Showing posts with label Sexual Revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexual Revolution. Show all posts

Lex Anteinternet: Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Lex Anteinternet: Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Note:  This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives.  I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.


We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.

There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.

What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:

2 Dubium about the claim that the widespread practice of the blessing of same-sex unions would be in accord with Revelation and the Magisterium (CCC 2357).

According to Divine Revelation, confirmed in Sacred Scripture, which the Church “at the divine command with the help of the Holy Spirit, … listens to devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully ” (Dei Verbum 10): “In the beginning” God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and blessed them, that they might be fruitful (cf. Gen. 1, 27-28), whereby the Apostle Paul teaches that to deny sexual difference is the consequence of the denial of the Creator (Rom 1, 24-32). It is asked: Can the Church derogate from this “principle,” considering it, contrary to what Veritatis Splendor 103 taught, as a mere ideal, and accepting as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine?

Which was:

Question 2

a) The Church has a very clear conception of marriage: an exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the begetting of children. Only this union is called “marriage”. Other forms of union are realized only “in a partial and analogous way” (Amoris laetitia 292), which is why they cannot strictly be called “marriage”.2 

b) It is not a mere question of names, but the reality that we call marriage has a unique essential constitution that demands an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities. It is undoubtedly much more than a mere “ideal”.

c) For this reason the Church avoids any kind of rite or sacramental that could contradict this conviction and give the impression that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

d) In dealing with people, however, pastoral charity, which must permeate all our decisions and attitudes, must not be lost. The defense of objective truth is not the only expression of this charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness and encouragement. Therefore, we cannot become judges who only deny, reject, exclude.3 

e) For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage. Because when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea to be able to Live better, a trust in a Father who can help us to Live better.

f) On the other hand, although there are situations that from the objective point of view are not morally acceptable, pastoral charity itself requires us not to treat as “sinners” other people whose guilt or responsibility may be attenuated by various factors that influence subjective imputability (cf. St. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17).

g) Decisions which, in certain circumstances, can form part of pastoral prudence, should not necessarily become a norm. That is to say, it is not appropriate for a Diocese, a Bishops’ Conference or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and in an official way enable procedures or rites for all kinds of matters, since everything “that which is part of a practical discernment in a particular situation cannot be elevated to the category of a norm”, because this “would give rise to an unbearable casuistry” (Amoris laetitia 304). Canon Law should not and cannot cover everything, nor should the Episcopal Conferences claim to do so with their various documents and protocols, because the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to the normative ones.

Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing.  This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did.  Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.

Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs.  Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves.  Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.

Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned.  Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves.  Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.

Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it.  Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O.  Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.

Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.

What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:

Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.  

Eh", you may be thinking.  I thought this thread was on something else.  One of these is not like the other.

Oh, they very much are.

Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics.  He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either.  The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch.  It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.

Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic.  Of interest, the document stated:

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present, because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience... We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.[17] It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity

* * *

72. If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries,[44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.

Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden.  They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."

We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative.  It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel.  A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.  Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow.  That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view.  A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.

Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view.  He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety.  Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science.  He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.

On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this.  People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it.  At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about.  Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy.  It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.

So the connection in all of this?

What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt.  A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:

Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.

Kennedy Hall in Crisis

We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.

Is there a world view that counters any of this?

The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.

Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature.  Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above.  We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.

People don't like the modern world.  It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.

We really don't have to do this.  Getting back from this, however, will not be easily.  It would take a purpose driven societal effort.

The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past.  It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not.  It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.

It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air.  It just isn't synthesized.

If it were. . . 

Footnotes.

1. These Bushmen bands are not Chrisitan, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.

Lex Anteinternet: Really Missing The Point

Lex Anteinternet: Really Missing The Point

Really Missing The Point

Annaba, Algeria, late 19th Century.  Why?  Well, read below.
We must be clear that the modernization of the Church on the great anthropological questions comes through Europe. In the West, there is greater sensitivity towards certain issues such as gender or homosexuality than in Asia or Africa. Although in Europe and the United States the Church is in decline, paradoxically the young Churches that are growing in Asia or Africa are the most conservative. Western societies are moving towards a new idea of mankind, and that game is undoubtedly being played in Europe, which is why there are so many European cardinals in this consistory

Piero Schiavazzi, professor of Vatican Geopolitics at Link University in Rome.

