'Patriarchy' and the material conditions of life
Agriculture, industry and famine
'Celebrating'
Obstacles
Army families, famine, Sophie Scholl, mining, happiness
Radical feminism, the Taleban and the British army
Non-patriarchal government in Austria and Russia
Serfdom
Feminism and the death penalty
More inconvenient facts
Kingsley Amis
Claiming superiority the easy way

The sphere of 'strict facts'
Hélène Cixous and academic publishing

Martha Nussbaum and radical feminism

See also my discussion of Fran Brearton's essay in the Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney:

Fran Brearton on 'Heaney and the Feminine'

'Patriarchy' and the material conditions of life

The phrase 'control over nature' offers so much scope to radical feminist interpretation - nature viewed as female, control as male, 'control over nature' as male supremacy and exploitation, to be opposed by radical feminism. A little thought shows that this amounts to complete distortion.

Nature offers no easy way of heating rooms or heating water, or constructing rooms or effective shelters against the forces of nature, such as wind, rain and snow. Radical feminists, like other people in societies where the control over nature is at a high level, get up in the morning in modern buildings or older buildings with modern conveniences. Putting on the electric kettle for a first cup of tea or coffee in a warm room in winter after a warm shower has advantages over waking up on a winter morning in a simple shelter constructed of natural materials with only natural fuel, such as branches or logs (cut with a stone-age axe) no obvious or easy way of lighting them, and no source of water, in the absence of technological achievement (if rainwater is collected, in what kind of container? Not one made of PVC, polyvinylchloride?) other than the water in streams and rivers probably polluted by human waste, and nowhere to wash away dirt from body and clothes, whatever natural clothes may be available, except for the icy water of those same streams and rivers. Control over nature, which has given the benefits taken for granted by feminists and others, has required immense human effort and creativity of a very high order, the creativity which for once isn't misnamed - in organic chemistry, physical chemistry, heavy electrical engineering, quantum theory, seemingly remote fields such as the mathematical calculus and linear algebra, and many other fields. It's a matter of strict fact that the contribution of men to all of these has been overwhelmingly important.

For a long period of time, it was coal in this and other countries which offered the only practicable way in most cases to heat homes and heat water and cook food, to carry out innumerable other jobs, such as relieving agricultural workers of a significant part of the back-breaking work on the land by means of steam-driven machinery, pumping water, and of course transporting goods and people on the railways and over the oceans. In 'On the Road to Wigan Pier,' George Orwell wrote, in connection with society's indebtedness to miners at that time, 'all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward ...'

Coal mining gives illuminating insights into feminism. It illustrates the intersection of humanitarian history and technological history. It illustrates the fact that most human suffering has been caused by nature, not by men, and that the achievement of men in overcoming the harshness of nature is incalculable. The world isn't nearly so dependent on coal now, but it's still dependent on technology. Modifying what George Orwell wrote to take account of changed conditions, 'You and I and the radical feminists who write about 'phallocentric' society and 'patriarchal society' and the defects of men really owe the comparative decency of our lives to a large extent to the scientists and technologists, far more often than not representatives of 'phallocentric and patriarchal' society, far more often than not men, who made the innovations which lessened the impact on human life of nature's harshness.

Susan James, in the 'Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy' writes, 'Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified.' Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' writes of 'the tyranny of man.'

Anyone using the language of oppression or tyranny should have the insight and the honesty to distinguish degrees of oppression, so different in intensity that they belong to completely different worlds: the 'oppression' a women's studies professor with tenure in the United States claims to be suffering, for example, or the 'oppression' of Susan James at a British university, and the back-breaking work of women in Scottish coal mines in the eighteenth century, carrying on their backs massive loads from the coal face to the mine-shaft, carrying the massive loads up ladders to the pithead again and again, day after day. Robert Bald wrote, in a 'General View of the Coal-Trade of Scotland,' 'it is no uncommon thing to see them, when ascending the pit, weeping most bitterly, from the excessive severity of the labour.' And he writes of a woman, 'groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up, she said in a most plaintive and melancholy voice: "O Sir, this is sore, sore work. I wish to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broke her back, and none would have tried it again." ' (Quoted in Anthony Burton's 'The Miners.' All the unattributed quotations in this section come from this compelling, deeply humane, outstanding book.)

In Britain, women hauled coal on their backs only in Scotland and the practice was banned in the Glasgow region by the end of the eighteenth century. In other parts of Britain, men, women and children generally hauled coal in waggons.

'... between 1841 and 1843, the Reports of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children in Mines appeared ... It was the illustrations, more even than the words, the interviews, and descriptions, that made an immense impact. Here were portrayed men and women and small children living the life of beasts: a teenage girl struggling on all fours harnessed to a waggon of coal that she was pulling along a narrow seam; little children clinging to a rope as they were lowered down a shaft by an old woman whose rags told of her poverty: boys chained to heavy corves, with only a single candle to light the dark roadways ... In one mine, near Chesterfield, boys had to pull corves weighing at least 1/2 ton and sometimes as heavy as 1 ton, for 60 yards along a roadway that was only 2 feet high ... The boys who worked as hauliers might work as many as fourteen hours a day, from six in the morning to eight at night, and on top of that they would have an often lengthy journey to and from work. (See my poem Mines is the poetry section 'Child Labour.') The pages of the Royal Commission Reports are full of accounts of children returning home too tired to eat, who fell asleep as soon as they sat at table an had to be carried to bed. Some were not even able to walk the distance to their homes, and parents would find them asleep by the roadside.'

Children as young as four, five or six would not have been able to do the back-breaking work of hauling coal, of course. There were various ways to be killed by working in the coal mines - drowning, crushing, or the much slower clogging up of the lungs with coal dust -but the leading cause of death was explosions resulting from the explosive gases of the mines. They accounted for about 90 per cent of deaths. 'Continuing explosions soon convinced colliery managers that the only solution was to ventilate the the whole pit, so the galleries and roads were turned into a vast labyrinth, along the whole length of which the air was coursed by using a system of trapdoors to keep the air current in its right path.' The system was only effective if the doors were kept shut, except when a waggon was passing through. The youngest children opened and closed these ventilation doors, hour after hour, in deepest darkness.

Extracts from the 1842 Report:

'We find in regard to COAL MINES

1. That instances occur in which children are taken into these mines to work as early as four years of age ...
3. That in several districts female children begin to work in these mines at the same early ages as the males.
8. [Of operating the trapdoors] That although this employment scarcely deserves the name of labour, yet, as the children engaged in it are commonly excluded from light and are always without companions, it would, were it not for the passing and repassing of the coal carriages, amount to solitary confinement of the worst order.

Susan James writes that 'Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men' but here we have suffering in common, the suffering of men and women together, boys and girls together - like the suffering of American slaves, the suffering of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto or Jews walking towards the gas-chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka. Sometimes men suffer disproportionately, sometimes women, but a very great deal of human suffering - oppression, disadvantage - is like this, inflicted no more on women than on men.

This common suffering in the mines was ended by The Mines Act of 1842, which prohibited the employment underground of girls and women (and boys under 10 years old). After this time, girls and women were exempted from the dangers and back-breaking work deep underground. Feminists don't in general acknowledge at all any of the significant ways in which women have been exempted from particular hardships and dangers and men not at all.

Abuses in British workplaces were addressed far too slowly, but at least they were addressed, one by one. Patriarchy didn't show the quietism, the moral apathy, the selective compassion, the lack of interest in practicalities and legislation of innumerable contemporary feminists - failings which Martha Nussbaum addresses in the case of American feminists. So many of these feminists ignore massive abuses against women, not just massive abuses against men. Their angry is very selective. Patriarchy got things done, it achieved, in the area of humanitarian legislation, just as it overcame the barriers of wide rivers, hills and mountains by building massive bridges, constructing massive tunnels, without which travel and transportation of the necessities of life would have been difficult or impossible, constructed thousands of miles of railway line, developed all the techniques of converting iron ore into iron and steel for the achievement of these and many other things. Any feminist travelling by rail in this country to attend a meeting at which 'patriarchy' is denounced is benefitting from such engineering triumphs as these.

These are a few examples of British legislation (from Key dates in Working Conditions.) Patriarchy, whatever the accusations levelled against it, wasn't selective, it didn't ignore in this legislation the harsh and dangerous working conditions of girls and women, in fact in many cases it exempted girls and women from harsh and dangerous working conditions which continued for males.

1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act limited the work of children in textile mills to 12 hours per day; prohibited night work; required minimum standards of accommodation; some elementary education to be provided; factories to be periodically lime washed; and infectious diseases attended to and reported. The act attempted to enforce on all employers the conditions provided by the more humane mill-owners.

1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act prohibited children under the age of nine years from working in cotton mills, and restricted those over the age of nine to a 12 hour day. Enforcement was in the hands of local magistrates. The act owed much to the efforts of Robert Owen.

1844 Labour in Factories Act amended the regulations concerning factory inspectors and certifying surgeons; for the first time machinery was required to be guarded; the age at which children may be employed was reduced from nine to eight years; and the maximum hours of work for children and women was prescribed.

1847 Hours of Labour of Young Persons and Females in Factories Act, the Ten Hours Act, reduced the permitted maximum hours of work for women and children to 10
hours per day and 58 hours in any one week.

