From the Easy Chair
Feminism
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 94-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161BX138
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BX138, Feminism, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 248, August the fifth, 1991.
Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss the subject of Feminism. This is a very important subject in our time especially because we have such a militant movement that has been in action since Betty Friedan wrote her book The Feminine Mystique. Now at the time it was written no one would have envisioned what came out of that book, because so many of us read it and found it laughable. The same was true of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Both books were full of so many absurd statements, so much nonsense that it was hard to believe that out of them could come the militant movement that arose. And, of course, it was marked by the absurdities that are almost too many to name.
I know that at one time when I was at the California State Senate talking with one of the Senators in his office and he told me of the really crazy bills that some of the Feminists were trying to get him to introduce and he was ticking them off and ordering them out of his office. But he said, “They get introduced all the same.”
And I said, “Why don’t you go them one better? Carry it to the point of absurdity. Pat, have a bill introduced that will make it illegal for women to have babies until men also can do the same.”
And he said, “Rush, I wouldn’t dare.”
[ Scott ] It would pass.
[ Rushdoony ] There are too many Feminists who would fight for that bill immediately, because, after all, they go through the valley of the shadow of death to have a baby and why shouldn’t men suffer similarly?
[ Scott ] Yeah. We will be reduced to sperm banks pretty soon.
[ Rushdoony ] So it has reached the point of absurdity. And this is not the first time. It has done that before in history. Just in the last century there was an attempt to translate the Bible or rather to pervert the Bible into a Feminist book and refer to God as she. And the belief was that God had to be feminine because God was too sensitive to be masculine.
[ Scott ] You and I, see, belong to a course breed.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, yes. Like water moccasins, I suppose, or something like that. Well, Feminism is waning now a bit, but is no less militant.
[ Scott ] Well, its stronghold seems to be as so many other things, in the universities.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And there is now an entire area, a whole sector of books by women. Now I remember. I have read books by women from the time I was able to read and so did you. Jean Stratton Porter, remember?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And her girl of {?} was it?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I have forgotten now.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Yes. And Merry Rheinheart and...
[ Rushdoony ] Grace Livingston Hill...
[ Scott ] And... and all kinds of...
[ Rushdoony ] ...produced shelves of books.
[ Scott ] Yes. I ... I remember and I read them without distinction. Some of them I liked and it never occurred to me that literature was a matter of sex, because most of the best sellers, by the way, since the term was coined, have been by women, because most of them have been novels. And women are very good at novels and I have often wondered why they are especially so good at detective novels, depicting how to poison husbands and so forth. I... I have always looked at that whole thing with a little bit askance. They are more dangerous than they seem these people.
But now that they have put them under the heating of Feminism, I no longer read theml.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ... because the whole idea that they reflect an idealogy, an anti masculine ideology causes me to lose interest in them.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I am not going to... I am not going to be involved in that sort of literature. I do not believe that women have been less important than men, but I think their conribution throughout history has been indirect. Now the men have held the official roles and there is now way that you can write history without talking about what the general did and what the king did. Although the queen may have been important, it was the king who ruled the roost and the generals who went into battle.
The history of the world is masculine history and to claim otherwise is to distort history.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And because history barely mentions farmers doesn’t mean that mankind has dependend on them from day one.
[ Scott ] Oh, absolutely. But we all know, too, that history is never complete. That there is no way that the historian could know how one man or one woman looked at somebody else and how in that one glance an acomodation was made, the deal was made an understanding was reached which had no trace anywhere at any time. So the majority... the life of history is something that we will never understand. We have to go by the letter of history and the letter of history is masculine.
[ Rushdoony ] I get the catalogs of a number of university presses. And it is amazing to me how many of the books published by the university presses today are what I would call faddish books.
[ Scott ] Oh, yes.
[ Rushdoony ] They are in women’s studies, American Indian studies.
[ Scott ] Right. One issue... one issue.
[ Rushdoony ] And...
[ Scott ] One issue books.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Environmental studies. Always by the faddists in these fields so that the universities are pouring a great deal of money and time and effort into creating special departments where none should exist and publishing libraries of books that are really nonsense.
[ Scott ] Well, they are really are comparable to what magazine articles and good magazines like Harper’s Atlantic were like the 30s and 20s. There is no more substance in them than an article used to contain. If you recall those essays they were quite heavy and complex. Today they are really light weight and the books are either overly pedantic or very light weight.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. If I may digress, I think a great deal of the blame for that goes back to John Dewey. Now John Dewey was a master of evasiveness.
