Chapter Seven: How the Devil Destroys the Family (Part I)
Serialized translation of the book 'How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World'
By Editorial Team of "The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party"
July 11, 2018 3:25 pm Last Updated: July 15, 2018 10:09 am
The Epoch Times is serializing a translation from the Chinese of a new book, “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World,” by the editorial team of “The Nine Commentaries on Communist Party.”
Table of Contents
1. The Traditional Family Laid Down by God
2. Communism’s Aim to Eliminate the Family
3. Communism’s Promotion of Promiscuity
4. The Practice of Wife-Sharing Under Communism
a. Wife-Sharing in the Soviet Union
b. Sexual Liberation in Yan’an
5. How Communism Destroys Families in the West
a. Promoting Sexual Liberation
b. Promoting Feminism and Spurning the Traditional Family
The Communist Ideology Behind the Feminist Movement
Preface
Since the 1960s, a variety of anti-traditional movements, including modern feminism, sexual liberation, and gay rights have risen to prominence in the West. The institution of the family has been hit the hardest. In the United States, the Family Law Reform Act of 1969 gave a green light to unilateral divorce. Other countries soon rolled out similar laws.
In the United States, the divorce-to-marriage ratio more than doubled from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the 1950s, about 11 percent of the children born in a married family saw their parents divorced, and in 1970, the ratio soared to 50 percent. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 40 percent of newborn infants in the United States in 2016 were born out of wedlock. In 1956, this figure was less than 5 percent.
In traditional societies in the East and the West, chastity in relations between men and women was seen as a virtue. Today, it’s thought to be quaint and even ridiculous. The same-sex marriage movement, accompanied by the feminist movement, has sought to legally redefine the family and marriage. A law professor who is currently a member of the U.S. Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission initiated a declaration in 2006 called “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” It advocated that people form any sort of new family, according to whatever desires they may have (including polygamous marriages, joint homosexual-couple families, and so on). The professor also argued that the traditional marriage and family should not enjoy more legal rights than any other form of “family.”
In public schools, premarital sex and homosexuality, which were regarded as shameful for thousands of years in traditional society, have not only been instilled as normal, but in some schools, they are even tacitly or explicitly encouraged. In this view, a child’s sexual orientation should be freely developed and chosen, with the obvious result of an increase in homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and so on. For example, in 2012 the Rhode Island School District announced that it was forbidden for public schools to hold parent-daughter and mother-daughter dance parties, and declared that public schools have no right to instill in children ideas such as girls like to dance and boys like baseball.
The trend toward gradual destruction of the traditional family is now obvious. The elimination of the family advocated by communism will become a reality before the long-promised elimination of class differences.
In Western societies, there are many aspects to the destruction of the family. This includes the impact not only of feminism, sexual liberation, and the homosexual movement, but also the broader social backdrop of left-wing advocacy, progressivism, and the like, all of which are claimed to be under the banners of “freedom,” “fairness,” “rights,” and “liberation.” These ideas are buttressed explicitly and implicitly by laws, legal interpretations, and economic policies supported by fellow ideologues. All of it has the effect of inducing people to abandon and transform the concept of the traditional marriage and family.
These ideologies originate from the beginning of the nineteenth century and are deeply infused with communist factors. The evil specter of communism excels at continuous mutation and deception, which has led to constant confusion about what exactly people are supporting when they endorse these policies and ideologies. The result is immersion in a worldview whose parameters were set by communist ideas. The tragic situation today — the degradation of the traditional family and people’s confusion about the true nature of this trend — is the result of the meticulous planning and gradual implementation of the spirit of communism over the past two hundred years.
The consequence is that not only is the family eliminated as a basic unit of social stability, but traditional morality established by God is also destroyed, and the role the family plays in passing on and nurturing the next generation in a framework of traditional beliefs is also lost. Thus the younger generation is unconstrained by traditional ideas and beliefs, and become playthings for ideological possession by the communist specter.
1. The Traditional Family Laid Down by God
In the traditional cultures of the East and West, marriage was established by gods and is considered to be arranged by Heaven. Once formed, the marriage bond cannot be broken. Both men and women were created by gods according to their own images, and they are all equal before gods. At the same time, gods also made men and women different physically, and established respective roles for them. In the Western tradition, women are the bone of men’s bones and flesh of their flesh. A man must love his wife as though she were part of his own body, and if necessary, sacrifice himself to protect his wife.