1850 Coal Mines Inspection Act introduced the appointment of inspectors of coal mines and set out their powers and duties.

1862 John Simon in his fourth annual report to the Privy Council drew attention to the ill effects of much factory work and concluded that "to be able to redress that wrong is perhaps among the greatest opportunities for good which human institutions can afford".

1868 First report of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture published.

1872 Metalliferous Mines Regulation Act prohibited the employment in the mines of all girls, women and boys under the age of 12 years; introduced powers to appoint inspectors of mines; and set out rules regarding ventilation, blasting and machinery.

1874 Factory Act raised the minimum working age to nine; limited the working day for women and young people to 10 hours in the textile industry, to be between 6 am and 6 pm; and reduced the working week to 56½ hours.

1880 Employers Liability Act extended the law regarding injuries to employees.

1883 Factory and Workshop Act set standards for all white lead factories.

1886 Shop Hours Regulation Act attempted to regulate the hours of work of children and young persons in shops; the hours of work were not to exceed 74 per week, including meal times.

1891 Factory and Workshop Act consolidated and extended safety and sanitary regulations; transferred enforcement in regard to some workshops from the factory inspectors to the local authorities; raised the minimum age for employment in factories to 11 years; prohibited the owner of a factory from knowingly employing a woman within four weeks of giving birth; and introduced some measures to control conditions of “outworkers”.

1893 Women factory inspectors introduced.

1895 Factory and Workshop Act amended and extended previous acts regarding sanitary provisions, safety, employment of children, holidays and accidents; and made certain industrial diseases (lead, phosphorus, arsenic and anthrax) notifiable for the first time.

1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act established the principle that persons injured at work should be compensated.1898 Thomas M Legge (later Sir, 1863-1932), appointed as the first medical inspector of factories.

Is it true that the few feminists of that age only paid attention to the suffering of the girls and women and had no further interest in conditions in the coal mines once the 1842 Act had been passed? No, it wouldn't be true. It's true to say that most feminists showed no interest in conditions in the mines before the passing of the Act. The suffering of girls and women was invisible to them. They belonged to a section of society which had no interest in such things, except for the 'immorality' of girls and boys working together, half-naked. Nor could they imagine all the other intensely difficult, dirty or dangerous trades. 'There were many occupations as likely to end in fatality - the grinders in Sheffield or Redditch could look forward to no longer life than the miners before they succumbed to chest disease; the lead-glazers of the Potteries needed to spend little time at their trade before the symptoms of poisoning appeared.'

In the coal mines, before the prohibition of child labour, childhood was the season for sitting in complete darkness and nearly complete isolation, youth was the season for hauling almost impossible loads, inhaling coal dust and risking crushing, drowning and being blown limb from limb, the generally short period of adulthood likewise. For Mary Wollstonecraft, 'Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation.' The life of the children in the mines was beyond her imaginative resources.

When women were working in the mines, 'At the end of a shift the family had the walk home to the cottage. They were still in their pit clothes and pit dirt, soaked with water, covered in mud and, in winter, their clothes all but froze stiff as they walked. Once home, there was no brightness, only the deserted house. The babies had to be collected and fed first before life could return slowly to the house.' Once the system of horse-drawn corves was adopted, women in all the Scottish mines stayed at home. The men and boys worked in the mine and at the end of a shift 'they were still in their pit clothes and pit dirt, soaked with water, covered in mud and, in winter, their clothes all but froze still as they walked' but once they reached the house 'the men and boys returned to a warm fire and a hot meal instead of cold and desolation.' How would radical feminists interpret the 'sexual politics' of this? The 'sexism' of women as home-makers rather than working, the 'sexism' of women not admitted to the working world of men?

Susan James ignores the overwhelming importance of innovation in science and technology which has reduced so much human suffering. Feminists who claim that many of these innovations were due to women should provide the necessary evidence.

Some of the suffering in the mines was eventually lessened by developments in bulk-handling, innovations which of course needed innovators - people who actually produced innovations and actually reduced suffering, not people who might have produced innovations but were prevented by 'prejudice' or 'stereotyping.' An early innovation was introduced by John Curr, who described a system of 'corves' in 1797: four-wheeled vehicles running on iron rails or plates. 'One horse, he reckoned, could shift as much as 150 tons a day along a 250-yard roadway. This was very evidently a much more efficient and economical method of moving coal.' Often, though, there was insufficient height for a horse, and man-hauling continued.

Successive innovations, using increasingly sophisticated advances in engineering based upon increasingly sophisticated advances in Physics and Chemistry, made coal-mining less and less arduous. By the time that George Orwell visited coal-mines in the twentieth century, the work was still desperately hard, impossible for the majority of non-miners to imagine let alone to carry out, but not as degradingly hard as work in an eighteenth century mine. Alongside innovations in bulk-handling which reduced and eventually eliminated the back-breaking work of hauling coal (and freed pit-ponies from a grim life spent entirely or almost entirely underground) there were innovations at the coal-face, such as the technology of compressed air, which reduced and eventually eliminated the back-breaking work of extracting coal at the coal-face with hand-pick and crowbar, although these innovations were much more difficult to implement. Well into the twentieth century, hacking at coal was back-breaking work even when the miner could stand. It was even harder when the seam was narrower and he had to kneel. It was hardest when the seam was very narrow and he had to lie down, contorted. The work was harder, more unpleasant still if this was a 'wet' pit, one in which water was a constant problem.

In the mines, 'after-damp,' the explosive gas which was a mixture of air and methane, was the cause of many catastrophic mine accidents. Naked flames needed for illumination could ignite the gas very easily. 'The Davy lamp wasn't 'the perfect solution to the problem,' but it was revolutionary in its benefits even so. 'The Davy lamp, because it was invented by the leading chemist of the day, is something of a landmark in the relations between science and technology, as also in the use of technology to serve humanitarian rather than purely economic purposes.' (T K Derry and Trevor I Williams, 'A Short History of Technology.')

The light from the Davy lamp was not very bright. A better solution to the problem of lighting mines (and the problem of lighting rooms so that feminists could compose their tracts against patriarchy during the hours of darkness) was only found with a spectacular, and spectacularly complex, series of innovations, acts of genius, such as those which made electricity generation practicable. Michael Faraday's demonstration of electromagnetic induction, which was announced to the Royal Society in 1831, was a fundamental first-step. When electric current could be generated, the conversion of electric energy into light energy required further intensely difficult and protracted work. Extracts from the Wikipedia article on incandescent lighting, to illustrate some of the practical difficulties, and how they were overcome:

'The incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is a source of electric light that works by incandescence (a general term for heat-driven light emissions, which includes the simple case of black body radiation). An electric current passes through a thin filament, heating it to a temperature that produces light. The enclosing glass bulb contains either a vacuum or an inert gas to prevent oxidation of the hot filament. Incandescent bulbs are also sometimes called electric lamps, a term also applied to the original arc lamps.

'In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.

'In 1802, Humphry Davy had what was then the most powerful electrical battery in the world at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In that year, he created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point. It was not bright enough nor did it last long enough to be practical, but it was the precedent behind the efforts of scores of experimenters over the next 75 years. In 1809, Davy also created the first arc lamp by making a small but blinding electrical connection between two carbon charcoal rods connected to a 2000-cell battery; it was demonstrated to the Royal Institution in 1810.

'Over the first three-quarters of the 19th century many experimenters worked with various combinations of platinum or iridium wires, carbon rods, and evacuated or semi-evacuated enclosures. Many of these devices were demonstrated and some were patented.

'In 1841, Frederick de Moleyns of England was granted the first patent for an incandescent lamp, with a design using platinum wires contained within a vacuum bulb.

'Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) was a British physicist and chemist. In 1850, he began working with carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. By 1860 he was able to demonstrate a working device but the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a short lifetime for the bulb and an inefficient source of light. By the mid-1870s better pumps became available, and Swan returned to his experiments.

'With the help of Charles Stearn, an expert on vacuum pumps, in 1878 Swan developed a method of processing that avoided the early bulb blackening. This received a British Patent No 8 in 1880. On 18 December 1878 a lamp using a slender carbon rod was shown at a meeting of the Newcastle Chemical Society, and Swan gave a working demonstration at their meeting on 17 January 1879. It was also shown to 700 who attended a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle on 3 February 1879. These lamps used a carbon rod from an arc lamp rather than a slender filament. Thus they had low resistance and required very large conductors to supply the necessary current, so they were not commercially practical, although they did furnish a demonstration of the possibilities of incandescent lighting with relatively high vacuum, a carbon conductor, and platinum lead-in wires. Besides requiring too much current for a central station electric system to be practical, they had a very short lifetime. Swan turned his attention to producing a better carbon filament and the means of attaching its ends. He devised a method of treating cotton to produce 'parchmentised thread' and obtained British Patent 4933 in 1880. From this year he began installing light bulbs in homes and landmarks in England. His house was the first in the world to be lit by a lightbulb and so the first house in the world to be lit by Hydro Electric power. In the early 1880s he had started his company.

'Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp in 1878. Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights" on October 14, 1878 After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879, and lasted 13.5 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by Nov 4, 1879, filed for a U.S. patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platinum contact wires." Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.