[ Scott ] He was a very muddy writer.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, his idea was to take what if stated plainly in one essay would upset people because they would understand what he was saying, make it into a book, a long wordy book. Someone described him as having verbal diarrhea and so much of the scholarship that has come out now on these faddist fields is that sort of writing. It very often has all the pretensions of scholarship. It is muddy writing, as you said, and full of footnotes and bibliography, but saying nothing.
[ Scott ] All the operatus. Well, it has had a tremendous affect upon women and it has a tremendous affect upon male female relations.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Now earlier we were talking about masculinity and I drew a parallel between the level of a person’s masculinity and his attitude and treatment of women. Let’s reverse this. You can estimate a woman’s femaleness, you might say, by her attitude toward men and her treatment of men. Now we have on the one hand, of course, we have the pervert, the lesbian. We have on the masculine the homosexual and ... and the abuser, the wife beater. But I have seen women, and so have you, who have gotten on top of their husbands and like the old witch of the sea and claw at him forever. They won’t give him a divorce. They won’t leave him, but they make his life living hell for ever. That is the equivalent of the wife beater in the female side.
[ Rushdoony ] There are actually about as many and some authorities believe more husband beaters than wife beaters.
[ Scott ] Well, I don’t...
[ Rushdoony ] That the men are unwilling to report it.
[ Scott ] I understand that lesbian relationships are often violent and that many of the battered women come from the butch dykes who beat them up. That has never been printed.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] But it is well understood.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] The ... then you can go from the actual torment that some women subject their husbands to, to just the normal nag and I am in charge of this and you don’t know anything and so forth and so on, intellectual abuse in a way.
Do you recall that book that we both read about the feminization of Americal literature?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, of American culture.
[ Scott ] American culture.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Well...
[ Rushdoony ] By Anne Douglas.
[ Scott ] By Anne Douglas, an excellent book.
[ Rushdoony ] Remarkable.
[ Scott ] At the end of the Civil War, after the civil war when everyone fled into business and the hard sciences and the arts were left to drift and for the women to take care of, well, this, in effect, put a lobotomy across American men... men. Unlike the men in any other country, American men came to believe that all forms of art were feminine, including literature. I... in this... and this claim is to this day. I remember telling a fellow who has a small oil company that I had written several oil company histories.
Well, he said, “Yes,” he said, “My wife reads books.”
And obiovsuly she had convinced him that women own books and that if he wasted his time reading books he wasn’t doing the manly thing. This is a form of abuse.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, Hegel’s concept of the war of the sexes has done incredible damage because instead of men and women seeing that they need one another and can only function best when their lives are meshed, they see anything that the other does as an attack upon themselves.
[ Scott ] As competitive.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I mentioned earlier when we were not on tape that I am reading Caper’s book on John Calhoun, opportunist. Well, John C. Calhoun was a pathetic man, very important in American history and deadly in his influence. But Calhoun’s ambition was such that he sacrificed every other aspect of his life of politics. He lived apart from his family a good deal of the time. He couldn’t be bothered with family problems. He concentrated on one thing, winning the presidency. And that is why he lost it, because he became such a sterile mind. And his thinking...
[ Scott ] You have to have a lot of friends to become president.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now he was not philosophically oriented at all in his political thinking. But the most common term applied to him by men in his days is thinking is too metaphysical. And they were saying this because someone it was not real. And the metaphysical they associated with Transcendentalism and the egg heads up in New England.
[ Scott ] Right, sure.
[ Rushdoony ] And here this fellow was talking in abstractions.
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] And it was because he had delivberatey improverished himself in terms of his ambition. So he was half a man.
[ Scott ] Well, leading women into abstractions about feminine rights to the extent... I recall... I get letters and especially when I was being published more widely, I used to get letters from women who objected to the language, who objected to using masculine pronouns, the word man as a synonym for humanity. And I remember on one occasion I wrote that this particular woman who wrote a novel was poisoning the well. And I said the publisher had better take more.... pay more attention to the cooks. And I got a letter, very sincere letter and... and formal language from some woman attorney in Washington... Chicago who took great exception to that joke and didn’t obviously know that it was a joke. And I see letters in the Wall Street Journal today and in other publications from women objecting to language, ignoring the thrust of the statement to insist that it be couched in feminine terms. And here we have this philosophy that women have been subjugated all their lives.
