Smoke and Mirrors: the 'Woman Trap' of Anglo feminism

Anglo feminism is the creation of white middle class women who are wildly unrepresentative of most women. Many of the problems currently afflicting the whole Anglosphere - the emergence of a welfare-dependent underclass, male alienation, family disruption and much else besides - can be traced to this. Most women who work are in crappy, low paid jobs, they are not high powered lawyers or whatever. This is 'the Great Unsaid' concerning feminism, it applies the experiences of privileged minorities to disenfranchised groups like the underclass, with disastrous results.

We see this most of all in the issue of female employment. We always find that women extolling the wonders of work are privately educated, high paid and wildly unrepresentative of most women. The average woman earns very little, so little that there is no point her going out to work at all. Moreover, most of the work that women undertake is not economically productive - shop-work, routine pink-collar work or teaching pointless liberal arts subjects to future taxi drivers and waitresses. Of course, this large majority of underpaid, unhappy women have no voice in politics or the media, so their miserable lot is largely ignored. By contrast, prominent female politicians like Hilary Clinton (ughh) or Harriet Harman (double ughh) have their unrepresentative views and experiences inflated out of all proportion by the Anglo-American media.

In itself, this is problem enough, but the fallout from these delusions is socially catastrophic. While elite women can afford an army of professional childminders to accommodate their careers, underclass women (indeed, most women) cannot. This has fed the growth of a Welfare dependent underclass, where single women feel that pumping out child after child is economically preferable to work (which for them, it is). In this scenario, the male is increasingly marginalized as a luckless sperm-doner to be discarded like some poor mantis after his reproductive duties are discharged. As Daniel Amneus has shown, this has resulted in the Garbage Generation: our slack-minded, idle underclass. Children reared without fathers are far more prone to crime, mental illness and a host of other maladies, yet western governments persist in actively promoting such matriarchal families.

Of course, in an elite context, even the matriarchal family will avoid most of these problems. This is because affluence cocoons the growing child in liberal neo-Christianity, rationale, empathy and altruism. An elite child can deconstruct and contextualize the snarling anti-Semitism and misanthropy of rap music, for instance. However, a child without culture, wealth or prior contact with neo-Christian liberalism lacks this distancing facility; for them, such cultural artifacts form an immutable statement. There are many more examples of this: video games, violent movies, pornography and drug use. Ultimately, in all these cases it is absurd to assume that an underclass child will approach these cultural artifacts/experiences as would an elite child already imbued with humane values as part of its primary socialization. In short, the delusion that elite values can be effortlessly transplanted into an underclass context without serious social malfunction is at the root of our present social crisis. Unfortunately, this delusion is also at the root of Anglo-American feminism.

The article below raises questions about the glib elite assumption that all women yearn to work. My own analysis in the foregoing paragraphs explains the all-important class context underlying these issues.

Women do not want highpowered careers and find more fulfilment in motherhood than work, a prominent liberal commentator said yesterday. Millions have been left frustrated and miserable by Government policies that push them into jobs and their children into nurseries, Cristina Odone said.

She backed her argument with a poll that showed fewer than one in eight mothers want to work full-time and that only one in a hundred mothers in two-parent working families with young children think it is right for them to have a full-time job. The research found women feel bombarded by images of 'superwomen who manage everything, plus a high-profile career', when many just wanted to be stay-at-home mothers with their husbands taking the role of breadwinner.

The call for a reversal of the march of women into work came from a former deputy editor of the New Labour house magazine, the New Statesman, and editor-of the Catholic Herald. Miss Odone condemned her feminist colleagues in media and politics as a 'small, influential and unrepresentative coterie' who assume that women must achieve self-realisation through work.

She added: 'We need to break the stranglehold that the small coterie of women, who work full-time and buy into the macho way of life, enjoy on our public life. They have for years misrepresented real women who reject the masculine value system for one that rates caring above a career and interdependence above independence.

'Real women do not want to commit full-time to a job. The future belongs to the real woman, who points to a lifestyle embracing feminine values. Let's hope this government, or the next, is brave enough to heed her call.'

The attack, published by the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies in a pamphlet titled What Women Want, comes against a background of growing political pressure on mothers to go out to work and on companies to ensure women staff are offered flexible hours and better pay.

Ministers have redoubled efforts to persuade mothers to take jobs in the face of evidence that a big majority of the poorest families are two-parent families in which only the father works. Labour (British Democrats) leaders believe they can never hit their targets for reducing child poverty unless more mothers go out to work. Ministers have redoubled efforts to persuade mothers to take jobs in the face of evidence that a big majority of the poorest families are two-parent families in which only the father works.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (the British NAACP), headed by Trevor Phillips, and equal pay pressure groups, say that mothers are often anxious to go back to work but are pressured into a caring role by lack of opportunities for flexible hours, lack of affordable daycare, and the reluctance of male partners to take over a share of the childcare.

As a riposte, yesterday's report produced a YouGov poll which showed that only 12 per cent of mothers wanted to work full-time and nearly a third, 31 per cent, did not want to work at all. In families where there were two children under five and the father worked, one per cent of mothers said it was right to work full-time and nearly half, 49 per cent, thought a mother should not work at all. Official figures show that 57 per cent of mothers of children under five work either full- or part-time.

The findings, taken from two separate YouGov polls taken in February and March among 2,270 and 2,420 adults, said disaffection with paid work was not confined to mothers.
They indicated that 19 per cent of all women, nearly one in five, said they wouldn't work if they didn't have to.

Miss Odone called for an end to state support for child daycare which has over the last ten years topped £21billion. Some of the money could be spent on marriage support services and pointing out to women the dangers of unmarried cohabitation. She said the tax and benefit system that treats single parents much more generously than couples with children should be reformed, and regulation and red tape should be cut to open up more part-time jobs of the kind most attractive to mothers. She called for a 'cultural shift' to 'stop forcing women into a mould'.