 |
As the nation-wrecking impact of the Demographic Winter begins to bite, it is becoming more and more obvious that feminism isn’t a rather daft distraction from more important issues, but actually a key factor in the ongoing collapse of industrial civilisation and the world as we know it. That being the case, we need to know where it came from.
The role of feminism in the long and complex war on Western civilisation has been widely recognised by traditionalists. Much less widely known are the curious facts about the actual origins of this pathological psychological virus.
Marx and Engels infamously called for the abolition of the family in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. This fact is often put together with the predominance of far-left Jewesses in the feminist wave of the 1960s to portray feminism as part of a ‘Jewish plot’ against Western society.
The overwhelmingly Jewish identity and motivations of the ’68ers is an undeniable fact, but this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the key players in the early and decisive stages of the feminist disease were neither Communist nor Jewish.
As an aside, blaming “the Joos” for everything is an infantile disorder among a section of the ‘far-right’. Together with Hitlerism it is also a tendency perpetually encouraged by the various agencies which infiltrate and misdirect nationalism; there are all sorts of ‘cosnpiracies’ and bad actors out there in real life, to obsess about any one of them is to miss the others, and often to become ridiculous and repulsive in the eyes of others.
So people and groups should be named and blamed when they are guilty of specific things, but not blamed when they are not.
The truth is that feminism owes its origin to specific sect of oddball Christians, rather than to anti-Christian haters. Let’s dive in deeper and learn more.
According to some feminist ideologues, hints of feminism go back as far as the Ancient Greek political philosopher Plato. They also point to the emergence of a handful of proto-feminist female writers during the Renaissance writers. Like most advocates of eccentric and unnatural ideas, modern feminists are desperate to find ‘roots’ in order to give their fantasies some sort of bogus respectability.
This means that they are all too ready to present isolated passages out of context or to exaggerate. In any case, none of these claimed feminist forebears had any influence, so to all intents and purposes they can be discounted.
An honest assessment of the facts reveals that the groups most to blame for feminism were heretical Christians (overwhelmingly Quakers), hysterical upper-class women with too much time on their hands, and big business interests seeking to drag women from their traditional roles in order to expand the pool of cheap labour.
 |
The whole sorry tale can most realistically be traced back to the 17th century. Specifically and curiously – given the Number of the Beast - to the year 1666. This was when a high-profile Lancashire Quaker woman, Margaret Fell (above), published a pamphlet entitled Womens Speaking Justified. Born Margaret Askew into a family of local gentry, she married Thomas Fell, a barrister, in 1632, and became the lady of Swarthmoor Hall.
Her husband was a member of the so-called Long Parliament, until it was dissolved by Oliver Cromwell over its notorious corruption. Margaret was won over to the heretical sect when founder George Fox visited the wealthy family home on 1652. Swarthmoor Hall became a centre of Quaker activity and Margaret served as an unofficial secretary for the new movement, which was known officially as the Society of Friends.
They shunned the Old Testament and most of New, except for Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and the Book of John. Their “meetings”, were assertively egalitarian, without priests or any formal organisation. Members sat in silence until moved by the spirit to speak.
After her husband’s death in 1658, Margaret Fell was so involved in Quaker campaigning that she became known as the “mother of Quakerism”. She was arrested in 1664 Margaret Fell was arrested for failing to swear an oath of loyalty to Charles II and for allowing cult meetings to be held in her home.
 |
Apart from their rejection of authority (clerical as well as civil), the sect became known, and widely despised, as ‘enthusiasts’. Enthusiasm is a state of religious excitement in which those affected actually twitch and shake in some sort of delirium. The early "Friends" were noted for the paroxysms of violent shaking when they believed they had been possessed by the spirit of God. Hence the nick-name "Quakers". It is surely no accident that the woman claimed by feminists as the first of their kind was literally hysterical.
Fell was imprisoned until 1668, during which time she wrote various pseudo-religious pamphlets, including Women's Speaking Justified. In this short pamphlet, Fell bases her argument for equality of the sexes on one of the basic premises of Quakerism, namely spiritual equality.
Her belief was that God created all human beings; therefore both men and women were capable of not only possessing the Inner Light but also the ability to become prophets. Fell has been described as a "feminist pioneer”, and her ideas were carried on by several of her daughters and by a succession of other Quaker women, including Dorothy White, Hester Biddle, Sarah Blackborow, Rebecca Travers and Alice Curwen.
Despite this intellectual continuity, however, their proto-feminism might have come to nothing, if it had not been supported by a quirk of economic history.
Most early Quakers were involved in small-scale local trade, as farmers and skilled artisans. As the Industrial Revolution unfolded in Britain in the 18th century, many Quakers poured their energies and talents into innovative business ventures. Like other nonconformists (and Catholics), they were barred from universities, and most professions, so business was a natural outlet for their talents. They also often had ready access to advice and support, and start-up resources, within their community: Quakers had become a close-knit network of mutually supportive families, many of whom were involved in interconnected businesses.
Between them, the Quakers and their Nonconformist brethren had a huge impact in the early Industrial Revolution. At one stage they comprised nearly 50% of all the entrepreneurs in Britain, and the trend rapidly took hold in the American colonies as well.
