Word: rationalists
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...trappings of For Her Own Good are its most serious drawback. Unfortunately, for the easily discouraged reader, the hefty first chapter is hard going. An oversimplified Marxist interpretation of the industrial revolution accompanies broad generalizations about women before and after and allows the authors to construct a dichotomy of rationalist and romantic views of women. The romanticists idealize pre-industrial women who supposedly led full, productive lives. Although they were inferior in status to men, the argument goes, they worked so hard that they didn't have time to worry about it. The post-industrial romanticist maintains that women should...
...rationalist theory, put forth by early suffragists as well as modern feminists such as Betty Friedan, claims that rationality dictates even the life of the family, and will eventually produce a world in which women would have the same opportunities and responsibilities as men. Ehrenreich and English contend that both of these theories fail to provide a viable role for women. This failure resulted in a cult of professionalism; women became dependent on experts who could explain why they felt unfulfilled...
...synthesis which transcends both the rationalist and romanticist poles must necessarily challenge the masculinist social order itself.... This is the most radical vision but there are no human alternatives. The Market, with its financial abstractions, deformed science, and obsession with dead things--must be pushed back to the margins. And the 'womanly' values of community and caring must rise to the center as the only human principles...
...visitor from the Miami News, enjoying a complete absence of memory ("There is no such thing as organized crime"). What does he do with his spare time? Well, he reads: "Lately, philosophy-just now I'm reading Spinoza." One might wonder what the 17th century Dutch-Jewish mathematical rationalist would have had to say to a retired racketeer. Perhaps this, from Spinoza's Ethics: "He who cannot govern his desires, and keep them in check with the fear of the laws ... cannot enjoy with contentment the knowledge and love...
...machine-gun bursts of talk reduce argument after argument to rubble in Man and Superman, one becomes more and more aware of the self-divided ambiguity of Shaw's nature. Just as he was a celibate husband, he was a plutocratic socialist, a religious atheist, an irrational rationalist, a philosopher clown, a meditative activist and a sexually emancipatory puritan...