“Making the World Home-Like”: Fighting the Sexual Double Standard in the Nineteenth Century and Today

Learning from First-Wave Feminists

In today's FD original, Caleb Morell tells the story of the women reformers who transformed nineteenth-century politics, providing a "vision of a state in service of the interest of the family."

Fairer Disputations
 

"Making the World Home-Like": Fighting the Sexual Double Standard in the Nineteenth Century and Today

CALEB MORELL

Contemporary authors on the right and left often share the same false perception of first-wave feminists as progenitors of the sexual revolution. But a careful examination of the long-forgotten voices of nineteenth-century women yields a conclusion as refreshing as it is common-sensical. In a word, these woman reformers focused on promoting the interests of women and children by confronting male sexual immorality through moral suasion and political legislation.

A sex-realist feminist approach to woman’s political activism recognizes that women bring a distinctive and essential set of shared values to the public square. Nineteenth-century reformers like Josephine Butler and Frances Willard argued for women’s suffrage in no small part because they believed that only women would and could do something about the legal and cultural double standard of sexual ethics.

This Week's Links:

In our first curated piece, Joan Smith argues that the rapes perpetrated by Hamas are not only a grievous violation of Israeli women, but an indication that Palestinian women are also victimized.

UnHerd
 

Don't Overlook the Sexual Violence of Hamas

JOAN SMITH

Rates of domestic violence soar in conflict situations, and in 2019 the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics said that 41% of women in Gaza had experienced domestic violence. In a patriarchal society, where reporting this kind of violence is likely to be met with indifference, the real figure is bound to be much higher.

What this means is both chilling and obvious. When people who imagine themselves to be “progressive” cheer on Hamas, they’re siding with pitiless misogynists. And it is women, in both Israel and Gaza, who get forgotten when idiots make excuses for rapists and murderers.

In The London Evening Standard, Holly Bourne writes of her years working as a sex and relationship advisor, a job which "forever altered" her.

The London Evening Standard

'Every Day Girls are Being Forced to Have Degrading, Violent Sex Their Boyfriends Have Seen in Porn'
 

HOLLY BOURNE

Every day, young girls would describe being pressured, coerced, manipulated, and downright forced to have painful sex, degrading sex, violent sex, and sex like their boyfriends had seen in porn. This charity wasn’t a rape crisis charity, but it was becoming one. I wasn’t a rape crisis worker, but I was becoming one. Quite quickly, I started to dread my shifts. After I’d clocked out, I didn’t feel fulfilled for my altruistic contribution to the world, but a deep rage at what was happening to young girls.

Finally, Kay Hymowitz reviews Melissa Kearney's new book, The Two-Parent Privilege. In spite of its commonsense premise, the book is making waves by breaking the taboo against acknowledging that kids need both their mom and their dad.

City Journal
 

The Indispensable Institution

KAY S. HYMOWITZ

“[A]s an economist I am focused on marriage as an institution that is defined by two people combining and sharing resources in a long-term contract,” Kearney writes. That marriage is an economic contract is a blunt truth on which many Americans prefer not to dwell. It’s the framing shared by most policy experts, but especially in a wealthy society such as our own, where many individuals can manage independently, it is only a partial truth. To marry is both to enter into and to create a family—the most powerful community in which most individuals will ever engage—and to connect to a supporting network of friends, extended families, and neighbors. Family breakdown on the scale that we’ve seen in past decades inevitably ruptures communities and social life.  

Worth a Listen:

Check out the latest episode of Maiden Mother Matriarch, with FD featured author Eliza Mondegreen (and of course, host and FD featured author Louise Perry).

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