Is it True? Or is Patriarchy Trying to Justify Itself?
A lot of cultural narratives have no basis in science or facts
It’s often been noted that history is written by the victors. They are the ones who get to decide what the narrative is. The Founding Fathers of America are transformed from a squabbling bunch of flawed young men playing around with Age of Enlightenment concepts to near saints wisely pontificating from Olympus. The fact that their concept of equality is meant only for guys like them — rich, white, Christian, landowners — gets glossed over. We learn the propaganda, not the reality.
The framers of the American Constitution were deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought, but at its core is the belief that only certain people have the capacity for reason. Therefore, some people qualify as being worthy of rights, freedoms, and liberty, and others do not. The Founding Fathers owned slaves and did not consider women to remotely be their equals. In fact, for the first 100 years of the new Republic, only white men who owned property were allowed to vote. These are core Enlightenment beliefs but they are also deeply problematic and limiting.
And yet, what nearly all of us learned in school was that these framers of our Constitution were motivated by altruism to create a freer society, ruled by democratic…
