Yes, some people may occasionally take it too far in the other direction, as humans tend to do. Forcing a boy to play with dolls against his will is just as bad as forcing him not to. But that's nowhere near as large or widespread a problem as traditional gender-enforcement still is today.
The typical narrative we are fed regarding women's rights is that women decided one day they didn't like being oppressed as they had through the ages and fought for equality which they got. The problem is that this narrative doesn't actually work. It supposes a sort of oppression a few centuries ago that is really hard to support on the evidence, and it supposes an equality today which is just as far off. Also not all feminists have adopted this narrative. Many post-modernist feminists (for example Robbie Davis-Floyd) have not.
It is worth remembering that Jefferson's campaign called Adams (in 1800, LONG before the 19th Amendment) "a hideous hermaphroditical figure, lacking the force and firmness of a man, and the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Far from the oppressed narrative here, this quote strongly suggests women having important roles in the political discourse. We see this also from letters in the day. Similarly there were whole industries dominated by women before they were industrialized (interestingly depending on time and place this included not only textile manufacture but also brewing, midwifery, and more). So before industrialization, women had businesses. They were entrepreneurs, and strong active players in both politics and the economy.
What happened though is that the women's industries were the ones which were industrialized most heavily and consequently between this and urbanization women were kicked out of the economy. I strongly suspect also that women's political institutions (which were relatively informal but no less effective) were also destroyed. Feminism, women's suffrage, etc. to my mind is a reaction to that sort of inequality that industrialization brought.
On to the issue of complementary natures. The question I think is the question of an aversion to essentialism which is generally seen as constraining. This is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon. Essentialism which presupposes that women are by nature both more gentle and sensible than men, but that men are more predictable is not so oppressive and that's the sort of essentialism one sees in pre-industrial America. This was not new. Chris Faraone in his excellent study "Ancient Greek Love Magic" talks a lot about drama and love spell formulas in ancient Greece in terms of complementary forms of misogyny and misandry (and contrary to what the male Greek writers thought, women had a lot of power in ancient Greece).
Of course the truth is probably more abstract than was seen by any time and place, but some patterns are unavoidable. If women's political work is behind the scenes, then reliability and keeping one's word becomes very specifically an important male trait (because it is what assures a woman that her interests will be protected), and it means that men largely navigate a social world created by the social entanglements of women.
The complementary natures are not "stay at home and raise kids" vs "go accomplish stuff" but rather "working together and socially" vs "going off by oneself to work alone." This one pattern is extremely common.
I could go on for hundreds of pages, but I will stop here.
One of the recurrent problems though is defining oppression. What usually happens is that folks project assumptions about the way society works based on the US today to times and places that are very different.
Two things I have come to conclude though:
1. In most times and places, power relationships among women have greater variety, complexity, and nuance than power relationships among men (and therefore defy formalization to a larger extent) and
2. Almost anywhere you have patriarchy you also have matriarchy. The two, instead of being opposites, tend to go together.
1. In Middle Eastern cultures, the husband's mother has a very strong matriarchal role to play in the family. These are formally some of the most patriarchal cultures in the world, and in particular the young wife is one of the lowest-status members of the household. (But the highest status is that of the husband and of his mother.)
2. This may seem very anecdotal, but if you have ever watched "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" there is this discussion about head of household vs neck of household. My wife (Chinese-Indonesian) always points to that scene as how women operate in Chinese-Indonesian culture.
First, that you have made it so far in life with such a thorough and articulated idea of what feminism is without even considering that you might have a slightly lopsided perspective, that perhaps your rebuttal to feminism perhaps coincides a little too conveniently with what you believe and doesn't seem to challenge you in any way -- that should be applauded as a feat of human obstinance par excellence.
Also unsurprisingly, when given a chance to substantiate your very large claims you provide an absurd caricature of Arab cultures, and some comment your wife made while watching a movie. It is literally amazing to me that -- unless you are posessed of remarkable self-awareness -- you are able to, given this evidence, continue to adhere to a worldview which is predicated on the supremacy of your beliefs, and that you can continue to believe in that supremacy even having looked over your own writings.
Literally, the only substantiation you have provided are abject speculations. You have simply declared your interpretation of a Jefferson quote to mean whatever you want it to mean, you have not at all demonstrated that women possessed political influence at the time, nor have you attempted to show how very obvious mechanisms against those efforts -- e.g. lack of suffrage, complete lack of female representation -- are mitigated or made irrelevant by any of this.
Your recollection of the history of feminism is pure fantasy, a Potemkin village constructed solely to assuage yourself apparently. That you cannot apparently analyze even to a first order your arguments herein and find them lacking suggest that to me that you are predisposed to accept the products of your own prejudices without much deliberation.
The facile composition of your argument coupled with the smug manner in which you present them, the certitude that you have reached meaningful conclusions with this lazy thinking -- well, I am left astounded.
The citation is "Etching Patriarchal Rule" by Elaine Combs-Shilling, which discusses henna ceremonies and family structure in Morocco.
