The Power of Sexual SurrenderRobinson, Marie Nyswander
Science
The Power of Sexual Surrender
Robinson, Marie Nyswander
Frigidity (Psychology); Sex (Psychology); Women -- Sexual behavior
What did this movement want to achieve? Let me quote to you what
two profound students of feminism, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia
F. Farnham, had to say about it in their book _Modern Women, The
Lost Sex_: “Far from being a movement,” they wrote, “for the greater
self-realization of women, as it professed to be, feminism was the
very negation of femaleness. Although hostile to men and hostile to
children, it was at bottom most hostile to women. It bade women commit
suicide as women and attempt to live as men … Psychologically,
feminism had a single objective: the achievement of maleness by the
female, or the nearest possible approach to it. In so far as it was
attained, it spelled only vast individual suffering for men as well as
women, and much public disorder.”
What was the program of the feminists? Actually Mary Wollstonecraft
had enunciated it in its entirety in her book, _A Vindication of the
Rights of Women_, and the movement never deviated from her original
demands. She had stated that men and women were, in all fundamental
characteristics, identical, and that therefore women should receive the
same education as men, be governed by the same moral standards, do the
same work, and have identical political rights and duties. Women were
to be treated exactly as men in every detail of living, and the same
demands were to be made on them.
The appeal of this program was enormous. Nineteenth-century woman
felt: “Ah, if we could only achieve _this_, then we would be happy
once again.” The fact--and it’s a dreadfully simple one--is that now,
indeed, the entire program has been realized and modern woman, having
reaped the benefits of it in full, is more confused, perhaps even
unhappier, than ever.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that woman’s lot was
not difficult, often impossible, in the nineteenth century. Nor am
I saying that all of the goals set by the feminists were neurotic
and wrong-headed. The movement indeed helped to overcome some of
the gravest dislocations in social and economic life caused by the
upheavals that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
I _am_ saying this: that in so far as the feminist movement pitted
itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to
masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was
dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this
movement started ever since.
The rage of the feminist was directed against herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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