Wow, talk about missing the point.

I don't know why the Pope picks the Cardinals that he does, but if this is the reason, it shows a real misappreciation of the evidence.

The church is on the rise in Asia and Africa, where the parishioners are conservative.

It's in decline in Europe, although that decline tends to be misunderstood and to some degree exaggerated, where contemplating "anthropological questions" is the rage.  It really isn't in decline in the US in the way that's asserted, as overall numbers remain steady, but partially due to immigration.  And not noted by Signore Schiavazzi, conservatism is on the rise in younger American Catholics.

Indeed, also in the West, a recent survey showed that amongst Australian Catholic women, younger women were noticeably more conservative than older ones. 

So appoint European Cardinals who are sensitive to the issues where the Church is failing?

Eh?

The old maxim is that nothing succeeds like success, to which we must presume that nothing fails like failure.

All over the globe, and not just in religion, the older generations that advanced the liberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s continue to remain in power in significant ways and don't seem to grasp that the failed legacy of that is not something that younger generations, heavily impacted by it, wish to advance further.

The impact of Cardinal appointments is much like that of Supreme Court Justices.  It's difficult to tell what they'll really do and even more difficult to tell what a Pope will do at first.  But if Signore Schiavazzi is correct, this is a bad sign.  Once again, the Papacy will not make major doctrinal changes, because it cannot, but there have been historic periods of Church failure (some involving laxity) that resulted in large departures from the Church.  History, we're told, doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.  A sort of small Counter Reformation of sorts is going on amongst the young, while at higher levels the necessity for that seems to be not only not appreciated, but perhaps not even grasped.

Also not grasped, seemingly, anywhere in the West is that the colonial era is over.  We apparently have never understood that wind the "winds of change" swept colonial powers out of Africa and Asia, it also swept the cultural balance of the world.

Europe's impact on the world was enormous culturally.  Indeed, it triumphed. But that culture was a Christian one, no matter how poorly grasped that was and no matter how poorly expressed.  Much of what we take for granted, indeed liberalism itself, about "modern culture" is Christian, and pretty much exclusively Christian, in origin.  It's no accident that cultural decay has set in, in the West, as the Christian roots have is culture have been strained by a long competing culture, that of consumerism, of which both advanced consumer society and socialism are expressions.

St. Augustine.  He was a Berber.

But Christianity itself, at least Apostolic Christianity in the form of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, has never been a European thing.  Indeed, the fundamental event of European culture was the spread of (Apostolic/Catholic) Christianity within it, which forever changed it. But Christianity didn't come out of Europe, and indeed it took the rise of Islam to cause there to be a temporary hiatus in it having a major African expression.  St. Augustine of Hippo was a Berber, not a European, and the Bishop of Hippo Regius, which is modern Annaba, Algeria.

Of course, all of the Apostles were Jews from the Middle East. The first Pope, Peter, was from modern Israel. St. Paul, who dealt with what Signore Schiavazzi calls a "new idea of mankind", as there are no new ideas really, and dismissed the conduct that we now are re contemplating as, well whatever we're re contemplating, was from Tarsus, in what is modern Turkey and which was then part of the Greco Roman world. Pope Victor I, who died in 199, was a Berber. Pope Miltiades was also a North African, as was Pope Gelasius (who was for strict Catholic orthodoxy). Pope Saint Anicetus was a Syrian as was Pope Sisinnius, Pope Constantine, and Pope Gregory III.

What ended the strong influence of North Africa, of course, was the Islamic conquest of the region, although remnant North African Catholic churches held on until the early 1400s.  Even as Christianity has spread around the world, and conquered almost all of non Arab and non Berber Africa, it's been easy to forge that its not a Eurpean religion.

That mistaken impression is about to end, and it can't end soon enough.  Trying to somehow assume that decaying European culture needs to be accommodated, if that's occurring, is a mistake.  It needs to be reformed, and it will be, and a rising Africa and Asia will be part of that.

Lex Anteinternet: Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get ...

Lex Anteinternet: Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get ...:

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.

Soviet realisim painting depeciting sorting grain. While hopelessly romanticized, the depiction of women in this work is accurate, and would have been fort the pre Soviet era as well.

A tired, discouraged Tik Toker young woman has gone viral with a post, in which she says in tears;

Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?

I am so tired. . . I want to put my feet up. . 

