The Anti-Feminist Culture

With social media's dominance in the years since its conception, information has become easier and easier to display and spread on a grand scale. With this immense power of the individual has come a precariously balanced sense of what it means to label one's self in today's age. It can be difficult for many to distinguish the facts from the opinions, as well as misconceptions. One of the topics to be blown into the spotlight in the past few years has been feminism, with what at first glance appears to be a dichotomy- a person is either a feminist or an anti-feminist. The battle calls into question what feminism really is, considering its diversity in regards to its followers, and the reason why the "meninist" culture has sprung. There are three
The first "took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage". She continues, "In its early stages, feminism was interrelated with the temperance and abolitionist movements… [and] some claimed that women were morally superior to men… so their presence in the civic sphere would improve public behavior and the political process." Advocating for the vote, allowance to attend college, and the ability to find a career in law or medicine were the cornerstones or first-wave feminism, and they were largely
This is a side of the story not often told in history textbooks or even by today's anti-feminists, and there may be a very good reason for that. Nancy Isenberg, a historian at Louisiana State University, wrote in her book titled White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, that what we believe of our country and its history is both inspiring and crippling. She states that the promise of the "American Dream" and that all are equal was a selling gimmick, and history as it is taught and presented in pop culture is written by those in power- the dark sides of the story are not told. For an anti-feminist, this is perhaps a good thing. Tom Head, a civil liberties expert with About News, gives a timeline of big moments in anti-feminist history, starting with Sex in Education: Or, a Fair Chance for Girls, in 1873. In this, Edward H. Clarke argues for sex segregation in schools, claiming that women are "incapable of grasping the same kinds of ideas that men and boys study". From there, it quickly grows from sentiment to movements of its own. Head mentions the 1917 assault on suffragists at Occoquan Workhouse, and the "Austrian League for Men's Rights, founded to '[combat] all excesses of women's emancipation'" coming onto the scene in 1926. In 1972, he says, the Eagle Forum led by Phyllis Schlafly is founded to combat feminism