Anti-Feminism

Proudhon was an anti-feminist ?

Reading Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev off-handedly presents a physically unattractive, radical, liberated woman as a reader of Fenimore Cooper and an admirer of Emerson, who says that about the French anarchist.

Reportedly, Nietzsche was also a great fan of the American clerical essayist.

Makes sense.

How he flattered intellectuals !

Secular prophets, they conceive themselves.

Or secular mullahs, more like.

What a vast will to power in these people !

That is how they differ, these intelligentsia, as Marx practically admitted, from real philosophers.

One third of the way through it, the story is about fathers and sons; there are no fathers and daughters in it, though there are several women and one recognizes women have fathers.

The narrator tells us what the men think and feel, speaking almost only of what one could observe - what a man could observe - of the women.

Mostly he does not presume to venture inside their heads, or hearts.

For the censors ?

Bazarov to Arkady about Odintsova.

"Whoever she may be, simply a provincial lioness or an 'emancipated woman' like Kukshina, she still has the nicest pair of shoulders I've seen in a long time."

The next day after a visit he exclaims, "What a body ! Perfect for the dissecting table."

And then, in case you mistook him, "I tell you, she has a delectable body !"

A few days later, Bazarov says this to her, accounting for the difference between the stupid and the clever.

"We know more or less what causes physical ailments; moral illnesses result from bad upbringing, all the nonsense that gets stuffed into people's heads from childhood, in a word, the deformed condition of society. If you correct society you won't have any more illnesses."

Such stupidities have never deserted the left.

When the government of men has been replaced by the enlightened administration of things there will be no coercion and no need for prisons.

They say.