The observation is that every one of us has lopsided views that, for sake of getting everything done, we must generally assume to be mostly correct.
(Also, I have lived among several cultures.)
I mean, you're correct that nobody can possess true objectivity. But the conclusion to be drawn from that, the better conclusion to me it seems, is that your own ideas need to pass through much more rigorous filters from multiple -- even antagonistic -- perspectives before being suitable for consideration by others.
About supremacy of one's own ideas -- yes we all have this bias. The point is that, knowing that you have this bias, it seems to me that you have not attempted to correct for it at all. As you have presented them, these ideas fall down to even basic opposition.
> why are you limiting your analysis to intra-household dynamics only?
Because before industrialization:
1. Most households were businesses, and
2. Society largely functioned as a union of households, not a union of individuals (Indonesia is still this way, btw). Interestingly this was the basis of Aristotle's social theory and is generally considered to be representative of the Indo-European world before industrialization. From this perspective democracy would mean "one household, one vote" which is a fair summary of the pre-19th Amendment status quo, actually. Obviously this doesn't work if votes are private (and secret) or if women don't have the keys to power by collaborating to get agendas passed.
So intra-household dynamics is the question of power where those are the case.
Edit: the other problem is that extra-household dynamics and gender before industrialization leads to all kinds of apple/orange comparisons. How do you compare political assembly membership with collective plotting on political issues while washing laundry down by the river? Does it matter if the man's wife will likely know how he voted?
Obviously the household exists in a context regarding dealings with other households in a traditional culture so intrahousehold dynamics are important. Again, I said I saw modern feminism and women's suffrage arising as a response to changes in the interhousehold space brought on by industrialization.
This being said matriarchy and patriarchy are almost always a question of intra-household dynamics. The question is, whether women effectively hold the keys to power or whether women are isolated from eachother, unable to effectively organize and make their agendas compelling. A strong matriarchy/patriarchy in the household is a good indication of women being able to do this (again one sees this in Greek material despite the fact that the society was formally patriarchal with formal privileges associated with men only, see the drama of Lysistrata for a dramatic account, but also look at Faraone's works cited above).
The family is also generally a state in miniature. What goes on with the family is a mirror of state power structures (see Elaine Combs-Schilling, "Etching Patriarchal Rule" for some brief discussion of this, but also see "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich for a psychologist's view). So intra-household dynamics are the among the best indications of political power structures in the whole of society.
In short, whoever has power at home, has power everywhere.
Well, there are things called social norms. That they should be allowed to do such things is also a social norm. I don't see any real argument about one being better than the other.
That you're allowed to post this comment is a social norm. Not allowing you would also be a social norm. Is there no real argument for why you should be allowed to comment?
Yes, I don't. I take a more philosophocal stance to the issue of society than "freedom above everything". That's not to say I'm against freedom, but I understand that they are nuances to that.
For one, everybody acting the way he pleases, even in areas that seem innocuous or totally a personal choice, can have potentially harmful impact to society at large.
Who's to say what's harmless? This requires a notion of harm, and harm to one's customs/preferred way of life/kind of society he wants, is also a kind of harm.
Even something as basic as the right to eat whatever you want (e.g consequences for obesity rates, social welfare costs, etc). So it depends on what the priorities are. Not everybody, and not every culture, puts the individual ahead of society. Nor it is self-evidently right to do so.
>That you're allowed to post this comment is a social norm. Not allowing you would also be a social norm. Is there no real argument for why you should be allowed to comment?
Well, not really. If the goal of the forum was "total openess and free expression for all", there would be an argument against disallowing certain people/comments.
But if a team, X, built a forum for a specific purpose, why should they allow anyone not aligned with that purpose to post in it? People make choices, not only about how they personally live, but also about how other people shall behave if they want to use/live in etc what they've built, from a country to a web forum.
Any evidence of that?
*I'm sure you can cherry-pick unusually liberal examples of either, but you know what I'm talking about.
Perhaps in some very conservative societies.
Where I live I'm confident that a boy who enthusiastically engages in things which actually interest him is at a social advantage over boys who halfheartedly pretend to enjoy in whatever his parents think is normal.
Ballet, for sure. Maybe not dresses so much, at least not if he is doing the wearing, but having an interest in the clothes of his female peers certainly isn't any kind of social problem.
What gulfs?
Men and women are complimentary. The masculine and the feminine interplay between each other and cooperate toward mutual benefit. There is no gulf.
I reject the notion that we somehow have to eliminate the feminine and the masculine, to be left with some sort of androgynous average. That's just nonsense.
And yes, some men can be feminine and some women can be masculine, and we all certainly have characteristics that can be described as one or the other, but they can and should be described as one or the other. Not as some gender-less PC nonsense.
There is nothing wrong with being a masculine man. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine woman. And there is nothing wrong with the array of all the other possibilities. There are no gulfs that need bridging.