There is an old Tom Paxton song called The Marvelous Toy I enjoyed for decades before, one day, I realized it is the most perfect depiction I have ever seen of the way women have been abused since the beginning of Bourgeois society. This insight spoiled that beautiful song for me, and now it’s really hard to enjoy it as music. It’s sad, but let me do the same for you.
The Marvelous Toy’s lyrics go like this:
When I was just a wee little lad
Full of health and joy
My father homeward came one night
And gave to me a toy
A wonder to behold it was
With many colors bright
And the moment I laid eyes on it
It became my hearts delight
It went 'Zip' when it moved
'Bop' when it stopped
'Whirr' when it stood still
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will
The first time that I picked it up
I had a big surprise
For right on its bottom were two big buttons
That looked like big green eyes
I first pushed one and then the other
Then I twisted its lid
And when I set it down again
Here is what it did
It went 'Zip' when it moved
'Bop' when it stopped
'Whirr' when it stood still
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will
It first marched left, then marched right
Then marched under a chair
And when I looked where it had gone
It wasn`t even there
It started to cry and my Daddy laughed
For he knew that I would find
When I turned around my marvelous toy
Chugging from behind
It went 'Zip' when it moved
'Bop' when it stopped
'Whirr' when it stood still
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will
Now, the years have gone by
Too quickly it seems
I have my own little boy
And yesterday I gave to him
My marvelous little toy
His eyes nearly popped right out of his head
He gave a squeal of glee
Neither one of us knows just what it is
But he loves it just like me
It still goes 'Zip' when it moves
And 'Bop' when it stops
And 'Whirr' when it stand still
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will
Neither the parent nor the boy who inherits “the marvelous little toy” know what it actually is. Well, in order to deal with anything one must know to the best of one’s capacity what the thing is. The greatest error of Bourgeois society regarding women was precisely not realizing what a woman is, thus denying them not only the recognition of their capacities but their very humanity. They were toys to be played with, things that went “zip” and “bop”, and “whirr”, with a couple of big buttons and a twisting lid, but whose “users”, delighted as they might be with their toy, could not even start to understand what they were holding.
And holding they were. Women were treated as if they were retarded, stupid half-wits barely able to take care of their own children and cook dinner on time. Or walk and chew gum.
But if we travel a bit further down History, we will see a completely different image of women in the Middle Ages. Medieval society, after all, was a Catholic society, and in the Catholic religion the greatest of all creatures, the ruler of Heavens and Earth, is a woman. The Most Holy Virgin Mary is the preferred daughter of God the Father, the mother of God the Son, and the wife of God the Holy Ghost. Unbeatable, I’d say. And that’s how we could have then women in situations of power, women that ruled over vast kingdoms (as Richard the Lionheart’s mommy, Eleanor of Aquitaine), women universally respected as intellectuals (as Hildegard of Bingen), women who were not afraid to address powerful men and show them their errors to their faces (as St. Catherine of Siena).
The Christian society that replaced the classic Roman Empire tremendously raised the role and the respect given to women in society. In Roman times things were pretty dire, as the paterfamilias, the “father of the family”, had absolute rights over his whole household. He had the right to kill his wife or his progeny (both children and adults, even if they were socially important) without needing to explain his actions. He could rape anyone within that group of people.
Now that is the “Patriarchy” we hear feminists talking about. Something the arrival of Christianity (that is, the Catholic religion; the only alternatives then were rabbinical Judaism and Paganism) dismantled and replaced with a literal woman-worshipping society. In the later Middle Ages, the Love Tribunals — a very public and very feminine game played in Southern France courts — helped create the Romantic vision of love we still have these days.
The rightful social role of women, in the Medieval worldview, was that described in chapter 31 of the Book of Proverbs (as in all Bible quotes I’ll use the King James version, for literary reasons). In the Latin Vulgata text she was called mulier fortis, “the strong woman”:
10 Who can find a virtuous [strong] woman? for her price is far above rubies.
11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
13 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
14 She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
19 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
20 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
22 She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
24 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
28 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
29 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.
Now, what did that strong woman do? If we pay attention to what she was praised for, we will notice she is in fact the C.E.O. of a quite big family business, while her husband is its public-relations officer. The only time he appears in the text doing anything other than praising her, “he sitteth among the elders of the land”. That’s a civic function, not unlike being a City Counsellor nowadays. The “elders” were not a bunch of old geezers sitting idle and ogling the young ladies passing by, but the (male) representatives of (female-run) family businesses in the area, assembled to take care of common problems.
