Viewpoint: What if women ruled the world?

BBC News Magazine ^ | 3-7-2013 | Dee Dee Myers

[haffast]

Not so long ago, the idea that women might rule the world seemed slightly ridiculous - like something out of science fiction. But in an essay to mark International Women's Day, political analyst and former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers argues it's now a topic that can be seriously discussed.

Women clearly lacked the intellectual capacity and emotional fortitude to make the difficult decisions that leadership required. It wasn't bias, it was biology - it was just the way women were made.

But that was then. In recent decades, attitudes and ideas have changed - and fast. That's not to say that every corner of the world has welcomed women moving from the traditional and private into the modern and public. But move they have.

So what's changed? A lot. As a huge and growing body of research and experience makes clear, empowering women makes things better. Not perfect. But better.

snip

Former US Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice says she has learned first-hand that you need women to participate in the peace process.

"First and foremost women are often the guardians of the village, the family, and are therefore the ones who suffer most in conflict zones. They're often the target of marauding forces, the target of those who would rape and maim and if you can engage them in the process, then they also can help the society to heal."

So empowering women isn't about political correctness, it's about improving outcomes. It's about investing in stronger economies and healthier communities - it's about ending conflicts, and sustaining peace. It's about improving the quality of life for people all over the world.

Empowering women isn't just the right thing, it's the necessary thing. And because women are increasingly ruling, the world is changing for the better.

[haffast]

Queen fights for gay rights: Monarch makes historic pledge
The Daily Mail ^ | UPDATED: 17:58 EST, 9 March 2013 | Simon Walters

"The Queen will tomorrow back an historic pledge to promote gay rights and ‘gender equality’ in one of the most controversial acts of her reign."

"In a live television broadcast, she will sign a new charter designed to stamp out discrimination against homosexual people and promote the ‘empowerment’ of women – a key part of a new drive to boost human rights and living standards across the Commonwealth."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2995342/posts

[central_va]

Women do rule the world. Why? Guys don’t want to sleep on the couch.

Advice: own a very comfortable couch.

[x]

Women did want safety and security -- for their children -- but more women than men saw that security in marriage, the family, and religion. Then came the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s, spearheaded by men.

You seem like an older person. Do you really not remember the atmosphere of the Sixties? It wasn't women who were driving social transformation. Not at the beginning anyway. Nor did the original sexual revolution have very much to do with women's concerns. Nor was it women who were building and expanding the welfare state.

Once that work was done, once marriage had become a much shakier institution, women came to look for security in government programs, rather than in families that often were left high and dry by men's abandonment. Or so the story goes. In fact, even in the last elections more married women voted for Romney. It was single women who gave Obama his edge, and that was most likely a result of abortion and sexual politics, rather than economic or social policy. To be sure, most women aren't in favor of a significant rollback of federal power, but neither are most men.

There's a parallel between your attitude on this thread and your view of Catholics on other threads. White women, married women, churchgoing women, White Catholics, married Catholics, churchgoing Catholics all voted (so far as I know) for the Republicans in the last election. Neither the male-female or the Protestant-Catholic divide was as significant as you've maintained. For better or worse, race, marital status, and religious observance count for more.

Do women and Catholics trend more Democrat than men or Protestants do? It looks like it. But so what? Some groups will always tend a little more in one direction than other groups. It doesn't mean everyone in the group or the group as a whole is somehow depraved. You can ignore the whole group or you can try to win over individual voters within the group (the wiser course), but condemning the whole group and praising your own doesn't serve much purpose in politics.

Once upon a time groups that are the most Republican today, say Southern White Evangelicals, were very much on the outside, and very much trying to use political power to get things for themselves, voting for Bryan and Wilson and Roosevelt, enjoying all the pork that seniority in Congress brings. Now other groups think of themselves as outsiders and follow similar strategies. That changes over time. Maybe we can do things about it. Doing little superiority dances probably won't do much good.