She says it, struggling back heavy tears.  

A couple of things before we go on to analyze this topic, and people's reaction to her cri de coeur.

First, my initial guess was that this probably would have resulted in a flood of people making fun of the young woman, but in fact, there isn't much of that.  Lots of women actually posted back with complete sympathy.

A few men posted, too, in this one instance, stupidly:

Jacob McCoombe

Who thought ANYONE should have to work? We should all be sitting on the beach eating cheese and wine 😭

6-61453Reply

AtticusMax123

but... there would not be any cheese or wine .. 😱

6-9 64Reply

Jacob McCoombe

I’d classify it as a hobby. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t mind at all making homemade cheese and wine

6-950 Reply AtticusMax123

but that's work. it's where we have gone wrong. all worried about money, instead of worrying about actually enjoying and being passionate about

Ahh. . .that age old belief that farming and agriculture is not work. . . from urbanites.  Farmers, of course, believe hte same thing about people who have office jobs in town.

But I digress.  

Quite a few replies were like this one:

Fr why did they do that🀚 I would have been completely chill running a household cooking, going shopping, cleaning stress free like ugh I hate working

One of the most interesting replies was this one:

🥀𝐞𝓂𝒟𝓁𝓎🥀

we just wanted the option we didn’t want to HAVE to work 😭😭😭

So I'll start my comments here.

Secondly, therefore, the question, answered straight, and then I guess through a technological analysis and economic analysis. . . or I suppose I'll look at all of these simultaneously.

Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?


Well, proto feminist and early feminist did that.  The reason that they did it, as understood by them at the time, was that they lived in a world that had been heavily impacted by industrialization which had removed men from home based enterprise, for the most sake, and sent them off to "work places" of various types during their working shifts.  This vested economic power in men, and in turn the economic power equated with political power and societal power.  Arguably, it was the power aspect of this that most concerned early feminist and proto feminist, as that imbalance of power worked heavily to the detriment of women in all sorts of ways. 

At the same time, however, technological advances made women's labor in the homes greatly reduced, as we have described here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

So, basically, feminism rose up in the 20th Century as part of a long, slow, female emancipation movement that began prior to the Civil War but which really took root in the very late 19th Century and very early 20th Century just as technological changes made it possible for fewer women to be required to be employed in the household, a necessity which had greatly increased, ironically enough, when industrialization mandated men to leave the household.

Put another way, consider this.  Once men worked in factories, or town jobs, there was no way that they were really available to lend any kind of hand with domestic matters.  This was so much the case, that boarding houses were a staple of men's lives if they were single.  Indeed, they were so much a staple that they inspired a long-running cartoon which would now make no sense to most Americans.


Indeed, boarding houses were so common that they were the souse of a folk song noted by Mark Twain, which went:

There is a boarding-house, far far away,

Where they have ham and eggs, 3 times a day.

O, how the boarders yell,

When they hear that dinner bell

They give that landlord –@#$3

Three times a day.

– The American Claimant, Chapter 17*

This brings up another aspect of this, however.

Women have always worked, and some women have worked outside their households for time immemorial.  Indeed, as the thread linked in above discussed this:

You an find varying data, but it's all pretty close, what it tends to show by decade is the following, with the categories being year, numbers (thousands) employed, percentage gainfully employed, and percentage of the workforce over age 16.

1900 5,319 18.8 % 18.3 %

1910 7,445 21.5         19.9
1920 8,637 21.4         20.4
1930 10,752 22.0         22.0
1940 12,845 25.4         24.3
1950 18,389 33.9         29.6
1960 23,240 37.7         33.4
1970 31,543 43.3         38.1
1980 45,487 51.5         42.5

This doesn't really take into account the spike in employment during either World War One or World War Two, which may be significant in that it tends to potentially be overemphasized.  Taken out, what we see is a slow increase from 1900 onward, which coincides with the rise of domestic implements.


If we figure in the years after 1980, it might be even more revealing.


