The great obsession of liberals is radically free individualism.  Unchosen obligations-to nation, God, family--get in the way of this concept.  So too does the idea of inherited archetypes of good and bad behavior and obligations based on inherited and unchosen differences in nature, i.e., old/young, male/female, high born/low born.  This is why liberals are atheists.  This is why they’re feminists.  This is why they love abortion.  The thread is “liberating” human beings from the moral order.

The stubborn nature of sex differences, however, and the utterly unrewarding aspect of most jobs, suggests that the entire house of cards is tumbling.  Even Ivy League women are starting to stay home with their kids, and they are undoubtedly under the greatest social (though not economic) pressure to self-actualize by doing M&A;work at a big New York law firm for 3,000 hours per year, or whatever it is professors define the American Dream as these days.

If we believe that conforming to femininity is every woman’s responsibility in the same way that conforming to manliness is every man’s, conservatives (especially conservative women) shouldn’t be shy about saying so.

Absolutist statements about how others should be are just as bad coming from the right as they are coming from the left.  There have always been and always will be people who don’t conform to traditional gender roles due to biological factors, perhaps chief among them being exposure to abnormal hormonal levels in the womb.  (We call them sissies and tomboys.) What room is there for such people in Ms. Rittelmeyer’s ideology? 

I agree that femininity should be encouraged among women, and that masculinity should be encouraged among men, because most people naturally conform to some degree to traditional gender roles, and are happier doing so.  But just as it’s cruel to force inverted gender roles on the majority (e.g., promoting sexual promiscuity as “liberation” to women), it’s equally cruel to force rigid, traditional gender roles on the minority of people who are ill-equipped, biologically speaking, to take them on.

I fear that Marc is sadly mistaken, at least about tomboys.  I have quite a number of them as friends, and all are delightful and quite feminine.  Does skill with a rifle, riding a horse or motorcycle, or in bow hunting automatically change a beautiful lady into a masculine butch?  Not hardly.  I cannot speak to the nature of “sissies” but there is certainly nothing wrong with tomboys.

In the good old times, such women and men as Marc describes would likely have realised that God did not make them attractive to the other sex because their vocation was religious life.

The “death of feminism,” proclaimed or predicted for 30-years, is at best a partial-truth. Although “radical feminism,” properly defined, is in decline and has lost much of its influence outside of academia and other enclaves of doctrinal purity, liberal feminism or sexual liberalism is so triumphant and de rigueur that few of its basic tenets and policies are criticized or challenged, not even by soi disant “conservatives.” To give but one of many examples: how many women (including the mothers of infants and toddlers) have been killed or gravely wounded in Iraq? And how many “conservatives,” even paleocons, are appalled by something so perverse and unnatural? Then imagine the power liberal feminists and sexual egalitarians will enjoy under President Obama.

And how many “conservatives,” even paleocons, are appalled by something so perverse and unnatural?

Plenty. But it’s not an issue that is revisited over and over again for obvious reasons.

There is nothing sexier than an intelligent and selfreliant woman who is Annie Oakley with a rifle, but still lets a man open the door (and shoot the goblins) for her, because while she can always do it, ladies do such things only in extremis.

Hillary Clinton is a feminist? Ya coulda fooled me.

Other important leaders include Lucy Stone, Olympia Brown, and Helen Pitts. American first-wave feminism involved a wide range of women, some belonging to conservative Christian groups (such as Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) -Wikipedia

Reading the posts I would have thought that ONLY the left engaged in feminism by the finger pointing going on.

And furthermore, with the falling value of the dollar and rising costs of living, more women are having to work so the family can get by. Its called Capitalism and its not left or right. I am not railing against religion, I know my GOD, but in a monetary system such as ours......

Anyway this is like trying to fix a flat tire when the streets are made of tacks.

Femininsm, I thought, began generations ago with the Suffragettes. It wasn’t invented
by Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan. The Left highjacked the feminist movement at its
moment of fruition to give itself gravitas. This story of unwarranted laurels is, or
should be familiar by now. Wasn’t it generations and generations of both black and
white Americans who fought for the Civil Rights Movement, until the Left highjacked it
in the 1960s to claim the victory for Marx at the finish line? Need we look at
environmentalism, or Nature Conservation, as it was once called, another movement
going back at least to Teddy Roosevelt? And who painted the environment in Leftist colors
to claim it as their own invention? And more recently, how about political conservatism?
Who highjacked and claimed it as their own? Any pattern here? Maybe we shold go back to
the writings of the Suffragettes to get a clear picture undiluted by an alien Leftism
to understand what these ladies always had in mind, and let the Bella Abzugs rot.

Modern feminism, which up to now has seemed an attempt at nothing less that to create a separate species category for women, sprang from the old leftist priority of “divide and rule”: How more basic destruction of bourgeosie fundament can be achieved than splitting men from women? Like all lefty dribble, it’s support today is a mile wide and an inch deep. No real crisis has emerged to drive us to a philosophical fork in the road, but once it has, feminism will join dialectics and “revolutionary poetry” on the ash heap of history.

The best approach for women today is the same as that for men: Think for yourself and don’t be suckers for trendy hogwash.

First-wave feminism IS leftist.  The suffragettes were fanatical liberal revolutionaries, and all ideological idealism that attempts to deny human nature and historical experience is equally rooted in Jacobin perfidy.  To refer to such Protestants as ‘conservative’ misses all sense of historical proportion.  That avowed conservatives would greet first-wave feminism as conservative and acceptable, even going so far as alleging that it was good until hi-jacked by the left, is a depressing commentary on the state of traditionalism today and society at large.  How much you have given up!  How much you have compromised!

Steve,

There are tomboys and there are tomboys. 

Charles,

Oh, please!  I had a bit of the sissy in me as a kid and I’ve never suffered from a lack of female attention. 

Besides, by your reasoning, the Catholic Church should have a hideously ugly priesthood.

Marc,

That some sorry-looking souls might decide that they were not created for married life due to their appearance does not justify the converse syllogism, that all priests and religious necessarily thought so as a precedent to discerning their vocations.

I do not see how your other statement addresses my arguments.

Charles,

You mean this “argument?: 

“In the good old times, such women and men as Marc describes would likely have realised that God did not make them attractive to the other sex because their vocation was religious life.”

It really isn’t much of an argument, but here goes:  You have no way of actually knowing 1) whether God creates people with specific vocations in mind and 2) what those specific vocations actually are for any individual.

No, I meant my other comment, actually.  Perhaps argument was not the best word, but in any case I was not referring to what you quoted.

First-wave feminism IS leftist.-Charles

Its neither one, its capitalist.

Lets take Cindy Hensley McCain, for example, which is the eqiuvalent of Teresa Heinz Kerry.

McCain owes his good fortune to a woman. Why is it so difficult for people to comprehend that woman now own 90% of the wealth. They outlive men. Who is the King of Britain, a Queen! Heh.

Asserting that feminism is not leftist, Jet wrote, ‘Its neither one, its capitalist.’

Heh-hem.  The prosecution rests.

Heh-hem.  The prosecution rests. -Charles

The prosecution never had a case and so it rests.

capitalist = leftist

Which will render the term “leftist” completely useless, though Charles undoubtedly has a point behind all of this.