In turn, a woman should cooperate with and help her husband, making the couple an integral whole. Men are responsible for working hard and making a living to support the family, while women suffer in childbirth. All this stems from the different original sins people carry.
Similarly, in Eastern traditional culture, men are associated with the yang of yin and yang, which is symbolically connected with the sun and the sky, and which thus demands that they continuously strive to make progress and shoulder the responsibility of taking care of the family through hard times. Women belong to the yin principle, symbolically connected to the earth, which means they bear and nurture everything with great virtue. They should be yielding and considerate of others, and have the duty to support their husbands and educate their children. Only when men and women work well in their own roles can the yin and the yang be harmonized and children grow and develop in a healthy manner.
Traditional families play the role of transmitting beliefs, morality, and maintaining the stability of society. The family is the cradle of belief and the bond for the transmission of values. Parents are the first teachers in children’s lives. If children can learn traditional virtues such as selflessness, humility, gratitude, endurance, and more from their parents’ words and deeds, they will benefit for the rest of their lives.
Traditional married life also helps men and women grow together in morality. It requires husbands and wives to treat their emotions and desires with a new attitude and to be considerate and tolerant of each other. This is fundamentally different from the idea of cohabitation. Human emotions are fickle. If the couple are together because they like to be together and break up because they don’t like to anymore, the relationship is not much different from a common friendship unbounded by marriage. Marx ultimately hoped for widespread “unconstrained sexual intercourse,” which of course is about dissolving the traditional marriage and thus in the end eliminating the institution of the family.
2. Communism’s Aim to Eliminate the Family
Communism believes that the family is a form of private ownership. To eliminate private ownership, therefore, it follows that the family should also be eliminated. The original principle of communism regards economic factors to be key in determining the kind of family relationships formed. Contemporary Marxian-Freudianism regards sexual desire as the key to questions associated with the family. The common characteristic of these two ideologies is their casting aside of basic human morality, their worship of materialism, desire, and pragmatic interests. All of this simply turns humans into beasts. It is a twisted ideology that has the effect of destroying the family by corrupting thought.
The fantastic delusion that sits at the heart of communism is the doctrine of the liberation of mankind. This manifests not merely as supposed liberation in an economic sense, but also the liberation of mankind itself. The opposite of liberation, of course, is oppression. So where does the oppression that must be resisted come from? Communism’s answer is that the oppression comes from people’s own notions, which are imposed by traditional social morality: The patriarchy of the traditional family structure oppresses women; traditional sexual morality oppressed human nature, and so on.
The feminism and homosexual rights movements of later generations inherited and then expanded upon this communist-inspired theory of liberation. It leads to a full battery of concepts in opposition to traditional marriage and family, as well as sexual liberation, homosexuality, and the like. All of these ideas have become tools used by the devil to undermine and destroy the family. Communism sets itself against and wishes to overthrow all traditional moral values, as clearly stated in The Communist Manifesto.
3. Communism’s Promotion of Promiscuity
The communist evil specter sets itself against the traditional family, which it wants to destroy. Early in the nineteenth century, Robert Owen, a representative of utopian socialism, sowed the seeds of the devil’s ideology. A communist ideological pioneer, Owen established the utopian community New Harmony in Indiana in 1824. (It failed two years later.) On the day the community was established, he declared:
I now declare, to you and to the world, that Man, up to this hour, has been, in all parts of the earth, a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer to private, or individual property — absurd and irrational systems of religion — and marriage, founded on individual property combined with some one of these irrational systems of religion.
After Owen died, another influential utopian communist was the Frenchmen Charles Fourier, whose thoughts deeply influenced Marx and Marxists. After his death, his disciples brought his thoughts into the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune, and later spread them to the United States. Fourier first coined the term “feminist” (“féminisme” in French).
In his ideal communist society (called the Phalanx), the traditional family was scorned, and bacchanals and orgies were praised as fully liberating human inner passions. He also declared that a fair society should take care of those who are sexually rejected (such as the elderly or unprepossessing) to ensure that everyone has the “right” to sexual gratification. He believed that any form of sexual gratification, including sexual abuse, even incest and bestiality, should be allowed as long as it’s consensual. Fourier, therefore, can be regarded the pioneer of queer theory, a branch of the contemporary homosexual movement (including LGBTQ and the like).
