The True History Of Female Emancipation (Part 3)

Another field that was dominated by men was publishing, and again thanks to their investment and enabling, women would rise to prominence as authors of fiction. The famous Brontë sisters may have had short lives, but their works are still read with enthusiasm today. Emily Brontë died aged just  thirty, possibly because she ignored medical advice. Charlotte had been married for less than a year when she died just short of her thirty-ninth birthday and heavily pregnant. Had they been born a century later, all three sisters might well have lived to old age.

Another lady author, one who did live well into old age, was Agatha Christie (pictured), who became the queen of the crime novel. Said to be the best-selling novelist of all time and comparable to Shakespeare himself, how far would she have progressed without her first publisher, The Bodley Head, which was founded by two men?

In our own day, the children’s author J.K. Rowling is another prodigious female talent, but if it had not been for her male literary agent and publisher, she would have been unheard of today. While Rowling specialises in fantasy fiction, the current crop of feminist authors live in their own fantasy world. These include Kat Banyard whose mistitled book The Equality Illusion paints a picture of women as the downtrodden and oppressed half of humanity, always under the male thumb. Then there is Jessica Valenti who says all we have to do is believe women to make the world a better place. Presumably that means we should have believed Jodi Arias when she claimed she didn’t murder Travis Alexander, and Beverley Allitt when she denied murdering four babies in a Grantham hospital, in addition to believing U.S. Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial sexual predator.

If the patriarchy did exist, women like Jessica Valenti and Julie Bindel wouldn’t be given the platforms they have to spew their hatred of men over the entire world, nor would the Fawcett Society be bankrolled by major trust funds.

A lot more could be written about female emancipation, but the bottom line is that advances in technology coupled with the accumulation of capital have vastly improved all our lives. With rare exceptions, most of these technological advances and wealth-creation has come from men, particularly white men. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that if no woman had ever set foot inside a laboratory, a medical school, or an engineering workshop, the world would not have been any less wealthy or any less free.

Having said that, it is clear that while women’s contributions to science and technology have been negligible, the same cannot be said for the arts including and especially the written word and contemporary music. Just as every individual has strengths and weaknesses, so do men and women, so just because women do not make up 50% of world leaders does not mean they are being held down anymore than they are excluded from engineering or highway maintenance. Only an idiot would suggest otherwise.

One final point, in 1963, the United States enacted equal pay legislation. The UK followed seven years later. In both countries, most countries, it has long been illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, yet the Banyards and Valentis of the world still claim there is a gender pay gap, but as this article explains, this pay gap exists only in their tiny minds.

Total female emancipation will come the same time total male emancipation comes, namely when robots do all the work and we can sit around all day playing music or video games. But even then the Jessica Valentis and Kat Banyards of the world will find something to bitch about.

Back to Part 2.