A war on masculinity is boiling over. Today, nearly half of men believe traditional masculinity is under threat. While the left talks about toxic masculinity, some politicians fear men’s deconstruction. Researchers point to data showing a relative decline in men’s education rates and a rise in deaths from drugs and suicide.
Even before the guns fell silent on the Western Front, the long-term social consequences of World War One were being felt back home. Women had a stronger voice, education, health, and housing appeared on the government’s radar, and the old politics were swept away. 1900 – 1920 was a time of immense innovation in transport and communication.
After WWI, the most tangible impact of war on men was the mutilation and dismemberment of male bodies. Shell-shocked soldiers faced new social expectations along with their damaged self-images as men.
Essentially, traditional agricultural societies were based on feudal modes of governance. Now, things were changing. That culture was being superseded by industrial, urban-centered societies. The city, rather than the village, became the average living space for most people. The birth of this new order created complexity and conflict; young against old, class struggle, racial conflict, and notably, the revival of pre-war anti-semitism in France and Germany. Robust, brutal solutions to social and political problems were encouraged in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia.
The war had reduced the sanctity of human life because of the trauma of unimaginable war casualties. Dictatorships embarked on mass slaughter without any thought to morality or conscience. Things changed, and not necessarily in a good way.
The League of Nations emerged from the Treaty of Versailles with thirty-two member countries, including most of the victors of World War I, and eventually expanded to include Germany and the other defeated nations.
Germany’s road to the Second World War began near the end of the first when it signed an armistice in November 1918. Onerous financial terms placed on Germany lit the fuse that exploded into World War ll. Nazism and Italian fascism strangled Democracy in Europe between World Wars.
By WW11, men were expected to embody courage and bravery. Men tried to develop traits such as aggression, competition, stoicism, toughness, and independence to prove to others that they were genuinely masculine. The war was a catalyst for the great migration of African Americans, and those who returned from the war, finding inequality intact, demanded returned from the war, finding inequality intact, and demanded civil rights. In addition, the conflict heralded the rise of conscription, mass propaganda, the national security state, and the FBI. War II changed women’s and men’s lives on the Home Front. Wartime needs increased labor demands for male and female workers, heightened domestic hardships and responsibilities, and intensified pressures for Americans to conform to social and cultural norms.
Over six million women took wartime jobs in factories, three million volunteered with the Red Cross, and over 200,000 served in the military. World War II provided unprecedented opportunities for American women to enter jobs that were never open to women, particularly in the defense industry.
Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 triggered declarations of war from France and the United Kingdom, formally starting World War II.
After World War ll, Europe was no longer a global power. Japanese Imperialism resulted in defeat. The Hitler Holocaust killed over six million Jews from 1941 to 1945. International human rights laws were implemented to ensure that history would not repeat itself.
Russia’s Iron Curtain dropped in 1945. It went away when the Cold War ended in 1991. The USSR was no more. Russia wants their countries back.
The Women’s liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s, primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected significant change (political, intellectual, and cultural) worldwide. Betty Friedan, a journalist, activist, and co-founder of the National Organization for Women, was one of the early leaders of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Margaret Meade said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” A Declaration of Sentiments was published in July 1848. It demanded that American women be extended the same civil and political rights that American men enjoyed, including voting. Women gained the right to vote in 1920. This was seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls convention. When America was founded, white, privileged, propertied males called all the shots. America was a man’s world.
SOME WOMEN CHANGE MAKERS: Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jane Addams, Ida Wells-Barnett, Helen Keller, Irène Joliot-Curie, Amelia Earhart, Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Florence NightingaleElenore Roosevelt, Judith Arlene Resnik, Virginia Woolfe, and Condi Rice.
