Feminism is a set of social theories and political practices that are critical of past and current social relations and primarily motivated and informed by the experience of women. Most generally, it involves a critique of gender inequality; more specifically, it involves the promotion of women’s rights and interests. Feminist theorists question such issues as the relationship between sex, sexuality, and power in social, political, and economic relationships. Feminist political activists advocate such issues as women’s suffrage, salary equivalency, and control over reproduction.

Feminism is not associated with any particular group, practice, or historical event. Its basis is the political awareness that there are uneven power structures between groups, along with the belief that something should be done about it. There are many forms of feminism.

One subtype of feminists, Radical feminists, consider patriarchy to be the root cause of the most serious social problems. This form of feminism was popular in the second wave, though is not as prominent today. Some find that the prioritization of oppression that Radical feminists did was too universalizing and that women in other countries may find racial instead of gender to be the root oppression that they may face.

Some radical feminists advocate separatism -- a complete separation of male and female in society and culture -- while others question not only the relationship between men and women, but the very meaning of “man” and “woman” as well (see Queer theory); some argue that gender roles, gender identity, and sexuality are themselves social constructs (see also heteronormativity). For these feminists, feminism is a primary means to human liberation (i.e., the liberation of men as well as women, and men and women from other social problems).

Other feminists believe that there may be social problems separate from or prior to patriarchy (e.g., racism or class divisions); they see feminism as one movement of liberation among many, each with effects on each other.

Some of the major subtypes of feminism are: Amazon feminism, cultural feminism, ecofeminism, libertarian feminism or individualist feminism, material feminism, gender feminism, pop feminism and separatist feminism. Certain actions, approaches and people can also be described as proto-feminist or post-feminist.

Although many leaders of feminism have been women, not all women are feminists and not all feminists are women. Some feminists argue that men should not take positions of leadership in the movement, but most accept or seek the support of men. Compare pro-feminist, humanism, masculism.

It should be noted that the feminism has been principally a movement within the Western societies in the 20th Century. Some limited advances have been made in some non-Western countries; but the movement has been principally Western in origin and effects. Feminists hope that their movement will have an equal impact across the rest of the world in the 21st century.

History

The earliest works on ‘the woman question’ criticised the restrictive role of women without necessarily claiming that women were disadvantaged or that men were to blame. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the few works written before the 19th century that can unambiguously be called feminist. By modern standards her metaphor of women as nobility, the elite of society, coddled, fragile and in danger of intellectual and moral sloth, sounds like a masculist argument. Wollstonecraft believed that both sexes contributed to this situation and took it for granted that women had considerable power over men.

Feminism is generally said to have begun in the 19th century as people increasingly adopted the perception that women are oppressed in a male-centered society (see patriarchy). The feminist movement is rooted in the West and especially in the reform movement of the 19th century. The organised movement is dated from the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the founders of the suffragette movement and aimed to reveal the institutional sexism in British society, forming the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Often the repeated jailing by the Cat and Mouse Act, for trivial misdemeanours in activism, inspired members to go on hunger strikes, and because of the resultant force feeding that was the practice, caused these members to be very ill, serving to draw attention to the brutality of the legal system at the time and to further their cause.

Over a century and a half the movement has grown to include diverse perspectives on what constitutes discrimination against women. Early feminists are often called the first wave and feminists after about 1960 the second wave.

Feminist history in the United States

In the United States, this view had begun to evolve by the 1830s. Early feminists active in the abolition movement began to increasingly compare women’s situation with the plight of African American slaves. This new polemic squarely blamed men for all the restrictions of women’s role, and argued that the relationship between the sexes was one-sided, controlling and oppressive.

Most of the early women’s advocates were Christians, especially Quakers. It started with Lucretia Mott’s involvement as one of the first women to join the Quaker abolitionist men in the abolitionist movement. The result was that Quaker women like Lucretia Mott learned how to organize and pull the levers of representative government. Starting in the mid-1830s, they decided to use those skills for women’s advocacy. It was those early Quaker women who taught other women their advocacy skills, and for the first time used these skills for women’s advocacy. As these new women’s advocates began to expand on ideas about men and women, religious beliefs were also used to support them. Sarah Grimké suggested in her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1837) that the curse placed upon Eve in the Garden of Eden was God’s prophecy of a period of universal oppression of women by men. Early feminists set about compiling lists of examples of women’s plight in foreign countries and in ancient times.

At the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton modeled her declaration of sentiments on the United States Declaration of Independence. Men were said to be in the position of a tyrannical government over women. This separation of the sexes into two warring camps was to become increasingly popular in feminist thought, despite some reform minded men such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendel Phillips who supported the early women’s movement.

