional religious beliefs, human rights, or how intensely one feels that women are equal to men in every way. It is a straightforward and unavoidable consequence of the law of supply and demand.
An increase in the size of the workforce results in an increase in total production. With middle- and upper-class women being unable to perform useful work at the same level as their male counterparts we've created make work for them. This results in their labor being a net negative for the economy as a whole. If upper- and middle-class women did jobs they were suited for: Child care, cooking, or anything that required repetitive small focus production then their contribution would be a net positive, but their earnings would be a lot less.
Furthermore, the notion that equal access to higher education was going to cause a flowering of female intellectual achievement was always false. Although the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female undergraduates in the United States was close to parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and later as GIs returned from World War II. A high point of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. But starting then and continuing until the present in an almost unbroken trend, female college enrollments have increased relative to male enrollments.
In other words, elite women were attending university in equal numbers to elite men, but more middle-class and working-class men going to college threw the balance out of whack. Middle-class women followed suit, and the consequent collapse in national demographics caused the replacement of 60 million aborted natives with 60 million foreign immigrants.
Consider the two great laments of the modern American members of the fairer sex. For the unmarried woman, it is the reality that she must marry later in life than ever before, if she is able to marry at all. For the married woman, it is that unlike generations of women before her, she cannot afford to stay home with her children unless she is fortunate enough to be of the financial elite.
Both of these developments can be traced directly to women’s rights. Men’s increasing unwillingness to marry stems primarily from two causes — the feminized family court system that transformed marriage from a mutually beneficial contract into a financial and emotional liability, and the removal of paternal responsibility for the sexual behavior of young women. Ergo, the need for marriage has been eliminated while its liabilities have increased.
Take into account the words of the brilliant Peter Drucker in an excerpt from one of his most seminal papers.
Peter Drucker, in his famous essay, Managing Oneself
You can never win by improving your weaknesses, only by improving your strengths. In broader socio-economic terms, feminism has pressured women to build on their weaknesses (ability to compete against men) and discouraged them from capitalizing on their strengths (youth and fertility).
Adding to this cruel feminist hoax inflicted on impressionable women, some companies make a spectacle of offering to freeze their female worker’s eggs so they can devote their youth to the corporation and attempt childbirth long after the ideal window for this has passed. This is not to imply that women should not be educated; a woman should have an education as a financial backup and to use after child-rearing.
It’s not surprising that a growing number of people are becoming ambivalent towards feminism considering even self-proclaimed feminists are coming to terms with the fact that about two-thirds of women received a raw deal from the so-called women’s movement.
“Outspoken She Devil author risks infuriating working mothers by claiming their cause helped to drive down men's wages by half.
Weldon, 85, says the feminist revolution had adverse implications by ‘halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family’.
That meant some women had to get jobs, even if they would rather have been at home with their children. ‘Women had to work to support the family. So for two in three women, it really was a problem’”. -Chris Hastings, Daily Mail
Linda Hirschman once claimed, “the tasks of housekeeping and child-rearing are not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings”.
But, the truth of the matter is, no one benefited more from the increased involvement of women in the workforce than these four groups of people:
1. Daycare providers. An industry that exists where one wasn’t previously required.
2. Corporations. The increased supply of labor has pushed media male wages down to a level last seen in 1968.
3. Divorce lawyers. Working women are more than three times more likely to be divorced than their stay-at-home counterparts.
4. Retired old men. In 1950, 45.8 percent of men over 65 worked. In 2000, 17.5 percent did. In 1950, 86.9 percent of men 55-64 worked. In 2000, 67.3 percent did.
This is one reason more women are filing for bankruptcy than men in this day and age. In times of investment booms and expanding wealth, everyone has an economic margin of error and can afford to do stupid things like getting divorced for superficial and ephemeral reasons. Contractionary times are considerably less forgiving. Particularly now that women entered the workforce in greater numbers which lead to a significant reduction in the price of labor.