We Didn't Start The Fire

To anyone who reads the scriptures, particularly those dealing with "the end times," the decay of our civilization is clearly foretold. Chapter 3 of Isaiah is particularly distressing, because, although on the surface discussing the decay of David and Solomon's empire, it is applicable to any great society that has fallen into corruption and decay. There, we read that both the leadership of God and that of responsible leaders will be taken away, to be replaced by the immature and incompetent: "And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them." "And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour." "The shew of their countenance doth witness against them; and they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not." In this regard, the Lord makes specific reference to the behavior of the women produced by such a culture: vain, haughty and openly sexual (e.g., cougars); enamored of ostentatious and tawdry clothes, jewelry, and other fashions (e.g., fashionistas).

While we think of the latter as being a consequence of the so-called "sexual revolution" and feminism--and, thus, having appeared within only the last several decades--such a viewpoint is incorrect. Long time readers know that I periodically write about Oswald Spengler's forecast of the decline of civilization, including what he referred to, in the 1920's, as the Ibsen woman:

The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “lives for herself”—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.

A more modern description of the Ibsen woman--or "new woman" (as opposed to the Victorian, or "old," woman--was given by Gail Finney:

The New Woman typically values self-fulfillment and independence rather than the stereotypically feminine ideal of self-sacrifice; believes in legal and sexual equality; often remains single because of the difficulty of combining such equality with marriage; is more open about her sexuality than the 'Old Woman'; is well-educated and reads a great deal; has a job; is athletic or otherwise physically vigorous and, accordingly, prefers comfortable clothes (sometimes male attire) to traditional female garb.

 But feminism had reared its head long before Spengler. In 1890, Ragnar Redbeard (a pseudonym) published "Might is Right," in which he observed:

There is nothing particularly inviting about barren, dyspeptic, blue-stocking ‘New Women,’ in pants and spectacles; talking idiotic snuffle through their noses; with busts made of adjustable india-rubber; with narrow or padded hips, and “wheels between their legs,” scorching across the curbstones like mad. When such women are ‘captured’ what good are they? They won’t even breed; or if they do so (by accident) their puny embryos, have to be delicately nurtured into life with steam-heated incubator-mechanism and afterwards fed and weaned on ‘the bottle.’ The sons of such women — bottle fed abortions — of what good are they?

It is women of this kind (unnatural monsters they are) that cause so much domestic unhappiness. They have been “educated” along false lines, filled with bookish artificialism, and thereafter when called upon to take up their maternal duty, they are organic incapables. Hence the divorce court scandals — the fruit of wholesale degeneracy — encouraged by State interference with domestic affairs.

“Our times, in sin prolific, first
The marriage bed with taint have cursed,
And family and home —
This is the fountain head of all,
The sorrows and the ills that fall —
On Romans and on Rome.”
Horace

Gradually the curse of ‘Law’ invades the privacy of every home. It encourages emotional feminines to defy husbands, and Deify an irresponsible Authority [i.e., the State]. In other words it deliberately promotes unfaithfulness and unlimited free-love. It undermines the husband’s Control, but at what a dreadful cost? With the “equalization” of women comes wholesale panmixia — scientific concubinage, State-regulated polyandry, and the poisoning of all inter-family intercourse. When average women find in Statute Law a “deliverer” and a “champion” more powerful than their husbands and brothers, they become both unfaithful and profligate — especially if “well educated.” Then it cometh to pass (as in all ages of connubial decadence) “no man knoweth his own father.” Is not that the practical tendency of the times? Again, is that ‘tendency’ itself not the horrible result of State-Paternalism — of majority-box dictation — of Statecraft and Priestcraft? The Church lives by the functional emotionalism of women. Thus the Individual wanes and the State grows more and more. In natural society, every woman’s husband is to her, both priest and king. When the baleful shadow of politics and preacherisms, looms over the marriage bed, dreadful days are at hand.

 And there, in a nutshell, is the result of the breakdown of the family due to feminism, including the rise of the single mother households; where the father is absent (if not unknown), replaced by the State and its subsidy. The difference is that, in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Ibsen woman was a product of, and existed within, the upper strata of society. Now, it is found at all levels.