Shouldn't Conservative Women Just Admit They're Feminists?

I’m asking this for two reasons.

First, the word “feminist” is, in my opinion (and I don’t have any data to back this up), attractive to low-information female voters looking for — as people do — a sense of belongingness (if you’ll allow that word) in the world, and a sense of value. And a sense of intellectuality.

I clearly remember listening to (not participating in) a conversation between two low-information female friends of mine in which they both declared themselves “feminist.” 

 I got no sense from either of them that they had much of a sense of what “feminism” was apart from three  notions:

1.  Women are equal to men; and

2.  Women’s values and beliefs are just as important as men’s; and

3.  Women have, or ought to have, ambitions equal to men. 

Now, it seems to me likely that a great number of low-information female voters probably believe that’s about the extent of what “feminism” is, and that anyone calling himself, or herself, a “non-feminist” is against such things.

Which of course we’re not; virtually nobody is.

Second, it might be salutary to “take the world back,” as they say.  Given that most conservative women believe these things — I don’t detect a lot of “deference to men” among my conservative sistren (I’m just making up words left and right now) — maybe conservative women (and men, for that matter) should just say we’re “feminists,” at least as most people actually understand the word to mean.

I mean, the low-information female voters I mentioned did not talk about “free birth control” or “The Patriarchy” or even “The Conversation about Puffy Faces.”   All that baggage — which is really just Marxism For Girls Who Aren’t Good At Math (TM) — is part of what the left knows as feminism, and what the left calls feminism, but they’re the only ones seeking to expressly define it.

Meanwhile, millions upon millions of conservative women go to work every day, seek promotions, pitch stories and screenplays, reject stories and screenplays, fire guns, approve loans, set up escrows, do the family’s budget, give their kids the education the State denies them, tell their husbands they can’t have a motorcycle at age 47, tell their sons they  can’t get an earring, also tell their husbands they can’t get an earring, and so on and so forth, and yet don’t self-identify as what they are:  Humans who’ve moved quite beyond the antique social convention of treating women as if they were children and now compete with men in virtually all segment of the economy.

If conservative women are “feminist” for all purposes — minus the superstructure of Critical Gender Theory Marxism layered over actual feminism by leftists — why not just declare it and gain the positive political attractiveness of the term?

Frankly I’m a feminist — as most people would define the term.

I know there may be some conservative women who hold to that part of the Bible that says something about wives deferring to their husbands (I don’t know the actual passage); but Michele Bachmann claims that too, and yet… I cannot imagine her as a wilting flower.  And whatever the Bible may say about deferring to a husband, it surely doesn’t say anything about deferring to some male idiot in Accounting.

 

 

Funny Because It’s True: I did notice I was being a little bossypants to women in a post about embracing feminism. Rolondo noticed too, and linked this Onion article — Man Finally Put In Charge of Struggling Feminist Movement.

Well it’s about damn time. We’ve had a lot of foolishness and twaddle until now. Now it’s time to get serious about it.