Talk about the evils of women's suffrage is a lot like talk about the evils of direct election of Senators. People think if they could just correct that things would revert back to a better state of affairs. But the 17th Amendment, like the 19th (or the 16th) was as much a result of trends as a cause of them.

In an age that prided itself on its democracy and egalitarianism, a non-elected body would either lose power or be forced to consent to having its members directly elected by the public. In such an age the vote wasn't going to be confined forever to men. Between suffragists who would go to prison or die to achieve their ends and a broader public that didn't really care, the franchise was going to be extended to women.

So is society more feminized now than it once was? Sure. But that's more a result of larger trends, many of them set in motion by men. Women's suffrage is a result of those trends, not a cause of them. Once women got the vote they did contribute more to increasing federal power, but that's very much a recent trend, something that's happened over the last 30 years or so.

There's a parallel here in the arguments about the "greatest generation" and the Boomers and post-boomers. The GI generation (and its precursors) set into motion a welfare state for working men. Lately the welfare state and society as a whole have become more "feminized." You can complain about that, but it wasn't women or their influence that originally established the welfare state, just as it wasn't the 60s and post-60s generations that made government so powerful and domineering. Maybe that older welfare state was better than the current one or maybe it wasn't so different. But it wasn't something women built.

[ansel12]

You really are a troll, and evidently a stalker as you continue to try to make this thread related to past threads in some strange personal vendetta.

Just discuss the topic at hand the female effect on politics, and leave out whatever personal baggage you are carrying.

Women created the most destructive movement in American history, the "womens's movement" to liberate women and to fight for everything that you bizarrely think is a man's movement. Women suddenly, in a matter of decades, changed America and turned politics into a permanent discussion and contest over women's issues and interests, which are in opposition to American ideals and freedoms and American/male concerns and goals.

Women led the charge in the social/sexual revolution, not men. It wasn't men promoting divorce and sexual liberation of females, and the end of gender roles and the destruction of the family, that was all the creation of the women's movement and the beginning of the gender gap in voting.

"In addition, advocates for no-fault divorce argued that the law should be changed to provide a straightforward procedure for ending a marriage, rather than forcing a couple who simply couldn't get along to choose between living together in "marital hell" or lying under oath in open court. The most prominent advocate of this position was feminist law professor Herma Hill Kay (who later became dean of UC Berkeley School of Law).
At its convention in 1947, the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) voted to draft and promote a bill that would embody the ideal of no-fault divorce and describes its efforts to promote the passage of no-fault divorce laws as "the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.""

1965 Founders of NOW as the women's movement grew ever larger by decade, and came to totally deconstruct and restructure all of American society and concepts of marriage and family and law and government power and freedom, and every element of life, a deconstruction of civilization bursting forth as females found their footing within the power of the universal vote.

[x]

You really are a troll, and evidently a stalker as you continue to try to make this thread related to past threads in some strange personal vendetta.

Sort of like with you and Mitt Romney?

It wasn't men promoting divorce and sexual liberation of females, and the end of gender roles and the destruction of the family, that was all the creation of the women's movement and the beginning of the gender gap in voting.

C'mon. Hugh Hefner? Ring a bell?

Read the history of the New Left. That wasn't a women's movement. For all it's support for sexual liberation, it pretty much had contempt for women.

Feminists did push for no-fault divorce, but it wasn't some thing women created or most women supported or benefited from. No fault was the result of a strange alliance of left, right and center Source.

The mythology now is that you can pick enemies who are responsible for everything that went wrong. The reality is that things were more complicated than that and responsibility more widespread.

[a fool in paradise]

International Women’s Day is a Communist holiday. BBC can suck it.

[a fool in paradise]

Peace will come to the Middle East when muslim WOMEN learn to love their sons more than they hate Jews.

[ansel12]

You seem confused and totally mixed up on this thread, Mitt Romney for instance isn’t a freeper, he doesn’t post here, no one stalks him.

