3 July 2024

Abigail Adams and realist feminism

It probably comes as no surprise to my readers that, just as John Adams is my favorite Founding Father, Abigail Adams is my favorite Founding Mother. I see in her a kindred spirit—a woman who was not meek and quietly polite, but strong and intelligent and well able to manage her own life and her family’s affairs and eventually the challenges of being the second First Lady (she ranks consistently in the top three First Ladies ever).

A 1766 portrait of Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blythe.

Abigail was not conventionally educated, but her mother taught her and her sisters to read, write, and do math, and she had access to large libraries in her extended family, which enabled her to educate herself to the extent that she is considered one of the most learned women to become First Lady.

Due to John’s legal and political career, Abigail was often left to manage their Braintree, Massachusetts farm and their financial matters on her own, at which she excelled. Thanks to the constant correspondence she kept up with John, we know a great deal about their relationship and the extent to which she influenced him.

During the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence, when John was in the Continental Congress, she wrote the following to him:

Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.

Of course, Abigail does not satisfy modern feminists, because her concerns were property rights (women should be able to own their own property), education (she believed that educated women could better raise their children and manage their households), and shared decision-making in marital decisions. She never mentioned voting specifically—since even men who did not own property were not allowed to vote at the time—but her threat to John does suggest that she felt women should have some form of representation.

But her ideas nevertheless are part of the core of early feminism, which was a realistic feminism—a feminism that demanded respect for women as women, rather than an attempt to turn women, in every possible way, into men.

In a recent essay on her Restoration Substack, Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about the value of realistic feminism, as compared with what she dubs “luxury feminism”:

[F]eminism is an incredibly splintered concept, and the late-stage feminism which dominates Western institutions today is more confusing and paradoxical than ever before. […] A contrived hierarchy of oppressed groups governs feminist rhetoric and has generated several paradoxes […]. Indeed, so-called “progressive” feminism defends hierarchy far more than any standard conservative would.

Ms. Hirsi Ali points to three problems with this “luxury feminism.” One is the way in which race is privileged over sex:

In the hierarchy of victimhood, white people can never be victimized by people of color. To say otherwise is a feature of imperialism, or white hegemony, or white cisheteropatriarchy (it seems that feminists have recently grown tired of the vagueness of their terms so have resorted to inventing German-style neologisms). Luxury feminism is, first and foremost, a political opposition to conservatism: Whatever the latter says, the former must revile. When immigration proves harmful to women (both women in the West and within immigrant communities), feminists turn a blind eye out of political allegiance.

As a result of this style of feminism, women lose all protection from rape—historically the biggest threat to women’s bodily autonomy—as long as the rapist is not white. This has been a trend in Europe for two decades.

For example, in the late 00s, gangs of “South Asian” men (the British way of avoiding saying “Arab Muslim”) were permitted to groom and traffic British girls without any interference from the police, even though the police knew what was going on. They were afraid of being dubbed “racist” if they did anything.

More recently, the 2020 gang rape of a 15-year-old German girl by men who were migrants or had migrant backgrounds resulted in 8 of the 9 men whose semen was found inside her getting off with just probation. It is widely understood by police and other officials in Germany that rapes by migrants should not be reported. In fact, a female German politician was just fined $6K for the “hate crime” of posting statistics about the prevalence of Afghans among those committing rape in her country.

This intersectional approach also allows feminists to turn a blind eye to the suffering of Muslim women, since the “race” (and being Muslim is now considered a “race” for intersectional purposes, regardless of the actual skin color of the perpetrator) of the men who abuse them is privileged above their own female sex.

Another problem with “luxury feminism,” says Ms. Hirsi Ali, is that transgenderism is also privileged over women who were born female:

[W]omanhood loses all meaning under the law of self-identification. Any man with feminine inclinations, or an autogynephilic fetish, can claim womanhood for himself. On the flip side of the coin, young women experiencing the strife of puberty and female embodiment are encouraged to reject their womanhood altogether.

Not content with destroying all-male spaces, “luxury feminism” now seeks to destroy all-female spaces. Even in prisons—where the female population might be considered extremely vulnerable—any male rapist who suddenly claims to be a woman is given access to female prisoners.

The third problem that Ms. Hirsi Ali identifies is the glorification of “sex work”:

Despite MeToo’s obsession with consent and its punishment of men for minor sexual misconduct, one modern feminist myth is that sex work – both online in the form of OnlyFans and in the porn and prostitution industries – is empowering. There is even a “sex worker inclusive LGBT+ Pride flag” featuring a red umbrella, the international symbol of sex workers. In 2001, Venetian activists took to the streets with red umbrellas to protest inhumane working conditions, while at the same time defending the legitimacy of such work. Can you imagine a more bizarre paradox?

Historically, it was understood that the vast majority of female sex workers had run out of all other options for survival. That often they had been kidnapped into the trade, which was usually controlled at the highest level (even if female overseers were employed) by men.

But the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s disallowed the idea that women might not want to sell their bodies (especially to have their bodies sold for someone else’s profit). Feminism had developed into preferring “male mimicry” to the point that it required women to have sex drives that were the equal of men’s. Women who wanted to have conventional sex lives with just one man were considered prudes.

Now “luxury feminism” pushes women to use sex-selling site like OnlyFans, ignoring the fact few women make enough to live on, and that nude photos can never be scrubbed from a woman’s internet presence, locking her into a “sex worker” identity for the rest of her life.

Ms. Hirsi Ali concludes:

One obvious way of fighting luxury feminism is to support the growing body of “realist” feminists in the UK. These women have widened the Overton Window to challenge gender clinics and put a stop to the NHS’ irresponsible distribution of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for trans children.

There is a growing “postliberal” movement which brings together this kind of feminism with more conservative, pro-family and often pro-Christian views. Louise Perry is one such postliberal thinker, whose book The Case against the Sexual Revolution (2022) has the audacity to encourage women to listen to the wisdom of their own mothers and to avoid drinking heavily around promiscuous men.

In my view, it would help if we abandoned the troublesome term “feminism” altogether in favor of more specific terms like “sex realism” and “scepticism” when it comes to things like excessive immigration. We must preserve single sex spaces – yes, including all-male spaces like social clubs. We must emphasize the importance of marriage and increase financial and social support for mothers, making it not just normal but normative to lend a hand to the mothers in your life. We can give transformative help to the women I described at the beginning of my talk; it just requires the bravery to sound a bit old-fashioned!

Maybe the early feminists were onto something? They didn’t want to be men, or to be just like men. They just wanted the rights and the tools that would enable them to fulfill their female roles with dignity, honor, and respect from society.

The fact that feminism itself has made the essential roles (in a healthy society) of household manager and childcare worker the most denigrated of all jobs suggests that feminism has long since ceased to be about what is most beneficial for women or for society.

Thoughts?