https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/believe_the_women.html
As Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been disrupted by the #Me Two Movement’s chant “Believe the Women,” it is worth recalling the origins of this slogan — and the huge damage it wreaked in its first incarnation. It is also worth considering what light the earlier Believe the Women movement can throw on the current allegations.
I described its origin in 2001 in The Women’s Quarterly. I noted it could be traced to a single moment in history, April 17, 1971, when the New York Radical Feminists, a group that at its height boasted no more than 400 members, held a groundbreaking conference on rape, a subject long considered taboo. The event produced an unlikely star, Florence Rush, a middle-aged social worker who had never been raped. It was the conclusion to her speech that electrified the audience. “The family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of child abuse… permitted because it is an unspoken but prominent factor in socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role… In short the sexual abuse of female children is a process of education that prepares them to become the wives and mothers of America.” A participant, Susan Brownmiller, who would go on to write a book on rape, recalled: “I have been to many feminist meetings, but never before, and not since, have I seen an entire audience rise to its feet in acclaim. We clapped. We cheered.”
Feminist writers would begin to outdo each other in their estimates of incest victims. Catherine MacKinnon, the law professor who helped develop the legal definitions of sexual harassment, announced that 4.5% of all women are victims of incest by their father and if brothers, stepfathers, uncles and family friends were thrown in, the figure rose to 40 percent. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman dedicated her 1981 book Father-Daughter Incest, to the women “estimated by us to be in the millions, who have personally experienced incestuous abuse.”
At the time of the 1971 conference psychiatric textbooks estimated the rate of father-daughter incest at one to two for every million women in the United States. If that figure was accurate, it was not surprising that incest attracted little public attention. On the other hand, if, in fact, fathers were sexually abusing millions of daughters, why did no one know of it?