Because of the influence of Owen and especially of Fourier, dozens of communist utopian communes were set up in the United States in the nineteenth century, though most were short-lived and ended in failure. The longest was the Oneida Commune established on the basis of Fourier’s theory, which lasted 32 years. The commune despised traditional monogamous marriages and advocated polygamy and group sex. Members got a “fair” sexual access by being allotted the opportunity each week to have sex with anyone of their choosing. In the end, the founder, John Humphrey Noyes, fled for fear of a lawsuit by the church. The commune was forced to abandon wife-sharing, though Noyes later wrote books and became the originator of Bible Communism.
Communism’s promiscuous gene is an inevitable consequence of its theoretical development. From the very beginning, the demon of communism tempted people to abandon godly teachings, to deny the divine, and to deny original sin.
According to this logic, social problems originally caused by the degeneration of human morality were attributed to private ownership. Communism leads people to believe that if private property is destroyed, people will not fight over it. However, even if all property is shared, people might also have conflicts over their spouses. Therefore, utopian socialists openly use a system of wife-sharing to solve such problems inherent in human nature.
These communist “paradises” either directly challenged the traditional family or advocated a system of common wives, which led local communities, churches, and governments to see them as a challenge to traditional morality and ethics, and take action to suppress them. The scandalous communist wealth and wife-sharing became widely known.
The failure of utopian communes taught Marx and Engels a lesson: It was not yet the time to openly advocate promiscuous wife-sharing. Although the goal of eliminating the family in The Communist Manifesto had not changed, they adopted a more concealed approach to putting forward their theories and destroying families.
After the death of Marx, Engels published the book “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan” to complete Marx’s theory on the family and further expound the Marxian view of marriage: “[The emergence of monogamy] is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish.”
Engels argued that monogamy was based around private property, and that once all property is shared, there would be a brand new model of marriage based purely on love. Superficially, it sounds so noble — but it is not.
The attempted defenses of Marx and Engels seem feeble in light of the actual implementation of communist theory. Feelings are unreliable. If a person loves someone today and another person tomorrow, does that not encourage promiscuity? The promiscuity that took place after the establishment of the former Soviet Union and the Chinese communist regime (see the following section) is in fact the result of applied Marxist doctrine.
Relationships between husbands and wives aren’t always smooth sailing. The vow “till death do us part” during a traditional wedding is a vow to God. It also represents the idea that both parties are prepared to face and overcome all hardships together. What maintains a marriage is not merely emotion or feelings, but also a sense of responsibility. Treating one’s other half, the children, and the family with care transforms both the husband and wife into a mature man and woman with a sense of moral responsibility.
Marx and Engels boasted in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that in a communist society, private property becomes public; housework becomes professionalized; there’s no need to worry about looking after children since it’s the country’s responsibility to take care of and educate the children.
They wrote: “This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences,’ which today is the most essential social — moral as well as economic — factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame?”
What Marx and Engels promoted, even though using the phrases “freedom,” “liberation,” and “love” to conceal the fact, was nothing more than the complete abandonment of personal moral responsibility. They encouraged people to act solely on their desires. However, during Marx’s era and that of Fourier, most people had not abandoned godly teachings entirely and were wary of communism’s promotion of promiscuity. Yet even Marx himself could hardly have imagined the rationalizations that people would come up with, in the twentieth century and following, to embrace the sexual chaos of Marxist thought and press forward the goal of eliminating the family.
The red demon arranged certain individuals to sow these seeds of prurience and deviance. It also systematically arranged for luring people to follow their desires and oppose godly teachings, so as to gradually deprave them, until finally achieving the goal of eliminating the family. This ultimately brings about the deviation of the human heart and leads people to fall into the devil’s grasp.
4. The Practice of Wife-Sharing Under Communism
The sexual chaos described above is an innate part of communism. Marx is believed to have raped his maids and had Engels raise the children. Engels cohabitated with two sisters. Lenin carried out an extramarital affair with a woman named Inesa for ten years, and also committed adultery with a French woman. He also contracted with syphilis consorting with prostitutes. Stalin was equally lecherous and is known to have taken advantage of other people’s wives.
