Only Of Their Tyranny

John Stuart Mill | Women in the Workforce Ruined Everything | Factoids

National Woman’s Party Silent Sentinels at the White House gate, 1917 (source: National Woman’s Party)

Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only of their tyranny.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection Of Women

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Women in the Workforce Ruined Everything

David French responds to the incendiary claims of Helen Andrews, in a speech titled Overcoming the Feminization of Culture, that women in the workforce have ruined everything:

The challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that case, the supposed feminine commitment to “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” manifests itself as the dread wokeness and ultimately destroys institutions and professions.

That’s the core thesis of an essay by Andrews that was based on a speech she gave at the National Conservatism conference in September.

And MAGA conservatives love it. French, again:

First, it’s yet another contribution to one of the most prominent debates in America — regarding the differences, whatever they are, between men and women and the declining dominance of men in education and the work force.

Second, it scratches some specific itches of the new right, including the desire to return to an imagined American past that was far better than the present along with the relentless impulse to decry the supposed decline of America, one of the new right’s favorite themes, as something that “they” have done to “you.” There are villains in every new right story, and in this case the villains are women, and the crime they commit is … being themselves.

French agrees that men and women are ‘dispositionally different in aggregate’:

a 2022 study of nearly 306,000 people in 57 countries found that women demonstrated more cognitive empathy than men in 36 countries, they were similar in 21 countries, and there was no country in which men registered higher cognitive empathy than women.

But he disagrees with nearly everything else Andrews says, particularly

her position [...] that the increased representation of women in the government, economy and education is a “potential threat to civilization.”

Andrews lauds men in aggregate as being rational and eager to make up after warring in a way that is ahistoric, and denigrates women as being too emotionally petty and vindictive. Very strange.

Many of the world’s greatest horrors, past and present, are rooted in male emotion. The rage and fury of war have bathed the world in blood. Hatred fosters discrimination. Greed leads to exploitation.

The killer argument is really made by Kelly Chapman:

In many ways, Andrews’s piece is an essay-length argument for the old Ben Shapiro line, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Facts, in this telling, are rational and masculine. Feelings are irrational and feminine. Facts can be trusted. Feelings cannot.

That’s an impoverished view of moral reasoning. Kelly Chapman, a culture writer for The Spectator, posted a beautiful response on her Substack, where she writes under the pseudonym Audrey Horne. “To Andrews,” Chapman argued, “empathy (girlish, frilled) clouds reason (chiseled, plain) and creates an organizational — yea, civilizational — liability.” But, as Chapman observed, emotion isn’t an impediment to moral reasoning; it’s indispensable to it.

“Indignation, awe, remorse, and yes, empathy — all these gut-level feelings are what make moral reasoning possible,” Chapman wrote. “When that capacity is simultaneously gendered and discredited, it is not only the moral agency of women that suffers, but moral knowledge itself.”

This is exactly right. We are all balls of reason and emotion. To render either automatically suspect, or to embrace either unconditionally, is to diminish part of our humanity and undermine our capacity for virtue. In fact, they are so linked together that it’s impossible to truly separate them in our minds or hearts.

Reminds me of the Terrence Malick line from Days of Heaven:

Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you.

Great close by French, that captures the spirit of MAGA [emphasis mine]:

The new right groans under the weight of its nostalgia for a nation that did not exist. It pines for a story that vindicates its reactionary rage. And in writing about a false enemy that destroyed a fake past, Andrews and the many other architects of the right-wing gender wars are committing the very sins they attribute to the enemies they detest.

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