In the early centuries of Bourgeois society (in the Bourgs I described in another text) the same went, on a more modest scale: the artisan would work on his calling, while his wife would run the business, talk to customers, invest the money, in fact making the thing work.
It all changed with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly and sadly, for the first time in recorded history work and home became separate places. People would leave home for work. In the beginning, everybody would; one of the saddest elements of that period is how it exploited labor to an extent we have a hard time realizing today.
As an aside, it is worth noticing that Karl Marx recognized the problems, and proposed a (lousy) way out, while more or less at the same time the Church also recognized them, and proposed much better solutions, kickstarting the systematization of Catholic Social Doctrine. Nowadays, the only places where one can find labor conditions as bad as those that righteously inflamed Marx is in countries run by Communist parties.
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After a while, things more or less stabilized, as industrial tycoons realized it was better to have a larger domestic market buying their wares. Labor laws forbade child labor to a great extent, and factories started to avoid hiring women (at least in peacetime, that is). So another weird social phenomenon started, wherein men, and men only, would leave home in droves to go to work, leaving their wives behind.
Women became virtual prisoners, locked inside their homes with nothing to do apart from taking care of kids (something the introduction of free and mandatory public education also took off their hands pretty soon, to a large measure), cooking, and cleaning. The apogee of that decidedly weird situation can be said to have been the middle of the last Century, especially in the US, which had suddenly become the richest country in the world when WWII winners started paying their war loans and WWII losers started paying compensations.
That is the strange period that formed — among other things — Feminism. While it is perfectly right to point to the beginning of the same XXth Century as the beginning of organized movements for women’s rights, such as the Suffragettes (who fought for the female right to vote), the middle of the Century was when the pressure pot really started to blow.
After all, it was indeed an absurd situation. The great-granddaughters of powerful queens had become literal slaves within their own homes, treated as if they were idiots, at best mollified with the stupid stuff (male-crewed) factories were vomiting on the market.
And blow it did. If one takes a look at the dates, it’s easy to see that the children of those poor women — many of them either hidden alcoholics or drugged to the gills to withstand their situation — are the kids who “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out” of Bourgeois culture in the Hippie movement (or in French May 68 protests).
(Not all of them aged that well. See Mrs. Clinton for a more representative example)
It is quite obvious that replacing a Valium-enabled suburban-wife life in a prison/home with an LSD-enabled life as a beggar on the streets of San Francisco wasn’t such a great idea, but, hey, that’s the option most could see. Others went to the academic world, and others still decided to become Feminist activists.
(full disclosure: the poor author was Bella Abzug’s personal translator in the Rio ‘92 Conference)
What they had in common is that they threw the baby out with the bathwater. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” is one of the most idiotic statements ever made about the real needs of women (and men).
Women and men are complementary; a woman needs a man as much as a man needs a woman. “The LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone” is as true as if He had said, “It sure ain’t no good for a woman to be all by her gorgeous lone self.” After all, all people, of either sex, were born of the conjunction of a man and a woman, while nothing grows out of the mating of fish and bicycles.
The poor feminists, in their ignorance, mistook one form of madness — Modernity, separating home and work, enslaving women within their own homes, and so on — for another — true Patriarchy, like the Roman, where the husband was a true and full slavemaster of his household. Even worse: believing the modern Black Legend about the Middle Ages, they not only closed their eyes to the time when women were respected, but to the source of that respect. Medieval women were powerful because that society was Christian, and thus recognized a woman to be the apex of perfection among all creatures. And there they went, denying the Christian message in full, instead of using it as leverage against what is, finally, a society built on the distortion of that message. An anti-Christian society, against which they were certainly right to fight.
So, instead of trying to get back to — or rather building anew; Ortega y Gasset warns us that going back in time would mean living through it all again — a well-ordered situation, in which the talents of both men and women were respected, wherein their complementarity was put to good use, they just embraced yet more of the same Modern ideological craziness that had given them such a hard time before. One has to be a hallucinated ideologist to deny the complementarity of sexes, even if only because the universal success of this thesis would mean the end of mankind in a single generation.
But, hey, that’s human nature. One studies History so one can see stupid things being done again and again, what else?