How Feminism Negates Folkways

3,863 words

“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfill; but they are HUMAN duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same. To become respectable, the exercise of their understanding is necessary, there is no other foundation for independence of character; I mean explicitly to say that they must only bow to the authority of reason, instead of being the modest slaves of opinion.”

–Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792 [1]

“The sacred is the unconditional respect for something.”—Alain de Benoist [2]

According to an old folk saying, “Cabbage, like a good wife, is often taken for granted.” Your reaction to that statement will show you either just how far both a staple European foodstuff and a staple European occupation have fallen in your estimation, or how much you are in tune with our ancient folksoul. Cabbage is unpopular these days, considered a vile and stinky vegetable, abandoned to short stories about the lives of the poor and a half-hearted appearance on fewer and fewer tables every March. Good wives, too, are unpopular. Taking either for granted as the prop upon which life itself is sustained is unthinkable these days for most people. What a shame. At least the dependable cabbage has been replaced by various vegetables of equal or superior taste and nutrition.

Despite the long term damage inflicted on the Northern European peoples by the yoke of Christianity, it is feminism (not femininity, not strong womanhood, but feminism) which has done the most deep-seated harm to us. I say this because, while Christianity converted the veneer of us, we must always keep in mind that the Christ of the European people is typically blue eyed, light brown haired, and pale skinned. Our ancestors were Christians (or so they thought), but the god they followed was not the woolly haired fellow from the south; our ancestors, who were the Northern people that became converted to Christianity, were following what you might call a Christian-overlay of their indigenous religion . . . an overlay that did not fully obscure (it actually tended to preserve) almost all of the ancient beliefs. Yes, these beliefs were sometimes, and to different degrees, distorted, yes these beliefs were sometimes permuted . . . but, to this day, they were never purged. Never quite.

Everywhere Christianity has gone it has had to subsume the worship of native divinities. . . . Actually the lore, myths, rituals and beliefs of the church often accommodated themselves to heathen practices. Examples of this are found in everything from the adoptions of the pagan calendar of festivals to popular things such as the Christmas tree, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Indeed, heathen forms and practices survived in syncretization with Christian customs both positive and negative. [3]

As a people we were able to continue to exist within the confines of a stranger faith—the green man peered from the churches as our gods went under different names, meanwhile the old foods, the old tales, the old ways remained. As a folk we could, and can, withstand Christianity, the fact that you are reading this sort of essay in this sort of media is ample proof of that, but as a people—a race—we cannot withstand the onslaught of diminishment from within.

As a people, we need families, and all that a traditional family life encompasses, to continue, (indeed to maintain), our rightful presence in the world. When the basic units of the family are blasted apart . . . then everything we are, as a people, means nothing. We’ll be gone.

The family is the pillar . . . By tradition, people have been devoted to family, and rightly so, for the family is the basis of all enduring social achievements.[4]

As regrettable as Christian conversion is, and while the roles of men and women were disrupted at this point, importantly, the family unit continued. Thus the core of the folkways survived, to be handed down with the recipes, the traditions; the parents passing them to the children one generation after another.

Traditionally it is a woman’s role to feed the race and it is a role that gives most of them a real joy. But equally important is their attitude towards life, a love of the soil and of nature’s work, their songs and dances, their fairy tales related to the children, their anecdotes, proverbs and riddles, their famous spinning evenings where work and fun are so intermingled that the spinning and weaving takes on a festive air, their embroidery and carpet weaving, the making of the peasant costumes, the painting on pottery and even the painstaking carvings on their wooden household utensils. All this gives them no time to feel bored. They are busy and happy.

It is a tradition from olden times in Romania to look with reverence not only upon God, but also upon the earthly good he gave us, like bread, water and the fruits of the fields. And this respect applies also to cooking. It is considered a sin to change in any way the patriarchal dishes and drinks which their beloved ancestors have created and passed on to them.[5]

Two thousand years is a long time, and still we remember so much of who we were and what we did as a folk.

Break this line and you break the back of who we are, one and all. Take the links from a chain and there is no chain left—only disarticulate pieces. For being such a ‘modern’ invention, feminism has wrecked havoc nearly beyond salvage, for the damage it does is irreplaceable destruction. Far more damage than Christianity – which did harm enough to women by devaluing and oppressing them . . . but, at least it left them where it found them: still in existence as the heart of the family, with their valuable customs and folkways (if not their native religion) gathered around them.