The Quakers’ special insistence on fair dealing and honesty often gave them the edge over even other Nonconformists, earning them the trust of much of wider society. Thus a mixture of pressure from hostile authorities and their own reputation gave the Quakers a unique head start when it came to the Industrial Revolution.
Quakers such as the Darby family pioneered the mass production of iron, and there were mining and metal production concerns, all central to the new era. Alongside older occupations such as wool and cloth production, farming, craft and shop keeping, they made shoes, domestic china, cast iron utensils, engine and railway components, medicines, chocolate, ships and much else. The Quaker Edward Pease opened the Stockton and Darlington Railway in northern England in 1825. It was the first modern railway in the world. The 18th century also saw the rapid growth of Quaker banks, such as Barclays and Lloyds in Britain, and Western Union in North America.
The Quaker network and associated business activity quickly became transatlantic. During the 17th and 18th centuries many British, Irish and German Quakers went to the new colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, especially to Pennsylvania. Indeed, the colony of Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn in 1682, as a safe place for Quakers to live and practice their faith. Quaker women there went on to play a key role in the development of the first feminist ideas in America.
Philadelphia merchants traded in both directions with their counterparts in Britain, in many sectors. Nurserymen traded in plants. The Nantucket whaling industry, providing fuel for lamps, was largely a Quaker enterprise.
A key factor in the appeal and growth of feminism among the Quakers was the way in which women in well-to-do families were expected to stay at home while their husbands and brothers went to work. Looking as we do in the rear-view mirror of the Industrial Revolution, we tend to think of this as a very old and ‘traditional’ – perhaps even ‘natural’ arrangement. In fact, however, this is simply not the case.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the family home was the workplace for the vast majority of people. Whether in workshops or on farms, men, women and children all participated in a way of life in which work, the daily routines of family life and moments of relaxation and pleasure - along with church on Sundays and involvement in religious festivals – were all experienced by the family as a whole.
Naturally there were exceptions – generally strongly reflecting greater male physical strength – such as fishermen and other sailors, specialised woodsmen and the like. Even within the home, innate and unquestioned differences between male and female naturally had a big impact on who did what, but most families shared the labor which bought their daily bread. To give just one specific example, in the cottage forges that made chains in the Black Country (named for the coal soot that covered everything) west of Birmingham, men made heavy chains for things such as ship anchors, while their wives and older children toiled to make dog chains and the like.
Before factories appeared, most textile manufacture (including the main processes of spinning and weaving in the important and widespread textile industry) was carried out under the “putting-out” system. Since textile workers rarely had enough capital to be self-employed, they would take raw materials from a merchant, spin or weave the materials in their homes, and then return the finished product in exchange for piece-rate wage. The system vanished during the Industrial Revolution as new machinery using water or steam power replaced human energy, and work moved from the home to the factory.
Before this huge change, hand spinning had overwhelmingly been women’s work. It could take as many as ten spinners to provide one hand-loom weaver with yarn, and men did not spin, so most of the workers in the textile industry were women. The new textile machines of the Industrial Revolution first depressed the wages of hand-spinners and then destroyed the occupation altogether. Mechanization did the same for other jobs traditionally done by women at home, such as lace-making.
 |
Thus, the innovations and specialization of the Industrial Revolution broke ancient patterns of employment. The attendant division between home and workplace hit Quaker families even earlier than in most of the rest of the population. Additionally, the unusually high average prosperity of the Quakers meant that their womenfolk were not forced by poverty to seek low-paid and often dangerous work minding machines in the new manufacturing industries.
Hence, while most working-class women were struggling to survive the extra poverty imposed by mechanization and the Enclosure of vast tracts of common land, it was very different among the Quakers. Many of their women, already imbued with ideas of equality, suddenly found themselves left at home by husbands whose work away from the house gave them the leisure and wherewithal to meet and talk and to feed each other’s’ resentments and theories. “The devil makes work for idle hands”, indeed!
Feminism began to expand into society more generally during the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This was the upsurge of liberal ideas which sprang from the poisoned intellectual soil of freemasonic lodges. Many Enlightenment theorists wrote enthusiastically of the rights of women, including Jeremy Bentham (1781), and the Marquis de Condorcet (1790).
The experience of Quaker women being left at home by husbands going to separate places of work was spreading throughout ‘polite’ society. Poor women, of course, had no choice but to labor in the same early industrial hell-holes as their husbands and barely grown children. But for women of the wealthier classes, the boredom of privileged idleness soon created a ready market for the ideas of feminist theorists and anti-slavery campaigners. A few, to be fair, involved themselves in efforts to relieve the desperate poverty of the local poor, but most preferred to keep the dirt, disease and roughness of reality at a safe distance.
The ideas promoted by wealthy 19th century feminists were popularised heavily by liberal men. The English utilitarian and classical liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham advocated complete equality between sexes including the rights to vote and to participate in government. He even came up with the concept of gender-neutral pronouns: “When both sexes are meant to be intended, employ not the word man but the word person.”
