Abstract

This essay attempts to make the case for including – even embracing – men in the fight for gender equality. I do not mean to argue that men should supplant women in this struggle, or that enlisting men implies dismissing or diminishing women. My aim instead is to make this fight less isolated and more practical, and to attack the so-called women's problem with a broader, blunter tool. If men believe in equality, then expanding that belief to explicitly include women is not a leap of logic or act of charity. It is instead a basic extension of a truth already deemed self-evident, and a channel through which men can begin to redefine their own identities and interests. Men have been an obstacle to women's equality for a very long time. Perhaps the moment has come to make them part of the solution as well.

Highlights

  • This essay attempts to make the case for including–even embracing–men in the fight for gender equality

  • After an exhaustive summary of the Bible–his era’s source of all guidance–Locke concludes that, “far from Establishing the Monarchical Power of the Father,” the Scriptures instead “set up the Mother equal with him, and injoyn’d nothing but was due in common, to both Father and Mother.”[2]. To write his better-known and more radical Second Treatise, entire passages of which were borrowed, almost verbatim, in the Declaration of Independence.[3]. His theories of governance inspired the American and French revolutions; his views on property rights carved the foundation for the modern capitalist state.[4]

  • In his 1884 treatise on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels lays out a vast and sweeping history of the family, arguing that “the first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding.”[6]. In pre-industrial times, he posited, this division was a gentle one, with men doing more of the hunting and women more of the gathering, trapping, and cooking.[7]

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Summary

Introduction

This essay attempts to make the case for including–even embracing–men in the fight for gender equality. Letting men into the tent of gender equality just at the moment when it suits their self-interest risks obviating the struggle that women have fought, alone, for so long.

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