Hugh Hefner bigger than the radical leftist women’s liberation movement and Margaret Sanger, no, me not remembering the history unfolding before my eyes and in my reading in my life, no.

I have the largest feminist library that I have seen in a home including the many lesbian and feminists homes that I have been in, although it is mostly packed away now. I used to subscribed to MS and my favorite feminist book is S.C.U.M., I unknowingly cured the president of a university NOW chapter, she showed me her hand and told me that she had removed the NOW ring and resigned her presidency because of changes in her thinking, because of me.

I remember a little about the reality and history of the left’s most successful movement and one which is all woman.

You are being silly and anti-female to pretend that women were the victims and bystanders in the results of their own glorious emergence into political equality in the world, and don’t deserve credit for their own accomplishments and decades of hard work.

I think that you must be female yourself, it didn’t take long for the left to figure out how to appeal to women, to learn how to use the female traits to move both parties to the left, today when we vote for a republican, we know that we are voting for democrat lite, because frankly, American politics has been feminized, never to return to normal.

If you had the power to turn all voting over to one sex or the other for a 50 year shakeout period and with all campaigning taking place in closed sites so that the other sex couldn’t hear the language used and the arguments made and the issues that those voters naturally gravitated to and chose to focus on, and hear the proposed solutions to what seem like intractable problems today, to to see if we could get things back on track within 50 years, which sex would you choose to be those voters?

[x]

Stalking would be if somebody were going to search and dig up old forgotten posts you'd made, but you've been very visible posting on virtually every Romney/Mormon thread. You and about two or three other people are famous here (well, it's a small world) for your posts about Mitt and his church. So when I find you posting the same thing on current threads about Catholics or women it doesn't take much to make the connection. I didn't have to do any special rummaging or foraging.

Hugh Hefner bigger than the radical leftist women’s liberation movement and Margaret Sanger, no, me not remembering the history unfolding before my eyes and in my reading in my life, no.

All kinds of groups issue manifestos making all sorts of arguments. Those arguments don't take root immediately. There are a few trendy, early adapters, but to really reach critical mass with a larger public, people have to feel the idea or ideology corresponds to their personal experience. Then, once the experience and the ideology become widespread, part of the natural environment of the age, a lot of people come to accept it without much thought. It's getting over that big early hurdle that makes the difference. The wave of divorces about 40 years ago or so -- men leaving their wives and children for the most part, at least at the beginning -- did a lot to convince women that feminism and big government spoke for them.

Surely this isn't a novel or controversial idea. You can find it in many conservative or neoconservative publications, at least when the writers were trying to explain a complicated historical process, rather than simply looking for easy villains to blame changes on. This relationship between ideas and experience is a major reason why simply "putting back the clock" doesn't work (or "putting forward the clock" for that matter). You can't just replace one idea with another if it doesn't jibe with people's experience.

If you had the power to turn all voting over to one sex or the other for a 50 year shakeout period and with all campaigning taking place in closed sites so that the other sex couldn’t hear the language used and the arguments made and the issues that those voters naturally gravitated to and chose to focus on, and hear the proposed solutions to what seem like intractable problems today, to to see if we could get things back on track within 50 years, which sex would you choose to be those voters?

Replace "sex" with "race" and maybe you'll get a better idea of how you sound.

[AuntB]

Who says they don’t now? Yeah, I know women are still abused and discriminated against in many places...women have always been the hardest on women...you don’t see outfits like NOW standing up for any of them, do you? Our own government and culture has suffered from being too feminized.

[ansel12]

Stalking is also your obsession with me to the extent that you got on this thread to make some weird and dishonest personal attack against me about things from past posts on far ranging subjects from candidate Romney to the Mormonism cult and all kinds of things that you don’t want criticized.

If you want to continue to defend and promote Mitt Romney and Mormonism then return to that thread and post there, discussions of candidate Romney would be in News/activism, and your religious defense of Mormonism would be made in religion, but don’t continue your personal attacks and attempts to hijack this thread into yet another Romney defense thread.