'Hiram S. Maxim started a lightbulb company in 1878 to exploit his patents and those of William Sawyer. His United States Electric Lighting Company was the second company, after Edison, to sell practical incandescent electric lamps. They made their first commercial installation of incandescent lamps at the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company in New York City in the fall of 1880, about six months after the Edison incandescent lamps had been installed on the steamer Columbia. In October 1880, Maxim patented a method of coating carbon filaments with hydrocarbons to extend their life. Lewis Latimer, his employee at the time, developed an improved method of heat-treating them which reduced breakage and allowed them to be molded into novel shapes, such as the characteristic "M" shape of Maxim filaments. On January 17, 1882, Latimer received a patent for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons," an improved method for the production of light bulb filaments which was purchased by the United States Electric Light Company. Latimer patented other improvements such as a better way of attaching filaments to their wire supports.

'In Britain, the Edison and Swan companies merged into the Edison and Swan United Electric Company (later known as Ediswan, which was ultimately incorporated into Thorn Lighting Ltd). Edison was initially against this combination, but after Swan sued him and won, Edison was eventually forced to cooperate, and the merger was made. Eventually, Edison acquired all of Swan's interest in the company. Swan sold his United States patent rights to the Brush Electric Company in June 1882. Swan later wrote that Edison had a greater claim to the light than he did, in order to protect Edison's patents from claims against them in the United States[citation needed]. In 1881, the Savoy Theatre became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electric lights. [26]

'By 1964, improvements in efficiency and production of incandescent lamps had reduced the cost of providing a given quantity of light by a factor of thirty, compared with the cost at introduction of Edison's lighting system.'

The claim that none of the 'humanitarian blessings' of feminism have come anywhere near to equalling the humanitarian blessings of modern contraception isn't an original one. Effective contraception depends on the innovations of scientists and technologists, including the chemical engineers and production engineers who make it possible to manufacture on a large scale.

In nature, there are many progeny but only a few survive. Animals living in the wild are still subject to these harsh Malthusian laws of nature, and so were human societies for so many millennia. As a matter of strict fact, the scientists and technologists who dramatically reduced infant mortality and dramatically reduced the risks of a woman dying in childbirth have almost all been representatives of 'phallocentric and patriarchal' society.

The material conditions of life, such as water supply and sewage, are almost entirely ignored by feminists. The most significant cause of ill-health and premature death by far has always been failure in supplying water and disposing of sewage, a simple problem with a very complex solution: such as the development by organic chemists of techniques in molecular architecture, a precondition for manufacturing modern pipework, without which modern water supply and sewage systems aren't feasible, more generally advances in iron and steel manufacturing, the manufacture of components for hydraulic drills, petrol and diesel engines, needed for laying the pipes and and maintaining the pipes.

Water, although not an element, is elemental, a basic requirement of life, but providing this basic requirement isn't at all simple. Water illustrates the complexity of reality. It can carry disease organisms, such as those that cause cholera. The cholera-causing organisms are just as much part of nature as plants and trees, but it's vital to control nature by eradicating them from drinking water. Any notion that 'nature' is feminine, control over nature masculine, to be opposed by feminists, is obviously ridiculous.

The separation of water for drinking and water for disposal of faeces poses immense practical problems. Gratitude is the only proper response for the work of the engineers who designed dams, for those who built the dams and made the bricks and the materials for the pipes which led the water from the dams, for the foundries and other factories which manufactured the taps, the pumps, for the mathematical and scientific innovators who developed the techniques in calculus, fluid mechanics and the other techniques needed for supplying water efficiently.

Radical feminists have made spectacular use of generalization, as in 'all men are useless' or 'all men are rapists, or potentially rapists.' John Snow is a man who led a blameless life and a man whose contribution to human welfare was surely greater than that of any radical feminist. He was one of the founders of epidemiology. He identified the source of a cholera outbreak in 1854, without the use of any advanced scientific ideas. There was a miasma or 'bad air' theory of cholera: the disease entered the body through the mouth. He disputed this. He investigated the cholera outbreak of 1854 in Soho, London and plotted cholera cases on a map. He identified a water pump in a particular street as the source of the disease. As soon as he had the handle of the pump removed, cases of cholera began to decline. He also used more advanced science. He was a pioneer in the use of anaesthetics and made anaesthetics safer and more effective. But control of life-threatening diseases such as cholera and control of pain by means of anaesthetics aren't high in the priorities of most radical feminists, who would far sooner attack men, any men, such as John Snow.

Earthquakes show that control over nature is sometimes impossible. Patriarchy has developed a method of delaying the crushing effects of a building collapsing so that the occupants have enough time to escape to safety - the technological / humanitarian innovation of metal ties connecting together walls and roof. When victims are trapped under rubble, then of course technological / humanitarian techniques are the only effective ones - the use of heavy lifting equipment, made up of a very large number of separate components, ultimately derived from metal ores, crude oil and other raw materials, which demand techniques of very great complexity, even the screw-threads of the fixings. The precise engineering essential for manufacturing these components wasn't inevitable or easily gained. It was due to the achievements of such particular men - again, representatives of 'patriarchy' - such as Joseph Whitworth, who by 1856 'was regularly using in his workshops a machine capable of measuring to one-millionth part of an inch.' ('A Short History of Technology.') Without the work of Joseph Whitworth and many other innovators, earthquake victims would have to be rescued - in tiny numbers - by bare hands and the simplest of tools. Precision engineering and scientific and technological advances in general, again, almost unimaginably complex, are needed, of course, to transport food and other relief supplies to earthquake zones by air, road or sea. In the absence of these, human labour and pack animals will give aid to only a tiny fraction of those in need.

Feminists not only fail to acknowledge the work of scientists and technologists working at a high intellectual level, they fail to acknowledge the work of men doing far more humble work. George Orwell, in 'Marrakech:' 'All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.'

Unless the sick are to be looked after in simple shelters or in the open, the work of roofers and scaffolders and other manual workers in building hospitals is so important that they deserve heartfelt appreciation - and proper pay and working conditions - but the work of roofers and scaffolders is almost invisible, their work taken for granted. The average roofer or scaffolder lacks refinements and many would fail any tests for political correctness, but few people in possession of those advantages would choose to do physically demanding work at a height in almost all weathers.

The industrial revolution was harsh, as harsh as the pre-industrial age, but a necessary prelude to this age of comfort and comfortable assumptions and illusions.

The harshness of the industrial age, like the comfort of this age, wasn't, of course, shared by everyone. The harshness was experienced by people who really are all but invisible today, all but forgotten, such as the navvies.

'Men of Iron,' the superb book by Sally Dugan, is mainly concerned with the audacious work of the engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson (she also does justice to the genius of their fathers, Marc Brunel and George Stephenson).

She writes of the navvies' work, 'Maiming or mutilation came with the job, and navvies were lucky if they escaped with nothing more than the loss of a limb. They worked using picks and shovels, crowbars and wheelbarrows, and their bare hands; the only other aid they had was the occasional blast of gunpowder. Some were blinded by explosions; others were buried in rock falls. All led a life of hard, grinding physical toil, tramping from one construction site to another in search of work. Their reputation for violence and drunkenness made them a frequent focus for missionaries and temperance society members, as well as turning them into the bogeymen of folk myth.' Elizabeth Garnett was the secretary of the Navvy Mission Society and might have been expected to give a harsh verdict on their uncouthness and worse. Far from it. 'Men of Iron' quotes her words: 'Certainly no men in all the world so improve their country as Navvies do England. Their work will last for ages, and if the world remains so long, people will come hundreds of years hence to look at it and wonder at what they have done.'

There are many people who like their reality smoothed out, comfortable, free of unsettling paradoxes and contradictions: in the terminology I use, with {adjustment} of reality, a sub-theme of {modification} of reality. How could such drunken, violent people (although they were not all drunken and violent) and generally sexist people, no doubt, have done so much to reduce human suffering, and far, far more, in general, than the genteel and the anti-sexist? The human suffering they reduced was not their own, but the suffering of the wider population, including the suffering of their critics, in far more comfortable circumstances.

Agriculture, industry and famine

I'm self-sufficient or almost self-sufficient in the vegetables and fruit I eat. I've no illusions. Work, often hard work, and certainly very time-consuming work, is needed to produce enough vegetables and fruit - not grain, of course - for a few people. Without recourse to agricultural machinery and other modern techniques, using mainly hand-tools, productivity is bound to be low.

The section above has described the hardships of industrialisation, but its benefits are almost impossible to over-estimate. Peter Mathias's 'The First Industrial Nation' stresses the fact that pre-industrial life was far from idyllic. 'Changing conditions of employment have to be related to their context before they can be evaluated historically. The first point is to remember the very poor standards existing before industrializing began. Comparisons must begin from here, not from later standards.'

On the back cover of the book: 'The fate of the overwhelming mass of the population in any pre-industrial society is to pass their lives on the margins of subsistence. It was only in the eighteenth century that society in north-west Europe, particularly in England, began the break with all former traditions of economic life.'

