Feminism and Individualism

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men but over themselves.
-Mary Wollstonecraft

I will like to start here by building my argument on Ayn Rand’s philosophy. She stated ” how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to the world without them. I derive from her the concept of primary movers and state how women in their own ways are primary movers and they have been treated viciously. There is immense hatred against the whole concept of womanhood. She is just treated as a tool for sex and reproduction, while men reap the benefits of their labor.

Backstabbing of women at family and workplace: Women have to deal with more of backstabbers than men especially if she is one of the prime movers.[1] Thus as prime mover and mother, she is a threat to the world order so she has to be shown her place. She is often backstabbed by her family and work which does immense harm to her mental and physical well being. Women have to face sexual and psychological harassment at work. Psychological harassment continues at her home as well which can take the form of marital rape and involuntary sex within the domestic sphere also. Glass ceiling is faced by women at the workplace. While at home they have to bear the burden of bearing children. Some scholars would say that it is a voluntary decision and that they should not be treated as victims but the fact is that women have played no role in it as they have been deceived into believing by a society that this is the life they eventually will have to lead. Thus it is not an informed decision Criticism is good but if it means hurting them irreparably something needs to be done to restore the world which we are currently visiting. Ayn rand protagonist was a male, but if it were a female as a prime mover her problems would have been much more. Because she would have not just to deal with a backstabber workforce ie where she works, but to the family which is one of the prime backstabbers.

It’s not just men who would backstab an independent woman but also women who have been absorbed within patriarchy.[2]  Family whether before or after marriage is the worst refuge for women. It doesn’t provide security for women. To become successful in the world she has to struggle a hundred times more than men because it is a man’s world and their way of looking at the world prevails. It is not a women’s world.

A women absorbed in family before and after marriage is must to preserve the patriarchal world set up. Indulging in sex with men and having children is a must to be preserved within this set up. French Feminists like Cixous thereby attack the father and threaten them with castration. I would say its not just fathers but also mothers who attack other prime mover women because these women have been absorbed by the patriarchal system.

The family and workplace unite to set such women, prime mover, in order. This is the scene that has to be taken cognizance of by contemporary feminism. So many feminists and gay men and women were inspired by Rand’s work, even though she was the kind of lady who would have lamented both feminism and the gay and lesbian movement.”[3]

                                                         II

Religion 

LOSS OF WOMEN S RIGHT TO INDEPENDENCE

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

There have been several crimes against humanity committed by humans in the name of religion. The so-called repositories of religion have tried to capture women’s souls and bodies from time immemorial. Gurus in India especially have worked to preserve the set up of family teaching morality to them. The present-day preachers across religion are just talking peace and love but in turn, they are asking the ignorant populace to hero-worship them. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that these preachers have practiced manipulating techniques, rapes, black magic against their vulnerable followers. Can nobody in the world see this fraud happening against women in the name of religion be it Muslim, Christian, or Hindu

