Feminism's Multicultural Blind Spot
Throughout Europe, women's rights are regressing rather than advancing, as immigration from North Africa and the Middle East transforms European societies.
The first International Women's Day was observed in Germany a century ago. How are things for women in Germany today?
Pretty good, you might say: The country has a woman head of government, Angela Merkel. But it also has this, according to the German magazine, Speigel:
'We have long been practicing Islamic law,' confirmed Hilmar Kruger, a law professor at the University of Cologne . A federal court in Kassel, for example, cited Islamic law in a ruling several years ago in which the court found that a widow had to share her husband's pension with his second wife. Another case saw a court in Koblenz granting residency to the second wife of a man from Iraq. A Cologne court forced an Iranian man to pay his ex-wife 600 gold coins in 'bride price' (money paid by the groom or groom's family to the bride or bride's family) upon divorce and cited the shariah system applied in Iran. A court in Dusseldorf arrived at a similar verdict, forcing a Turkish man to pay €30,000 in bride price to his former daughter-in-law.
Throughout Europe, women's rights are regressing rather than advancing, as immigration from North Africa and the Middle East transforms European societies. Europeans have found it very difficult to demand that the newcomers adapt to local ways. So Europeans are adapting instead.
Every visitor sees the spread of face-covering in European cities. What is less visible is the increase in domestic violence, even murder; the increase in social isolation; even the increase in illiteracy among new arriving immigrant women.
Feminist organizations in Europe have responded uncertainly to this new challenge.
Feminism is, of course, a movement of the ideological left, a fact nicely symbolized by International Women's Day itself. The first government to recognize March 8 as Women's Day was the Soviet Union, shortly after the 1917 revolution. (For a long time, International Women's Day was a self-consciously socialist alternative to the American and British "Mother's Day.")
Socialism is dead and gone. The new foundational doctrine of the left is multiculturalism -this being a fancy word for the notion that, in any disagreement between a Westerner and a non-Westerner, the Westerner is always wrong; and that nobody from a Western background may criticize anything said or done by anyone from a non-Western background.
A generation ago, feminists could romanticize non-Western misogyny from a safe distance. In 1984, the Australian feminist Germaine Greer published a book, Sex and Destiny, denouncing birth control as a Western plot against Third World women. But since the 1980s, a great movement of populations has erased the distinction between the First World and the Third. Europe now receives more immigrants than does the United States. European cities are now crowded with hijabs and burkas. European police investigate honor killings. European hospitals confront female genital mutilations.
And these things all happen in North America, too, albeit to a lesser degree.
On this 100th International Women's Day, the challenge for feminists has become both imperative and anguishing: Will they argue forever against American television sitcoms of the 1950s -or are they morally and intellectually capable of recognizing the dangers to women's aspirations in the 21st century? Can they transcend their inherited ideology, and recognize that the best and only guarantee of women's equality is Western liberal democratic capitalism? Will they accept critics of Third World misogyny -such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji -into the pantheon of feminism along with Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony and Simone de Beauvoir? Can they perceive that the people who would destroy Israel hate women even more than they hate Jews?
In short, can they accept that the irony of history has reoriented feminism into a fundamentally conservative movement? Or will their inherited ideological prejudices entrap them forever in a vanished world -- dooming feminism to obsolescence and subjecting the dwindling rights of women to the aggressions of "multiculturalism"?
Originally published in the National Post.