Well, my father who used to wax very eloquent against the United States because he said that this was a woman’s country. He said, “The women take charge of the boys.” And he said, “The wives take charge of the husbands.” And he said, “It is not a man’s country.” Most American Feminists would be very astonished to hear that. But he could see it very clearly because he came from a man’s country. And I see it and so do you. When you go to London and you see the stores in London you see that there are as many stores for men as there are for women. And you go into a jewelry store you see cuff links and stick pins and so forth for men. I get catalogs in which there isn’t a single item of jewelry for men, not one, not one. Apparently cuff links are out of style and so forth.
We have come to a very strange condition and I remember I was trying to think of her name. I knew then commissioner of corrections in New York City in the 60s. And Beuford Peterson who was running a half way house was a friend of mine. He took me to meet her. She was a very impressive woman. She was a little bird like Jewish woman and she had this big car with a chauffer and she was in charge of the Ryker’s Isalnd penitentiary and all these other institutions dealing with these very difficult problems. She had been raised by Margaret Thatcher in an apartment over a store in a rather poor section of the city. And I think when I talked to her she must have been either in her late 60s or early 70s. And I don’t know how we got on to the male, female thing, but she said the women of the United States are no longer taking care of the men.
Now that this a concept which you never hear. And yet of the two sexes, I must say, I think that men fall apart a lot easier than women do without women. Whereas women...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...can live without men without falling apart.
[ Rushdoony ] That is right.
[ Scott ] Of the two sexes, one needs more support than the other.
[ Rushdoony ] Men become very sterile without a woman.
[ Scott ] They don’t seem to be able to take care of themselves.
[ Rushdoony ] It is a rare man.
[ Scott ] The... they... they get... they get eccentric.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I have known a handful of men who don’t get warped by that.
Well, you as surely as I recall when we were boys and men wore bowler hats, a suit and a vest.
[ Scott ] Oh, yes.
[ Rushdoony ] A pocket watch.
[ Scott ] A chain.
[ Rushdoony ] ...with chain.
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] ... in their vest. And the boys were expected to wear vests, too. But they weren’t men yet. So you didn’t... you were given a dollar watch and they were good dollar watches in those days.
[ Scott ] The thing I hated was knickers.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I hated them, too.
[ Scott ] Gosh, how I hated those things.
[ Rushdoony ] They never...
[ Scott ] They weren’t good for anything except putting apples into.
[ Rushdoony ] They never caught on in California.
[ Scott ] They didn’t. Oh.
[ Rushdoony ] They were strictly eastern.
[ Scott ] How luck you were.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I had them when we were in Rio de Janeiro and I attracted crowds as I walked along the street. Honest. People pointed to me, pointed me out.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, when we came back from Detroit to Kingsbury, I got out of my knickers in the rest room and into a pair of pants.’
[ Scott ] Oh, how lucky you were.
[ Rushdoony ] ...before I landed and I made sure ... I had gotten a pair of pants.
[ Scott ] My mother held out as long as possible, because she said it would make her look old. Talk about women. Carry on.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, I recall one man, a Serbian who told me that when he graduated from school then he was given a watch, a gold watch by his father and grandfather to put into his vest.
[ Scott ] The real thing.
[ Rushdoony ] Gold chain, because he was now a man. And he was told what a man’s responsibilities are.
[ Scott ] Well girls today... I don’t know ... they are having trouble finding men. One of the results of the sexual revolution has been that a premature experimentations with sex has destroyed love.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And this has always been true. A promiscuous girl has always grown up without love or into a situation where she would not have love, because she would lack the position of respect that chastity brings. And, of course, the spiritual strength that accompanies it.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And this is a very important topic, because these young women are being misdirected. They are being told that to be sexually active is all right as long as it is safe. But what is it safe from? I mean the idea that you can have sex and be safe is an absolute fallacy.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] There is no way you can be safe. If you don’t get a disease that is not safety. Your heart can be broken. I remember very distinctly a young woman, a young Jewish woman in San Francisco years ago who was given a very impressive courtship or a seduction effort by a young and very wealthy Israeli. And this was a Jewish girl, very beautiful. And she asked the advice of the other women in the foundation where she worked and we told her to go ahead. Don’t be a fool. And she went ahead and then, of course, he rejected her and went back to Israel to get married. And she as absolutely devastated, devastated. She had fallen in love with him and she had assumed all sorts of things which didn't work.
