Ever since the feminist ideologues burst into our national consciousness in the mid-1960s, I have wondered where they got their peculiar notions about men. Feminist “gospel” according to Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer teaches that men, especially husbands, are awful creatures and that a wife is just an unpaid servant-mistress.
I thought all this nonsense was a creation of their weird imaginations because it is so at variance with the men I know. Most American men are decent and honorable, and work long hours (often moonlighting) to provide for a wife and children.
Now, at last, through the meticulous research of one of the 20th century’s greatest historians, Paul Johnson, I have discovered where these feminists got their nutty notions. His newest book, The Intellectuals, makes it clear that the leftists, secular intellectuals of the last two centuries really did treat their wives and mistresses like unpaid servants and usually treated their children even worse.
The intellectuals on whom Johnson reports were not just artsy celebrities who could presume the public would accept an immoral bohemian lifestyle. They were writers who arrogantly presumed to diagnose the ills of society, to prescribe cures, and to tell mankind how we should live and how society and the economy should be structured.
So how did they run their own lives? They were typically selfish and self-centered, cruel and violent, dirty (many of them seldom bathed), and never treated any women as equals. They built a reputation on the falsehood that their theories would help the working class, but they never knew any of the working class except as mistresses.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who wrote prolifically about “truth” and “virtue,” kept an illiterate laundress as his mistress for 33 years, treating her like an unpaid servant, while he continued his affairs with many other women. He was known for his theories about raising children – a subject he knew nothing about because he forced his mistress to abandon their five babies at birth on the doorstep of a foundling home.
Karl Marx made his wife’s life a nightmare, kept her and their children destitute, denied his daughters an education, and vetoed their careers because he thought women were suitable only to be clerical assistants. He kept a female slave in his household, never paid her a wage, used her as his mistress, and refused to acknowledge their child.
Leo Tolstoy, who had the effrontery to think he was some kind of messiah destined to remake society used and abused his wife, and forced her to read torrid accounts of all his sexual exploits in brothels and with a succession of gypsies and peasant girls. He refused to acknowledge his illegitimate offspring, and refused to admit that a woman could be a serious, adult, intelligent human being.
Ernest Hemingway was abusive and alcoholic, publicly humiliated his four wives, had numerous adulterous affairs, and could not form any kind of civilized relationship with a woman except one based on her complete subservience. One complained with justification, that she was leading “a slave’s life with a brute for a slave-owner.”
Bertrand Russell, who ground out a steady stream of advice on almost every subject from disarmament to religion, was one of the biggest names in the 20th century movement to “emancipate” women from Victorian morality. He had three wives and seduced almost any woman who was available, including chambermaids, governesses, and daughters of friends he happened to be visiting.
John-Paul Sartre, a professional philosopher who aligned himself with the Communists, used Simone de Beauvoir as his mistress, cook, laundress, seamstress, and housekeeper, all the while boasting of affairs with others. As he grew older, he preferred younger and younger women until he got to teenagers.
Edmund Wilson, another adulterous literary notable, had four wives whom he abused. He voted Communist or Socialist in every election, always demanding big government spending for welfare, but he himself refused to file income tax returns.
The Intellectuals proves that the public posture of leading intellectuals cannot be separated from their private lives. The one explains the other. Women were “loved” only insofar as they were servile and acquiesced in being treated as a man’s property. Fortunately, the bizarre feminist theories about men and marriage are true only as to the crowd they associate with – the leftwing intellectuals.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that the substance of this important book is to recount sexual relationships. Johnson’s primary thesis is that the leftist intellectuals were liars who had no regard for the truth and falsified “evidence” for their theories. That’s not surprising, since a man who spends his life lying to women will probably lie about everything else, too. For that story, you’ll have to read the book.
