What is Feminism?  

May 22, 2002

Feminism is a movement made up of two kinds of feminists: liberal feminists and radical feminists. They both believe that women everywhere and forever have been oppressed. I disagree.

My first knowledge of feminism began several years ago with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. Feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller, who think they represent all women, supported Equal Rights and were busy writing books. They all claimed to advance women, but I saw no positive aspect to their feminist ideology. They said women were oppressed and that they endured gender discrimination, but it was the radical feminists who offered to remedy this malady and it would be through redefining the family, eliminating the role of the male, liberating sexuality and backing abortion on demand.

What was wrong with these women? Were they angry or hurt? Were they not allowed to vote or be educated? Did they not believe that the words, “all men are created equally by their creator with certain unalienable rights” included them? I grew up in rural Georgia. I was never oppressed. I had every opportunity; music, speech, dance and art. I was in church. I remember to this day the first scripture verse I ever learned. It was: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come…” Had these women never derived pleasure in those kinds of experiences? Feminists seemed to be engrossed in destructive behavior like rejection of motherhood and sexual promiscuity. They were out to change human nature. Their enemy clearly was the “religious right”.

Notwithstanding, women and children have suffered; history will bare this out. Women are blamed for working outside the home, even when forced by tax pressures. When I was a gubernatorial candidate, one man indicated to me that a woman would be last on his list as a candidate. I was able to draw upon my faith and ask God to “help me accept the things I could not change and courage to change the things I could”. According to feminist's standards, there is no place in the public arena for my sectarian viewpoint.

I have attended several U.N. Conferences in New York; Istanbul, Turkey and Rome, Italy, but it was the U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing, China where I saw the war on motherhood and the blurring of genders. As I questioned what I was seeing, a dear little doctor from Australia showed me that if I looked closely I would see that radical feminists, devoted to ending compulsory heterosexuality, class struggle and oppression were following Karl Marx. No wonder these far-left feminists wanted freedom from the restrictions of marriage and motherhood. They were pushing for the liberation of children, adult/child sex and the death of childhood. Marxism offered the atheists their “cause” to provide freedom to the “oppressed”. Marxism and radical feminism, I discovered, were one in the same.

The cultural war we find ourselves in is a feminist Marxist revival for the predominately atheist movement. The “cause” has found a warm home in the United Nations to use its influence to mainstream the feminists' perspective globally.