That story could be multiplied now by the millions.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Women have been encouraged by Feminist propaganda to destroy their own children in the womb and to become promiscuous as part of their rights.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And promiscuity has never helped women at any time anywhere.
[ Rushdoony ] No. And we have had in the evangelical churches the same decline of chastity, because preaching has become so pietistic it has not related itself to the problems of the world outside the church door.
[ Scott ] The clergy is not protecting the people.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] It is supposed to protect the people from these traps.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, Dwight Craig has observed that in most churches their theology stops at the church door. It doesn’t go out into the world. And he is right.
[ Scott ] Now I don’t recall and neither... I am sure you don’t either.... a single historical incidence of any culture anywhere at any time that tried to treat both sexes the same. Now we hear now that women are to be in combat. The Israeli army, it is true. The Israelis use women in some ... some combat roles when they were conducting their unofficial war against the English to get the English out of Jerusalem and out of Palestine. And in the early days of the repelling the attacks of he Arabs against them. But they very soon discovered that it didn’t work. It didn’t work for the women and it didn’t work for the men. Today they have less of a term in the military than the men do. They have different conditions. They are behind the lines. They are in service departments. They are stenographers, et cetera, radio operators and so forth. But they are not combat troops. And I read an article by an Israeli veteran who went through the whole sequence, not a young man, obviously. He sounded like he was in his 50s. In his last sentence—I will never forget—he said, “A country that uses women in combat is not a country worth defending.”
[ Rushdoony ] Good for him. Good for him.
[ Scott ] Well, we are talking about the destruction of a civilization.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Feminism is the cutting edge of a destructive effort against women. You mentioned before the rise of rape. Well, if men can no longer have to protect women, what is to stop them from rape? And the men of the United States are not protecting the women from rape.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] They are not doing anything to the rapists. They are... their wives and their daughters are afraid to go out in the street at night and the men are not there to protect them. What can we say about the relationships of the sexes in such situation?
You would think as a matter of course that a man would say, “You can go out and I will go out with you and I will see that you are safe.”
[ Rushdoony ] Well, we are in the last days of a dying culture. And a culture that cannot defend its women and its children is dead.
[ Scott ] Yes, because your children ... you are talking about your continuity.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is sacrificing. It is killing its future.
[ Scott ] Yes. Who would ever believe that a million and a quarter women would kill the babies in their own womb every year?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I don't think I have ever seen an example of propaganda and its influence more markedly in my whole life. This goes against everything that women are for.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
Well, to refer again to Hegel on the concept of the war of the sexes, it has become so deeply embedded in our culture that a good deal of the humor now revolves around the idea of the war of the sexes.
[ Scott ] Do you remember Thurber’s book?
[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.
[ Scott ] The War of the Sexes?
[ Rushdoony ] Right.
[ Scott ] That was really funny, because he took it to a ... he had the general of the women on horseback.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And the general of the men on horseback and they had the battle of the bridge and so forth. In the end, however, he said nobody could agree upon who won.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, it has become a grim reality now and I am sometimes startled, although I should know better by now, when I hear some women express themselves on the subject, a very intense hostility to men. The idea that somehow men are out there to do nothing but to exploit women.
The failure of the churches in this sphere, I think, is a very, very important and sad aspect of the story, because there is not enough hard headed teaching on what the family means and what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.
[ Scott ] I don’t think there is any on that level.
[ Rushdoony ] No. All that you have and now a vast segment of Protestantism is at one with Rome on this. No divorce. In other words, we are not going to face the problems of what constitutes manhood, what constitutes womanhood, what constitutes a family and try to create strong families again. They are going to put the lid on things and say, “We don’t recognize the problems.”
One very prominent man tried to talk to me for an hour saying that the Christian position should be in total opposition to divorce. And I said, “Godly, biblical divorce its he cure for a problem. It is not the problem itself.” But the Church has failed signally here.
[ Scott ] They don't discuss the subject at all.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] I don’t recall every hearing a sermons on this subject.
[ Rushdoony ] No. You don’t.
[ Scott ] And women... the only things that I have read on this particular area have been very muddy. Margaret Meade....
[ Rushdoony ] Oh.