In the 'Prologue,' this is elaborated: 'The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country before its industrial revolution and modernization is poverty. Life on the margin of subsistence is an inevitable condition for the masses of any nation. Doubtless there will be a ruling class, based on the economic surplus produced from the land or trade and office, often living in extreme luxury. There may well be magnificent cultural monuments and very wealthy religious institutions. But with low productivity, low output per head, in traditional agriculture, any economy which has agriculture as the main constituent of its national income and its working force does not produce much of a surplus above the immediate requirements of consumption from its economic system as a whole ... The population as a whole, whether of medieval or seventeenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India, lives close to the tyranny of nature under the threat of harvest failure or disease ... The graphs which show high real wages and good purchasing power of wages in some periods tend to reflect conditions in the aftermath of plague and endemic disease.'

Larry Zuckerman, 'The Potato:' 'Famine struck France thirteen times in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth, and sixteen in the eighteenth. And this tally is an estimate, perhaps incomplete, and includes general outbreaks only. It doesn't count local famines that ravaged one area or another almost yearly. Grain's enemy was less cold weather (though that took its toll) or storms, which damaged crops in localities, than wet summers, which prevented the grain from ripening and caused it to rot.'

Desperate poverty in pre-industrial societies and the early period of industrialisation required that 'every member of a family who could work did so, down to young children.' ('The Potato'). And child labour, 'though among the industrial revolution's evils, wasn't restricted to factory or home workshop. Farm workers' six- and seven-year-old children toiled long days too.'

What ending grinding poverty (the poverty of being clothed in filthy rags as well as the poverty of not having very many clothes), what eventually freed these children from work in mines, factories, workshops, the fields, what gave men, women and children increasing relief from back-breaking work, was greater productivity. For that we have to thank not feminists but above all such representatives of patriarchy as mechanical engineers, civil engineers, instrument makers, labourers, who as a matter of strict fact benefitted women as well as men.

Eventually, the economic benefits of industrialisation became diffused through much of the population of this country and other industrialized countries. 'The average of real wages in Britain is believed to have risen 100 per cent. in the second half of the nineteenth century ... ' (T K Derry and Trevor I Williams, 'A Short History of Technology.')

'Celebrating'

We're encouraged to 'celebrate' so many things now other than the traditional objects of celebration such as weddings and birthdays. 'Celebrating' now often means showing respect for, and more than that, admiring. The great achievements of the pre-industrial age in stone, the great achievements of the industrial age in stone, iron, steel and all the new materials which were created during the industrial age - these and other achievements should give rise to awe as well as respect and admiration.

Anyone looking at rocky outcrops and quarries can understand that the rock was shaped by cutting and incorporated into buildings and bridges, although the tools used and the explosives now used involve less straightforward transformations. The intricate fan-vaulting of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, was achieved by precise cutting and the lifting into position of heavy loads, but no prosaic account can possibly do justice to the sublime achievement, which gives the appearance of effortlessness despite the enormous difficulties, overcome with enormous effort, the quarrying and transporting and lifting of stone.

The massive stone blocks which make up the aqueducts which carrying canals over valleys, the railway bridges and road bridges, the massive stone blocks which are used in harbours and ports - how many travellers notice them and 'celebrate' the extraordinary achievement by which these blocks were placed one above another with such precision, sometimes submerged, starting from the sea-bed?

Anyone looking at rocks, fields, the natural or semi-natural world, and then looking at iron or steel should understand that the process by which the ores were converted into iron and steel was a massive human achievement. The uses of iron and steel represent an achievement which couldn't possibly be adequately 'celebrated.'

How to 'celebrate' the Forth Railway Bridge, which was completed in 1890, the first major bridge made of steel? A recital of some statistics is a tribute, too, to the achievement of the men who played a part in its construction, and for some at the cost of their lives. Although there were boats under each cantilever for rescue, 57 men were killed during construction.

The bridge is 2.5 km (1.5 miles) long. The spans of the girders are gigantic - 521m (1710 feet). The ties and struts of the bridge are the setting for enormous, balanced forces - tension in the ties and compression in the tubes. Each of the cantilevers, 110 m (361 feet) high is supported on massive granite piers. Granite is a particularly hard rock and the difficulties in cutting and shaping it are extreme. 54 160 tonnes of steel were used, and 4 200 tonnes of rivets. Steel plates were shaped using a 2 000 tonne hydraulic press. The bridge was constructed simultaneously on both sides of the three massive main piers. 'The precision of the assembly, using hydraulic cranes and riveting machines, was such that, when the work from the two sides was to be joined up, it required only hastily improvised fires of wood-shavings and waste to expand it by 1/4 in. for the final bolts to be inserted.' (T K Derry and Trevor I Williams, 'A Short History of Technology.'

Rail travellers, including feminists, headed for Northern Scotland still use this bridge - but its achievement, like other great bridges, goes far, far beyond usefulness.

Obstacles

Here, I directly compare 'patriarchy's' attitude to obstacles and that of feminists. Above, in connection with the 'patriarchy' of the first industrial age, I show that patriarchy 'got things done, it achieved, in the area of humanitarian legislation,' just as it overcame, but far more dramatically, natural obstacles.

In a speech at Newcastle, the great engineer Robert Stephenson said, 'It seems to me but as yesterday that I was engaged as an assistant in laying out the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Since then, the Liverpool & Manchester and a hundred other great works have sprung into existence. As I look back upon these stupendous undertakings, accomplished in so short a time, it seems as if we have realized in our generation the fabled powers of the magician's wand. Hills have been cut down and valleys filled up; and when these simple expedients have not sufficed high and magnificent viaducts have been raised and, if mountains stood in the way, tunnels of unexampled magnitude have pierced them through, bearing their triumphant attestation to the indomitable energy of the nation and the unrivalled skill of our artisans.'

At the time he spoke, the railway age had been in existence for only twenty years. By then there were 6 084 miles of railway in Great Britain. The achievement is directly relevant to our own age and its concern for sustainability and climate change. Once railway lines have been electrified - another achievement of patriarchy - trains can use, of course, electric current produced by any means, including renewable sources. The cutting down of hills and the filling up of valleys was carried out for one purpose only - to achieve a level foundation. Without it, the railway line could not have been used at all. This was not patriarchal despoliation of nature.

Robert Stephenson's did far more than assist in laying out the Stockton and Darlington Railway. He built (with the assistance of navvies, of course) the first main railway line to serve London, the London and Birmingham railway. It was completed in 1838 and Thomas Roscoe described it as 'unquestionably the greatest public work ever executed, either in ancient or modern times.' He built the great High Level Bridge, opened in 1849, which links Newcastle-upon-Tyne with Gateshead. He built the Royal Border Bridge, carrying the North Eastern Railway across the River Tweed. This formed the last permanent link in the continuous line of East Coast Railway between London and Edinburgh. His tubular railway bridge by Conway castle was completed in 1848. Each of the wrought-iron tubes weighs more than 1000 tonnes. Robert Stephenson had taken his railway along the coast of North Wales. To take the railway into the island of Anglesey and then to the port of Holyhead, where ships left for Dublin, it was necessary to bridge the natural obstacle of the Menai strait. He did this with his Britannia Bridge, completed in 1850. This was a major advance in engineering. Earlier girders had not exceeded 35 feet but the main spans of this bridge were much longer, 460 feet.

The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, edited by David Crystal, 'celebrates' Robert Stephenson's achievements in 11 lines, and the engineering achievements of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 12 lines, whereas their contemporary Horace Bushnell, 'Congregational minister and theologian,' who published Christian nurture in 1847 is given 15 lines.

'Railway mileage in Great Britain reached its peak with 20 443 route-miles of which a total length of about 310 miles was in 1 085 tunnels (excluding the London Underground). The longest was the Severn Tunnel (4 miles 628 yards) and in addition there were eleven tunnels over two miles long and a further forty-five over one mile long. Bridges totalled 62 244 ...' (Charles E Lee, 'Railways,' in 'The Archaeology of the Industrial Revolution,' edited by Brian Bracegirdle.)

The obstacles overcome by the civil engineer John Metcalf were first of all severe personal ones. 'One of the few civilian road builders of ability active in the eighteen century was the remarkable Yorkshireman, 'Blind Jack of Knaresborough ... born in 1717 and blinded by smallpox at the age of six. Despite this disability he grew up strong and active ... Metcalf's road making career began in 1765, when he succeeded in winning a contract to construct three miles of the new turnpike from Harrogate to Boroughbridge. So superior was his stretch of road that fresh work came pouring in. Altogether he built about 180 miles of road, mostly in Yorkshire and Lancashire but also extending into Derbyshire.' (Anthony Ridley, 'Other Means of Communication,' in 'The Archaeology of the Industrial Revolution.') He built bridges too to carry his roads over rivers.

Many or most radical feminists claim that 'gender' is socially constructed, they would claim that women have just as much interest as men in technical matters and are just as good as men at solving technical problems, the major technical problems of civil and mechanical engineering and the much smaller technical problems involved in working on car engines, that it's only patriarchal oppression and patriarchal stereotyping which could explain women's seeming lack of interest in technical matters, compared with men.

Feminists should have realized that the recital of these 'facts' was no substitute for actual achievement, for overcoming obstacles. The obstacles were not so very great, after all. By now, feminists should have organized in every town and city women-only garages, for example, proof that women were not at all dependent on men for servicing cars, for carrying out minor and major repairs on cars. This would not have involved the difficulty of developing the techniques and designing and manufacturing the tools and heavy equipment and the specialist chemical products needed to do the work, the obstacles to be overcome would have amounted to only a tiny fraction of the obstacles overcome by patriarchy, but it would have earned them respect. As it is, feminist talk is cheap, available in vast quantities. It talks about obstacles and how enormous the obstacles are, but the triumphant overcoming of obstacles isn't much in evidence.

