Book Review--

Masquerade: The Feminist Illusion, by W. Edward Chynoweth. Trafford Publishing ,Victoria, B.C., Canada, 2004, ISBN 141201145-0.

Earlier this year, Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers, while speaking at what was supposed to have been a private conference with faculty members, suggested that the relatively small numbers of women in the physical sciences might be explained by psychological differences between the sexes. Given the venue, a “politically correct” reaction to such a statement might have been predicted, but even so, what followed was astonishing in its vehemence. A female faculty member stormed out in a huff, announcing that if she had to remain in the room she surely would have fainted (inadvertently confirming the Victorian stereotype of a damsel in emotional distress!). Any pretense of the meeting’s privacy was soon abandoned as the controversy spread and word of it reached the newspapers. Summers, though hardly a conservative (he was Secretary of the Treasury in the second Clinton administration), was still not far enough to the left to satisfy the professoriate. He was forced to endure a non-binding, though still humiliating, “no-confidence” vote from his faculty senate, and made a series of groveling public recantations. Summers finally bought peace by pledging to spend $50 million of Harvard’s endowment to hire more women faculty in the sciences. The suggestion that any differences exist between male and female apart from the gross anatomical ones will henceforth be as risky at to advance at Harvard as Galileo’s astronomical theories were in 17th century Rome.

Such an episode should make us all the more appreciative of writers like W. Edward Chynoweth. His book, Masquerade: The Feminist Illusion, addresses the issue with a courage that Larry Summers signally failed to display. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and career Army officer, Chynoweth left the military to enter the practice of law. After working both in the private sector and as a public prosecutor, he retired in 1978 to pursue interests in art. In 1987 he returned to his legal experience and took up political writing when Robert H. Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court. Chynoweth has also ranched in the San Joaquin Valley for 35 years. He is, in short, a throwback to the sort of independent, serious thinker, well-educated and widely experienced, that held forth in the early years of this country’s existence, before the academy came to dominate American intellectual life. As the academic mind is now substantially closed, we must hope for more men of this kind.

Like a skilled advocate, Chynoweth has marshalled an impressive body of evidence to counter the claims of radical feminists that men and women differ only in plumbing. He begins by addressing the question of whether there is a right order of the sexes, and proceeds from that to how art, culture, and literature address the issue. Marriage next engages his attention; this is followed by an examination of Biblical paradigms, then an extensive discussion of Catholic thought on the nature of the sexes and the proper roles of each in the Church. Protestants will also benefit by these discussions; in concentrating on their disagreements with Catholicism, they often forget about how much all Christians can agree.

Chynoweth turns his guns on feminist “scholarship” or “herstory” in the following section of his book, exposing its shallow assumptions and fallacies. Anyone who has witnessed the proliferation of victimology in the universities, and the establishment of various “studies” as supposedly respectable academic disciplines, must be dismayed by how much our respected citadels of learning have come to resemble Swift’s Academy of Lagado. Chynoweth’s challenge to these developments is vigorous, and not likely to win many admirers among the professoriate. The rest of us, however, can enjoy it. This discussion is followed by an equally extensive section on “non-feminist” women writers as well as a few miscellaneous feminists.

The two final sections review a broad spectrum of literary and philosophical approaches to the subject, ranging in time from classical antiquity to the present. The reformation and the romantic era are compared in the persons of John Knox and Robert Louis Stevenson. Another Scotsman, Adam Smith, is considered, not from the point of view of his famous Wealth of Nations, but from that of his less well-known but equally important Theory of Moral Sentiments. The feminist “goddess” movement receives brief mention and is correctly tied to 19th century irrationalism and occultism. Aristotle, Irving Babbitt, various 19th century thinkers, Henry Adams, Richard M. Weaver, final contrasting examples, and a conclusion complete the text. Extensive notes (over 70 pages) are placed at the end of the book, and there is a bibliography and a thorough index.

