I hadn’t heard about the new right wing movement to drive women out of the workplace but apparently, it’s a thing:
Although interest in “The Great Feminization” has been building for a while, it exploded recently with a viral essay by Helen Andrews, a conservative commentator. In it, Andrews argues that female group dynamics are responsible for “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” which she describes as “simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” Andrews argues that corporate cultures often suffer when they become majority female, and she worries particularly about the impact of gender dynamics on law. Too many women lawyers, she suggests, might well bring down the American legal system:
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
Andrews concludes that while it is “still controversial” to argue that “there are too many women in a given field or that women in large numbers can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well,” it is necessary to do so because “we all are … dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.” In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference last month, Andrews argued that “a thoroughly feminized civilization will set itself on the road to collapse.” Although Andrews is careful to point out that she doesn’t want to roll back women’s rights (and acknowledges that individual women can pursue professional excellence), she hopes the trend of feminization will reverse if we take what she sees as needed steps to abandon our “system in which it is illegal for women to lose” and “[r]emove the HR lady’s veto power.” While Andrews is cagey about what future she hopes for, she’s explicit that institutional threats remain “as long as demographics remain unchanged.” She doesn’t say where she wants the apparently too many working women to go.
The essay is notable not only for how much interest it generated, but also how many positive comments it received among pundits. One female business leader called it a “seminal essay,” while a professor at Duke said it “contains far-reaching hypotheses that academics should take seriously and test rigorously.” And it seems to have spread beyond the writerly class: Andrews’ tweet of her essay has, as of this writing, racked up 6.4 million views.
That’s from The Dispatch, a conservative outlet, and the author actually makes the case that this is wrong and warns that Republicans are creating their own gender war and that’s a mistake. She makes a good argument about why this is bad politics but never really grapples with the fact that they are just making the oldest conservative argument in the world. Until very, very recently, the idea that women are incapable of leadership and important responsibility because they’re too dizzy, stupid and soft to do what’s necessary was the consensus and every institution and virtually every society was organized with that understanding. It is hardly some new idea being advanced by exciting original thinker. Good lord.
Patriarchy has always been fundamental to conservatism. Whatever progress has been made for women is always subject to reversion the minute they get the chance. And they have the chance now. Ending abortion rights was only the beginning.