1980 45,487 51.5     42.5

1990 56,829 57.5     45.2
1993 58,795 57.9     45.5
1994 60,239 58.8     46.0
1995 60,944 58.9     46.1
1996 61,857 59.3     46.2
1997 63,036 59.8     46.2
1998 63,714 59.8     46.3
1999 64,855 60.0     46.5
2000 66,303 60.2     46.6
2001 66,848 60.1     46.5
2002 67,363 59.8     46.5
2003 68,272 59.5     47.0
2004 68,421 59.2     46.0
2005 69,288 59.3     46.4
2006 70,000 59.4     46.0
2007 67,792 56.6     46.4
2008 71,767 59.5     44.0
2010 71,904 58.6     53.6 (which is another watershed year in that the majority of the                                                                     workforce became female and stayed that way)
2014 73,039 56.9     57.0

If we do all of that, we find that the number of women gainfully employed doesn't reach 50% at any point (including WWI and WWII) until 1980 and that it peaked for several years at 60% starting in 1999, before dropping down slightly.

That's correct.  Nearly 20% of women worked outside their households as early as 1900.  

Of that remaining 80%, at that time, you have to keep in mind that the farm population was much higher than it is today, its decline as a percentage of the population being one of the sad realities of the barbarity of modern life.  Even this is a bit deceptive, however. PBS's American Experience relates the following:

1870 The 1870 census shows that farmers, for the first time, are in the minority. Of all employed persons, only 47.7 percent are farmers. As farming becomes more mechanized, farmers rely more on bank loans for land and equipment.

1880 U.S. population reaches 50,155,783, with farm population estimated at 22,981,000. Forty-nine percent of all employed persons are farmers, and of those, one in four is a tenant, despite the Homestead Acts. With the development of barbed-wire fencing and windmills, plow farming reaches the Great Plains.

1893 U.S. experiences an economic crisis: 642 banks fail and 16,000 businesses close. As produce prices plummet, tens of thousands of small farms go under.

1900 There are 5.7 million farms in the U.S., with an average size of 138 acres.

1920 The number of farms has grown to 6.5 million and is home to roughly 32 million Americans, or 30 percent of the population. This would soon change. Migration, mostly by young people who left for the cities, escalated over the next ten years.

What this shows us, of course, is that farmers as a percentage of the American public peaked in the late 19th Century, dropping to 30% by 1920.  1919 was the last year of economic parity for American farmers.  Still, for our discussion here, this is significant.  1920 was the year that the 19th Amendment was ratified in the United States, and women got the right to vote throughout the country.  At that time 20% of women were employed outside the household, and approximately 30% of them lived in farm families, and women in farm families most definitely worked.  That would mean, therefore, that about 50% of women were actually working in some fashion in addition to maintaining their households, and that's at a bare minimum.

Indeed, if we consider the fact that family run businesses were much more common in the first half of the 20th Century than they are now, that figure increases even more.  For families that owned small businesses, whether they be stores, or restaurants, etc., the entire household was employed in them in some fashion.  There may have been a division of labor in those households, but it was not as great as might be imagined.

Even for professionals, this was true to some degree.  Doctors, for example, frequently had their offices in their homes up into the first quarter of the 20th Century.  Medicine was more primitive to be sure, and the practice was not as lucrative as it was to become.  Quite frequently, jobs preformed by hired help today, were preformed by a spouse.  A person might expect the receptionist, for example, to be married to the physician.  "He married his nurse" or "he married his secretary" was a common line for doctors and lawyers, and other professionals. The businesses were much less lucrative, and the family connections, and the natural inclination for couples to work together well expressed.

So, in terms of "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . .  why did you do that?", well, women didn't have to fight for "jobs".  Having a job, one way or another, was a condition of life for most women well before women are regarded as having entered the workplace.


So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.

Well, what's up with it is that as farming as the primary occupation of people declined, and men began to have no choice but to work in other capacities, an unnatural economic division of resources occured. A division of labor, quite frankly, is natural.  Men and women really are different, vegan eating emaciated weenies views aside.  But men working daily away from their families are not.  The economic power, therefore, vested in men, and that created an odd unnatural living condition that still prevails in some quarters.  The Rust Belt life of going to work in the factory early, for a good paycheck, getting off work late, hitting the bars with the guys in the Rust Belt Tavern where the workers would get blotto and make wolf whistles at the bar maids, before going home blitzed and demanding dinner from their wives came about.

And while that is clearly an exaggeration, it's not all that unrealistic of a depiction of the height of the American blue collar era.  The point isn't to unfairly condemn it, but rather to note that money, the motivator for crawling out of bed every day and heading to the GM plant, vested primarily in the hands of men and not women. That was a problem.