By flagrantly exaggerated obstacles, they can make the overcoming of obstacles seem an enormous achievement. They can make a seeming lack of interest in overcoming the obstacles not a sign of indifference, only more evidence of how severe are the obstacles imposed by patriarchy. Schemes such as WISE ('Women into Science and Engineering'), which aim to help women to enter science and engineering are regarded as completely insignificant - after all, the oppression of patriarchy is far too great for initiatives like this to mean anything.

Bonds: Army families, famine, Sophie Scholl, mining, happiness

Linkages include bonds, including the bonds formed by bitter experience. Often, these tie men and women together far more closely than the ties of men to other men and women to other women. Radical feminists isolate linkages between women, they treat the linkage of 'gender' as always the most important. Often, this amounts to a complete distortion. A feminist who claims or assumes that she's speaking for 'women' is more often than not speaking for women similar to herself, not women whose experiences are vastly different.

There are many communities with unity of outlook and feeling. Feminists outside those communities aren't speaking for women within those communities. Usually, they have not the least conception of the difficulties they face. The women whose husbands or partners go to fight in Afghanistan won't take seriously the idea that these husbands or partners are oppressors. The inconvenient fact, for feminists, is that these soldiers are doing a very great deal for women, facing risks of course beyond the experience of most Western feminists. See also the next section, Feminism and the Taleban.

During the Great Famine in Ireland, six hundred starving men, women and children walked from Louisburgh in County Mayo to Delphi Lodge to ask, unsuccessfully, for famine relief. Many of them died on the way back, below the stark mountains which overlook Doo Lough. Searing experiences such as these establish linkages which are vastly more significant than any linkage between a starving woman and a prosperous woman, or between a starving man and a prosperous man.

The linkages between Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans - they were guillotined by the Nazis on the same day for membership of the White Rose group, which protested against the Nazis - were far more significant than the linkage of gender between Sophie Scholl and the wife of Goebbels or the linkage of gender between Hans Scholl and Goebbels.

I quote from the account given in William L Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:'

'The University of Munich, the city that had given birth to Nazism, became the hotbed of student revolt. It was led by a twenty-five year-old medical student, Hans Scholl, and his twenty-one-year-old sister Sophie, who was studying biology. Their mentor was Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy. By means of what became known as the 'White Rose Letters' they carried out their anti-Nazi propaganda in other universities; they were also in touch with the plotters in Berlin.'

'...the students, led by the Scholls, began to distribute pamphlets calling on German youth to rise. On February 19 a building superintendent observed Hans and Sophie Scholl hurling their leaflets from the balcony of the university and betrayed them to the Gestapo.'

'Their end was quick and barbaric. Haled before the dreaded People's Court, which was presided over by its president, Roland Freisler...they were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. Sophie Scholl was handled so roughly during her interrogation by the Gestapo that she appeared in court with a broken leg. But her spirit was undimmed. To Freisler's savage browbeating she answered calmly, 'You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won't admit it?'

She hobbled on her crutches to the scaffold and died with sublime courage, as did her brother. Professor Huber and several other students were executed a few days later.'

There are photographs of the female camp guards and the male camp guards taken after the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. One of them is shown in Tom Bower's 'Blind Eye to Murder,' which is about the failure of Britain and America to prosecute Nazi war crimes effectively, except in limited cases. Anne Frank died at Belsen. Any bonds of gender between Anne Frank and the female camp guards are irrelevant. Feminism is irrelevant here.

To return to coal-mining, women worked in the mines in this country until the passing of the Mines Act in 1842. The men and the women working underground had this in common: they did backbreaking work in complete or almost complete darkness, breathing in coal dust, constantly at risk of severe injury or death by explosion, crushing or drowning. These linkages were vastly more significant than the linkage between the women toiling in the mines and the wife of a colliery owner or an aristocratic woman. During the last miners' strike in this country, there were linkages between the miners' wives and Mrs Thatcher based on gender, but the linkages based on shared hardships in the mining communities were far more significant.

There was no linkage of sympathy and empathy between a woman novelist, George Eliot, and the miners, including the miners' wives. 'George Eliot's approach in her novel Felix Holt the Radical is reasonably typical. She introduces the miners into the story as an ignorant mob, preyed on by every kind of agitator, frequently drunk and often riotous. Although they play an important role, they never emerge as characters nor do we ever learn anything about either their work or their lives away from work.' ('The Miners.') The miners and their wives had bonds, George Eliot had no bonds with the miners' wives except 'gender,' which radical feminists would count as the most important bond of all.

An extract from Anthony Burton's 'The Miners' about the rescue of five men trapped underground at Tynewydd Pit in 1877, to illustrate not just these bonds but the heroism of the rescuers - these men, like other men, would be dismissed as 'useless' or 'no more than rapists' by lunatic feminists - of whom there are many. The rescue was the subject of a book by an eyewitness, Charles Williams, 'Buried Alive!'

'Between the rescuers and the trapped men there was a 38-yard barrier of coal, which could only be approached down roadways turned into a vast underground sea. The alternative was to try and reach them through the main floodwater, and divers came who volunteered to attempt to travel the 257 yards of passages flooded from floor to ceiling. They tried and failed. It was clear that if there was to be a rescue, then a way would have to be forced through the coal barrier ...'

[After many difficult operations, complicated by gas seeping into the workings] 'All through the rescue operation, the men kept continuously at the task ... They worked under the double threat of inundation or explosion, but no one hesitated ... on the Friday, the attempt was made. The coal-face was broken in, gas and air rushed out like a hurricane, and, before the waters could fill their refuge, the five prisoners were pulled to safety.

'The Tynewydd accident was not exceptionally bad, nor the rescue exceptionally heroic: it is mainly notable for having been so carefully recorded. But death and injury were familiar enough in every mining village, and the endurance, the carelessness of danger shown by the rescuers, were repeated a hundredfold with no one on hand to record them. Although Williams hardly mentions it, this common experience of sharing hardship, of facing death, drew the mining community together by uniquely strong bonds. when the news of a pit accident reached the village, everyone felt it as a personal disaster. Each wife knew that her husband or her sons stood in the same danger. So too, the rescuers were working to save friends and relations. These strong bonds were reinforced by the nature of the mining village and its community. They were isolated, with the mine often the only source of employment. Miners, looked upon almost as a race apart, ignored by the rest of the world, were content to draw inwards, to make their own lives. Probably only the fishing villages, which shared the same sense of isolation and shared danger and loss, could show a comparable unity of outlook and feeling.'

Happiness and unhappiness are different communities of feeling. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Proposition 6.43 of the 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,' 'Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.' C K Ogden translates this, accurately but not gracefully, as 'The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.' I would give this as one interpretation, which of course leaves out all the possible reasons for being happy or unhappy:

'The world of the happy woman is different from the world of the unhappy woman. The world of the unhappy woman is similar to the world of the unhappy man.'

Radical feminism, the Taleban and the British army

A simple, direct question for radical feminists. Should Western military action in Afghanistan continue or be ended as soon as possible? Bear this in mind:

Under the Taleban, 4 - 5% of Afghan children received primary education, virtually none of them girls. Now, about half of Afghan children do, about a third of them girls. If the Taleban can be driven out of the areas they still control - by the use of military force, unless radical feminist have a better idea - then the number of girls being educated will rise. If Western armed forces are withdrawn, then the Taleban will surely defeat the Afghan army. (But radical feminists may well view the Afghan army, like the coalition forces, as one more manifestation of 'patriarchy.') If the Taleban take control of Afghanistan, then the plight of girls and women (and males) will be extreme. As it is, the Taleban burn school books, bomb schools, murder teachers and plant bombs that kill civilians. The number of civilians killed unintentionally by coalition troops is vastly exceeded by the number of civilians killed by the Taleban.

Radical feminists can be accused of preferring posturing, pontificating, evasion, of preferring to quote, some of them, Hélène Cixous or Judith Butler or other feminist luminaries, and to use, some of them, words like 'logocentric' and 'phallogocentrism' (see my discussion of Fran Brearton) - far more pleasant and congenial activities than answering legitimate objections, accounting for inconvenient facts, engaging with reality, which is so much harsher and so much more unfair than they suppose, no more designed to fit radical feminist conceptions than Christian ones.

Whether it was advisable or not to go into Afghanistan in the first place is a separate issue. As a matter of strict fact, Western armies are engaged there. They either stay until Afghanistan is able to defend itself against the Taleban - this isn't guaranteed, but not much in history is guaranteed - or they leave. Which of these alternatives do radical feminists prefer?

I see every reason why radical feminists should be intensely grateful to these soldiers, whose achievement is all the greater if we remember the massive dangers they face, but of course there isn't the least chance that they will be grateful. But to repeat the question, should Western military action in Afghanistan continue or be ended as soon as possible?

This was long before the British army went to Afghanistan, but some feminist graffiti which appeared on the walls of the army barracks near here typify the glibness, superficiality, simple-mindedness of radical feminists: 'All war is war on women.' 'War - men make it, women take it.' 'Take the toys from the boys.' When they write at enormous length, the writing isn't always less glib, superficial and simple-minded.

