The following is a preview of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Helen Andrews on “The Signal Sitdown.” The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 30.
For the past half-decade or more, conservative intellectuals have tried to answer the question: Where did woke come from? Some believe it is rebranded cultural Marxism. Others say it came from academia with the postmodern rejection of objective truth ultimately leading to the weaponization of culture. Maybe it came from the global corporations because woke is the ideology of the new managerial elite in late-stage neo-liberalism.
But perhaps “woke” and its offspring like “cancel culture” came from something called “The Great Feminization.” Helen Andrews, author of “Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” recently wrote an essay called “The Great Feminization,” a term borrowed from the pseudonymous online writer J. Stone, that explains how “woke” is “an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” She joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss.
Like many conservative intellectuals, Andrews has been in search of the source of woke. The other theories about wokeness’s origins were unsatisfactory. “All of those theories have merit to them,” Andrews said, but “in most cases, something about the mechanism didn’t seem to be entirely clear to me.”
Such is the case with the idea that wokeness is a rebranded kind of cultural Marxism. “There are some people who see an ideological genealogy of wokeness,” Andrews told The Daily Signal. “They say it’s cultural Marxism, and that’s spread on the universities and the universities infected everybody else and that’s why we got wokeness everywhere all at once.”
However, “the weakness of the ‘wokeness is cultural Marxism’ theory for me is that I saw wokeness erupt in areas of our society that are not remotely Marxist, like big business Fortune 500 companies,” Andrews explained. “Wokeness tended to show up in the most unexpected places.”
“I think the moment that I knew wokeness was different than [political correctness] or any of the old previous iterations was when people started getting fired from NFL teams or from NASCAR,” Andrews continued. “Why is NASCAR displaying wokeness? You would think that would be the last place you would wanna look to find it—or Wall Street firms.”
“These are not hotbeds of wokeness,” Andrews claimed. “It didn’t seem really to be ideological at all. The common pattern was feminization.”
The theory of “The Great Feminization” is that female representation at many institutions has achieved a critical mass that has altered the way not only these institutions operate but how society operates writ large.
“We had a big fight called feminism in the 1970s over whether or not we thought women could be lawyers. And we decided that they could, and that’s great,” Andrews explained. “But it took a long time to go from token representation of the kind that was achieved in the heyday of second-wave feminism to what we have now.”
What we have now is an outgrowth of the second-wave feminism that has permeated throughout our institutions. “Why the Great Feminization thesis resonates with me so strongly is because just the timing fits,” Andrews added.
While many of the institutions impacted by “The Great Feminization” began adding women to their ranks in the 1960s and 1970s, women are now not only represented but make up growing majorities of these institutions.
“Law schools became majority female in 2016,” said Andrews. “University professors? You thought it would’ve been earlier, I would’ve guessed it would’ve been earlier, but no, that tipped over only just in the last five years. Medical schools became majority female in the last five years. The white-collar workforce overall—most workers with a college degree in America are women.”
“There has never been a society in the history of planet Earth where women have been a majority of lawyers, or a majority of doctors, or a majority of managers in management positions in businesses and nonprofits,” Andrews later said. “Whether or not you think feminization is a problem, everybody, even people who hate me and think I’m a hater, needs to acknowledge that we are in uncharted territory here. The great feminization is definitely going to cause new challenges or new changes to the way society functions that we have never seen before—not our country, not any country.”
The timing fits with the rise of wokeness and cancel culture.
“Wokeness seems to me like a repudiation of rational debate,” Andrews said. At its core, wokeness is “the intrusion of identity politics into previously neutral arenas and the erection of taboos surrounding what kinds of things you are and aren’t allowed to question, hiding more and more debatable claims behind curtains of, ‘How dare you push back on that!’”
“To connect this back to feminization, one of the consistent differences between men and women … is that women tend to be much more caring towards people they regard as victims,” Andrews told The Daily Signal. “If you are able to frame a political issue as looking out for a weak or a victim class, then it is much easier to get women on board with it, and I think that is what wokeness does across the board every time.”
Wokeness closes off more avenues of rational debate “by continuing to accumulate more and more sacred victim classes that you’re not allowed to question.”
How to roll back wokeness, then, is linked to rolling back “The Great Feminization.”
Reversing “The Great Feminization” starts with restoring an equal playing field: Put an end to diversity boosts for female applicants to colleges or jobs. Narrow and define anti-discrimination law. “The weapon that these schoolmarms in the HR department have to wield is federal law because it is illegal as a matter of anti-discrimination law to have a workplace that is unwelcoming to women and that has been interpreted by judges extremely broadly,” Andrews told The Daily Signal.
“It is only by massively incentivizing women to enter paid work that we have been able to create the situation where they are more than half of young associates at law firms,” she explained. “But if we take those thumbs off the scale, I think that great feminization will recede.”
Andrews concluded: “I’m confident that’s what would occur in America if we stopped deliberately manipulating gender relations in the toxic ways we’ve been doing so far.”