In addition to that, what we've already noted above occured.  Domestic machinery came about, which made female household labor surplus.

While we haven't addressed it yet, of the 50% of women not employed on the farm or outside the home, the remainder tended to be actually "employed" in the true sense of the word, in the heavy labor of just keeping a household going.  Indeed, the 20% that were employed outside the home tended to be actually employed, as maids and servants, in the houses of those who could afford it.  And employing domestic help was surprisingly common.

Americans of a certain age will have watched The Andy Griffith Show, in which, of course, Aunt Bea is a resident of the widowed Sheriff Taylor's household, and acts as the woman of the house.  In the very first episode of the show, she's introduced when Taylor's prior live in female servant has left to get married.  Sheriffs don't make a vast amount of money, of course, but the audience would not have thought this odd, as it wasn't that unusual.  Other television depictions of the same era have similar depictions.

In my own family, my mother's family in Montreal employed several domestic servants.  Now, in fairness, they were doing very well at the time, but again this wasn't unusual.  With a large number of children, and before our current era in every way, she employed a collection of Québécoise who cooked and cleaned in the house.  They were not servants, in the English manor house manner, but domestic labor.

And this gets us to the next facet of this discussion.  Prior to the 1950s, and even well after that, female labor outside of the household fell into a fairly limited number of occupations, and that is what feminist were struggling against.  Women of lower means, including married women, often found employment as servants and maids.  By the first quarter of the 20th Century, they were finding employment in offices.  Poor women found employment in certain types of factories, often featuring extremely dangerous working conditions.  Women of greater means, but not wealth, had teaching and nursing open to them.

Indeed, it is that last fact that demonstrates what really occured, and what the "fight" was actually about.  Young middle class women finishing school, and more women than men finished school, who wanted to work could choose to teach or nurse.  If they were Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican (Episcopalian) or Lutheran, they might choose to become nuns.  We don't tend to think of Protestant denominations having nuns, but they in fact do, and this opens up another aspect of this.  Nearly all women married at the time, and nearly all women still do.  It's a natural institution.  But not all women wish to marry.  Just as we've discussed with the topic of male homosexuality, religious institutions offered an acceptable way to avoid marriage and still have a career.  That may well mean that not all had deep religious vocations (certainly most did), but that was an honorable path for them.

What was not possible, generally, was to become a physician, lawyer or the like.  Professions were closed to women.  Most occupations outside of those noted were, which was a legacy byproduct of the early stages of the industrial revolution.  Men were forced outside of the home for heavy labor, but some had the option of working outside the home in "desk jobs".  While these jobs were in particularly less subject to gender differences than those involving heavy labor, the concept that they were was absent and women were excluded.

Eliminating that exclusion is what feminist were "fighting for".

That fight, we might tell our youthful distressed TikToker, was one worth fighting for.  In the end, it's not that the fight was to allow her to work, the fight was to allow her to work at something other than scrubbing floors.

But all battles are always subject o the law of unintended consequences.

Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about.  The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force.  In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them.  Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.  

Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss.  Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy.  Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s.  Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family".  The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family.  Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to.  Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.

The problem with it is that it's a lie.  Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy.  Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.

The additional problem is corporate capitalism.

Corporate capitalism became so dominant in American society that by the 1970s it had swamped the original purpose of the economy and converted human beings into consumers.  Often missed in this is that while corporations need people to have enough money to buy products, it needs labor to be as cheap as possible, or even better nonexistent.  In this fashion, capitalism's two driving forces are actually pitted against each other.

Be that as it may, the freeing up of female labor from the household after World War Two was a boon to capitalism.  More workers within the same population meant reduced labor costs. Combined with a new societal imperative pushing women into the workplace, the rise of birth control which inhibited one of the primary reasons they were not, and the creation of a child warehousing industry, capitalism, along with socialism, drug women out of the household who didn't want to be in it, and put them into jobs which had little value in terms of the feminist dream of "fulfillment".

Indeed, the ultimate irony of the entire effort was that at the end of the day, corporate interest most benefitted.  Feminist never supported a movement that would "allow" women to work, but which actually compelled them to be required to, believing somehow that every woman who worked would find a high paying professional job.  In reality, doubling the workforce within the same overall population depressed wages in non-professional categories and ended up forcing all women to work, including in families in which there were children, which ended up being most families.  Feminism, ironically enough, had a mostly male view of the world, and a mostly Hefnerescque few of it, and the general assumption was that women wouldn't have children, and wouldn't even get married, but live a variant of the Playboy Philosophy, albeit without the huge boobs and dumb girl next store, but rather with an anorexic career woman in that role.