At the time of the graffiti, the most recent operation of the British army had been the one in Northern Ireland. I discuss the British army and terrorism in connection with Seamus Heaney's 'The Toome Road.' Before that, there was the British army's part in defeating fascism, with weapons, of course, not 'toys.' Radical feminists would do well to refresh their memory on such matters as Nazism and the Holocaust by reading some histories of the subject. Fran Brearton's glib comment on the 'emasculation' of British soldiers becomes much worse than glib in the context of The Second World War. I discuss it in the link above.

As a matter of strict fact - although radical feminists show few signs of caring very much for the world of strict facts - men have 'taken it' far more than women in war, if the number of casualties is any criterion, and it is. The name of the barracks is a reminder of that: 'The Somme Barracks.'

Non-patriarchal government: the Empress Maria Theresa in Austria and the Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great in Russia

Radical feminists generally give the impression that 'patriarchy' has been a constant in the recorded history of government. They are unaware, or fail to mention, that there have been extended periods of 'non-patriarchal' government for extended periods in some countries. In democracies, a female Prime Minister or President is subject to checks and balances. The most instructive examples come from the Age of Absolutism, when the Empress was subject to far less {restriction} in her policies and actions.

From these examples, it would be impossible to conclude that women make a mess of government whenever they are given the chance. Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, and Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, Tsarinas of Russia, were all strong and effective rulers, the Russian Tsarinas quite enlightened rulers, but none of them promoted the freedoms of women more than any 'patriarchal' rulers. None of them promoted the freedoms of men and women more than any 'patriarchal' rulers. 'Patriarchy' has achieved far more. More often than not, reality is desperately harsh - or awkward and inconvenient. Reality hardly ever flatters utopian, sentimental or naive illusions, such as those of radical feminists.

It isn't possible to do justice to the achievements and limitations of these three Empresses here, but I mention some facts which are sufficient to falsify some radical feminist interpretations.

Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, ruled the Habsburg empire between 1740 and 1780 - four decades of non-patriarchal rule. She was succeeded by her eldest son, Joseph II. Like any representative of patriarchy, she was preoccupied for long periods of time with military matters - the Seven Years' War, for example - but here domestic policies were more instructive, for the purposes of the discussion here, and the contrasts between her domestic policies and those of Joseph II.

Toleration for people with religious beliefs different from the state religion and toleration for people with no religious beliefs, the toleration taken for granted now in liberal democracies, was originally denied. It was dangerous, it required courage and a revolution in outlook to bring it about. The Enlightenment gave the powerful ideas of toleration, the rulers of Europe adopted those ideas enthusiastically, cautiously or not at all. Maria Theresa, a Roman Catholic, was virulently anti-semitic and loathed Protestantism. She rejected religious toleration completely. The Enlightenment also promoted humanitarianism. In penal reform, Beccaria and his circle in Milan - representatives of 'patriarchy' - were the most important of all advocates of humanitarianism, such as the abolition of torture. Maria Theresa was opposed to its abolition. She made no practical steps to abolish serfdom in the Habsburg Empire.

The reforms of Joseph II improved the lives of men and women in the Hapsburg Empire dramatically. In 1781, a year after succeeding Maria Theresa, he abolished serfdom and an edict of toleration gave Protestant and Greek Orthodox subjects almost complete equality with Roman Catholics. In 1782, the Jews of the Empire also had their rights recognized to a large extent. His codes of criminal law (1787) abolished torture and even the death penalty, a very rare accomplishment in the eighteenth century, but one shared by the Empress Catherine. Both, though, made use of punishments which were not intended to cause death but did cause death almost as certainly as by execution - forced labour in the Hapsburg Empire and such punisments as running the gauntlet in Russia.

The most serious humanitarian objection to the rule of the Empress Elizabeth and the Empress Catherine the Great concerns their failure to abolish serfdom in Russia. When she dismissed her lover Lavadovsky in 1777, Catherine gave him, by way of recompense, money - and 4 000 peasants, men and women. It was a representative of patriarchy, Alexander II, although much later, who ended serfdom. In 1861, he freed the serfs from private estates and household serfs. In 1866, he freed the state-owned serfs.

Serfdom

Radical feminists may feel anger, outrage at the injustice, when they read that '... in the higher classes, it was normal for married women to own property, even landed property, at a time when this was difficult in England. ''On the front of every house in Moscow and St Petersburg'', reported Haxthausen in the 1840s, ''is written the name of the proprietor, and before every third house at least the name is that of a woman.'' ' (Angus Calder, 'Russia Discovered: 19th-Century Fiction from Pushkin to Chekhov.') Anger and outrage because women found it difficult to own property in England, and anger because every third house in St Petersburg has the name of a woman. Why not something like 50 % of the houses, in accordance with the 'gender ratio?'

Just as everyday cuts and burns are outweighed by life-threatening injuries, and aches and pains are outweighed by the agony of torture, there was a major injustice, an overwhelmingly important injustice, which made such considerations far less important by comparison: serfdom.

The woman who owned property in Russia, even if less property than men, had incomparably more freedom than the serfs. The property owned by women in Russia often included serfs. The owner of the serfs had almost unlimited power over them. The owner had no right to kill a serf but did have the right to flog the serf with 'the knout,' which tore strips of flesh from the skin. If the serf died under the knout, then this was allowable. Serfs were bought and sold and were hardly distinguishable from slaves. In the census of 1857, the private serfs (not owned by the state) amounted to 23 million out of a total population of 62.5 million Russians.

The writer Turgenev was a young adult in the 1840's. His mother owned 5 000 serfs. She had them flogged and she had Turgenev flogged very often. When two young serfs failed to bow as she was passing them, she made use of her almost absolute power over them by ordering them to be deported to Siberia.

The moral priority at this time in Russia was abolishing serfdom rather than ensuring that the property rights of propertied women was the same as the property rights of propertied men. This is an episode from long ago but still there's the refusal amongst radical feminists to recognize moral priorities.

Feminism and the death penalty

Above, I noted the many cases in which British legislation exempted girls and women from harsh and dangerous working conditions which continued for males. Feminists have chosen to ignore the complete or almost complete exemption of women from the death penalty in many jurisdictions. Their survey of women's sufferings and disadvantages is incomplete and distorted.

The Death Penalty Information Center in the United States documents and discusses the death penalty in meticulous detail. From the page

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty

'Women account for only 1 in 50 (2%) death sentences imposed at the trial level;
W omen account for only 1 in 67 (1.5%) persons presently on death row; and
Women account for only 1 in 100 (1%) persons actually executed in the modern era.'

The walk to the execution chamber or conveyance to the execution chamber on a wheeled stretcher of the arguably innocent, the mentally ill, the victims of gross childhood abuse, the juvenile offenders, and offenders who are none of these things, after the degrading ritual of the 'last meal' (called the 'special meal' in Ohio) has been the experience almost entirely of males. Feminism has done nothing to help to save the female victims, such as Christina Riggs. Her photograph, like that of other executed female victims, is on the page given already.

The execution of 'Christina Riggs in Arkansas on May 2, 2000 - Riggs, a licensed nurse, was convicted of murder by smothering her two preschool-aged children in their beds at the family's Sherwood home. She wrote suicide notes saying "I hope one day you will forgive me for taking my life and the life of my children. But I can’t live like this any more, and I couldn't’t bear to leave my children behind to be a burden on you or to be separated and raised apart from their fathers and live knowing their mother killed herself." Then took 28 Elavil tablets, normally a lethal dose, and injected herself with enough undiluted potassium chloride to kill five people. The next day, police officers entered her apartment and found Riggs and rushed her to the hospital. During the death penalty phase, Riggs would not allow attorneys to put on a defense, saying she wanted a death sentence. The jury obliged, and she was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Riggs said "thank you" and squeezed her attorney's hand.'

I assume that the execution team which put her to death was made up of men, not women. I have complete loathing for them, and the others responsible for her execution.

Feminism isn't responsible for the continuance of capital punishment in the United States, which separates it from more civilized countries. But feminism gives the impression that the continuance of the death penalty isn't so important, or not important in the least.

A few more instances of exemption in other countries. I could have given many more. Countess Constance Markievicz played a prominent part in the Easter Rising of 1916 against British rule in Ireland. She was sentenced to death but wasn't shot. Sixteen men went before the firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol but she was reprieved explicitly on grounds of 'gender.'

From information supplied by 'Hands off Cain,' an Italian anti-death penalty organization:

February 14, 2010: Bangladesh has executed more than 400 people since the country became independent in 1971, an official said, and more than 1,000 others are currently sitting on death row.

At least 36 women have been sentenced to death but none went to the gallows, another prison official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to reveal figures.
"Those hanged were all men," the official said ... '

Any honest survey of the relative sufferings and disadvantages of men and women should take account of the death penalty.

My page The Death Penalty has evidence concerning the death penalty and arguments against the death penalty but it can only give a brief indication of its horrors, which are the experience almost entirely of men in The United States. This is one more horror which I don't describe on that page. I travelled to London to attend a vigil outside the United States embassy. Gary Graham, a black prisoner, was due to be executed in Texas later that day. At the time I travelled to London he was alive, at the time the vigil started he was alive, but meanwhile, as he was in the holding cell, preparations had been made to kill him. He was a juvenile offender at the time of the offence. Almost all the jurisdictions which still executed never executed anyone under the age of 18 at the time of the offence. The United States was an exception. A couple of hours after I arrived to take part in the vigil, news came that there had been a stay of execution. Who can convey the horror of facing extinction? Dostoevsky could, but he had been sentenced to death himself, led out to execution and only reprieved at the last moment.