After the Soviets seized power, they instituted the practice of wife-sharing. The Soviet Union at the time can be viewed as the pioneer of sexual liberation in the West. In the tenth edition of the Russian magazine Rodina, printed in 1990, the phenomenon of wife-sharing during early Soviet rule was exposed. The piece also described the private lives of Soviet leaders Trotsky, Bukharin, Antonov, Kollontai, and others, saying that they were as casual as dogs in their sexual activities.
a. Wife-Sharing in the Soviet Union
As early as 1904, Lenin wrote: “Lust can emancipate the energy of the spirit — not for pseudo-family values, but for the victory of socialism must this blood-clot be done away with.”
At a meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Leon Trotsky proposed that once the Bolsheviks seize power, new fundamental principles of sexual relations would be drafted. Communist theory demands the destruction of the family and the transition to a period of unconstrained satisfaction of sexual desire. Trotsky also said that the responsibility to educate children resides solely with the state.
In the letter to Lenin in 1911, Trotsky wrote: “Undoubtedly, sexual oppression is the main means of enslaving a person. While such oppression exists, there can be no question of real freedom. The family, like a bourgeois institution, has completely outlived itself. It is necessary to speak more about this to the workers. …”
Lenin replied: “And not only the family. All prohibitions relating to sexuality must be abolished. … We have something to learn from the suffragettes: Even the ban on same-sex love should be lifted.”
After the Bolsheviks seized power, Lenin brought out a series of regulations effectively abolishing marriage and the punishment of homosexuality.
At that time, there was also the slogan “Down with shame!” This was part of the Bolshevik attempt to create the “New Man” of socialist ideology, and sometimes even included roaming the streets naked and hysterically screaming slogans like “Shame is in the bourgeois past of the Soviet people.”
On December 19, 1918, to celebrate the commemoration day of the decree effectively abolishing marriage, lesbian groups celebrated. Trotsky writes in his memoirs that the news of lesbians celebrating with a parade made Lenin very happy. Lenin also encouraged more people to march naked.
In 1923, the Soviet novel The Loves of Three Generations popularized the word “glass-of-waterism.” The author, People’s Commissar for Social Welfare Alexandra Kollontai, was a revolutionary who fought her way into the Bolshevik faction from a traditional family, in search of “women’s liberation.” The “glass-of-waterism” promoted by the novel is, in fact, a synonym for sexual indulgence: In communist society, satisfying sexual desire is as normal and easy as drinking a glass of water. “Glass-of-waterism” was widespread among factory workers and especially teenage students.
“The current morality of our youth is summarized as follows,” the well-known Communist Smidovich wrote in the Pravda newspaper (March 21, 1925):
Every member, even a minor, of the Communist Youth League and every student of the ‘Rabfak’ (Communist Party training school), has the right to satisfy his sexual desire. This concept has become an axiom, and abstinence is considered a notion of bourgeois. If a man lusts after a young girl, whether she is a student, a worker or even a school-age girl, then the girl must obey his lust, otherwise it will be considered a bourgeois daughter, unworthy to be called a true communist. …
Divorce also became normalized and widespread. “The divorce rate skyrocketed to levels unseen in human history. In short order, it seemed as though everyone in Moscow had a divorce,” Paul Kengor noted in his book Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage. In 1926, the influential American magazine The Atlantic published an article about the astonishing situation in the USSR, with the title “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage.”
The phenomenon of “Swedish families” — which has nothing to do with Sweden, but refers to a large group of men and women living together and engaging in casual sex — also appeared during this period of sexual liberation. This opened the doors to promiscuity, sexual chaos, homosexualty, moral collapse, the destruction of families, sexually transmitted diseases, rape, and more.
Following the expansion of socialist communes, these “Swedish families” spread across the Soviet Union. This was known as the “nationalization” or “socialization” of women. The Socialist Women in Yekaterinburg, March 1918, are a sad example: After the Bolsheviks seized the city, they issued an ordinance that young women between ages of 16 to 25 must be “socialized.” The order was implemented by several party officials, and ten young women were “socialized.”
The Bolsheviks quickly tightened their policies on sex at the end of 1920s. During a conversation with feminist activist Clara Zetkin, Lenin deplored the “glass-of-waterism” philosophy, calling it “anti-Marxist” and “anti-social.” The reason was because sexual liberation brought about an undesirable byproduct — many newborn babies. Many were abandoned. Again it was shown that the destruction of the family eventually results in societal collapse.
b. Sexual Liberation in Yan’an
During the CCP’s early years, the circumstances were similar to that of the Soviet Union. Of course, these communist parties are all varieties of poisonous fruits from the same tree. Chen Duxiu, an early communist leader, was known for his debauched personal life. According to the memoirs of Zheng Chaolin and Chen Bilan, Qu Qiubai, Cai Hesen, Zhang Tailei, Xiang Jingyu, Peng Shuzhi, and others had a somewhat confused sexual history, and their attitude toward sex was similar to the “glass-of-waterism” of the early Soviet revolutionaries.