[ Scott ] Margaret Meade was one of the great propagandists in this area.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Now she did a study of primitive cultures, as you know, in the south... in Southeast Asia. And she took several tribes in one of those islands, several different tribes.
[ Rushdoony ] In Samoa.
[ Scott ] It was... well, it was...
[ Rushdoony ] And several others.
[ Scott ] Several others. And I have forgotten the title of this particular book, but she pointed out that what was considered women’s work on one tribe would very well be treated as men’s work in another. And she went on to say that in some areas women developed muscle... muscles, because they were put on tasks that men had performed in other areas. And then she said something which stuck in my mind and which caused... I had to think about it.
She said that there is a woman inside every man which comes forward in moments of tenderness and concern and so forth and a man inside every woman who comes forward as a warrior to defend the frontier when a woman is angry or attacked or something like that.
And she the... one of the problems, of course, is that to call out the man inside a woman all the time is to result in distortions and the same way if you call out the woman inside a man.
Now I thought about that and I thought, now that is not so, because what she was trying to do was to say that certain emotional responses are totally sexual and that men cannot be ...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...have a compassionate moment without being effeminate and that women can’t stand up for themselves without being masculinized. Well, this is not true. You know that women are very formidable when they get angry. And, of course, men even more so. And both sexes share emotions. I mean, you don’t... you know, you... the... the... the female dog will bite you as well as a male dog. And ... and... and let’s face it. I mean we are... we are rather formidable people as human beings.
But what she succeeded in doing by that sort of an argument was to confuse the genders and to confuse the profile of what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman. And there ... she was just one of a whole host...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...of people who were redefining the sexes of the American audience.
[ Rushdoony ] One of the books I was particularly delighted to see was Freeman’s book on Margaret Meade and the fact that her work represented fraud.
[ Scott ] Yes.
[ Rushdoony ] And the coming of age in Samoa represented not research, but pure invention on her part, because very vividly I recalled this. When that book came out in the mid 30s, at least, I read it and was totally offended and angered by it.
And a girl ...
[ Scott ] Well, that was...
[ Rushdoony ] It is almost...
[ Scott ] ... a book in favor of promiscuity.
[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes. A girl spoke very respectfully of Margaret Meade’s scholarship. Her name happened to be Dorothy also. And I blew up. When I quieted down she said, “I will never again mention Margaret Meade’s name in your presence.” And she never did.
[ Scott ] I went to her office at the museum of natural history some years ago with Beuford Peterson in tow trying to raise money for Peterson’s halfway house. And she had gotten in... she had some sort of a foundation grant and I thought it might fit and she together with whom she called Bill Douglas which was William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court. She had a... an office in the museum and it was a regular profosorial clutter office. And Peterson who was an impressive man described his halfway house and his efforts to rehabilitte institutionalized people and she said, “Well,” she said, “I... that is very interesting.” She said, “We will... I will send some of my graduate students down to intern with you.”
And I said, “Well, what Mr. Peterson needs is money enough to pay the rent.” I said, “He is really not... his facilities are really not to be used without giving him some help.”
And she hated me and she said, “Well, I am not a fund raiser.”
And I said, “But you have been noted for doing very well at it.”
So the conversation when down hill.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] She was a great woman to get money and not a woman to ask for money.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, she is one of the spiritual mothers of the current Feminists.
[ Scott ] Indeed, she is.
[ Rushdoony ] ...movement.
[ Scott ] Her person...
[ Rushdoony ] {?} a thoroughly evil woman.
[ Scott ] Her personal history is very interesting. She discarded men who helped her in her career including husbands. And wrote a series of articles that were basically mischievous in their overall effect. None of these people seem to really consider themselves responsible for results.
[ Rushdoony ] I was told by someone who should have known what he was talking about that in her later years she dabbled with the idea of women witches and played with the idea as a good religious belief for women.
[ Scott ] Well...
[ Rushdoony ] ...in their occult powers.
