Women, Work, and Freedom: Terug naar het aanrecht maar betaald.

Women, Work, and Freedom

by Nicholas Farrell

January 20, 2013 Taki’s Magazine

Willingly or not, women play a starring role in the death of the West.

Women in Europe and America have made one great big fat suicidal error as a result of modern feminism since the movement’s inception: They have confused work with freedom. This confusion has had catastrophic consequences for all of us because it has fatally infected the core activity of any healthy civilization: the creation and upbringing of children.

During World War II there was a chilling slogan stamped in wrought iron above the entrance gates of Auschwitz in Poland where it can still be seen: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Labor Makes You Free); labor in this case meant work rather than giving birth.

That Nazi slogan could just as well be used nowadays by women in the West and their male collaborators (we know who you are) as their own slogan. What they have desired above all else (and got) this past half-century is work.

They have decided that to work full-time in an office or factory makes them free. They have therefore also decided that to be a mother is a prison sentence that deprives them of freedom. They have then also decided: Motherhood Makes You a Slave.
“If women stopped work tomorrow it would solve the West’s chronic unemployment crisis overnight.”

They must be mad. The truth is the precise opposite. In the case of the Nazis, work meant not freedom but physical annihilation; in the case of Western women, not freedom but creative annihilation.

Nearly all work, if we mean the work that most people in the West do day after day in exchange for money, is a life sentence in prison. It is dull, repetitive, and soul-destroying. It does not liberate.

The fact that women work means that fewer children are born. It also means that those children are raised by women other than their mothers. It also cranks up the stress still more on the already very fragile equilibrium in the male-female dialectic.

Women, unlike men, once had a way to avoid work. They still do, if they chose to compel governments to organize things differently. The choice is theirs and theirs alone.

If women stopped work tomorrow it would solve the West’s chronic unemployment crisis overnight. Due to the dire shortage of workers left, salaries would rocket.

The state could even chip in, if women made enough noise. The state could even pay married women to stay at home and have children. It already does in the case of single, non-working mothers. So what’s the big deal?

But more important than the cash side of it, surely women would be so much happier.

Let me take the example of Carla, my young Italian wife and mother of my five small children. Carla does not “work” 9-5 outside the home for a wage. She works instead 24/7 at home and for free. People where we are in Italy think she is out of her mind. Not only does she have more than the one or two children permitted by fashion, but she does not even “work.” I think they are out of their minds because I am convinced that she is far more fulfilled, free, and creative than if she were a part-time mother wage slave like them.

In the West these days even to suggest such a thing anywhere mainstream transforms a person, especially a male, into a deranged and dangerous social pariah.

Here in Italy, droves of these “liberated women” spend their days or nights assembling washing machines with pneumatic riveting tools or cutting off chicken heads with manual or mechanical neck cutters, or else sexing baby chickens with their bare hands. How creative is that?

Naturally, they are so busy drilling and decapitating and sexing that they have few children. You might be amazed given that old archetypal image of Italy as a place where mamma is surrounded by lots of bambini, but for years now Italy has had one of the lowest birthrates in the West: currently, only 1.4 children per woman. Italy is a Catholic country, so either the modern Italian woman is having very little sex or she is ignoring the Catholic diktat that contraception is a mortal sin right up there with abortion and adultery.

If I ask those Italian women I chance upon in my meanderings why they are having hardly any sex…no, let me rephrase that…if I ask Italian women why they have only 1.4 children, their reply is always the same. They do not trot out the bog-standard liberal London reply “overpopulation is killing the planet,” which is a lie—in Europe at least, where the problem is too few babies, not too many. But they lie just the same. “I can’t afford it,” they say.

But even if such a decision as the creation of life were taken solely on the basis of such bleak economic considerations, children are an investment, not a cost. Look at me! If I can afford five kids and a wife who’s not working, anyone can. The real reason is that Italian women, like your average woman all over the hedonistic “Anything Goes” West, just want to have a good time and children are a bloody nuisance.

Yes, the money gained in exchange for work gives women the financial independence to do things such as pay the mortgage, the rent, and the bills personally. They can also pay someone else to look after the 1.4 children while they work and have a good time. But if I were a woman I would find the human price of such independence too high.

Sooner or later I am going to have to have “the talk” with my own three daughters. Should I—dare I—tell Caterina, Magdalena, and Rita the truth? Or would that lead to the state’s confiscation and reeducation of my family?