Common sense dictates that the lesser of two evils is better than the greater. The European-descended folk alive today are better served by a devout Christian woman in braids and long skirts who has 18 home-schooled European-descended children than by some Mjollner-wearing SCA ‘battle Valkyrie’ feminist who has not provided a child for our folk future. With the 18 children, no matter how non-truly-European their present Christian faith may be, there can be real hope that their descendants will return to the authentic folk way. With no child, however, there is no hope to be had.

Feminism negates the value of, and therefore repudiates the existence of, the good wives of our people and replaces the important role of the feminine with nothing at all.

It never intended to replace it with anything. Feminism doesn’t exist for the good of goodwives. Feminism exists to feed and support two main agencies of modern social construct. These agencies are capitalism “with its transformative process of turning the sacred into the profane, and the worship of crass materialism”[6] and cultural Marxism.

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism.[7]

Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s: “The visible impact of feminism.” . . . “The transformation of family life,” including “rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media. The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general . . .”[8]

Cultural Marxism thrives on false equality and the break up of family, folk and faith. Mom working for wages as well as Dad means that no one is working for the folk at all and, who needs Mom AND Dad if they both do the same thing (work for wages)? Who needs marriage? Who needs, for that matter, children? Single people are greater consumers of so many more service industries than even dual wage families are.

According to the Frankfurt School ideology, Europeans who identify with family, nation or race suffer from a psychiatric disorder. In the ideal Frankfurt School world, Western nations would become therapeutic states. They would be dedicated to rooting out the remnants of adherence to traditional cultural forms of family, nation, religion and race in their citizens. . . . In this upside down world, families that are proud of their ancestors, concerned with moving up socially or even having biological heirs are viewed as pathological. In fact, one might conclude that the real agenda of The Authoritarian Personality [a major work of the Frankfurt School intended for an American audience] is to pathologize adaptive behavior in general. Those who value highly committed marriages and cohesive families, who are upwardly mobile and seek material resources, who are proud of their families and identify with their parents, who have high self-concepts, who believe that [religion] is a positive moral force, and a spiritual consolation, who strongly identify as males or females — but not both! — and who are socially successful and wish to emulate paragons of social success (e.g., American [or cultural] heroes) are viewed as having a psychiatric disorder. . . . Good parenting, upward social mobility, pride in family, religion, nation and race were all suspect. Many of the central attitudes of the 1960’s counter cultural revolution find expression in the The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, uncommitted sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, [religion] and patriotism.[9]

Without family, without faith, the whole issue of us becomes a non issue. We exist as a folk with a distinct history, culture, worldview, and folkway because we continue our lines down through time. We exist because we wanted to exist in the past, and we can only exist if we want to exist in the future. Having no families means having no future, means having only a very materialistic here and now, with nothing else at all.

Viewed at its most abstract level, the fundamental agenda of the Frankfurt School [and therefore feminism itself] is to influence European peoples to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. People who do not identify with the basic social categories of family, religion, nation or race would not be concerned with their demise.[10]

We don’t need the ‘help’ that feminism seems to give to the women of revealed religions—we never have. Let’s face it, our ancestors were neither women haters nor men haters—they were people who recognized the divine in the winter woods and the summer sun, who took part in Krampus events and Mothers Nights, who revered Freya and Frey, who found wisdom in the Norns as in Odin. The Valkyries are not the Einarhjar, yet even today, in the midst of mostly unchallenged feminism and all that this movement has influenced, does any one of us think one better than the other? We wouldn’t, because they aren’t.

Our folk’s feminine heritage is a strong and valid one; it is a heritage of balanced power, respect, honor, and action. The feminists today chortle with self satisfied glee about getting women the right to vote, but . . . all the feminist movement ever did was to “return” to us what we already had before. This is why free-thinking, unoppressed, strong women are so natural to us.