Try and focus on this thread alone and follow FR guidelines to not drag threads from one to another, to not create personal hatred of a freeper and carry it with you in a vendetta across the forum.

If you had the power to turn all voting over to one sex or the other for a 50 year shakeout period and with all campaigning taking place in closed sites so that the other sex couldn’t hear the language used and the arguments made and the issues that those voters naturally gravitated to and chose to focus on, and hear the proposed solutions to what seem like intractable problems today, to to see if we could get things back on track within 50 years, which sex would you choose to be those voters?

I think that your identity as a woman is making you a little off on this subject and unwilling to recognize the reality, scope, and success of the women’s movement, it is THE single biggest element in the destruction of America.

[x]

Between saying I must be a woman to think as I do and saying I must be "anti-female" to do so, you're not really the person to lecture about the proper rules of argument. For the record, I'm a man, and for the record, I don't hate you. I have a soft spot for kooks and like arguing with them, so long as it's done from a great distance.

You can either try to understand how things arise and develop and relate to each other, how ideas you have and ideas you abhor may be related, or you can just pick some vague, monolithic enemy and attack it. It's pretty clear what you've decided to do.

To be sure, sometimes attacking is all that one can do or what one has to do, but at almost half a century's distance, I thought it might be time to take a look back and try to see things in perspective. I guess you're just not ready to do that. Pity. Your loss.

[ansel12]

You have got to lay off this personal vendetta, thread crossing, stalking, name calling, everyone of your posts on this thread seem to be about your personal feelings about me and evidently some old threads, rather than this thread.

I think that most conservatives recognize the reality, scope, and success of the women’s movement, it is THE single biggest element in the destruction of America, it isn’t just some vague thing, or just another creation of those evil men.

[x]

You have got to lay off this personal vendetta, thread crossing, stalking, name calling, everyone of your posts on this thread seem to be about your personal feelings about me and evidently some old threads, rather than this thread.

That is because you simply ignore the substantive points I've made. It's an old tactic, I guess, to get around having to actually debate opposing viewpoints.

If you are a crank, people are going to want to joke with you some times. If you focus on your actual argument and the arguments against them maybe you can win people over to your point of view. If you just go on and on indignantly or censoriously about the initial joking it just makes critics and skeptics think they were right to begin with.

I think that most conservatives recognize the reality, scope, and success of the women’s movement, it is THE single biggest element in the destruction of America, it isn’t just some vague thing, or just another creation of those evil men.

You'd have to look for a while before you'd come up with people who'd say that. I'm not saying that plenty might not nod in mild or bemused or exasperated agreement if you said it. I'm talking about people who'd volunteer that opinion without prompting and build a worldview around it.

I'm also not saying that there aren't other cranks who obsess about Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan. It's just that the controversy has a very old-fashioned sound to it by now.

That's not to say that feminism or the women's movement is a good thing. It's just not at the center of other people's consciousness the way it is of yours. It's not the topic of most conversations here.

I hope most of us can oppose the latest bit of feminist nonsense without seeing it as the end of the world. Maybe we can see Steinem, Friedan, and the rest as a part of history, rather than as THE great monster threatening our future.

Anyway, this is going nowhere, so I'll stop responding. I am interested, though, to see which group you're going to attack next.

[ansel12]

No wonder I ran into so much trouble with the Romney crowd.

Even being against the women’s movement and feminism angers them.

[ansel12]

In case people may not remember where the romneybots are on feminism, here is a campaign quote from their man.

“My position has been the same throughout my political career, and it goes back to the days of 1970,” he said. “There was a woman who was running for political office, U.S. Senate. She took a very bold and courageous stand in 1970, and that was in a conservative state. That was that a woman should have the right to make her own choice as to whether or not to have an abortion. Her name was Lenore Romney, she was my mom. Even though she lost, she established a record of courage in that regard.”