While women and girls are being abused and erased by the Queering of America, leftwing feminists have been conspicuous by their absence. Except when it comes to their sacrament of child-sacrifice.

Prof. Linda Nicholson, an ‘expert’ in one of the grievance studies projects, has spent upwards of 50 years steeped exclusively in “gender”. Indeed, the ‘tell’ of her religious, Leftwing ideology is easy to spot with her listing of pronouns (she/her/they). So I certainly wasn’t surprised that her article on “American womanhood” and it’s rather glowing review of left-feminism over the past six decades.

Let’s just say that as I have recently watched as my life’s odometer roll into my seventh decade, I find Linda’s musings sadly lacking in balance or even simple acknowledgement that significant numbers of women reject(ed) left-feminism. I lived those years and the trajectory and focus of women’s rights was neither a straight line nor the exclusive province of Nicholson’s illiberal Left.

The story begins in the 1960s, when feminism became a loud presence on the national political stage. Women founded the National Organization for Women, or NOW, in 1966.

Prominent among NOW’s founders was Betty Friedan. And what Linda leaves out is that Friedan’s ‘feminism’ was born both of her lifelong dedication to Marxism and of her own personal failures as a wife and mother. And while many young women of the 60s/70s were happy to support Title XII and the idea of one’s sex being removed as condition of employment, other demands of Left-feminism (anti-man, anti-marriage, pro-abortion) gave rise to alternative choices and organizations like Phyllis Schafly’s Eagle Forum or the annual, well-attended March for Life that has taken place every year since 1974.

And that’s where we get to the major thrust of Linda’s article. That women’s rights rest on laissez faire abortion.

(Women’s Liberation) movement created the popular slogan “the personal is political.” In 1970, a women’s collective in Boston printed the first edition of “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” a book focused on giving women greater knowledge of and control over their bodies.

Neither of these movements accepted the popular view that unexpected pregnancies ought to be carried to term, a view based on the belief that women’s primary role in society was that of wife and mother. (snip)

In response, feminists, both in NOW and within the women’s liberation movement, demanded increased access to birth control and abortion. A first-of-its-kind abortion-rights group, The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, was formed in the late ’60s.

Let’s note that the phrase “the personal is political” is listed just below “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” in damaging, toxic phrases of the 20th century. Plus it brightly highlights that this “feminism” is little more than a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Marxist Left.

Along with Linda’s other, self-serving omissions, this is the only mention of birth control. And yet, it was never solely abortion that lead to sea changes – good and bad – to Western culture, but The Pill. The Pill did, indeed, gave women an unprecedented control over their own fertility. Left-feminists seized upon it to demand that women adopt male sexual behaviors, but with little to no responsibility. And that was to include the ability to kill any unborn child at anytime for any reason.

Linda touts the increases in women’s shift into the professional workforce as an unalloyed Good Thing.

Paid work for women has steadily become not just a means to increase family income but also a source of self-identity. While this has been more true for higher-income women than for lower-income women, lower-income women have also, to a greater extent, come to see their work lives as an important part of who they are.

Well, sure. That dovetails quite nicely with demanding women’s right to kill their own unborn. Must not disappoint our employers, eh?

pic.twitter.com/K804mDliI9

— George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) May 18, 2022

Linda never touches on the trade-offs so many women have had to make and the effect on society at large. Her cloistered academic existence has kept her from the everyday women she attempts to speak for. The women who are badgered into abortions by parents, boyfriends or girlfriends. Women who feel “choice” is no choice at all since children are not lives but commodities and a proper Modern Women who takes home the bacon and fries it up in a pan should reject maternal feelings as a mere product of a Handmaid Patriarchy who doesn’t like her enjoying sex.

I personally know several women who have told me their stories of being on the receiving end of great pressure to get an abortion. From the cavalier, “it’s just a clump of cells” to the disingenuous “This isn’t a good time and we can always have a baby later”.

Are women generally happier now? No. And leave it to academics to frame it as a paradox.

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well‐being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well‐being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well‐being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well‐being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well‐being for men.

Left-feminist ideology just substituted one shiny set of handcuffs for another. Rather than allowing for sex-neutral policies from a limited government, left-feminists sought to recreate human relationships where all needs and desires are not fulfilled by spouse and family, but by making The State the primary relationship. “Free” abortion, “free” daycare, “free” contraception — all without any responsibility to another human being.

Many women have bought into it, one way or another and find themselves suddenly in their 50s with a good 401(k), a frig full of wine, and a couple of cats. Have you ever met a happy Leftist? Or a left-feminist who wasn’t into fits of projection?

Over the last six decades, normal women have struggled in that space between what Our Betters tell us we should desire and our own desires for home and family. Jordan Peterson has pointed out over the years that

the more egalitarian and wealthier the country, the larger the differences between men and women in temperament and in interest. And the relationship is not small.

I have my “lived experience” and JP has data. But it makes sense that after artificial barriers to choice are removed, innate preferences come to the fore.

And that ‘fore’ for most women isn’t one that prioritizes career and rejects family, much to the Marxists’ chagrin. So the drum beat from the Leftist cultural gatekeepers in academia, media and government is that women choosing more traditional ways of being is something to be named and shamed.

Meanwhile, the whole category of “women” is at risk as Queer males seek to dominate women’s spaces for their own agenda while ostensible women’s organizations like NOW are silent.

Convincing women that killing their own unborn children is the only right they need to be concerned about while organizations like a cancer charity are busy turning them into non-men.

I need to leave Canada ASAP. This is untenable.https://t.co/ecsfaWKsk6

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) June 5, 2024

This is Marxism in birkenstocks. Reject it. Hard.

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license