Though the revolutionary women’s movement has done some great things to reestablish our valued status, we still have a long way to go before regaining the stature we held in the prime of our folk history.[11]

The stature we held in the dawn of our people’s history was not one of women versus men, like it is now. It was a stature based on mutual respect, on equivalency of value. Our ancestors—female and male—were equal in all dealings from the moment they matured to womanhood and manhood. And their equal footing was not based on women behaving like ersatz men—which, when you look at it, is not equality at all but a pathetic mimicry.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic [as well as Femino/Marxist] idea of just one life, after which you either go to heaven or to hell gives the impression that time is running out. Some even think ‘you have to get everything out of this life, because when you’re gone, you’re gone, so grab all the gusto that you can’. This has given the Modern Western woman the idea that she is not getting everything she should, and therefore the man’s world looks doubly attractive, because she is just passing through and will never come back. So, living a man’s life is very, very attractive. She doesn’t want to stay home all the time and not see anything, not meet anybody, go through the boredom of raising a family, talking care of the children. She wants to be out with life, functioning in a man’s world because she is told that she missing something.[12]

No wonder modern women leap headlong into the feminist notion that equality means women being exact copies of men (men being the default normative against which women’s value is weighed) instead of seeing equality as our ancestors did: each gender equally balanced to the other, with female gender having no need to try and become like the male.

Our equal gender footing–before Christianity–was based on the healthy respect of each for each. Respect for the warrior, respect for the weaver, respect for the father, respect for the mother. Respect for those who bear the arms and those who bear the keys. Raising/nurturing the family properly and protecting/providing for the family properly are of crucial and very equal importance to a healthy civilization, a strong people, and a spiritually vital folkway.

Idun holds the seeds of new life which must be awakened each spring to release Midgard from the world of winter and death ruled by etins. Her might keeps the forces of chaos and uncertainty at bay every bit as much as Thor does.[13]

We must bring every facet of our daily lives in line with our convictions of who and what we are, and who and what we wish to continue to be. We are a folk, with a heritage worth every conceivable effort to preserve and enlarge upon. This effort must be a practical one as well as a spiritual one. Every home is holy. Each act of home making has a spiritual as well as practical purpose. Every member of a home has a distinct and distinctive part in the running of it. The roles of man and woman/ mother and father/ husband and wife are each distinct, distinctive and important. Neither is transferable; neither is superior. As our Vedic cousins note:

From the point of view of the Second World, or astral plane, the home is the family temple and the wife and mother is in charge of the spiritual environment. The husband can come into the sanctum sanctorum, but should not bring the world into it. He will naturally find a refuge in the home if she is doing her duty. . . . He needs that inner balance in his life. . . . If a woman is working [for wages outside the home] she cannot provide this balance. She has to start thinking and acting like a man. She has to become a little tougher, create a protective shell around her emotions. Then the home loses its balance of the masculine and feminine forces . . . [14]

The importance of the family, with the sacred feminine roles of mother and wife, carefully installed in the heart of it, cannot be overstated. Even today, in one of the most liberal progressive weeklies out there, The Willamette Weekly, where you can get phone numbers for single women chat lines, get directions to erotic balls, obtain information on herpes support groups and find out how to adopt away your unwanted baby (“living expenses paid”), the truth about what is best for families still shows itself.

Under the ‘Adoption’ heading of the October 14, 2009 classified ads, an ad looking for “a precious first baby”[15] appeared. The prospective adoptive mother listed herself as a college professor and journalist—reading between the lines you can get a sense of a woman who’s biological clock stopped ticking either due to a youth spent working to be the best man-like woman she could be, or due to years of birth controlling hormones designed to make her body as unwomanly and unnatural as medically possible (so she could be the best man-like woman she could be without all those nasty female side effects!). The ad states this at its conclusion: “will stay at home mom.” A simple eloquent five word statement, intended to persuade, designed to show what a good mother this woman would be, how she will do the best, be the best, give the baby she wants the best that can be given. How up-to-date she is. How utterly feminine her impulse.

Biology, culture and spirituality are all intimately connected, and any attempt to separate them is doomed to frustration.[16]

To make a difference, we must be different. We are the deed that says: “I know my value as a human, as a parent, as a spirit, as a people—and thus I know everyone else’s value as well. I am the deed, I am the decider. I know that my folk is wise, my folkways valuable, my time here of worth. I know that my decisions will not be the same as decisions made by those of other peoples and stranger faiths. I am the deed that breaks with these foreign ways. I am the deed of coming home, of acknowledging what is right and, of fixing what is wrong. No matter how difficult, no matter how it looks to a thought-manipulated PC mainstream set up to judge and thus keep me from upsetting the status quo, no matter what.”

If we believe in . . . family lines, who are these children we are abandoning to daycare in order for their mothers to leave the house?[17]

As a committed group of people, we need our families to be strong. We need our men to be successful as fathers and husbands, we need our women to be successful as mothers and wives. We need our children brought up at home, with values and ethics and spirituality that reflect our commitments, our outlooks, our culture, our age old folk ways, with nourishing food made properly, with love, with trust, and with people who know and respect them both for who they are now, the ancestors we share and the future folk we shape together.

