You’re kidding, right? “Seems to suggest”?!? Men and women ARE different, i.e. NOT EQUAL. Brain structure, brain chemistry, bone structure, bone density, organ arrangement (you may notice that lack of ovaries in your abdomen), muscle mass, etc. The ONLY way men and women can be considered equal is in an ontological sense.

Forcing society to treat men and women as the same is as IDIOTIC as forcing parents to treat their children the same, when the only measurement of equality is “do you treat them exactly the same?” Calling for society to treat them equally is just as moronic as forcing it. The useful question isn’t “are you treating little Kelly the same as Chris”, it’s “are you treating little Kelly appropriately for Kelly, and Chris for Chris?” [You may assign sex to the above children as it pleases you, what with the androgynous names chosen... :-) ]

As for the “evangelical feminism” characterization that the media has trotted out, that’s easy to explain. To them, without feminism, women CANNOT succeed, so any successful woman MUST be a feminist. The purpose of the terminology is to hijack success to serve their worldview, whether it is warranted or not. Were Palin and Bachmann simply evangelicals, it is inconceivable to the media that they could have succeeded, so there must be some stealth feminism afoot, and by gosh by golly, better make sure it is credited.

This actually makes more sense. It makes no sense at all for a woman to invest heavily in her career until she is in her late 20s or early 30s (or later), then have kids, so that her attention is divided right at the worst possible time.

Since women can’t have their children in their mid-50s – and since so many women agree that children need lots of direct attention from their mothers in the first few years of life – the logical supposition would be that the ideal time to have your children would be early, so that one could start building a career when the children are old enough to not need their mom around so much.

The problem, of course, is that this requires a strong, ideally intergenerational family. The wife must trust the husband, and the husband must be trustworthy. This does not seem compatible with many things prominent feminists have said about the advisability of trusting husbands, or relying on anything but one’s own income.

I’m not sure what you mean. The reason I support much of feminism is that for too long we have had a male-dominated society that has subjugated women and stripped them of their rights. Now, it seems that with any movement that tries to bring up the oppressed, there is a sort of tendency to see things in a zero-sum manner; that is to say, “Now that we’re trying to bring women up to the same level as men, men must necessarily take many losses.” My goal is not to make women better than men socially but to make them equals.

Now I am aware that there are some feminists whose vitriol towards men makes it seem like feminists want women’s rights at the expense of men’s. This I do not support, any more than those who claim that because of the horrific atrocities committed against African-Americans, white people are inherently evil and dehumanizing. I reject any such characterizations. I hope the feminist movement does not come at the cost of labeling all men as inherently evil. One of my philosophy professors said this well in a chapter he wrote on sexism:

“A third move is to avoid the notion that what women want is male guilt. i taught a feminist philosophy class some years ago and came home daily feeling beaten up by the readings. Men were often, but not always, cast as a major source of evil-and not wrongly so. My guilt nearly froze me, and my response for awhile was to think that I could not find a solution so there was no point in trying. Guilt is not a great motivator in finding positive solutions. Dialogue and listening are.”

(See McLeod-Harrison, Mark. Apologizing for God: The Importance of Living in History Eugene: Cascade, 2011.)

I think so. I once asked a feminist what feminism meant on a broad level, and she said that more or less all “waves” of feminism agree on the following:

(1) Men and women are fundamentally equal.

(2) There is a sexism, whether outright or subtle, that exists in today’s society, and we ought to move past that.

I think Bret’s point supplants the second tenant well.

Feminism, (without the advocacy of abortion) is not only a perfectly understandable development historically, but is based on sound moral reasoning.

Some credible emerging neuroscientific evidence seems to suggest that, the male and female brains possess differences, reflecting how evolution shaped us. For example, women tend to be better at verbal traits, men perhaps have better spatial abilities. These neuroscientific findings can be easily misinterpreted. For one thing, they need to withstand the test of time. If further neuroscientific studies reflect the brain differences seemingly deciphered in the current ones, we can have more confidence in the notion that men and women really do have these differences, and its not a reflection of the limitations of the studies.

And,these preliminary neuroscientific findings, if true,don’t, obviously apply to every man, and every woman. unfortunately, some people who don’t understand statistics, may have a propensity to misunderstand this. After all, they might retort, I know a woman with good spatial abilities, and a man who speaks eloquently.

But these differences, if they exist, have absolutely no implications for equality. Men and women are ontologically equal.

But at the same time Christians (largely) object to abortion. But society has so changed the term feminist and so closely related them with the pro-choice movement that in the political realm, it would be impossible to be considered a “feminist” without believing in the legality of abortion.

I’m not saying that this is correct, obviously I disagree, but the meaning of feminism has been, in my opinion, so overused and abused that it literally bears little meaning than simply a buzzword. It’s been used more as political ammunition than anything. “You believe political view X. Therefore you are not a feminist. Therefore you are a sexist”.

I don’t believe so at all. I’m a feminist, I suppose “without limitation,” but I think that women, just like men, have an equal obligation to not take innocent life. Moreover, I believe the rights of the female fetus in the womb are also to be considered.

Sarah,

That does indeed seem to be the issue, that of the functional level of male/female equality. Fortunately there aren’t many who hold an Aristotelian notion of the female.