A book by the 1966 co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Betty Friedan that could be described as the Feminist Manifesto. Released in 1963, it was a major force behind the 1970s explosion of the radical feminist agenda.
The American feminist movement began with her propaganda book, which took as its theme the emptiness of consumer culture, the frustrations of being a dutiful parent, and the wife’s lack of freedom within the family and opportunity for personal self-realization. Friedan was not at all a normal suburban housewife, although she deceptively sought to portray herself as one. She was in reality a left-wing journalist and political activist steeped in Marxist theories of psychological alienation and oppression and bourgeois ennui (a fact she later sought to conceal). She characterized housewives as prisoners of “comfortable concentration camps.”3
The works of French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) greatly influenced Friedan’s writing. In fact, The Second Stage mimics the title of de Beauvoir’s two-volume work, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). Friedan once stated of de Beauvoir:
I had learned my own existentialism from her. It was The Second Sex that introduced me to that approach to reality and political responsibility … [and] led me to whatever original analysis of women’s existence I have been able to contribute.
Simone de Beauvoir was a brilliant woman and a gifted mathematician. She was also a devoted admirer of both Hegel and Marx. Thus, de Beauvoir was a hard-core leftist [ii]. Her writings on feminism are filled with the typical Marxist rhetoric of class identity and economic struggle against the male-dominated “bourgeoisie.”
Like most leading French intellectuals of the time, de Beauvoir was influenced by the lectures and unpublished writings of Alexandre Kojève [iii]. It is by reviewing certain portions of the works of the Hegelian/Marxist Kojève that we will be able to vividly see the feminine mistake.
Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) was a world-class thinker — undoubtedly one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. His influence on intellectuals in Europe (and to some extent, in the U.S.) was enormous.
Kojève published few of his manuscripts during his lifetime. His work was so honest, and his views so explosive, that he avoided directly expressing his ideology to the general public [iv].
Kojève did not hesitate in his work to disclose to us what Hegel and Marx really thought about women. Both Hegel and Marx grounded their philosophical theories in Hegel’s infamous master/slave dialectic. Kojève explained the essence of the master/slave dialectic in a lecture on Hegel (see Note iii below) in 1939:
Man is desire directed toward another desire — that is, desire for recognition — that is, negating action preformed for the sake of satisfying this desire for recognition — that is, bloody fighting for prestige — that is, the relation between master and slave — that is, work — that is, historical evolution that finally comes to the universal and homogenous state and to the absolute knowledge that reveals complete man realized in and by this state. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, men become self-conscious and fully human by subjugating other men. This historical process of certain classes of men enslaving other classes of men eventually ends in the “universal and homogenous state” when all men are either (depending on one’s perspective) “free and equal” or enslaved to a monolithic one-world government.
Kojève’s studies of Hegel and Marx taught Kojève that only men could participate in this struggle. (Man in the passage above means “male human being,” not “any human being.”)
Kojève explained why only men would attain “absolute knowledge” by serving in a one-world state in his posthumously published Esquisse d’une phenomenology du Droit (Outline of a Phenomenology of Right):
It is because man has already been made human (by the negation of his animal nature through fighting and work) that man also “negates” his animal sexuality and transforms his pairing [with a woman] into a family. It is because he is now a master (of a slave) … that the man behaves differently [than an animal] towards his woman and becomes a “husband” of a “wife.” [Page 486 footnote.]
Two pages later, in another footnote, Kojève clarifies and reemphasizes his position:
The humanization of the wife is mediated by the man (the husband) in the same way as the slave (by working) is made human by the mediation of the master (and through rebellion); this is the basis of the analogy between the wife and the slave.
Women are tied to life. They give us life. They are not inclined to fight and die for recognition or the “struggle” or the revolution — so according to Kojève, women can never be fully “human.”
It gets worse. In another footnote in the same chapter Kojève remarks:
The newly born [son], when assumed to be unable to be humanized, … may be killed like any animal (and also the daughter — since she cannot be humanized, humanity being refused to women). [Emphasis added.]