As the movement broadened to include many women like Susan B. Anthony from the temperance movement, the slavery metaphor was joined by the image of the drunkard husband who batters his wife. Feminist prejudice that women were morally superior to men reflected the social attitudes of the day. It also led to the to focus on women’s suffrage over more practical issues in the latter half of the 19th century. Feminists assumed that once women had the vote, they would have the political will to deal with any other issues.

Victoria Woodhull argued in the 1870s that the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution already guaranteed equality of voting rights to women. She anticipated the arguments of the United States Supreme Court a century later. But there was a strong movement opposed to suffrage, and it was delayed another 50 years, during which time most of the practical issues feminists campaigned for, including the 18th amendment’s prohibition on alcohol, had already been won.

Feminists of the second wave in the 1960’s focused more on lifestyle and economic issues; “The personal is the political” became a catchphrase. As the reality of women’s status increased, the feminist rhetoric against men became more vitriolic. The dominant metaphor describing the relationship of men to women became rape; men raped women physically, economically and spiritually. Radical feminists argued that rape was the defining characteristic of men, and introduced a new phase of hostility to maleness. Lesbian separatists appealed to lesbian women, advocating the complete independence of women from what was seen as a male-dominated society.

Radical feminists, particularly Catharine MacKinnon, began to dominate feminist jurisprudence. Whereas first-wave feminism had concerned itself with challenging laws restricting women, the second wave tended to campaign for new laws that aimed to compensate women for societal discrimination. The idea of male privilege began to take on a legal status as judicial decisions echoed it, even in the United States Supreme Court.

One of the largest, earliest and most influential feminist organizations in the U.S., the National Organization for Women (NOW) illustrates the strong influence of radical feminism. Created in 1967 with Betty Friedan as president, the organization’s name was deliberately chosen to say for women, and not of women. By 1968, the New York chapter lost many members who saw NOW as too mainstream. There was constant friction, most notably over the defense of Valerie Solanas. Solanas had shot Andy Warhol after writing the SCUM manifesto, seen by many as a passionately anti-male tract calling for the extermination of men. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of NOW described her as, “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights”. Another member, Florynce Kennedy represented Solanas at her trial. Within a year of the split, the new group limited the number of women members who live with men to 1/3 of the group’s membership. By 1971, all married women were excluded from the breakaway group and Atkinson had also defected.

Friedan denounced the lesbian radicals as the lavender menace and tried to distance NOW from lesbian activities and issues. The radicals accused her of homophobia. There was a constant fight for control of NOW which eventually Friedan lost. By 1992 Olga Vives, chair of the NOW’s national lesbian rights taskforce estimated that 40 percent of NOW members were lesbians. However NOW remains open to male members in contrast to some groups.

Feminists disagree over the role of men as participants within the movement. Some female feminists feel that it is inappropriate to describe self-named “feminist men” as “feminist” and instead prefer the title “pro-feminist men”; however, this usage has not caught on in most of American society. Others think that the imposition of a label like “pro-feminist male” on people who prefer another label like “feminist” is equivalent to the imposition of racial epithets that are not preferred by the groups they name.

In 1979, Belva Lockwood became the first woman to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to become a member of the Supreme Court.

Relationship to other movements

Most feminists take a holistic approach to politics, believing the saying of Martin Luther King Jr., “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. In that belief, feminists usually support other movements such as the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. At the same time many black feminists such as bell hooks criticise the movement for being dominated by white women. Feminist claims about the disadvantages women face are often less relevant to the lives of black women. Many black feminist women prefer the term womanism for their views.

However, Feminists are sometimes wary of the transsexual movement because they challenge the distinctions between men and women. Transsexual women are rejected by some feminists who say that no one born male can truly understand the oppression women face. On the other hand, transsexual women are quick to retort that the discrimination they face due to asserting their gender identity, more than makes up for any they may have “missed out on” growing up.

Impact of Feminism in the West

Feminism has effected many changes in Western society, including women’s suffrage; broad employment for women at more equitable wages (“equal pay for equal work”); the right to initiate divorce proceedings and “no fault” divorce; the right of women to control their own bodies and medical decisions, including obtaining birth control devices and safe abortions; and many others. Most feminists would argue, however, that there is still much to be done on these fronts. As Western society has become increasingly accepting of feminist principles, some of these are no longer seen as specifically feminist, because they have been adopted by all or most people. Some beliefs that were radical for their time are now mainstream political thought. Almost no one in Western societies today questions the right of women to vote or own land, a concept that seemed quite strange 200 years ago.

In some cases (notably equal pay for equal work) major advances have been made, but feminists still struggle to achieve their complete goals.