We who seek the revival of our native faith and a resurgence of our people owe it to ourselves to our ancestors and to our descendants to explore every possibility.[18]

As hard as you think it might be, there is no room for lack of conviction in the bringing up of the next generation. Having a traditional, one income family, with feminine and masculine roles naturally delineated is still viable. It can be done, and is being done, by families who have chosen to follow their reason and their heart rather than be led around by their economic noses.

Respect for our forefolk [and thus our folkway] may be expressed in a variety of ways. Especially in the way we live our everyday lives.[19]

The writer of this essay is a stay at home mother of three, who homeschools, has home-birthed, and cooks three meals a day—sometimes more if there’s a holy event coming. The old folk wisdoms come into play every minute, and the commonplaces are made sacred by the fact that everything we do is done for the good of our family, of the folk, and for the future as well as the present. Our home, like so many homes where a mother is the feminine core and a father is the masculine guardian, is at once happy and holy, chaotic and charmed, timeless and very much part of a long chain of once-upons and here-and-nows. The past and the future meet constantly, in each of us. Remember who you were and who you are going to be. We can do this, all of us. It is doable. It is desirable. It is of the greatest importance.

Don’t break the chain.

If you would like to obtain recommendations about resource books pertaining to various aspects of traditional householding, email the author through this site.

Householding Creed

(Inspired by the Homemakers Creed of the Home Legion, 1944)

• I believe in the feminine heart of the home.
• I believe householding is an irreplaceably valuable role.
• I believe householding requires various skills, noble arts and knowledgeable ways.
• I believe a people are known by their homes.
• I believe every family and home reflects the soul of the feminine.
• I believe a homemaker must adhere to the highest standards of faith, folk and family.
• I believe that no aspect of householding is too lowly; life has many facets–dark as well as light, enjoyable as well as tedious—for all.
• I believe that householding done well adds to the good of us all as a people.
• I believe homemaking is one of the most important jobs on earth and has an influence on our folk both now and forever.
• I do not put faith in foreign ways or feminist agendas; I know what is right for my family, my folk and our future.

Notes

1. Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) (New York; Dover, 1996), p. 50.

2. Alain de Benoist, On Being A Pagan, ed. Greg Johnson, trans. John Graham (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), p. 18.

3. Edred, Witchdom of the True: A Study of the Vanir-Troth and the Practice of Seidr (Smithville: Runa Raven: 1999), p. 16.

4. The Indiana Asatru Council, “What is Asatru?” Idunna, vol. 5, no. 24, September 1994.

5. Anisoara Stan, The Romanian Cookbook (Secaucus: Castle Books, 1951), p. xii.

6. David J. Stennett, Foreword to Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality (Newport Beach, Cal.: Noontide Press: 2004), p. xv.

7. Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Cambridge: South End Press: 1999), p. 2.

8. William Norman Grigg, “Toward the Total State,” The New American, vol. 15, No. 14, July 5, 1999.

9. Kevin MacDonald, Foreword to Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (Charleston: Book Surge: 2007), p. xix.

10 Ibid., p. xxi

11. Mark Puryear, The Nature of Asatru (Lincoln, Ne.: iUniverse, 2006), p. 131.

12. Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, Living With Siva: Hinduism’s Contemporary Culture, 2nd ed. (Kapaa: Himalayan Academy: 2001). p. 254.

13. Alice Karlsdottir, “Idun,” Runa Magazine no. 18, no date, p. 24.

14. Living With Siva, p. 253.

15. Classified Ad under column “Adoption” from the The Willamette Week, October 14, 2009.

16. Stephen McNallen, The Hoosier Heathen Hoedown Hawg Roast; A Wotan’s Watchtower Publication, Issue 1 (private program); Nov. 18, 2006, p. 3.

17. Dave Hobson, from a private speech given by RavensHalla Arts Publishing, Portland, Mothers Night, 2009.

18. Stephen McNallen, “Comments on Carl Jung’s ‘Wotan,'” introduction to Dr. Carl Jung’s Wotan; Nevada City: private paper distributed at the AFA Winter Nights, 2007.

19.  James AllenChisholm, True Hearth: a Practical Guide to Traditional Householding, 2nd improved edition (Smithville: Runa Raven: 1994), p. 4.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Heathen Thought, vol. 1 (Charleston: Heathen Publications, 2010).