ABSTRACT

For centuries, middle-class bourgeois life has been knocked and lampooned: it is unimaginative, unadventurous, stultifying, sterile, we have heard all this a thousand times. But poverty, hunger, ignorance, and pestilence do not make for a scintillating existence either, and only in modern times could ordinary people exchange all that for comfortable bourgeois life. The "Noble Savage" critique portrays modernity as oppressing women, contrasted with a supposed halcyon past in which women were respected, valued, and powerful. Technology has liberated women from full-time enslavement to household and childcare obligations. Contraception has given them control over childbearing. Whereas in the past, people were mostly tied down to farming lives, the modern growing industrial economy has created both opportunities and needs for female employment. The biggest characteristic of modern culture is change. Multiculturalists who say that rationalism is something peculiarly Western, are actually insulting non-Western cultures.