Feminists are often proponents of using non-sexist language, using “Ms.” to refer to both married and unmarried women, for example, or the ironic use of the term “herstory” instead of “history”. Feminists are also often proponents of using gender-inclusive language, such as “humanity” instead of “mankind”, or “he or she” in place of “he” where the gender is unknown. Feminists in most cases advance their desired use of language either to promote a respectful treatment of women or to affect the tone of political discourse, rather than in the belief that language directly affects perception of reality (compare Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

Impact on morals

Opponents of feminism claim that women’s quest for this kind of external power, as opposed to the internal power to affect other people’s ethics and values, has left a vacuum in the area of moral training, where women formerly held sway. Some feminists reply that the education, including the moral education, of children has never been, and should not be, seen as the exclusive responsibility of women. Such arguments are entangled within the larger disagreements of the Culture Wars, as well as within feminist (and anti-feminist) ideas regarding custodianship of societal morals and compassion.

Impact on heterosexual relationships

The impact of feminism has certainly affected the nature of heterosexual relationships in Western and other societies affected by feminism. While these impacts have generally been seen as positive, there have been some negative consequences.

In some of these relationships, there has been a change in the power relationship between men and women. In these circumstances, women and men have had to adapt to relatively new situations, causing confusions about role and identity. Women can now avail themselves more to new opportunities, but some have suffered with the demands of trying to live up to the so-called “superwomen” identity, and have struggled to ‘have it all’, i.e. manage to happily balance a career and family. Instead of the onus of childcare resting solely on the female, it has shifted somewhat, and the men are expected to assist in managing family matters more than in previous times. Various socialist feminists in response to the family issue blame this to the lack of state-provided childcare facilities, but this is not the case in all societies.

Men in some circumstances have also felt a loss of power and identity, and have struggled to come to terms with the changing social environments and differing demands made upon them.

There have been changes also in attitudes towards sexual morality and behaviour with the onset of second wave feminism and “the Pill”: women are then more in control of their body. Some see these changes as not always positive from the feminist perspective.

Impact on religion

Feminism has had a great impact on many aspects of religion. In liberal branches of Protestant Christianity, women are now ordained as clergy. Within these Christian groups, woman have gradually become equal to men by obtaining positions of power; their perspectives are now sought out in developing new statements of belief. In Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism, women are now ordained as rabbis and cantors. Within these Jewish groups, woman have gradually become more nearly equal to men by obtaining positions of power; their perspectives are now sought out in developing new statements of belief. These trends have been resisted within Islam; all the mainstream denominations of Islam forbid Muslim women from being recognized as religious clergy and scholars in the same way that Muslim men are accepted.

There is a separte article on God and gender; it discusses how monotheistic religions deal with God and gender, and how modern feminism has influenced the theology of many religions.

Worldwide statistics

Despite advances made by women toward equality in the West, there is still a very long way to go, according to those who provide the following statistics:

* Women own only 1% of the world’s wealth, and earn 10% of the world’s income, despite making up 51% of the population.

* When childcare and housework are taken into consideration, women work longer than men in both the industrialised and developing world, (by 20% in the industrialised world, and 30% in the developing world).

* Women are under-represented in all of the world’s legislative bodies: Sweden has the highest number of women at 42%. The United States has just 11%. The world average is just 9%.

* Worldwide, women on average earn 30% less than men, even when doing the same jobs.

Perspective: the nature of the modern movement

Discrimination against women still exists in the USA and European nations, as well as worldwide. How much discrimination and whether it is a problem is a matter of dispute.

There are many ideas within the movement regarding the severity of current problems, what the problems are, and how to confront them. Extremes on the one hand include some radical feminists such as Mary Daly who argues that the world would be better off with dramatically fewer men. There are also dissidents, such as Christina Hoff Sommers or Camille Paglia, who identify themselves as feminist but who accuse the movement of anti-male prejudices. Many feminists question the use of the “feminist” label as applying to these individuals.

Many feminists, however, also question the use of the term feminist to refer to any who espouse violence to any gender or who fail to recognize a fundamental equality between the sexes. Some feminists, like Katha Pollitt (see her book Reasonable Creatures) or Nadine Strossen (President of the ACLU and author of Defending Pornography [a treatise on freedom of speech]), consider feminism to be, solely, the view that “women are people.” Views that separate the sexes rather than unite them are considered by these people to be sexist rather than feminist.

There are also debates between difference feminists such as Carol Gilligan on the one hand, who believe that there are important differences between the sexes (which may or may not be inherent, but which cannot be ignored), and those who believe that there are no essential differences between the sexes, and that the roles observed in society are due to conditioning. Modern scientists sometimes disagree on whether inborn differences exist between men and women (other than physical differences such as anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones). Regardless of how many differences between the sexes are inherent or acquired, none of these differences is a basis for discrimination.