A long time later, Gary Graham faced execution again. By this time, he had been given not one execution date, on the day I took part in the vigil, but six times. This was gross cruelty, not the actions of a civilized state. He refused a final meal. (The Web site of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice used to provide details of the last meal but now no longer does. I refused to look at this information even once.) This time he was executed, one of four juvenile offenders executed that year in the United States, all male. He went to the execution chamber protesting his innocence. There was only one eyewitness evidence of the murder and no forensic evidence at all.

The horrors of the execution or attempted execution: 'Ohio prison staff earlier this month failed to administer a lethal injection to another man, Romell Broom, despite 18 attempts to insert a needle into his veins. After two hours, Broom was returned alive to his cell ... the 2007 case of Christopher Newton, when it took more than an hour to find a vein, giving him enough time to go to the bathroom in the middle of the procedure. And there was also the case of Joseph Clark who sobbed in agony during his execution when his vein burst.'

Even if the execution is fast and painless, waiting for execution is very prolonged and far from painless. After being sentenced to death long before (12 years is the average but Cecil Johnson was executed in Tennessee after 29 years on death row), the inmate may in the end, after losing the last appeal, be given an execution date which is eight months ahead, an exact date on which he (or she) will be put to death. Then comes the weekend before the execution, the day before the execution, and unless the inmate has been given a stay, he or she has to reckon with an hour of life left. In 99 cases out of 100 it's a 'he' rather than a 'she.' Radical feminists - what comments do you have to make about this form of 'gender disparity?

The history of the death penalty in this country offers instructive insights into feminism. Two quotations from my page The Death Penalty:

'Rituals of Retribution: capital punishment in Germany 1600 - 1987 by Richard J. Evans. The author writes that "The past, as the famous opening to L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between says, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. By visiting this foreign country we can enlarge our conception of what it means to be human, and perhaps gain a better understanding of the limits and possibilities of the human condition. One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to restore a sense of strangeness to the past. We have to make an imaginative leap of understanding by which to comprehend mentalities which present-day Europeans may find at first encounter repulsive and bizarre."

'The Hanging Tree: execution and the English people 1770 - 1868 by V.A.C. Gatrell. I fully agree with the comment on the cover: "This gripping study is essential reading for anyone interested in the processes which have 'civilized' our social life...Panoramic in range, scholarly in method, and compelling in argument, this is one of those rare histories which both shift our sense of the past and speak powerfully to the present." The author writes, "Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English people were very familiar with the grimy business of hanging. This is so large a social fact separating this era from our own that although it is not the most obvious way of defining modern times, it must be one of them...What they watched was horrific. There was no nice calculation of body weights and lengths of drop in those days; few died cleanly. Kicking their bound legs, many choked over minutes.'

Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' lived at a time when executions were frequent, the time of the 'Bloody Code.' There was a peak in the 1780's and a decline in (public) executions after that. V A C Gatrell: 'Trevelyan thought the eighteenth century English 'a race that had not yet learned to dislike the sight of pain inflicted'. There's no evidence that Mary Wollstonecraft was any different. She has many, many observations to make on female dress, but makes no comment at all on public hangings, whether of men, women or children.

Compare Cesare Beccaria. From my page on the death penalty: 'Cesare Beccaria (1738 - 1794), the author of 'On Crimes and Punishments' (Dei lelitti e delle pene) is magnificent, astonishing. His work has had an incalculable effect, wholly for the good. At a time when the criminal justice systems in almost all countries were hideously barbaric, he cut through all the traditional arguments and traditional complacency and attacked the death penalty and other abuses. From section XXVIII, on the death penalty: 'This vain profusion of punishments, which has never made men better, has moved me to inquire whether capital punishment is truly useful and just in a well-organized state...In order to be just, a penalty should have only the degree of intensity needed to deter other men from crime...If anyone should cite against me the example of practically all ages and nations, which have assigned the death penalty to certain crimes, I shall reply that the example is annihilated in the presence of truth, against which there is no prescription, and that human history leaves us with the impression of a vast sea of errors in which a few confused and widely scattered truths are floating.'

If he had confined himself to attacking the death penalty, this would have been an enormous achievement, but his humanitarianism was very broadly based and deserves to be mentioned here. From the introduction to 'On Crimes and Punishments' (Hackett edition, translated by David Young):

'The criminal justice systems of Europe in the eighteenth century were open to criticism on a number of counts. There was often cruelty in the investigation and punishment of crime. Judicial torture was frequently used, and the death penalty was common even for relatively minor crimes. Almost everywhere, the law reflected the common assumption that political loyalty and good behavior were best secured by religious uniformity. Reliance on tradition and ancient custom tended to reinforce the powers of local courts and parochial elites...and to circumscribe the central authority of the state. In most countries, equality before the law was not recognized, even in principle; different rules applied to different levels of the social hierarchy. The law's vagueness, contradictions, and wide scope for interpretation and discretion tended to reinforce the personal dependence of the disadvantaged on those with inherited property and authority.'

Beccaria wrote against all these abuses, and his writing had a dramatic impact. It should be read, and remembered, with gratitude.'

Women in traditional Moslem societies

If all men are oppressors - or potentially rapists - then the radical feminist who chooses to attack even liberal men in liberal democracies is attacking oppression. People like myself who claim that the most serious oppression of women surely takes place in traditional Moslem societies and some traditional Moslem enclaves in liberal democracies and are determined to oppose it are liable to be labelled as 'racists.' There are radical feminists whose attacks on 'oppression' never refer to these injustices but confine their attention exclusively to the failings of liberal democracies.The incandescent fury of so many of them has advantages. It allows them to maintain their self-image. But this is moral cowardice. The feminists who live in traditional Moslem societies and actively oppose the injustices to women have chosen a far more difficult, far more courageous path.

More inconvenient facts

A proportion of women have an intense interest in shopping, in the kind of shopping which is more to do with image than with needs. These women are unacknowledged by many feminists. 'Facts' are crude or imaginary things according to the higher feminist views.

Generally, the 'Men's Movement' opposes particular injustices, such as the notion that all domestic abuse is by men against women. It doesn't claim that men have the monopoly of virtue. Many feminists are close to claiming that.

In the traditional Moslem societies where there is gross injustice in the treatment of women, women who oppose the injustice are outnumbered by women who are willing accomplices. The practice of female genital circumcision is perhaps the most dramatic illustration, practised in various non-Moslem societies as well as in some Moslem societies.

As a matter of strict fact, in some Moslem and traditional societies where female genital circumcision is practised, the women carry out the operation, which leaves the woman, very often, with medical problems for life. There are growing numbers of men who try to stop women carrying out circumcision. One case was reported in 'The Times.' A man identified as 'Abdi' tried to stop his wife 'from circumcising their two daughters, aged 2 and 4. She called him from Somalia while on holiday to say she wanted to carry out the procedure.

'But he refused to be swayed, despite his wife’s argument that the girls would improve their chances of attracting a good husband because they would be perceived as being more traditional and pure.

'It is women who believe in the concept as their duty to look after their children,” said Abdi, who is also aware of prospective mother-in-laws examining their sons’ future brides to ensure they are circumcised.

'Women “fear that if they don’t circumcise their daughters then they won’t be able to get them married”, he said.'

Radical feminist writers prefer to write about 'woman' rather than women who may be heroic or cowardly, wonderful or repulsive, civilized or barbaric, and with all the contradictions and mixture of strengths and weaknesses which are more common in human nature than the absolutes.

They have nothing to say about the Nazi women, the subject of the book by Kathrin Kompisch. She writes, 'Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective conscious of the Germans for a long time ... The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that blamed men for everything. This was and is the popular picture ... Women typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the SS Action Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets, were invariably the secretaries - and sometimes much more - in all the Gestapo posts. And at the end of the war they tried to diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the all-male machine which gave the orders." The Gestapo files in Düsseldorf noted that women "try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis." Most of the people in apartments who spied on their neighbours and reported them for ideological unsoundness or for being Jewish were women.

Perhaps the best known of the 'particularly cruel examples' was Ilse Koch, who 'had become infamous for her manufacture of lampshades and gloves made out of tattooed skin of dead inmates ... Other accounts detailed her sadism while walking or riding through the camp, ordering SS guards to beat or whip individual inmates who displeased her ... the victims of Buchenwald included 51 000 who had perished ... as a result of straight physical torture and starvation ... Through all this Ilse Koch lived quite voluntarily. She had no military rank, so there was no suggestion of compulsion or fear of death should she refuse to remain. On the contrary, all the evidence suggested that she enjoyed living in Buchenwald. After all, she even stayed on after her husband's dismissal as camp commandant.' (Tom Bower, 'Blind Eye to Murder.')

The harshness of reality, the injustice of reality, tend to destroy illusions and support deeper thought but sometimes illusions have such a grip that {modification} of reality is more convenient than {modification} of the illusions.