I guess individualism and religion would stand poles apart. Individualism says first know thy self and then rely on anybody be it even your parents and who in the developing countries like India are propagated as sacrosanct. The religion teaches us to respect parents even if they are not just mentally harassing a person or sexually harassing a person in terms of having marriage which inturn means have sex with somebody you would otherwise not want. Does these elders’ society do even understand what religion means? Religion should be the one that supports true individualism rather than curtails the spirit the individual spirit exerts. So Individualism is especially in the present times because it is special for women’s rights who need to have right over their bodies in an absolute sense. What kind of an uncivil society would it be where women are forced into sex because of  particular religion. Any religion which is doing this needs to respond over its basic scriptures. Women’s freedom of spirit is paramount any religion is to continue to flourish in the times of liberalism and feminism. Women are traditionally controlled by religious psychology. Some religions however are more controlling women than others. This is for example very true of Islam which is one of the most dominant religions in the contemporary world. Christianity doesn’t fare far behind because of their emphasis on treating women as second based citizenship due to the whole debate on abortion. The whole issue of conversion is again extremely problematic for women in religions like Christianity and Islam. This is in these religions men have been taught by their scriptures that men are meant to not just sexually but also psychologically control the women’s mind. But why name just these religions the tradition amongst Hindus for example too for first fathers and husbands to control women sexually and psychologically is extremely problematic. The married women for example are supposed to wear vermilion and a mangalsutra which are literally problematic because they are symptomatic of a bigger problem lying underneath the system. So most religions of the world have done much to disempower women rather than empower them for centuries. That the need in contemporary times is for a theory based on individualism. This is because individualists would say respect yourself first, your own personhood rather than what has been taught by some religious text. Weigh it according to your personal thought, want, and what one needs. How can one justify religions which keep women in chains and grant no freedom of living, voice to be heard in contemporary times? In fact, religion has done much to defeat feminism even in the present times. Women because of religion do not have a voice and women have been psychologically brainwashed into believing that religion serves their best interest. Women and in fact men also do not know where their best interest lies. People should be free to follow a religion or abandon it. Why should we not question religion which has kept young women and in fact men too both in chains of following not one’s own self but somebody else? Women’s voice is especially muzzled in this respect. She for example in the present times does not have the right to stay single in most religions. They are coerced into believing that marriage is the ultimate end of human life. They are unable to understand even in the so-called developed countries that their own citizens young or old, men and women can also have other choices or options. One doesn’t have to be a slave to any religious ideology. All individuals have the right to make their own decisions. This is how one realizes how much of any religion or ideology one is supposed to follow or not follow. They don’t have to become herds or follow priests without thinking. A religion whose texts do not defends its follower’s choices needs to be abandoned by all young and old men and women. In fact, they are hardly libratory. What they do is to put people into ideological chains so that people cant question them.

                                                            III

INDIVIDUALISM AND LACK OF FREEDOM

Religion is more like false consciousness. It wants you to think about another world that may or may not exist. Young people therefore increasingly feel enslaved in the whole whirlpool of religion.

Individualism speaks against this move of religion. According to scholars of individualism, people not just in one country but all countries need to enjoy their basic liberties. Be it western, Islamic, Hindu, or Cofuscist. Young people across the world women or men need to be given an urgent rescue from the ideology of religion because they have been fooled into believing that religion is the ultimate rescuer from any problem in the world. Science of any kind understands the need to question not just society but also one’s own priority in Life. Individualism supports this kind of trend. So across religions, it can be an emancipatory and liberatory theory not just for young but also for old.

 Ayn Rand says “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth. Evil requires the sanction of the victim. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against the legally disarmed victims.

                                                               IV

ON BEING MOTHERS AND WIVES

According to Betty Friedan, “Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts, and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question– ‘Is this all? Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her child We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn’t it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society’s job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency, and immaturity that is mistaken for “femininity.” Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren’t girls forced to grow up – to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique? “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love.

.women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.” 

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.” “The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.”

VIEWS ON MARRIAGE

One of the biggest contributions to the women’s movement was Susan Anthony’s views on marriage. As a young worker in the women’s rights movement, Susan Anthony expressed frustration when some of her co-workers began to marry and have children, sharply curtailing their ability to work for the understaffed movement. When Lucy Stone abandoned her pledge to stay single, Anthony’s scolding remarks caused a temporary rupture in their friendship. Journalists repeatedly asked Anthony to explain why she never married. She answered one by saying, “It always happened that the men I wanted were those I could not get and those who wanted me I wouldn’t have.” To another, she answered, “I never found the man who was necessary to my happiness. I was very well as I was.” To a third, she said, “I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealth she became a pet and a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been a drudge or a doll for fifty-nine years. Think about it!”

Susan Anthony fiercely opposed laws that gave husbands complete control over the marriage. Blackstone’s Commentaries, the basis for the legal systems in most states at that time, stated that “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage”.

In a speech in 1877, Anthony predicted “an epoch of single women. If women will not accept marriage with subjugation, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The woman who will not be ruled must live without marriage. . Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.
Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage. And during this transition period… single women make comfortable and attractive homes for themselves.

[1] Ayn Rand was not exactly friendly toward feminists because most feminists are left wing.”

[2] See. Susan Moller Okin, Is multiculturalism bad for women? Princeton university Press, 2001.here she states how older women in family oppress younger women.

[3] Maureen O’Connor, Ayn Rand, Girl-Power Icon, https://www.thecut.com/2014/11/ayn-rand-girl-power-icon.html,2014

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