So in the new, in the dominant Anglo-American Culture, all women must now work and there's really no other easy economic option.  While plenty of families opt out of this, at least for at time, many cannot.  The big lie of "career fulfillment" has become a cultural norm, and interestingly enough has lead to personal misery on the party of many, who abandon all else for a career that, in the end, is just a job, but one without purpose or meaning.  And more than a few women have been left embittered by being forced into a labor/employment lifestyle that they resent and feel is unnatural.  Indeed, we've noted that here before:

So what does the TikToker do?  

We don't know, but it's apparently physically fatiguing.  A quick look at her TikTok page (and it is quick, as TikTok is weird) suggests that she works in something in which she interacts with customers, so perhaps sales.

So is her cri de cœur misplaced?

Well, at least partially, and probably substantially.  Unless she was born into wealth, and there's no reason to believe that, she was not going to escape all work in the first place.  The nature and the purpose of it would be different, however.  More likely than not, if she was her current age in 1923, she may have worked outside the home a bit, but then would probably find her work, and it is work, would be at home.  If it were 1823, on the other hand, or 1723, her work for her entire life would almost certainly be at home, unless she was born into severe poverty or wealth, neither of which seem to be the case.

So is her complaint about nothing?

Well, like a lot of female cries in this area, and there are a lot of them, the answer to that is no.  

One thing that the feminists crossed into, at some point, although they've started to cross back due to the unintended results of their success, was a war on women as women.  People remain people no matter what.  Truth be known, a lot of people don't want to be career people, they just want to live their lives and for a lot of them, those lives are close in their minds to the historic norm. The authors of Cosmopolitan may have imagined all women living lives of professional independence, sterile, and free of any commitments to anything, but sane human beings don't imagine lives like that.   So most people end up marrying sooner or later. Truth be known, in people's younger years, they spend a lot of time worrying about this topic and hoping to find somebody.

But the world brought about by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution doesn't really accommodate that very well.  So women who would have preferred the more traditional roles are punished as society won't allow for it.   Beyond that, the logical conclusion of a sexless society is a gender bending one, and we now see disturbed men trying to cross into female status, as in spite of everything women are allowed societally breaks on the demands that men still remain subject to.

In the end, while things were achieved that needed to be, perhaps in part because of the era during which they were achieved, they were overachieved.  Women were allowed ultimately into every role, including some, such as combat soldier, which history and genetics would naturally preclude.

All in all, what we've never figured out is how to deal with the aftershocks and destruction that followed in the wake of massive societal change in the West following World War Two, and more particularly the Revolution of 1968.  As societies don't really tend to debate what direction they're headed in, at least cleanly, this creates a titanic mess.  But stepping back from one sad girl with sore feet, what we should be seeing is a host of things.  One is that feminism combined with Hefnerism, pharmaceuticals and corporate capitalism to the detriment of everyone.   The late stages of that contribute to the warp and woof of our times as the left pushes to destroy what remains of evolution and biology and the varying elements on the right grasp to restore it, without really understanding what happened.  Society isn't going back to any particular date in the past, and there never was a perfect one, but most likely evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained human nature will recover an awful lot of it, in some new sort of compromise.

Footnotes:

*It seems a little disputed, but the same tune may have been used by, or came from, There Is A Happy Land, which was a religious themed tune.

There is a happy land, far, far away,

Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;

Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,

Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.


Come to that happy land, come, come away;

Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?

Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,

Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.


Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;

Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;

Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;

And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.

There is a Boarding House was adopted for the classic soldier's song Old Soldiers Never Die.

There is an old cookhouse, far far away

Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.

Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea

And we are gradually fading away.


Old soldiers never die,

Never die, never die,

Old soldiers never die

They just fade away.


Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.

Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.

Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will

So we drill and drill until we fade away.

It's worth noting that the Army, prior to World War Two, and indeed for some time thereafter, shared certain common features with boarding room life in that it was largely all male, and the occupataion took care of room and board.

Prior Related Threads:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two


The Long Slow Rise. Was Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two.



For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds. Generations: Part Three of Three




Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer up your pants.*

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