“Sexual liberation” was embraced not only by the Party’s intellectual leaders, but also by ordinary people living in the CCP’s early “Soviets” (revolutionary enclaves set up before the Nationalist Party was overthrown) in Hubei, Henan, and Anhui. Due to the promotion of equality of women, and absolute freedom of marriage and divorce, revolutionary work was often disrupted in order to satisfy sexual desire.
Young people in the Soviet areas sometimes engaged in romantic affairs in the name of connecting with the masses. It wasn’t unusual for young women to have six or seven sexual partners. According to the Collection of Revolutionary Historical Documents in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Districts, among local party chiefs in places like Hong’an, Huangma, Huangqi, Guangshan, and elsewhere, “about three- quarters of them kept sexual relations with dozens or hundreds of women.”
In late spring of 1931, when Zhang Guotao took charge of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet districts, he noted that syphilis was so widespread that he had to report to Party Central for doctors who specialize in treating the disease. Many years later, in his memoirs, he still vividly recalled stories of women in the Soviet districts being sexually harassed, including some of the senior generals’ mistresses.
In 1937, Li Kenong was serving as director of the CCP’s Eighth Route Army Office in Nanjing, making him responsible for collecting military stipends, medicine, and supplies. On one occasion, when checking the medicine list of the Eighth Route Army, the National Government staff found a large quantity of drugs for treating sexually transmitted disease. The staff asked Li Kenong, “Are there a lot of people in your army suffering from this disease?” Li wasn’t sure what to say, so he lied and said it was to treat the local people.
By the 1930s, however, sexual freedom came to be perceived as a threat to the regime. The same problem of social disintegration found in Soviet Russia was apparent, and Red Army conscripts began worrying that their wives would take up extramarital affairs or divorce them once they joined the revolution. This affected the combat effectiveness of the troops. Moreover, the trend of promiscuity seemed to reinforce the notoriety of the “common property, common wives” slogan. Thus, Soviet districts began implementing policies protecting military marriages, limiting the number of divorces, and more.
5. How Communism Destroys Families in the West
The evil spirit’s ideological trends find their origins in the nineteenth century. After a century of transformation and evolution in the West, they finally came to the fore in the United States in the 1960s.
In the 1960s, influenced and encouraged by neo-Marxism and various other radical ideologies, social and cultural movements manipulated by the evil spirit appeared. These include the hippie counterculture, the radical New Left, the feminist movement, and the sexual revolution. The turbulence of these social movements was a fierce attack against America’s political system, traditional value system, and social fabric.
The movements quickly spread to Europe, rapidly altering the way the mainstream thought about society, the family, sex, and cultural values. While this was going on, the gay rights movement was also rising. The confluence of these forces led to the weakening of traditional Western family values and the decline of the institution of the traditional family and its centrality in social life. At the same time, social turmoil triggered a series of problems, including the proliferation of pornography, the spread of drug abuse, the collapse of sexual morality, the rise of the juvenile crime rate, and the expansion of groups depending on social welfare.
a. Promoting Sexual Liberation
Sexual liberation (also known as the sexual revolution) originated in the United States in the 1960s. Its subsequent rapid spread through the world dealt a devastating blow to traditional moral values, in particular traditional family values and sexual morality.
The evil spirit made ample preparations for using sexual liberation against Western societies. The free love movement paved the way to gradually erode and disintegrate traditional family values. The concept of “free love” violates traditional sexual morality, and argues that sexual activity of all forms should be free from social regulation. In this view, individual sexual activities, including marriage, abortion, and adultery, should not be restricted by the government or law, nor subject to social sanction.
The followers of Charles Fourier and the Christian Socialist John Humphrey Noyes were the first to coin the term “free love.”
In recent times, the main promoters of free love ideas are almost all socialists or people deeply influenced by socialist thought. For example, among those pioneering the free love movement in Britain was socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter, who was also an early activist for gay rights. The gay rights movement’s most famous advocate, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, was an avowed socialist and a member of the Fabian Society. He claimed that morality should not limit humanity’s instinctive drive toward pleasure and advocated premarital and extramarital sex.
