Chapter three: Why Feminism holds back female empowerment

The foundation of feminism is the premise that men and women are equal.  The concept comes from the book, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” by Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1792.  At the time it was written, women had much the same rights as African slaves. Men justified their oppression of women by claiming that it was right and good that men should rule the world, because men were far more intelligent, capable and sensible than women.  (They were also saying similar things about African slaves). To counter these claims, Mary Wollstonecraft, had to argue that women were every bit as intelligent and sensible as men.

Then, in the 19th century, male scientists asserted that as women had smaller brains than men, they could not be as intelligent, and anyway women were far too emotional to make rational decisions.  Feminists had a difficult job contradicting these claims of male superiority.  Yet in spite of this, using the arguments of Mary Wollstonecraft, feminists won women the right to be educated, and in the early 20th Century, the right to vote.  In the 1960's the Women’s Liberation Movement sprang up and eventually won women the legal right to equal opportunities.  Unfortunately many people in this movement took the arguments of Mary Wollstonecraft to extremes, claiming that not only were women as intelligent and capable as men but exactly the same as men in every other way.  Unfortunately many of these extreme claims not only defied all logic and evidence, they created a barrier for further female empowerment.

It's relatively easy to establish that men and women are as intelligent as each other; IQ tests show that overall, there's not much difference between men and women.  Women are also as competent as men in professions like science, engineering, medicine, the law and politics, when they are allowed into these professions.  But it would be silly to suggest that men and women are equal in everything. Physically, the average man is bigger and stronger than the average woman.  In jobs that require physical strength, women are definitely at a disadvantage.  It's the same in sport. Men can outperform most women because of their greater strength.

The reason why a male’s body is physically bigger and stronger than a woman’s is that men’s bodies produce far more of the hormone testosterone than females do.  This hormone also has another effect; it makes men far more aggressive and competitive than women.  All of this should be completely obvious, but it is disputed by some Feminists, who claim that women are just as aggressive and competitive as men.  Some will even go as far as saying that women are just as violent as men, in spite of the fact that over 99% of all violence committed by humans, in wars, genocide and crime, is perpetrated by men.

There's a reason why some Feminists dispute the fact that men are more aggressive and competitive than women. If men have ruled our world throughout recorded history by being this way, then there seems no alternative to their continued dominance.  Women have no hope of ever gaining power for themselves. But if you assert that women are every bit as capable as men of such behaviour, there's a chance that they might succeed in a fight for power some time in the future. The trouble with this argument is that it flies in the face of all the evidence we have that men and women are very different from each other.

In the 1980s scientists began to study the human brain in greater detail and discovered that the brains of men and women were different.  They already knew about the advantages testosterone gave men, but in their studies they also observed that women had better social and language skills than men.  Some feminists seized on this and created the slogan, “the sisterhood is powerful”.  The idea was that women, with their superior social and communication skills, would be able to create a formidable sisterhood and ally with each other to end discrimination.  Unfortunately, since the 1980s, when this slogan was created, women have failed to create a noticeably powerful sisterhood.  Why is this?

The problem is the belief that men and women are the same. It creates the idea that women should be able to learn to be as competitive and aggressive as men if only they would try harder and throw off their conditioning. It's this belief that is setting women up for failure.  Just as it is unrealistic for women to try and compete against men in physical strength, it is equally unrealistic for women to be as competitive and aggressive.  They are wired differently. They don't have the testosterone which produces such behaviour. It's true there are some women who can learn to be very competitive, like there are women who can do weight training and become stronger than the average man, but it's unusual, as is the sight of a cut-throat career woman willing to trample on people to achieve her goals.

The problem for women, is that if they want to be successful and have power, the only role models they have are men.  Unfortunately, women on the whole are far more caring and loving people than men.  The patriarchy has reacted to this by claiming that this is what makes women ‘weak’.  It then goes on to claim that if you want power, then you have to be aggressive and ruthless -just like a man.  To be fair, this is what history seems to show us. Only the most competitive men become leaders.  So the message is that if women want power, they have to be the same as these men.  Some women have followed this advice; there are many cases of ruthless female politicians and businesswomen, but it does not alter the fact that aggression and competitiveness do not come naturally to women. It will always be a minority of women who can display these traits.

Not all feminist think like this, there is the concept of maternal feminism. To quote. –

Maternal feminism is the term that has been used by scholars to describe the ideology that drove many of the leaders of the suffrage and temperance movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Infused with the language of domesticity, it called upon women to define a public role for themselves as women, sisters and mothers so as to improve society, and particularly to alleviate the suffering of women and children.

For these women, there was no contradiction between the traditional role of women at home and participation in public life. Their actions in the public sphere were no more than an extension of their role in the private sphere. These women projected their maternal role beyond the confines of their own family life: they felt that as sisters and mothers, they could introduce into politics a unique perspective that issued from the concrete realities of women's lives, including the hardships wrought by poverty, abuse and alcoholism.

Unfortunately later on in the 20th century maternal feminism was attacked by other feminists and even when it was renamed social feminism it was still unacceptable to them.

There are many examples of women working together peacefully to achieve a goal, most of them unrecorded and unsung because it's violence that makes a headline on the news. One that did hit the news for some time was the Greenham Common peace camp in the 1980s that protested against US cruise missiles being sited in Britain.  The female protesters made an early decision not to allow men in their peace camps, which allowed them to form a powerful sisterhood. They remained in the camp until the decision was made to remove Cruise missiles from British soil.   Unfortunately when the cold war ended, the peace camps disbanded and the experiences of the Greenham Common women, seem to be forgotten now.

This means that with so few role models for a powerful sisterhood, ambitious women tend to go down the tried and tested road of behaving like a ruthless male, instead of joining with other women to empower themselves and achieve their goals through co-operation.

The picture is not all bad.  The increase in the numbers of businesswomen and professional females has seen women begin to outnumber males in some companies and professions and in the process begun to feminise them.  Often, this means that a company is run co-cooperatively and utilities women’s superior language and social skills.  This benefits the female employees but puts males at a distinct disadvantage.  The same may happen to patriarchal political parties; if women begin to outnumber men in a political party, they may also end up feminising it.

The path to female empowerment, at present, seems to be that a small minority of women to learn how to be as aggressive and competitive as men, and become businesswomen and politicians.  When enough of these women enter these patriarchal organizations, they can begin feminise them.  This allows more feminine women, who don't want to act and behave like substitute men, into these organizations. They thrive, and place the men at a disadvantage. It's a difficult and tortuous path to female empowerment, especially for the ground-breaking women who have to fight their way into an all male environment.  But perhaps in time, when we have organizations that are completely feminised, it may inspire women to create other feminized organizations from scratch, without the need for an interim stage of women having to act and behave like men.

Eventually, we may see a society where women’s social and communication skills will be more valued than men’s competitive and aggressive instincts, It will be a more harmonious, co-operative and caring society.

Greenham Common peace camp