Feminist Economics
- Post by: Rebekah Curtis
- November 13, 2023
Feminism Against Progress
Mary Harrington Regnery, 2023; 256 pages, $29.99 Why did it take so long for feminism to happen? Feminists have no Archimedes or Newton, spurred to insight by bathwater or apples. Feminist thought was not translated into consciousness by a discovery like the Rosetta stone, or inaugurated by an explosively brilliant philosopher. If women’s lives were plainly inhumane until the late 19th century, why did they put up with it? Why wouldn’t they, for the sake of their daughters, have thrown off their oppressors? The mechanism for doing so is as old as Lysistrata. Feminism’s relatively late arrival in human philosophy might be attributed to both esoteric and practical obstacles. Religion and philosophy held women to be spiritually and mentally fitted for the safer places and lighter work at which they were always found (childbearing notably excepted). The shape of the world itself accounted for the rest: men and women occupied themselves as they did because of the physical differences between them. Women made lousy miners, men made lousy mothers, and who has time to be a statesman when she keeps giving birth? So the enabling condition for feminism was a change in the shape of the world, or maybe not the world itself, but the shape of the tools and techniques with which people hacked at it. It is not an accident that industrialization and feminism arose in near proximity, argues Mary Harrington. Understanding this is critical to understanding the shape of the world today. “[I]n communities where men and women genuinely depend on one another to perform work that’s indispensable for the survival of the community, the idea that one sex could be uniformly ‘exploited’ by the other makes little sense,” she writes in Feminism Against Progress. But if men and women are interchangeable—if it doesn’t matter who pushes a button on an assembly line, or pushes keys on a cash register or keyboard, or pushes a stroller
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