I recognize that many men are irrational, trivial-minded, cruel, vindictive, bullying, infantile, easily-led, and many women likewise. Some feminists give the impression that they believe women are inherently virtuous. If so, this view is vulnerable to experience, I think. Feminists may find that in the workplace, some of the men are unexpectedly and uncomfortably compassionate and that not all the women are all they seem. One very bad woman boss may destroy the illusion for good, just as one very bad male boss may confirm views. A heterosexual feminist loses a husband or partner to another woman. The belief that women are inherently virtuous is diminished. A 'Women's Studies' academic is more often than not competing against other women rather than men and if she fails in an application, she may well blame women rather than men. In general, the warm feeling of sisterhood in the face of male opposition is a feeling difficult to maintain indefinitely. Reality is denied, modified to support the illusions but sooner or later, the complexity and harshness of reality make it impossible to continue believing in illusion.

Kingsley Amis

At the end of his novel 'Jake's Thing,' Kingsley Amis, a novelist obviously vastly inferior to such women novelists as George Eliot or Emily Bronte, or male novelists such as Kafka and Coetzee, writes about women. His intended target here isn't one I accept in the least, but it can be reinterpreted as an attack on radical feminists, and then it's surely devastatingly accurate -

'... their concern ... with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility ...'

These lines from his poem 'A Bookshop Idyll' will probably be just as offensive to feminists:

Women are really much nicer than men:
aaNo wonder we like them.

Here, Kingsley Amis is using generalization, of course. Feminists' use of generalization is almost limitless and just as empty. Feminist claims beginning with 'men are ...' or 'women are ...' should be examined very, very carefully.

Claiming superiority the easy way

Faced with a man's massive achievement, which has directly or indirectly reduced suffering - but only some massive achievement has humanitarian benefits - feminists more often than not overlook the achievement. If the man can be found to be 'sexist' in some way - the criteria used are very broad, the judgment regarded as practically infallible - then of course the matter is clear-cut, but otherwise, simplification-words such as 'phallocentric' and 'patriarchal' will do and the achievement can be dismissed or overlooked. Who are the important people? Why, the feminists. They are spared the necessity of achieving, they can gain a reputation for superiority by this easiest of ways, by using simplification-words, by showing that they know how to use the word 'gender' instead of 'sex.' In any case, 'achievement' may well be a 'masculinist' idea, according to some feminists.

'Sexist' is an easy way of disposing of arguments without the hard work needed to present a case in detail, with supporting evidence. It's far easier to say that a garage is 'sexist' or 'patronising' than for a radical feminist to set up a garage. Lying underneath a vehicle trying to dislodge a rusted part, covered with grime and oil, doesn't offer the same advantages in self-promotion. It's easier to deny angrily that in general women have less interest in mechanical matters and to speak glibly of 'gender stereotyping' than for a feminist car-owner to study a workshop manual and actually carry out major mechanical work on a car.

The sphere of 'strict facts'

I refuse absolutely to apologize for men or to defend men if their actions seem indefensible, or to defend women if their actions seem indefensible. I follow the principle of cross-linkage. In some cases, 'gender' is the most important linkage, but very often not. I feel ties to, linkages with, men in some cases, not in others. In other cases, I feel ties to, linkages with, women. 'Facts' were under attack for a time, but facts can now be seen as clear-cut in very many cases, open to theoretical objections but no more so than the existence of an external world or the materiality of a stone, a 'fact' of the external world, as shown by kicking it.

In the previous section, on the death penalty, I discussed the use of the death penalty in this country in the eighteenth century, and the failure of Mary Wollstonecraft to show any awareness of its evils.

As a matter of strict fact, the harsh penal code of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was imposed by men, not women. As a matter of strict fact, the harsh penal code of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was opposed by a tiny minority of men but no women, or none that I know of. As a matter of strict fact, the worst excesses of this harsh penal code were ended by men. V A C Gatrell: 'Then suddenly - and I mean suddenly - this ancient killing system collapsed. The 1832 Reform Act ... opened parliament to some hundred independent MPs, largely middle-class advocates of progress and critics of the ancien régime, fervently advocating the bloody code's repeal ... When most capital statutes were at last repealed in 1837, only eight people were killed that year in the whole country, and six in the year following, all murderers ...' As a matter of strict fact, women were denied any political say in such matters. Not as a matter of strict fact, but as a likelihood, if they had been, they would not have been any more humanitarian. As a matter of strict fact, Mrs Thatcher in the twentieth century made determined efforts to reintroduce the death penalty in this country after its abolition in the 1960's by Harold Wilson's government.

As a matter of strict fact, the Nazi terror in Germany was due to men. As a matter of strict fact, the Nazi regime came to be supported actively and passively by the overwhelming majority of Germans. As a matter of strict fact, the Nazi regime was actively opposed by only a tiny proportion of Germans, men and women. As a matter of strict fact, the armed military action which eventually ended the Nazi regime was overwhelmingly due to men rather than women.

As a matter of strict fact, virtually all the scientific and technological advances which have made life longer and less subject to such scourges as famine and epidemic disease have been achieved by men. As a matter of strict fact, feminists have increased human happiness to a far, far lesser extent than the work of these men.

Hélène Cixous and academic publishing

This is Hélène Cixous urging women to write: 'Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.'

This, of course, was published by W W Norton and Company, a big publishing house based in the United States which is inextricably linked with 'capitalist machinery,' and one of those 'crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives ...' It's not true that the managing editors and big bosses of this publishing company 'don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts.'

In this book of 2 624 pages there are many, many feminist essays, extensive extracts from such works as Adrienne Rich's 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,' Monique Wittig's 'One is not Born a Woman,' (Monique Wittig is described in the introduction as 'the French writer and radical lesbian theorist,' one who claims that "lesbians are not women"), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 'The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination,' (the extract begins 'What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?'), Annette Kolodny's 'Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,' Donna Haraway's 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's,' Barbara Smith's 'Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,' Susan Bordo's 'Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,' Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble.' There are no 'masculinist' essays at all. In some of the introductions, there are criticisms, but only of particular points. In the whole massive volume, there are no extracts from some of the very many works of sustained criticism of feminist interpretations which exist. Any readers unfamiliar with these works would never know from reading this book that they do exist.

It's true that general publishers generally don't publish books with such sentences as this, 'As Judith Butler notes in her discussion of the dialectic of Same and Other, that dialectic is 'a false binary, the illusion of a symmetrical difference which consolidates the metaphysical economy of phallogocentrism, the economy of the same.' But so many academic publishers don't hesitate. (This is taken from Fran Brearton on 'Heaney and the Feminine' in the 'Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney.') But general publishers do publish novels by women novelists, biographies by women biographers, poetry by women poets, and of course books by women in other fields - but the books may not in general meet the exacting criteria of radical feminists.

Every one of the books in the 'Cambridge Companion' series which I've referred to contains a chapter which could be described as feminist. It's not true that the 'managing editors, and big bosses' of the Cambridge University Press don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts.' What they don't appear to like are texts which criticize feminism. In the 1 000 pages (a little more) of 'The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy' there are substantial entries for feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy, but no entries which are critical of feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy. Above, I quote from the article by the feminist Susan James in the 'Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.' Again, there are entries on feminism but no entries critical of feminism.

These books in general reflect the vigorous debate in contemporary philosophy. They show the extent to which views are vulnerable to criticism as well as the extent to which they can withstand criticism. They fair-mindedly give the case against and the case for. To give just one from innumerable examples, in the Cambridge Dictionary, on the 'moral implications' of utilitarianism, we read 'Most debate about utilitarianism has focused on its moral implications. Critics have argued that its implications sharply conflict with most people's considered moral judgments, and that this is a strong reason to reject utilitarianism. Proponents have argued both that many of these conflicts disappear on a proper understanding of utilitarianism and that the remaining conflicts disappear on a proper understanding of utilitarianism and that the remaining conflicts should throw the particular judgments, not utilitarianism, into doubt. One important controversy concerns utilitarianism's implications for distributive justice ...'

Feminist essays and articles and feminist works published by academic presses in general either contain no criticism of feminist views at all or the criticism is muted, reflecting none of the vigorous, sustained criticism which exists.

It would be far closer to the truth to say that radical feminism has a stranglehold over academic publishing, with exceptions, and universities, with exceptions than that radical feminism is shunned, not at all welcome.

Martha Nussbaum and radical feminism

Extracts from Martha Nussbaum's 'The Professor of Parody.' The extracts are about only some of the themes in Martha Nussbaum's subtle and well-argued essay.

'In India ... academic feminists have thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law (which, in India today, has most of the flaws that the first generation of American feminists targeted), the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality; they cannot live with themselves without addressing it more or less daily, in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room.

'In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.
Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.

'These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action.

'One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler's work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat. II.
It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

'A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

'We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler's work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.
To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

'Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that "direction for thinking," what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

'In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.
Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

' "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Now, Butler might have written: "Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time." Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims.

'Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

'The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler's self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. Even in America, however, it is possible for theorists to be dedicated to the public good and to achieve something through that effort.

'Many feminists in America are still theorizing in a way that supports material change and responds to the situation of the most oppressed. Increasingly, however, the academic and cultural trend is toward the pessimistic flirtatiousness represented by the theorizing of Butler and her followers. Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?

'In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler's ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.'