“Feminism Is A Disease Of The Rich”

The title quote is from David Stove, coming in a 1985 essay entitled “Jobs for Girls“. That date is as good as any to celebrate as the birth of Woke, especially given the occasion, which was a Western university demanding, well, jobs for girls. It is well to review this essay as we now cheer on the death of Woke.

Woke is rampant unbridled egalitarianism, the seeking and enforcing of Equality (or Equity) where it could not exist on it is own, where Equality means extra privileges given to Official Victims, with punishments doled out to Official Oppressors.

We all know who the Official Oppressors were: those who had what the Official Victims wanted. Not just in material terms, but in essential, too, like possessing certain forms of beauty or intelligence.

The original Official Victims were women—recall we’re not only thinking of the United States, and not only the 1960s. Hence feminism was the first form, or proto-form, of Woke.

Stove was writing of Sydney University “Equal Employment Opportunity Statements”, which Stove recognized as quota mandates:

The University’s official policy, as late as last year, was a simple one: the best candidate should be appointed. Well, the present leaflet, which is as official as anything could be, not only does not say that, or anything like it; it implies, as clearly as possible, the opposite. For it expressly identifies women, and women alone, as having been in fact discriminated against unfairly (even if only “indirectly”) in the past; and it calls for the setting of “numerical targets together with a timetable for their achievement,” in order to “redress” this past discrimination. Translating from feminese into English, this means: “at least half the staff must soon be women.”

Quotas for females were just becoming common in academia in the States about the same time. I recall academic job announcements then all had the obligatory line “Women encouraged to apply.” Sometimes they tacked on “and minorities”.

Stove, like others not devoted to egalitarianism, saw correctly “The quality of university staff is sure to be disastrously worsened” with quotas. The pressure to institute them was feminists pushing on mostly open doors of government. But not entirely open. In 1985 intellectual sobriety was still the rule, but fading fast.

Our governments care little about what happens in universities. Why should they? Every farmer, every employer of labor, every policeman, is a person who is of some use; but you cannot say the same of one professor, or one student, in twenty. It is unreasonable to expect democratically elected ministers to care much, if mathematics and philosophy and physics are put into progressively more incompetent hands. And then, think of Ministers, beset in their offices (and likely enough at home too) by feminist furies: their chief anxiety must naturally be to escape the noise.

Men had not yet learned to say “I don’t care, Margaret.” Perhaps if sophisticated electronic earmuffs were available then that filter out high frequencies, as you see people now use on planes, we never would have had Woke.

Anyway, something sapped the courage from rulers. Consider:

…I say that contemporary feminism is not 64 percent, not 97 percent, but all rubbish, and destructive rubbish at that. But how many will (except in private!) agree with me? I will be lucky if my motion even finds someone to second it.

Few did. Some will now. Not as many as is ideal. Many are still cowed, and many are still egalitarians at heart. But the idea no longer sounds as impossible as it did even a four short months ago.

I ask you: how many professors since 1985 refused to sign Diversity statements or oaths? How many took the honorable path? These political rituals are fast disappearing with DIE being chased off—in the States. So how many will regret the missed chance to be brave? Of course, places like the UK grow worse; but for how long?

Stove saw that the solution was poverty:

Feminism is a disease of the rich: it is born of idleness, hence of leisure, hence of money. The sheer pressure of actuality immunizes poor people against feminist vapors…Is there not some hope, then, that jobs-for-the-girls will come to be recognized as a luxury we cannot afford? That feminism will be blown away by the wind of poverty, and (as the poet sings), “leave not a wrack behind”?

I’m too ignorant of Australian politics to say whether rulers there will hit upon this solution, which our new rulers has (as we saw yesterday). Turns out cutting off the supply of money was the one weird trick needed to fix universities.

Stove also foresaw (not a difficult prediction) the rise of woke bureaucrats tasked with creating and policing quotas: “the sky’s the limit”. Positively stratospheric.

On feminism itself:

Friend, do not ask for whom the feminist bell tolls: it tolls for thee…

…the feminist virus never spontaneously remits, but on the contrary absorbs its hosts at an ever increasing rate. It could not be otherwise. Nothing, not even heroin, is more stimulating, or more addictive, than hate, and that is the fuel that feminism runs on.

Boy, howdy, was that right, and explains the rise of the “coalition of the fringes”.

“But, Briggs, we can’t just kick women out or bar them from universities!” Nobody ever said to. Not now, not then:

The cream of the jest is that women in Australia never were unfairly treated in competition for university jobs; so that there never was an injustice to be “redressed.” I said this in the September 1984 Quadrant, and the feminists, though they raised a considerable squall about my article, were distinctly reluctant to contest this particular claim. It is not contested in this leaflet either, even by implication.

In fact the only discrimination against women which even the writers of this leaflet can come up with is the “indirect discrimination” (as they call it), arising from the burdens which fall only or mainly on women, “of childbearing, child rearing, and other family responsibilities.”

Tough cookies, ladies. Living with your biology is the same reason the Vatican uses to bar men from becoming nuns. Yet in woke time Americans turned this indirect fallacy into “disparate impact”.

Yet with all his prescience, Stove got one thing sorely wrong. He didn’t see the full vicious spread of Woke:

Or take sickness. Poor health, too, is a burden, and a cruel one, on anyone holding or aspiring to a university job. But no one would say on that account that the University has been guilty of discrimination in favor of healthy people, or call on the University to “redress” its past discrimination against the sick.

Not only did we have direct calls to employ the unable, we had body positivity, neurodiversity, and much else. Nothing can stand before Equality.

Except for strong men saying No.

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