An Anti-feminist Blast from the Past

One of the content producers I follow on YouTube will often make this point: Everyone born after 1965 is a feminist.
The first time I heard him say it, I thought he might be overgeneralizing. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Just thinking about my own experience - and I was born in 1966, so this statement applies to me – I have never known a time in my life when I wasn’t almost continuously assaulted with feminist propaganda. And I’ve always hated it. Yet there was no, or at least very little, pushback against it explaining why it was wrong.
There certainly seemed to be little appetite to push back on feminism from Christian sources, and this even though the Bible was replete with passages, some quite explicit, teaching that feminism was wrong and those who pushed its message were far from the mind of God.
John Robbins noted this and wrote,
The three books examined here are not the sort of books that one might hope, indeed expect, to come from Christian theologians who are confronted with a popular, militant, and anti-Christian movement like feminism. The rise of the women’s movement, with all its attendant evils – child abuse, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, and divorce – has not met the sort of strong Christian opposition that it would have met in earlier centuries. Instead of confronting this secular philosophy, Christian theologians, particularly the three who are the subject of this book, have sought to accommodate it by reinterpreting Scripture. They have in a measure conformed to this world, and they seek to conform other Christians to this world through their books.[1]
We in the 21st century are blessed beyond measure with wealth and technology. Yet, we do not realize our own tragic impoverishment as a result of our imbibing unbiblical and Satanic lies, such as feminism, that have done so much to rot out our souls.
Being so immersed in feminism as we are, it’s hard for men and women in the 21st century to understand just how far they’ve departed from the traditions of their forefathers and, more importantly, from the teachings of the word of God.
Just yesterday, I was watching a YouTube video when I was hit with a blast from the past about feminism that showed just how far we’ve fallen.
I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights,” with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to “unsex” themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.
An informed reader may already know who wrote those words, but this was the first time I had heard them, and I was astounded. They are from the pen of Queen Victoria.
Apparently, this is a well-known quote, but it was the first time I had heard it. According to the video I was listening to, she penned these words in 1870. And there are at least two important lessons we can take from them.
First, feminism didn’t begin with the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 but was around well back into the 19th century. To those who know the history of feminism, this, of course, isn’t a surprise. But I think not a few people will be shocked to learn that feminism was alive and well long before the 1960s.
Second, people from earlier and more Christian times weren’t afraid to speak out against feminism. Queen Victoria’s statement is far better than almost anything you’ll hear today from a Christian pulpit, even a conservative, Reformed pulpit. Let alone from a pulpit from a liberal church – I’m looking at you, PC USA - that long ago threw out the Bible’s teaching about men and women and their roles – yes, there are such things as men’s and women’s roles – in favor of the popular philosophies of this present age.
Third, many of the social pathologies that we suffer in the West – homosexuality, transgenderism, plunging birthrates, etc. – can be traced to the rise of feminism. This should surprise no one, as it represents an attack on our humanity, on the way the Lord made us.
[1] John W. Robbins, Scripture Twisting in the Seminaries Part I: Feminism (Jefferson, The Trinity Foundation, 1985) xi-xii.