The Anti-Women Women's Movement and the True Woman Manifesto

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

This little ditty about the True Woman Manifesto and so-called submissive feminists is wending its way around the Web, drawing choruses of excoriation from true, or progressive, feminists.

The article recounts a gathering earlier last October of 6,000 such women in Chicago:

The Associated Baptist Press explains the relationship of biblical womanhood to feminism, highlighting an ambitious initiative that arose from the meeting: a signature drive seeking 100,000 women to endorse its "True Woman Manifesto," which, the ABP writes, aims "at sparking a counterrevolution to the feminist movement of the 1960s."

To outside observers of the patriarchy movement, the starkness of the calls for gender hierarchy often seem amusingly outdated (not to mention historically misleading: feminist blogs Feministing and Pandagon have deftly dismantled some of the speakers' Leave I t to Beaver idealizations of the 1950s as a time when women were universally protected).

The article's headline reads as follows: "Women's 'Liberation' Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born."

The only problem is, there's nothing new about this movement or its followers. Anti-women women have existed since time immemorial. Another way of putting it is, women have been smart enough for decades to make their living by telling other women to stay home: witness Phyllis Schlafly (and her Eagle Forum), Beverly LaHaye (and her Concerned Women for America), and so on.

Why don't men form groups to campaign against other men? Am I missing something? If any of you out there know of such a group, please post about it. Women don't need to form a movement to stay home, make babies and submit to their husbands. That's what most women did until a few decades ago. If there are those who want to continue on that path, fine! Just do it. But women have not always been allowed to work, or work in meaningful, high-paying jobs. That's why the women's movement was formed.

Meanwhile, can we set up a new gender for so-called True Women, so normal women don't have to share anything in common with them?

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