LAF And Female Equality

[debrand]

ladiesagainstfeminism.com/theme-articles/the-womans-place/#more-4242

According to LAF, feminism is not needed because the bible offers women equality.

It is a common illusion that in man’s primitive, evolutionary past, women were the merest slaves, used at will by primitive brutes. Not only is this evolutionary myth without foundation, but in every known society, the position of women, as measured in terms of the men and the society, has been a notable one. The idea that women have ever submitted to being mere slaves is itself an absurd notion. Women have been women in every age

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I don't know what he means by evoluntionary past and I strongly suspect he is using that phrase incorrectly. The Greeks were as physically evolved as we are now. They were the same species as we are now. Considering that he speaks about the 'evolutionary myth", I'm a bit confused as to his meaning here.

Yes, women have been slaves. Slavery doesn't change your gender.

His proof that women have always been treated as equals is that they worked in the past. However, poor and lower middle class women have always had to work, no one contests that point. Equality involved more then working. According to the site, only in the 1800's, when women were put on a pedestal, did women stop having equal rights to men.

In order for a woman to work in any job that is traditionally male, she is going to have to compete for things like raises, job advancement etc. I'm not certain what their definition of manhood is but if it is destroyed by competing with women then its a pretty whimpy definition.

To return to the Biblical doctrine, a wife is her husband’s help-meet. Since Eve was created from Adam and is Adam’s reflected image of God, she was of Adam and an image of Adam as well, his “counterpart….†The Biblical doctrine shows us the wife as the competent manager who is able to take over all business affairs if needed, so that her husband can assume public office as a civil magistrate;

It amazes me that they can call this equality. Basically, the wife exists for the husband. She should be able to do his job to help him, if need be. Working at a job because she desires to do so isn't allowed unless it glorifies her husband. She certainly, in their minds, should not work outside her husband's authority.

This isn't the first time that I've noticed the women at LAF claim that they are their husband's intellectual and moral equal. However, they also advocate that women not go to college, obey their husbands/brothers/fathers and give up most of their rights. That is not how equals behave.

edited to add a word

[MamaJunebug]

A thousand thanks for finding this one, debrand! I'd given up glancing at Ladies Against Feminism Commonsense.

Apparently the writer is Rushdoony (he who must be read, according to Doug and his oncall theologian, Morecraft). A strong survivor of a dominionist church told me privately that Rushdoony wasn't all that bad in certain areas, and I thought of her opinions as I skimmed the LAFC article.

So, godless societies marginalize and misuse women - no real surprise there. That sort of thing has been going on since ancient days, or Jesus wouldn't have had to be a revolutionary in the way he treated women - even less-than-noble women. Even Paul wrote that in Christ, there is neither male nor female (nor Jew nor Greek, etc.), another radical thought for the time.

More recently: I had friends back in the uni days who steamed because in SDS-lite meetings, they were relegated to getting cookies for the men who were huddled around, planning plans and managing the revolution.

So sure, rationalism might have dismissed women, I haven't read up on it.

But for Rushdoony to say that feminism "put women in competition with men" is to look only at the USA experience of feminism. Here, yes, unfortunately, the early fems of the 1950s & '60s demanded the same treatment and the same opportunities for women as for men.

This led corporations to gleefully (well, I don't *know* that they were gleeful, but I imagine them being so) say, "Sure, keep working through your pregnancy, have the baby and come back to your job - after 6 to 12 weeks' leave, and don't expect any special treatment because you have a baby at home. Hell, your husband has a baby at home, too, and I bet he isn't asking *his* employer for special treatment!"

This, as opposed to the case in France (as it's been explained to me, and if I'm wrong, please, Sophie or others, correct me), where feminists said, "We expect equality with men but we are not the same as men, thus our benefits simply cannot be the same" - the result being family leave provisions that are superior in all ways to the meager weeks we get, here.

Those just as the examples that I know of.

Ole Rushdoony bought the farm early in 2001, so there was no way he could've heard my (otherwise sensible) pastor declaim against "disobedient wives" in an aside to his (otherwise worthwhile) sermon a few months back. Disobedience generally indicates the sin of an inferior towards her/his superior. But according to Rushdoony the genders - the married couples - are equal? Well, apparently rationalism still infects even the more conservative, scholarly churches, then.

Submitted as a first draft with my apologies for anything that's nonsensical. :!: