Are Feminists to Blame For All The Social Ills of Today?

Although we have progressed in many fields, even landed on the moon, our family structure is failing us. Divorce rate is mounting, marriage is declining and teenage pregnancy is not getting any less. Government ministers, who talk about family values, are concerned about the situation. It is a different story that their families aren’t faring any better.

In this scenario, partly blaming them for this and fully blaming them for clashing with men, let alone men, many women have negative views about feminists. It is true that in a competitive world, feminists have used fiery language against men. But are they to blame for everything that has gone wrong for women? Or is it that modern women are oblivious to the suffering women went through in the past? Do modern women know the suffering feminists and other women activists, even men, had to go through, in this revolution against men?



Although women still have not achieved full equality- say of pay, life of women in the past was very different than what is seen today. Many modern women, probably, can’t even think of the time, when women had no rights what so ever. They were regarded as inferior beings. Any mistake by them received much higher penalty than men. Woman’s life was so dependent on man that it was worthless on its own. When the husband died, she was given very little possession. Education was a far cry. She was there to cook food, do the house work, look pretty and have babies. The more babies she had the more respect she got. Being barren, on the other hand, was a real disaster. Voting right of women was not even talked about. Women’s empowerment was a far cry. Women, at that time, truly felt that it was a curse to be a woman.

Although the revolution started by French revolution’s ‘Right of Man’ would have given women the necessary rights in the long run, feminists have had a huge contribution in making it available so soon. They made both men and women aware of the plight of women. Those protests helped men notice women’s plight and formulate laws. Feminists and other active women, even men, went through a different kind of suffering in doing so. They were beaten during protests and were jailed for their beliefs. They also had to fight an intellectual battle with Freud, his supporters and other male chauvinists. Empowering women wasn’t easy.

The ‘Right of Man’ not only had a political consequence, changing concept of duty to right, it also had huge social consequence. Feminists simply accelerated that process. If there is any entity that is at fault, it is the ‘Right of Man’. This is because, it not only made man a free and independent being, in doing so, it made him an entity, almost like an animal, concerned with its own survival alone. This and many more factors are discussed in the work ‘Women’s Power : Its Past, Its present, Its Future: Femocracy’.


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