At least as influential as Bentham was the French mathematician and liberal politician, the Marquis de Condorcet, who agitated for equality of women and the abolition of slavery.
Condorcet took a leading role when the French Revolution swept France in 1789, hoping for a reconstruction of society, and championed many liberal causes. As a result, in 1791 he was elected as a Paris representative in the Legislative Assembly, and then became the Secretary of the Assembly.
Predictably, his pitifully naïve hopes of building a rational and humane society through a sort of semi-Communism were drowned in the rivers of blood spilled by the anti-Christian and anti-human ‘revolution’ his waffling and politicking unleashed.
Concorcet advocated women's suffrage for the new government, writing an article for Journal de la Société de 1789, and by publishing De l'admission des femmes au droit de cité ("For the Admission to the Rights of Citizenship For Women") in 1790.
As the revolutionary regime became steadily more extreme, Condorcet was branded a traitor. He was arrested in October 1793 and died of poison in prison in an apparent suicide. The phenomenon of leftist revolutions devouring their own children did not, however, die with him.
Female feminists who developed such ideas included Mary Wollstonecraft , Abigail Adams, Catharine Macaulay and Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht. Wollstonecraft came from quite humble origins, but most of the rest – and their followers – were upper class. From the start, feminism was part of the broader liberal project – a rebellion by a wealthy, spoilt, entitled and out-of-touch elite, against God, tradition and the normalities and realities of nature.
Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a “glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe”. Together with English radicals such as Thomas Paine, she journeyed to Paris to experience the wonders of the new regime for herself.
Once there, she was steadily disillusioned. While the ‘moderate’ liberal Girondins were often feminist, the more radical Jacobins refused to give women the vote, denounced 'Amazons', and made it clear that women were supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of helpers to men.
As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion. She was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins. On 31st October 1793, most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted.
Wollstonecraft called life under the Jacobins 'nightmarish'. There were gigantic daytime parades requiring everyone to show themselves and lustily cheer lest they be suspected of inadequate commitment to the republic, as well as night-time police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'.
Wollstonecraft survived thanks to a fictitious marriage to an American citizen. Some of her friends were not so lucky; many, like Thomas Paine, were arrested, and some were even guillotined. As well as her feminist writings, Wollstonecraft wrote An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. While she condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94.
Towards the end of her life, she wrote a series of increasingly depressed and needy letters to Gilbert Imlay, the American blockade-runner who had saved her with his claim of marriage and who later became the father of her first child. She attempted suicide several times, before settling down with anarchist intellectual William Godwin. She died shortly after giving birth to their daughter, Mary, who many years later wrote Frankenstein.
 |
Meanwhile, Quakers were particularly active in the anti-slavery movement which became such a major focus for liberal ideas and activities in the young United States of America. As early as 1811, Elias Hicks published a pamphlet arguing that slaves were "prize goods"—that is, products of piracy—and hence that profiting from them violated Quaker principles. Quaker women such as Lucretia Mott (pictured above) and Susan B. Anthony joined the movement to abolish slavery, hoping to cooperate politically with non-Quakers in working against the institution.
To their chagrin, however, they found that many of the wealthy men involved in the non-Quaker side of the broader anti-slavery movement were far from keen on seeing women in such an active role. Finding that they were often excluded from abolitionist activities, many Quaker women changed their focus over the years to the right of women to vote and influence society.
By the middle of the 19th century, feminist notions had, however, spilled out widely beyond the Quaker sect. The women’s suffrage movement was heavily dominated by the wives and daughters of upper-class men. The Women’s Social and Political Union, for example, was packed with well-connected, wealthy and titled women.
Modern accounts of their campaigns invariably give the impression that these early enthusiasts were trying to achieve equality with men. This is simply untrue. These wealthy females were campaigning for well-to-do and educated women such as themselves to have equality with the wealthy and educated men of their own class. In 1851, however, a mere 14% of all men could vote. Even by 1910, this figure had only increased to 60%. The privileged women arguing for a widening of the electorate wanted the right to vote for themselves, but not for their poorer sisters toiling in the mills below the stairs in their own homes – let alone their wretched menfolk behind the plough or in the foundries and mines.
In The Women Racket, Steve Moxon notes that the Victorian era Women’s Social and Political Union specifically argued that the vote “should be extended to women through an education qualification. The converse of this was also argued, and quite openly – that uneducated men should be denied the vote”.
Given their founding myth of human equality, it is unlikely that the Quaker women who basically founded feminism would have agreed with this class-ridden approach. Leadership of the feminist movement, however, now passed into rather different hands. That, unfortunately for society as a whole, did not make it any the less subversive of normality and common sense.
Long before it was taken up as a cudgel against European civilisation by the cultural Marxists and ‘68ers, feminism was already an unnatural monster, a revolt against normality and order.
How are we to restore normality and order? That’s an entirely different issue, and one on which I will tend to concentrate over the coming weeks. Subscribe for free so you don’t miss anything. Pledges of financial support are also very welcome, though this account won’t be monetised yet.
Most of all, many thanks for Restacks!
Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