The main forerunner of the free love movement in France was Émile Armand, in his early days, an anarcho-communist who later built on Fourier’s utopian communism, founded French individualist anarchism (which falls under the broader category of socialism), and advocated promiscuity, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The pioneer of the free love movement in Australia was Chummy Fleming, an anarchist (another socialist offshoot).
The free love movement in America bore important fruit — Playboy, the erotic magazine founded in 1953. The magazine made use of coated paper to create the impression that it was artistic and not seedy. It also used expensive color printing, with the result that pornographic content typically regarded as low-class and vulgar swiftly entered the mainstream, and Playboy became a “high-class” leisure magazine. For more than half a century, it has spread the toxin of sexual freedom to people around the world, and has laid siege to traditional morals and perceptions regarding sex.
In the middle of the twentieth century, with hippie culture increasing in popularity and free love gaining widespread acceptance, the sexual revolution (also known as sexual liberation) made its official debut. The term “sexual revolution” was coined by Wilhelm Reich, the founder of communist psychoanalysis and a German communist. He combined Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis, and believed that the former liberated people from “economic oppression,” while the latter liberated people from “sexual repression.”
Another founder of sexual liberation theory was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School. During the Western counterculture movement of the 1960s, his slogan “make love, not war” embedded the notion of sexual liberation deep within people’s hearts.
Since then, with the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and the widespread use of oral contraceptives, the notion of sexual liberation swept through the West. It is worth mentioning that contemporary scholars have discovered distorted statistical data in Kinsey’s work, as well as exaggeration, over-simplification, and other fallacies driven by his political and ideological commitments. Kinsey set out to show that extramarital sex, homosexual sex, and so on were common, and thus to direct society to accept the normalization of these phenomena, a task at which he was largely successful.
All at once, being “sexually liberated” became fashionable. Among young people, promiscuity came to be considered normal. Teens who admitted to being virgins were ridiculed by their peers. Data show that of those who turned 15 years of age between 1954 to 1963 (the 60s generation), 82 percent had premarital sex before the age of 30. In the 2010s, new brides who were still virgins before they married numbered only 5 percent, while 18 percent of brides had previously had 10 or more sexual partners before marriage. The cultural mainstream has become saturated with sex, including in literature, film, advertising, and television.
b. Promoting Feminism and Spurning the Traditional Family
The Communist Ideology Behind the Feminist Movement
The feminist movement is another tool the communist specter has used to destroy the family. When it began in the eighteenth century, the feminist movement (also known as first-wave feminism) started in Europe and advocated that women should be accorded the same treatment as men in education, employment, and politics. The center of the feminist movement shifted from Europe to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
When first-wave feminism started, the notion of the traditional family still had a strong foundation in society, and the feminist movement did not advocate directly challenging the traditional family. The influential feminists at that time, such as Mary Wollstonecraft of eighteenth-century England, Margaret Fuller of nineteenth-century America, and John Stuart Mill of nineteenth-century England, all advocated that in general women should prioritize the family after marriage, that the potential of women should be developed within the domain of the family, and that women should enrich themselves for the sake of the family (such as educating the children, managing the family, and so on). They thought, however, that some special women who are particularly talented should not be constrained by society, and should be free to utilize their talents, even to the extent of competing with men.
After the 1920s, when the right for women to vote was written into law in many countries, the first wave of women’s rights movements gradually receded. In the following years, with the impact of the Great Depression and World War II, the feminist movement essentially laid down its flag.
At the same time, the communist specter began to sow the seeds of destruction for traditional marriage and sexual ethics. The early utopian socialists in the nineteenth century laid the direction for modern radical feminist movements. François Marie Charles Fourier, called “the father of feminism,” declared that marriage turns women into private property. Robert Owen cursed marriage as evil. The ideas of these utopian socialists were inherited and developed by later feminists, including, for example, Frances Wright, who in the nineteenth century, inherited the ideas of Fourier and advocated sexual freedom for women.
The British feminist activist Anna Wheeler inherited Owen’s ideas, fiercely condemning marriage for supposedly turning women into slaves. Socialist feminist activists were also an important part of the feminist movement in the nineteenth century. At that time, among the most influential feminist publications in France were La Voix des Femmes, the very first feminist publication in France, and Free Women (La Femme Libre, later renamed La Tribune des Femmes), as well as La Politique des Femmes, among others. The founders of these publications were either followers of Fourier or of Henri de Saint-Simon, the advocate of modernity. Because of the close connection between feminism and socialism, the authorities scrutinized feminism.
