In part III of 'What's wrong with the world' I find myself disagreeing with Chesterton. He argues why women should not have a job outside of the house and not have the right to vote. Of course he wrote in 1910, so some years before women actually got the right to vote.
The argument that a woman who stays at home can remain an 'universalist', while her husband who has to work is a 'specialist' has been discussed a few days ago: this is apparently Chesterton's main argument on why women should not have jobs.
For the voting question it is argued that women should remain innocent of the responsibilities of citizens (such as capital punishment). Chesterton believes that most women do not want the vote. Women, furthermore, already rule in their respective houses and in society, in a manner appropriate to women. They always professed that politics was not serious; in a manner they were above it.
This was one of the few arguments where I really felt as if Chesterton lived a hundred years ago. Usually, he seems to be almost prophetic in his analyses of modern evils, but I cannot see the position of modern working and voting women as problematic in Chesterton's sense.
But as Chesterton said in other writings, right and wrong does not change simply because time has passed. I admit to reacting strongly when I first read that he didn't think women should necessarily be able to vote, and there are instances throughout history where women have had to work outside the home (almost always in the lower rungs of the social hierarchy), but can you find a reasonable argument (other than "times have changed") against women staying home? If the family is the fabric of society, and women are forced to work for social/financial reasons, what becomes of the fabric?
ReplyDeleteAnnabelle74, what about singularly gifted women: artists, singers, engineers, mathematicians... they should be silenced? Be told that they can't get a job at the university, or if she does they can only call herself a teacher? They can't be opera singers, but only sing in church choirs? They can't produce animation series or movies, but only sell hand made comics and paint china for fun?
ReplyDeleteTake Emmy Noether, who discovered a connection between continuos symmetries and laws of conservation, which is fundamental to our present understanding of physics; Lisa Meitner, who got snobbed out of the Nobel's prize, despite the discovery of fission being mainly her achievement; Rosalin Franklin's X-ray diffraction images which allowed two other famed scientists to discover the molecular structure of DNA. All of these women had to endure a lot of shaming, harassment, and worse from their colleagues and they didn't get a shadow of the honour they deserved. Nor any pay even approaching the amount of work they put.
And Chester did nothing to help them against these injusticies. He likely made it worse, since his writings are still influencing catholics to this day. Giving distributivists, who not only long for the ideals of that society and an end to abortion, but are pining for a day when women are finally home where they belong.
Likely he wasn't aware of these injustices them. Beyond his wife, and the occasionally woman writer, I'm not sure how closely he understood women. Usually when Chesterton describes men, that's what he does, describes a particular man be that Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, or anyone else. He will of course touch upon manhood abstracted from men, but he never talks about individual women, he always talks about womanhood.
You're also committing a fallacy, Chesterton being wrong in certain ways about women, which he was, doesn't mean that he was wrong in all ways. His essays had some predictions that came true, even though its largely a caricature of feminism which is being presented. It works, sad to say, mostly as a propaganda piece, but there's some truth in it.
In the light of what we know about women today, we can recognise his faults. That's likely what Elsbeth means, by his views looking quant. Not all old things are true, that's antiquuism, which is dangerous though not as dangerous as modernism. Just because Chesterton was not a modernist, doesn't necessarily put him on the side of good in everything.
Is Chesterton guilty of misogony? Yes, however his culpability of this is questionable. He defended the natural order as he best understood it, and he got a lot right, but there are places where he obviously in the wrong.
Just as Thomas Aquinas got it wrong that women were inherently less talented, intelligent, willfull or responsible than men. Or that the human soul first enters the developing life after 40 days.
There's no shame in recognising these flaws, understanding how either men could make them.
G.K. Chesterton’s thoughts on the differences between the sexes did not begin and end with the issue of the vote. Far from it. As he saw it, the differences were much more profound and much more mysterious than that.
ReplyDeleteWere these differences rooted in biology or in something else? Was it a matter of nature or nurture? Chesterton did not claim to know. Nor did he care to try to answer such unanswerable questions. Instead he directed his readers’ attention to something called tradition.
Of course, tradition must be a matter of nurture, mustn’t it? Once again, Chesterton preferred to look at life, rather than attempt to explain the unexplainable.
He also preferred to focus on the “average man” and the “average woman,” all the while, without formally saying so, knowing that there are always going to be exceptions. Those no doubt would be the exceptions that proved the rule.