Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

During the 1980s, the French government quietly permitted immigrant men to bring multiple wives into the country, to the point where an estimated 200,000 families in Paris are now polygamous. Any suspicion that official concern over headscarves was motivated by an impulse toward gender equality is belied by the easy adoption of a permissive policy on polygamy, despite the burdens this practice imposes on women and the warnings issued by women from the relevant cultures.1 On this issue, no politically effective opposition galvanized. But once reporters finally got around to interviewing the wives, they discovered what the government could have learned years earlier: that the women affected by polygamy regarded it as an inescapable and barely tolerable institution in their African countries of origin, and an unbearable imposition in the French context. Overcrowded apartments and the lack of each wife's private space lead to immense hostility, resentment, even violence both among the wives and against each other's children.

In part because of the strain on the welfare state caused by families with 20-30 members, the French government has recently decided to recognize only one wife and consider all the other marriages annulled. But what will happen to all the other wives and children? Having neglected women's view on polygamy for so long, the government now seems to be abdicating its responsibility for the vulnerability that women and children incurred because of its rash policy.

The French accommodation of polygamy illustrates a deep and growing tension between feminism and multiculturalist concerns to protect cultural diversity. I think we—especially those of us who consider ourselves politically progressive and opposed to all forms of oppression—have been too quick to assume that feminism and multiculturalism are both good things which are easily reconciled. I shall argue instead that there is considerable

Multiculturalism doesn't work, never has, never will. There has to be a dominant culture. In the West, it is primarily Christian, democratic, capitalist. Most of the immigrants from the Turd world (sorry, third world) are anything but...so, as the liberal politicians bend over to kiss their ##$$$@ to make them feel at home, the rest of us are being asked (including via laws and taxation) to accomodate their culture, which is basically anti-Western.

I won't do it, nor should anyone who has a spine and wants to save the West from these would be usurpers and conqueror wannabees. Get ready, folks, it's going to get bumpy, even rocky, that's if you want to stay free......which may include tossing a few of our so called "own" i.e., politicians, MSM, educators, etc. into the fray.

"Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?"

"'Multiculturalism' is harder to pin down, but the particular aspect that concerns me here is the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by ensuring the individual rights of their members and as a consequence should also be protected with special group rights or privileges."

I thought that multiculturalism was the claim that there is no real right and wrong, and that instead of right and wrong being real, each culture gets to make up its own standards of "right" and "wrong", based on nothing real, just on whatever. So, each culture gets to both (a) demand that the individuals in it live up to those culturally-determined "ethical" standards (even should that standard be, say, banning the education of women, or marriage only via arrangement, etc.), and (b) ignore any behavior not deemed an offense by that culture (even should that behavior be rape, polygamy, murder of rape victims, etc.)

With this definition, anyone that believes that real right and wrong exist must of course see that Multiculturalism is bad for women, and indeed for human being in general, as it is an ideology that permits a society to impose, at its wont, any evil standard on people whatsoever, and ignore, at its wont, any real and good standard whatsoever.

Question answered.

As far as author's definition, basically she's saying that Multiculturists realize that, when individuals born into a non-Western culture are given "individual rights" of a Western culture, many of them choose to abandon the bulk of the dictates of the non-Western culture. And these Multiculturalists bemoan the death of the non-Western culture, even if it should be via the choice of the individuals born into the culture. And these Multiculturalists want to use the power of the state to support the power-brokers of the dying cultures in forcing their dictates on people who would otherwise abandon that culture for Western culture.

Now if we for some reason pit this nutball position against the nutball position of feminists, I agree with the author that it is difficult to determine which of the two positions is better. But this is not because both positions are overflowing with virtue, by any means.

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