[ Scott ] She was a member of the Anglican Church at the end of the village, Greenwich Vilage. And she put on a film one day, one evening and showing a Japanese family in a great big hot tub together. That is where her hot tub stuff came from. And it was a grisly sight because they were the elderly grandparents or something, skeletal types and sitting with their bones sticking up out of the water... and... and other members of the family all in the same tub. And then a Canadian family exchanging Christmas presents. And she drew a contrast between the warmth and intimacy of the Japanese and the buttoned up carefully packaged gifts of that the Canadians were exchanging and made it seem as though one was terribly material and impersonal and the other was just wonderful and I had always thought that Christmas presents were great, especially if you had to unwrap them.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] The anticipation and the surprise and so forth. I... and I left raving into the sky. And I was never asked to come back after that. Those were my two encounters with Margaret Meade, both unforgettable in a way. She was one of a whole school.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] A whole school. Now Betty Friedan who you mentioned before is a divorced woman who collected and went to great pains to collect a great deal of alimnoney from her husband while she pursued her vendetta against his sex.
[ Rushdoony ] Reading her I find it difficult to imagine the man who would marry her. But I saw a picture of one. He looked like a normal human being.
[ Scott ] He must have been drunk.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, the sad fact is that young girls are being brought up with this kind of belief.
[ Scott ] Without protection.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They are exposed to the world. Now the fate of a young girl in a big city is almost a cliché of modern life for the last, say, 400 years, since the French Revolution and even before the French Revolution.
But today they are sent out into the world with sex education classes behind them, with encorugaements to do whatever they like and now, of course, we are beginning to see some of them who are approaching 40 who say that they have wasted their lives because they have tried to have a career and they have tried to have a companion at marriage, whatever you call it. They suddenly realize that they have no children. They have no partner or the partner they have doesn’t want responsibility. They have gone through a series of affairs. And this is terrible ... it takes a terrible affect upon the spirit.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I have seen some burnt out women who represented precisely that kind of life, a, pursuit of career and freedom to do as they pleased, were highly intelligent, very beautiful, thought they were on top of the world because they could command anything. And suddenly they were desperately alone.
[ Scott ] Well, you know what happens in the professional jobs or the business jobs. When a woman gets older those opportunities dry up. Younger and prettier women are brought in. And what happens to the career girl when she is 50? Unless she has made a very good marriage or unless she has saved her money, it is not very pleasant to contemplate. Now in the professorial world they are going to run into the competition from the blacks and the Asians the same as the white professors.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Right now the associate and assistant professors are having a great deal of trouble getting into a job. This is going to be true of the women as well, because to be both a woman and a minority is going to be more advanteageous than to be a white girl
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is a part of the process that Dr. Van Til so powerfully described as integration downward into the void.
[ Scott ] That is a tremendous phrase.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] It is a tremendous phrase. And the thing that gets me is that, of course, we remember when older men were treated with respecdt.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Well, that is gone. I go to the doctor’s office. I go to the dentist’s office and I am Otto. Some slip of a girl. And I have been told inferentially most of the time to be careful, but what really gets me is the coldness. They take on an official cold act. They are in business. I told you think of the conversation with the girl in my insurance brokerage when I protested at the cost of the insurance going up. She said, “If you can do better elsewhere, I would advise you to look around.”
And I have written a letter to Bruce Moore, the head of her agency to say I congratulate you on your sales representatives because if that this the way you feel, you will not have my business next year.
And these are attitudes which no man would use in dealing with the public. They come on as though they are school teachers disciplining you. And I understand also that women in business today are beginning to fall prey to the victims... to the disorders customarily associated with men. They are getting ulcers.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They are becoming alcoholic. They are having heart attacks. They are having high blood pressure. Because if ... if you get in the arena, you pay the price.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
Well, Rome went through all this. They went into a feminist culture. Their men became homosexuals and the culture became vulnerable to epidemics and plagues and it disingegrated.
[ Scott ] Well, the Persians had it first.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] At the time of Alexander the Greeks said, the Macedonians said that the best men in Persia were women.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, even before that in Assyria, the most militant power in all of history, no armies have ever brought more terror than the Assyrians did. And they were ruling the world of their time, the last of their emperors, when a foreign delegation visited and were introduced to the Assyrian emperor. They saw him powdered and rouged and playing like a girl with women of the harem and they left saying, “We will take them.” And they did.
[ Scott ] That is interesting because the historians of our day rated Japan as a predatory power. And they said the Japanese know weakness and when they do they attack. The first time they showed that was when they attacked czarist Russia and sank the Russian navy.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And defeated Russia. And the second time they did it is when the attacked us and defeated our Asiatic... our Pacific fleet. And I want to say now that the war in the Pacific was one of the most savage we have ever had, if not the most savage. It was a terrible war. All of the attention has bee placed on Germany. All of the attention was placed on bringing down Hitler and the sacrifices of our men in the Pacific have never been honored in this country properly. But ...
