Article - Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

REMEMBER the Sixties? Back then our liberal friends were sneering at “uptight” conservative men in gray flannel suits and celebrating creative people in flowered shirts who “did their own thing.”

Now uptight feminists are sneering at creative conservative women who decide to “do their own thing.”

But things were different then. Back then, the “uptight” conservative patriarchy was oppressing everyone, especially minorities and women, as it had for millennia.

Some people, African Americans in particular, resist the notion that women were ever as oppressed as blacks. All humans on the left are oppressed, of course, but some are more oppressed than others.

It is certainly true that feminism has never really been a movement of the oppressed willing to die for the principle that all men are created equal. It is more accurate to call it a movement of high-born women determined to liberate themselves from the humiliation of getting their hands dirty with domestic trivia—in the way that men have always seemed to have done.

The German sociologist Georg Simmel had understood this a century ago, according to Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market. It was not centuries of oppression that powered the feminist movement, but “the psychological effects of market developments,” the new technologies that “made for less labor in the household” for those that could afford them. The unaccustomed leisure provoked unease, even frustration, in middle-class women, and in response they sought activity outside the home.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

The public square has indeed been transformed to suit a more feminine sensibility, but in a curious way. It has been transformed to suit a particular middle-class feminist agenda, rather than a more general feminine sensibility.

But this was what the middle-class feminists wanted. Like many well-born women down the ages, they wanted to farm the care of their children and their homes out to the paid help. What these women wanted, to deal with their guilt, was a society that told everyone that it would be better for leave the home and seek paid employment like men. And they got it.

Then Sarah Palin came along and drove the whole project into the ditch.

Many people still think the feminist project is alive and well. That’s what The Economist’s Lexington columnist thought last week:

[I]f feminism means, at its core, that women should be able to compete equally in the workplace while deciding for themselves how they organize their family life, then Mrs Palin deserves to be treated as a pioneer, not dismissed as a crackpot.

Oh dear. Haven’t we got beyond that kind of binary thinking at The Economist yet? Really, some people today are no better than the Puritans that Max Weber sneered at in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

The success of the feminist agenda depended upon rigid control and compartmentalization of women’s fertility. Some have called this a death wish, but is more like an antiseptic sterility. The challenge that Sarah Palin poses to the “nullity” of the center-left culture is the challenge of fecundity. Conservative women do not aspire to the sterile life of the tenured academic sinecure or the strained consciousness of the government-funded “arts community.” They do not select from The Economist’s menu of competing equally in the workplace and/or organizing family life. They open themselves to Life itself, its risks, its joys, its sorrows, its faith, and, above all, its call to loving service.

The world we live in today is designed to make the world safe for cultural liberals and feminists. Resting comfortably upon their government sinecures and the flattery of their media courtiers, these people lash out with fury against anyone objecting to the wonderful world they have built. But theirs is not the only way to live.

The feminist way replaces the organic safety net of family and neighbors with rational, bureaucratic institutions that deliver social services to the needy, but without spirit and without heart. In particular the social services most important to women are sterilized into rigid bureaucracy: schools, health care, and relief of the poor.

The bureaucratic model is a male-oriented and goal-oriented culture. It is the structure of the army and of one-size-fits-all that orders everyone to serve a single goal from the top. It is hardly adapted to the community of women. Women’s culture relates less to fixed goals and more to the detection and satisfaction of particular needs in the welfare of families, the care of children, and the relief of the poor.

The chaps at The Economist assert that in the emergence of Sarah Palin feminism has won. They could not be more wrong. The flap over Sarah Palin points to the emergence of the genuine “feminine sensibility” projected by George Simmel and the exposure of uptight, sterile feminism as a dead end.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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