In which a decades-old question is answered:
In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. “Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman’s real capacities are,” Mosher wrote in 1923. “She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?”
My suspicion is that the men of my generation and the following one have a far lower opinion of “woman’s real capacities” than the men of Mosher’s generation did. Mostly because we have the advantage of seeing what women have done with the physical, economic, racial, and civic freedom that Mosher anticipated: Twilight, Oprah, Girls Gone Wild, Prohibition/War on Drugs, and the current debt/GDP ratio pretty much covers it.
No amount of male cynicism could possibly have anticipated a post-patriarchal world in which female professors would utilize their astrophysics degrees in order to teach lesbianism in Hindu film as part of a Women’s Studies program. The moment of that fortuitous discovery, for which I will always be deeply grateful to my interlocutor at the time, Mr. John Scalzi, was the precise one at which my loathing for feminism transformed into a genuine appreciation for the vast amount of intrinsic humor it offers. And the more I have learned about the history of feminism, the more I read about the optimistic hopes and dreams of its antecedents and activists, the more amusing its absurd reality has become.