The error of feminists has been to borrow the thinking and the rhetorical devices of an egalitarianism conceived in opposition to social hierarchy. Not all inequality is based on superiority and subordination, in other words, the kind of inequality that exists between king and subject, or master and slave. A saw and a hammer are certainly unequal, but their inequality is not one of worth or status, it is one of type or purpose. This inequality does not reflect adversely on the value of either--indeed, both are necessary to build a house. The inequality of man and woman is similar. The estate of woman, as wife and helpmeet, mother and nurturer of children, is no less (and no more) worthy than that of man as breadwinner, paterfamilias, and defender of his native heath. Each complements the other, and both are necessary to create a family. Such families, in turn, are the building blocks of the larger society, and on their strength depends the soundness of the whole edifice.

If I had one criticism to make of Chynoweth’s book, it would not be of what he says, but of what he does not. Marxism is mentioned at only three points in his book, two of them in passing. Despite this, it is much more central to radical feminism and the attack on the traditional family than this sparse coverage would imply. Marx railed bitterly in The Communist Manifesto against “the claptrap of the bourgeois family,” and Engels quipped that the only difference between marriage and prostitution was the term of the contract. We make a mistake if we view Marxism purely as a scheme to nationalize the ownership of business enterprises. Marx understood that economics began at the level of ho oikos--the home. Marx despised the family because he correctly saw it as the fundamental unit of the society he wished to remake on a different model. To him (and to his followers), the family was an institution that fostered inequality by standing between the individual and the state, and perpetuated it by inheritance (which he wished to abolish). Later disciples of Marx refined and developed his antipathy to the family. The guru of the ‘60s New Left, Herbert Marcuse, protested in his Eros and Civilization against “the repressive order of procreative sexuality” and voiced his hope for a “change in the value and scope of libidinal relations” that would “lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.” In view of the collapse of state socialism in Russia and eastern Europe, and a continuing inability to persuade the American public to accept more than half-measures towards state control of the economy, we should not be surprised that the Left has redirected its focus towards what Marx and Marcuse identified as their fundamental objective--subverting the traditional family.

Marxists have been aided in this process by the large contingent of neo-Malthusians, with their prophecies of doom through overpopulation. Birth control and abortion were first legitimized, against all traditional moral belief, by a fear of this putative catastrophe. As they became more widespread, this justification was abandoned in the prosperous and developed countries in favor of overt appeals to hedonism and selfishness, summarized in the popular euphemism “a woman’s right to choose.” Nonetheless, and in spite of all the evidence contradicting it, neo-Malthusianism continues to influence the formation of government policy around the world and to exert a malign influence against the family both at home and abroad.

The Left has also found influential allies amongst people of abnormal sexuality. It is a truism that many of the leaders of modern feminism are lesbians. The popular feminist slogan some years ago was “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” This is perfectly understandable if the woman in question is homosexual! This review is not the place for an extensive discussion of the politics of homosexuality and the “gay marriage” movement. Suffice it to say that their partisans always put their arguments in terms of rights and of the supposed unfairness and cruelty of denying to homosexuals the rights extended to heterosexuals--but the instinctive suspicion conservatives feel towards these ideas is well founded in light of Marcuse’s desire for “a change in the value and scope of libidinal relations.” We would do well to remember the admonition of Alexander Pope:  

 

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien

As to be hated, needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.  

 

As the public moves from endurance to pity, and finally to embrace, we may well see unions based in sodomy legitimized and celebrated by the state as equal in value to marriage as it has customarily been understood for the past 3000-odd years. While this would suit homosexuals for obvious and personal reasons, the Left as a whole understands all too well the effects of such a step: to devalue and diminish the standing of the family “begun in matrimony and ended in patrimony,” and undermine the foundation of a society based upon it. This is why leftists who have no seeming personal stake in it promote “gay marriage.”

Chynoweth expresses the hope that

. . . there must be some vestige of common sense in our people to convince them of the advantages of a civilized culture so that, instead of surrendering to an unproductive standard for the female of the species, they opted for a healthy balance of male and female roles and fortified themselves with determination to stay the course this time.

Better understanding the origins of hostility to the family, and how these have contributed to the phenomenon of radical feminism, makes us better prepared to combat its pernicious influence.

--Michael S. Swisher