Now you know where the idea of forced abortion comes from in communist China…and why John Holdren, Obama’s “science czar,” espouses the notion of “compulsory sterilization” and the creation of a “planetary regime” (read: universal and homogenous state) that would control the number of human beings allowed on earth.
The garden-variety (university professor) Marxist will object to Kojève’s position, explaining that women will, in the end, be equal to men by working the same jobs as men in the “universal and homogenous state.” (Remember, that’s the position that Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir both held.) Other faux leftist intellectuals will add that the family is the last great obstacle to attaining universal freedom and equality through labor. Ridding ourselves of the patriarchal family will bring about “happiness” (more accurately, “satisfaction”) — or so we have been told [v].
My response to these café philosophers is this: someone in your perfect state will have to mop the floors, stock the shelves, and work in the assembly lines. I have done all three jobs at various points in my life, and I can assure you that neither “happiness” nor “satisfaction” is a term used by anyone (male or female) performing these mundane tasks.
This pseudo-intellectual phoniness runs rampant through the hard left. Betty Friedan could rant about women getting out of the home and into the workplace because her workplace was Cosmopolitan magazine. Simone de Beauvoir could talk and talk and talk about women as a subjugated class at her numerous lectures and book signing-events (and make a good sum of money while doing it).
Alexandre Kojève was straightforward about the results of what people would really experience in the “universal and homogenous state.” In a very famous footnote in his lectures on Hegel, Kojève states:
[The] end of human time or history — that is, the definitive annihilation of man properly so-called or of the free and historical individual — means quite simply the cessation of action in the full sense of the term.
Stated differently, in the universal and homogenous state there is no freedom, no choice, just equal (and equally meaningless) work for all.
There is a reason why the left is so dead-set on a woman’s “right” to an abortion — and why the health care bill in the Senate will have the central government pay for this “right.” State-controlled abortion moves the left that much closer to eliminating the family and establishing its much-desired universal and homogenous state.
As Alexandre Kojève so bluntly showed us, women who have bought into the radical feminist agenda must eventually trade their freedom for slavery. In his 1939 lecture on Hegel, Kojève stated:
Hegel also sees, and he is the first to say so in so many words, that truly human existence is possible only by the negation of life…. [Emphasis in original.]
In my view, most women are (and should be) above this “Maoist” view of human existence.
Feminism, by grounding itself in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, is condemning women to a new servitude: slavery to the state. Not to worry, liberated ladies: In the paradise of the universal and homogenous state, you will still be able to mop the floors.
Like many of the “Grave Influencers”, Friedan was an atheist who embraced Marxism. As Benjamin Wicker points out:
Before she published The Feminine Mystique, Friedan had spent years in Marxist-inspired agitation on behalf of mistreated lower-class workers—and the abstractness of her analysis is fundamentally Marxist. She had been a Marxist since her college days at Smith in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the years after, she belonged to, worked for, or wrote positively about a string of leftist organizations and publications—like the Popular Front, the Federated Press, UE News, Congress of American Women, Jewish Life—that had significant Communist membership or Soviet sympathies. Knowing that the call to revolution in The Feminine Mystique would be damaged if it was associated with the call to revolution in the Communist Manifesto, she hid her radical past.
The bottom line is that feminism has been a tool of humanists to destroy the family. Leading humanist Paul Kurtz said, “Humanism and feminism are inextricably interwoven.” Humanists and communists have sought the destruction of the American family because they know that the family has been the instrument for passing on Christian values and a biblical worldview—the source and foundation of our freedoms and constitutional republic.
With the help of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, divorce laws were liberalized. The resulting drastic increase in divorce began to break down the strength, respect, and permanency of the marriage covenant in the civil arena. No-fault divorce made separation fast and allowed couples to split up without admitting fault or accepting responsibility.
Friedan and the cultural Marxists have used civil law, courts, and the media to destroy the family and fathers and to make possible the rise of the welfare nanny state. The break-up of the family has been the leading cause of generational poverty and the permanent underclass. And the chaos is having its intended effect: the American people increasingly call for government to solve the problem by greater intervention into family life.
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