Back in 1969, very close to the Year Zero of the modern "feminist" movement, an activist named Carol Hanisch penned an essay titled, "The Personal is Political," whose neo-communist, collectivist slogan was later weaponized by the former Lady Macbeth of Little Rock, now Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, Hillary Clinton. Although unfocused, unreadable, poorly argued, and couched (of course) in the language of "therapy," it served as the opening salvo of the anti-family, anti-"patriarchy" Left against postwar American society. Hanisch writes:
The paper, “The Personal Is Political,” was originally published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970 and was widely reprinted and passed around the Movement and beyond in the next several years. I didn’t know just how much it had gotten around until I did a Google search and found it being discussed in many different languages. I’d like to clarify for the record that I did not give the paper its title, “The Personal Is Political.”
The paper actually began as a memo that I wrote in February of 1969 while in Gainesville, Florida. It was sent to the women’s caucus of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) a group for whom I was a subsistence-paid organizer doing exploratory work for establishing a women’s liberation project in the South. The memo was originally titled, “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement,” and was written in reply to a memo by another staff member, Dottie Zellner, who contended that consciousness-raising was just therapy and questioned whether the new independent WLM was really “political.”
In case you're tempted to scoff at the sheer nuttiness of academic writing, three years later Alan Alda had supplanted John Wayne as the ideal American male. Duly empowered females were "liberated" to abandon the safety and comforts of the home and the joys and challenges of child-rearing in order to redundantly ape the males of the species in offices and cubicles all over the land, the better to "gain access" to the secret power corridors of the patriarchy on golf courses, locker rooms, and the waiting rooms of cardiologists. In short order, the cultural norms were, like Chesterton's Fence, torn down on the theory that they were entirely arbitrary and willfully punitive, and women -- the "gentler sex" -- would lead men out of the artificially imposed prison of sex roles where they had dwelled for lo, these hundreds of thousands of years and into a world of peace, sisterhood, and green acres as far as the eye could see.
How's that workin' out for ya? Not well:
Mental ill health among women is on the rise. One in five women (19%) experience a Common Mental Disorder (such as anxiety or depression), compared with one in eight (12%) men. Three quarters (75%) of mental health issues are established before the age of 24, and young women have emerged as the highest-risk group for mental ill health:
- A quarter of young women (25.7%) have self-harmed – more than twice the rate for young men. There is evidence this could be higher and is growing.*
- 26% of young women experience a Common Mental Disorder, such as anxiety or depression – almost three times more than young men.
- 1 in 7 young women (16-24) have PTSD (compared with 3.6% of young men).
- 72% of those in suicide counselling with NSPCC are girls
- Suicide is the third most common reason for girls to contact Childline, and the fifth most common for boys
Women -- and not just childless cat ladies or suburban wine moms driving SUVs with "Coexist" bumper stickers -- increasingly report mental-health issues, for which they largely blame men in general, their men in particular, instead of the real culprit, "fourth-wave" feminism embodied by the likes of Hanisch and Mrs. Clinton. Not to mention this gal:
Fifty years ago this lady would very likely have been relatively calm and rational. Certainly she goes about her business defacing a Tesla with -- to cite Mark Twain -- the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces, extracting a pistol and filling the offending Elon Musk avatar full of lead for the crime of existing. And by extension, Donald Trump. Upon being arrested, she expresses wonderment that she should be held responsible for wanton, premeditated vandalism because her feelings as a woman trump everything, including common sense, safety, and the law.
It's no longer enough, therefore, for the personal to have become political, but now the political has become personal. Lose an election? Take it personally. Disagree with government policies? Shoot up an automobile. Despise the president of the United States and his senior advisors? Let them know in the sternest way possible. After all, you have a "higher loyalty." And whereas a man might reasonably expect punishment, far too many women now presume to be able to escape any and all consequences of their radicalization. Hey, it's political speech protected by the First Amendment!
I've long made the argument that the 19th Amendment was not an unalloyed good, a sentiment shared by half the women in the country at the time of the amendment's passage. It was not animated by misogyny but by the very real fear that the delicate balance between the sexes could be upended for no good reason other than luxurious generosity. (In fact, much of the motivation, as with that behind the 18th, was the fear of the Protestant majority that they would soon be outvoted by hordes of foreign Irish and Italian Catholics and shtetl Jews, and something must be done.)
Those fears have been fully realized. Voting patterns increasingly skew along sex lines, with the AWFLs (affluent white liberal females) having swung hard to the Democrats; it is said that without the 19th Amendment, the U.S. would never elect another Democrat again.
Now, having just been thumped in the last election, the Harpy Democrats are trying to figure out how to attract young men back to their party. The Alda archetype, it seems, is finally on the way out, and John Wayne is itching to come back: "I don’t doubt that some of Democrats’ problem with young men is that they’re seen as what in the poker world we’d call “nits”: neurotic, risk-averse, sticklers for the rules, always up in everyone’s business," writes Nate Silver. In short, they're unmanly. In shorter, they're girls.
Motivating women to get angry and get involved was the Leftist goal all along. The patriarchy had to be upended by any means necessary, the family destroyed, and all under the cover of "rights" and "social justice." The problem was, as with the 19th, to convince enough women to join in the crusade. Wrote Hanisch at the time:
I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.
And so, with a lot of help from the media (which dearly loves a transgressive cause), they figured it out. Mission accomplished. Is everybody happy now?
Article tags: 19th amendment, Carol Hanisch, feminism, Hillary Clinton
Women and men are different: not just physically, but the way our minds work. Mne and women were formed from the beginning, and it really takes off after the hormones hit. The latest fad has been the "complete interchangeability of men and women" as the objective of equality - but eventually and sometimes tragically, reality will hit and hopefully as few people as possible will be lost as we find our way again.
I'm stunned by the actions of that crazed woman in the video. She actually thought that what she did was rational? Hope, after she serves her sentence and performs restitution, she gets mental help.
WOMEN thought him ideal, men still think Eastwood and John Wayne are the ideal.
The media, which was rapidly becoming feminized, promoted Alda as the new ideal.
You're wrong about the Alan Alda thing. Top male stars of '72 were McQueen, Eastwood, Newman, Bronson. Maybe--maybe--ten years later you have a partial point, though not really. I remember those years, and the only milieux in which Alan Alda was ever considered the ideal male were college classrooms.
I didn't say he was among the top male stars in America in 1972 (the year MASH) started. But that was the year the ideal of the "sensitive man" began to supplant the John Wayne male.