When the first wave of women’s rights movements proceeded in full swing, the devil of communism also made arrangements to introduce a variety of radical thoughts to attack traditional concepts of family and marriage, paving the way for the more radical feminist movement that followed.
The second wave of feminist movements began in the United States in the late 1960s, then spread to Western and Northern Europe, and quickly expanded to the entire Western world. American society in the late 1960s went through a period of turmoil, with the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and various radical social trends. Feminism, taking advantage of this unique set of circumstances, emerged in a more radical strain and became popular.
The cornerstone of this wave of feminist movements was the book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, as well as the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she founded. Using the perspective of a suburban middle-class housewife, Friedan fiercely criticized the traditional family role of women, and argued that the traditional image of a happy, content, joyful housewife is a myth forged by a patriarchal society. She argued that middle-class suburban families are “a comfortable concentration camp” for American women, and that modern educated women should reject the sense of accomplishment attained through supporting their husbands and educating their children, but instead realize their worth outside the family.
A few years later, more radical feminists dominated the National Women’s Organization, inheriting and developing Friedan’s ideas. They said that women had been oppressed by patriarchy since ancient times and attributed the root cause of women’s oppression to the family. In response, they came to advocate the complete transformation of the social system and traditional culture, and struggle in all aspects of human affairs — the economy, education, culture, and the family — to achieve female equality.
Classifying a society into the oppressor and the oppressed to advocate for struggle, liberation, and equality is exactly what communism is all about. Traditional Marxism classifies groups according to their economic statuses, while neo-feminist movements divide people based on gender.
Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, was not, as her book described, a middle class suburban housewife bored with her housework. Daniel Horowitz, a professor at Smith College, wrote a biography of Friedan in 1998 titled Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique. His research reveals that Friedan, under her maiden name Betty Goldstein, had been a radical socialist activist since her college years up to the 1950s. At different times, she was a professional journalist, or propagandist to be accurate, for several radical labor unions in the orbit of the Communist Party USA.
David Horowitz, a former leftist and no relation to Daniel Horowitz, reviewed her published articles to understand the development of her views. She was a member of the Young Communist League while in UC–Berkeley. Friedan even requested twice, at different times, to join the CPUSA. Judith Hennesee, her authorized biographer, also indicates she was a Marxist.
Kate Weigand, an American scholar, points out in her book Red Feminism that feminism in fact did not stay quiet in the United States from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. During that period, a large group of red feminist writers with communist backgrounds paved the way for the subsequent second-wave feminist movement. These include Susan Anthony, Eleanor Flex, Gerda Lerner, Eve Merriam, and the like. As early as 1946, Anthony applied the Marxist analytical method to draw an analogy between the white oppressing the black, and the male oppressing the female. However, due to the McCarthyism of the period, such writers no longer talked about their red background.
In Europe, French writer Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic work The Second Sex ushered in the craze for the second wave of feminism. De Beauvoir used to be a socialist. In 1941, together with communist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and other writers, she created Socialiste et Liberté, a French underground socialist organization. With the rise of her reputation for feminism in the 1960s, de Beauvoir declared that she no longer believed in socialism, and claimed that she was only a feminist.
She said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” She advocated that though sex is determined by physiological characteristics, gender is a self-perceived psychological concept formed under the influence of human sociality. She argued that the temperaments of obedience, submissiveness, affection, and maternity are all derived from the “myth” carefully designed by the patriarchy for its oppression of women, and advocated that women break through traditional notions and realize their unrestrained selves.
This mentality in fact lies at the heart of the damaging notions of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and the like. Since then, various feminist thoughts have emerged in a constant stream, all looking at the world through the lens of women being oppressed by a patriarchy, which is realized through the institution of the traditional family — making the family, then, an obstacle to the realization of female equality.
De Beauvoir held that women are restrained by their husbands due to marriage, and called marriage as disgusting as prostitution. She refused to get married and maintained an “open relationship” with Sartre. By the same token, Sartre also engaged in sexual encounters with other women. Her view on marriage is the standard among contemporary radical feminists. Such chaotic sexual liaisons and relationships are precisely the system of communal wives envisioned by Charles Fourier, forerunner of utopian communism in the nineteenth century.
