It’s been nearly three generations since women became a protected Affirmative Action Class. This gave Women, even wealthy educated Women, the power of government to accuse employers of discrimination, forcing employers to prove their innocence.

For 60 years, it has been illegal to discriminate against Women in education and employment. For years, women have outperformed men at every level of education: High School Graduation, Undergraduate, Graduate, and Doctoral levels. 

Upon graduation, Women are given priority hiring, by law.

Yet, nearly every person who identifies as a feminist will define feminism as fighting for equality.  For reasons I’ve gone into in great detail. This feels so good to believe that it doesn’t matter if it flies in the face of facts, logic, reason, or ethics.

All of this requires a faith that blocks out a plethora of available information. It also requires maintenance of contempt for fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers while overlooking the realities, agency, and power of your sisters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers to do harm.

In the second video in her series, Feminism Was Never About Equality,  Dr. Fiamengo dismantles myths about the origins of feminism that were being propagated by a conservative writer as late as 2021.

So persistent is the idea that “feminism” is about equality, it actually makes us uncomfortable to hear this story has always been a myth. If Women are to truly earn the respect and dignity that are afforded men, this comfortable fantasy is going to have to be reevaluated.

Dr. Fiamengo covers some uncomfortable and unquestionable realities about the history of the leaders of the feminist movement.  While there have always been reasonable men and Women in the Women’s Movement, the pathological lies, bigotry, and ideologically puritan bullying were not introduced with the 2nd and 3rd waves of feminism.  

These have been features of this movement for well over 100 years now.  

The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which I will explore in greater detail in this series, has been accepted as the reality of men and Women of the day. The signatories of this Declaration made claims that flew in the face of reality, but have been accepted as fact ever since.

The use of derogatory slurs such as Toxic Masculinity and universal victimhood of Women are hallmarks of this repeated nonsense.

In fewer than 14 minutes, Dr. Fiamengo exhibits the power of logic and reason, and use of historical documents, to eviscerate the astonishing fantasy that the women wealthy enough to attend the Seneca Falls Conference, or sign its “Declaration of Sentiments,” were oppressed.

They more privileged and protected than nearly any men in human history. 

Notice how this Declaration takes all power from Women and gives all of the agency to men. For 175 years, virtually no academics before Dr. Fiamengo have publicly criticized the historical inaccuracy and pure pathological fantasy of what is claimed. 

Declaration of Sentiments

• He has not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
• He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
• He has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
• Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
• He has made her morally an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
• He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of the women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of a man, and giving all power into his hands.
• After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
• He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
• He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
• He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.
• He allows her in church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
• He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
• He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
• He has endeavored, in every way, that he could destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

We are nearly 200 years into a modern propaganda war. Lies and bondage fantasies that have affected legal, family, corporate, education policy.  All based on the fantasies of wealthy women. 

The astonishing number of powerful men willing to sign on to what is easy to see as bigoted libel against working class men should be a tell.  For 100 years, since women’s suffrage, these powerful men have worked with the Women’s movement to undermine men and children has been nearly unquestioned, until now.

Imagine a world where we can all be humans who can speak the truth about issues that women face and that men face, that children face, and that we face as a society, together.

Dr. Fiamengo opens the door to that possibility.