The future arrives with the Great Feminism

Rick McGinnis:

At the end of last year Helen Andrews (whose book Boomers I reviewed here five years ago) published an essay in the online magazine Compact called “The Great Feminization,” looking over the world now that women have achieved parity and are edging into dominance of certain professions and institutions. It was a sensation and a scandal, the way such things are, before subsiding into the background din of dissent and doom that passes for cultural discussion today.

Writing about Andrews’ essay here, Paul Tuns reflected that far from marking a high-water mark of wokeness, it was more of a warning that more was to come as the effects of that Great Feminization worked their way through schools, business, media, politics and the law. Tuns wrote, “Recent history has shown that major institutions are more likely to change because of the influence of women than women are due to the influence of rising through the corridors of power within these major institutions.”

When I read Andrews’ essay I couldn’t help but remember dozens of books I bought years ago, back when I was fascinated by the boom in “futurism” in the years of the dotcom boom. Inspired by earlier titles like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and The Third Wave, they responded to the rise of the internet, new technologies, and a rapidly shifting world after the end of the Cold War by building out scenarios for the apparently radically different world we were heading into, for an audience in the worlds of business and politics whose future relied on navigating these disruptive changes.

Often funded by consultancies and think tanks like the now-defunct Global Business Network and hyped in WIRED magazine, they laid out visions of the near future that ranged from dystopic to utopian, all before the internet had reached widespread adoption, never mind the birth of the smartphone or social media. One of these books, The Futures of Women by Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey, was workshopped with help from the GBN and published in 1996 by Warner Books, a Time-Warner company.

Subtitled Scenarios for the 21st Century, McCorduck and Ramsey’s book laid out four general directions they saw for women and society in general. “Backlash” is the most critical, a scenario where equality for women is slowed or even halted by reactionary forces in business, government, and especially the religious right. Here and elsewhere in the book the authors assume that Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are roughly equivalent in ethos and intention – call it the “Handmaid’s Fallacy.”

It’s bracing, though, to remember a time when progressives in general and progressive women in particular saw Islamic fundamentalism as their greatest enemy anywhere in the world where it had access to power That is especially now that last year’s Hamas supporters have pivoted to backing the ruling regime in Iran, on the simple logic that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

The second scenario, “A Golden Age of Equality,” is the most utopian, and rests on the assumption that positive trends the authors observed in the middle of the ‘90s would continue without interruption for the next twenty years. (They even imagine the peaceful secularization of Iran somewhere between 2010 and 2015.) And like so many futurists, they anticipate helpful new technology that speeds progress along, like “the biotech fix, almost here, that turns abortion into a nonissue.” They never explain what that fix is, however, and, in any case, abortion remains an issue 30 years later.

They imagine “smart drugs” that improve cognition, robots that perform menial tasks in the home, “e-sex,” a whole new menu of birth control technology for both men and women, parents pre-selecting the DNA of their children (engineering out “diseases like diabetes, schizophrenia and obesity”) to optimize the investment of time and money that children entail, and an “artificial womb, perfected in 2007,” mostly used by “executive and professional women” too busy to “carry their own babies.” (Instead, we have the ethically fraught practice of surrogacy.)

Like every so-called utopia, it’s actually nightmarish the more you think about it.

A third scenario – “Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back” – is basically stagnation. The book is peppered with fictional testimonies from women living in these future scenarios. One, by a 35-year-old “Information Validation Specialist” in the US, complains here about her school board resisting computers in the classroom because “teachers wave these fake studies that claim computers impede children’s motor and cognitive development, their social skills.” From the perspective of 2026 and widespread acceptance that screens everywhere have decimated attention spans and social media is dangerous to children and civil society, it’s a reminder of how we got here.

This scenario is the one that seemed most like our reality at first, and it imagines a powerful and politically active “elder bloc” who “continued to occupy the large houses they’d needed when their children were growing, partly because they had got used to all the space and were loath to sacrifice it if they didn’t have to.” But it doesn’t predict how those houses could explode in value, concentrating massive equity in one generation while making eternal renters out of the grandchildren of those elders.

A fourth scenario called “Separate – and Doing Fine, Thanks!” seemed the most outlandish when I read The Futures of Women 30 years ago, but it might be the one that came closest to predicting The Great Feminization. It imagines women despairing of achieving equality with the patriarchy still dominating government, business, and society and gradually self-segregating – into their own businesses and associations, setting up parallel economies within the larger one, and even creating their own communities or “femmunes” where men over 12 are prohibited.

On the surface this seems like exactly what’s happening in our Great Feminization as Andrews describes it, where women dominate HR departments, public relations, universities, law and medical schools, and newsrooms, and will soon dominate the judiciary. The authors of The Futures of Women lamented that as they wrote their book 95 per cent of managers of corporations were men – down just four per cent from 20 years earlier – and that if this trend continued women wouldn’t achieve parity here until 2270. In her essay Andrews notes that women are now 46 per cent of managers.

The futurist books I collected were full of blind spots, some easy to pick out even then. The Futures of Women is full of flawed prognostications, to be sure, but it wasn’t off the mark depicting scenarios where men and women were being set at each other in a world where success is a zero-sum game.

McCorduck and Ramsey also accidentally hit a bullseye when, talking about how the modern workplace makes family life difficult. They quote a “working feminist” who recalls how “We often used to say if men had to face the discrimination women faced, that would be the end of it.”

“But we were wrong,” she says. “Traditional businesses weren’t just antiwoman; they were antifamily too. I wonder where they thought their future clients and customers were coming from.” With birth rates in steep decline, it’s still worth wondering where anybody’s future clients and customers – and voters and taxpayers – are coming from. As long as we’re cultivating greater and greater divides in politics, classes, generations, and – as both The Futures of Women and “The Great Feminization” insist – between men and women, we’re creating a world of enemies, drifting steadily apart.

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