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] ... it was a tough thing.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, the reason for that is they hated and still hate MacArthur. No general ever fought more campaigns and gained more territory with less loss of life to his men, but his politics did not suit the media and they treated him with contempt through the war and the historians agreed and they blocked out all of that.
[ Scott ] Well, they... our two bets generals, Patton and MacArthur...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...were treated worse by the press than the enemy’s generals.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Now this was the beginning of the argument against men. And we didn’t recognize it at the time. It just seemed political, but it wasn’t political.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Nothing is purely speaking political. Nothing is purely speaking economic. Nothing is purely speaking sexual. All these factors come together into an overall reality.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Now the women that I saw in the war, saw some of the naval nurses. I remember I ran into the nurse in Hawaii who was quite a person. The women played a part in World War II and a big part, a bigger part in Europe because they were part of the victims. And in the Russian army they were part of the soldiers, because the Russians saw no distinction under Communism between men and women. They treated them both as cattle.
And the Russian women... if you ever want to see the end of the revolutionary effort we should take more look... a longer look at the women. What happened to them? By the time they are 50 or so they have these creatures over there sweeping the street, working in coal mines who are neithyer men nor women, but just simply brute animals.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] That is the end of the men and women as alike.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I mean to push American women out into the work force, they had first to reduce the men’s wages so that both parties have to go out in order to make a decent living or what they consider a decent living. Now women didn't want to sacrifice a living standard and stay with a poor man and build him. So it was easier for both to go out to work. So here you have the beginning of what the Russians finished. But we are continuing it.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, there is a reaction against that. There are more and more women who are refusing to work, who are insisting that they are going to stay home with their children. Many of them are home schooling as well. They are devising all kinds of things to get their families out of debt, to be economical so that two incomes are not necessary, because the two income family becomes very prodigal. They immediately set for themselves a very high standard of living...
[ Scott ] And very precarious.
[ Rushdoony ] And a very precarious one. They want to start at the top. And that is waning. And especially among the young couples, Christian girls they are determined that they are not going to fall into that trap and they are doing some amazing things.
[ Scott ] Well, that is very smart, because the income tax cuts very heavily into a double income. The expenses that a woman entails on clothes, grooming and just traveling to and from the job, plus the day care expenses take away almost all the extra income that they go to work to obtain.
[ Rushdoony ] I am going to be reviewing in one of the fall numbers of the Chalcedon Report a cook book. It is...
[ Scott ] Are you capable?
[ Rushdoony ] Well, no. But it is a remarkable cook book written by the wife of a young man on our mailing list and they have taken a stand with regard to debt. And she is feeding her family on an incredibly small amount of money, nutritious meals and she has prepared a cookbook for that purpose.
[ Scott ] Very good. It sounds good.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. A remarkable couple. I was delighted with her letter and then I was happy that she sent me the cook book to see what she has done.
[ Scott ] Well, you can buy beans and oats and all kinds of things.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] In bulk and cook them.
[ Rushdoony ] So she is working an economic miracle and she and her husband combined are working to eliminate debt.
[ Scott ] Well, you know, when we were young being poor was a condition that most of the country shared, didn’t feel poor.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] Didn’t feel poor.
[ Rushdoony ] You did not feel poor.
[ Scott ] No, no, not at all.
[ Rushdoony ] ...in those days.
[ Scott ] You had soup for Sunday and you had clothes. You had food. You had a roof over your head and what more did you want? What more did you need? What more did you have to have?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I can remember during the Depression in the farm communities it reached the point where as men’s suits wore out what they did was to retain the coat...
[ Scott ] Sure.
[ Rushdoony ] ...becuase that didn’t wear out and they used their new overalls with a jacket over it.
[ Scott ] Well, you remember the two patns suit, don’t you?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Why every suit had two pants.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Two pair of pants, sure.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, during the Depression they wore out both pairs. They continued to use the coat and a shirt and a necktie under their overalls.
[ Scott ] That is when...
[ Rushdoony ] Our time is about over. It... do you have a last statement?
[ Scott ] No, I don’t think so. I think we have boxed this particular compass.
[ Rushdoony ] Ok.
Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.
[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.