This mostly Western debate about Feminism, should not distract from the fact that the major goal of the Feminist movement in the 21st Century is to improve the situation of women in non-Western countries.

List of notable feminists

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This is a list of important participants in the development of feminism.

Table of contents [showhide]

1 Early pioneers

2 First-wave feminists

3 Second-wave feminists

4 Third-wave feminists

5 Ecofeminists

6 Dissident feminists

7 French feminists

8 Lesbian feminists

9 Other feminists

Early pioneers

* Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

* Christina of Sweden

* John Stuart Mill

* George Sand

First-wave feminists

* Susan B. Anthony

* Emma Goldman

* Sarah Grimke

* Angelina Emily Grimke

* Lucretia Mott

* Elizabeth Cady Stanton

* Lucy Stone

* Mary Wollstonecraft

* Victoria Woodhull

* Virginia Woolf

* Frances Wright

Second-wave feminists

* Gloria Anzaldua

* Simone de Beauvoir

* Lorraine Bethel

* Susan Brownmiller

* Charlotte Bunch

* Mary Daly

* Angela Davis

* Andrea Dworkin

* Susan Faludi

* Shulamith Firestone

* Jo Freeman

* Marilyn French

* Betty Friedan

* Carol Gilligan

* Germaine Greer

* Donna Haraway

* Nancy Hartsock

* bell hooks

* Catharine MacKinnon

* Cherrie Moraga

* Robin Morgan

* Bernice Johnson Reagon

* Alice Schwarzer

* Gloria Steinem

Third-wave feminists

* Rebecca Walker

Ecofeminists

* Charlotte Perkins Gilman

* Carol J. Adams

* Helene Aylon

* Judi Bari

* Bernadette Cozart

* Françoise d’Eaubonne

* Lois Marie Gibbs

* Susan Griffin

* Petra Kelly

* Winona LaDuke

* Wangari Maathai

* Vandana Shiva

* Charlene Spretnak

* Starhawk

Dissident feminists

* Donna LaFramboise

* Wendy McElroy

* Camile Paglia

* Christina Hoff Sommers

* Naomi Wolf

French feminists

* Helene Cixous

* Luce Irigary

* Julia Kristeva

* Monique Wittig

Lesbian feminists

* Judith Butler

* Adrienne Rich

* Monique Wittig

Other feminists

* Flora Brovina

* William Moulton Marston

* Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures

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Non-sexist language (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-sexist_language

Non-sexist or gender-neutral language is writing or speech which avoids perpetuating what is perceived as sexism.

Calling this type of language “non-sexist language” is a loaded term, as it implies that failure to use this type of language is automatically sexist. Less loaded terms, such as sex-neutral or gender-neutral, are not as common.

Common positions

Views on ‘non-sexist language’ can be split into approximately four groups:

1. People who believe that ‘non-sexist language’ is a good thing, use it themselves, and try to enforce it on everyone else. These people often argue passionately for non-sexist language at every opportunity.

2. People who believe that ‘non-sexist language’ is a good thing, use it themselves, but do not wish to enforce it on everyone else. These people may try to persuade others of the merits of ‘non-sexist language’, but are generally less vehement in their arguments.

3. People who believe that non-sexist language is neither good nor bad. These people sometimes use ‘non-sexist language’, and sometimes use more traditional forms of expression.

4. People who believe that ‘non-sexist language’ is a bad thing, and do not use it themselves. These people may try to persuade others of the problems with ‘non-sexist language’, with more or less vehemence.

History

Many of the modern masculine terms in use today originated as gender neutral terms in Old English. For example, the word ‘man’ was originally gender neutral and qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wíf (which produced woman) survived, leaving ‘man’ with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people) and its gender-specific meaning, male.

The same sort of thing has historically happened in other languages. The word homo was sex-neutral in Classical Latin. Its descendants such as French homme, Italian uomo, Spanish hombre are specifically male; while in Romanian “om” is gender-neutral. But the derived adjectives humain etc. mean human as in English.

Awareness of the social effects of language was largely a 20th century phenomenon in the English-speaking world, and has been linked to the development of the Principle of Linguistic Relativity by Benjamin Whorf and others. However, a program to rid Norwegian of sexist presuppositions dates from the mid 19th century and remains an ongoing part of Norwegian culture.

Add later history here

Disputed issues

There are a wide range of disputed issues in the debate over ‘non-sexist language’. Are there inherently sexist language forms, and if so, what are they? If they exist, should they be changed? If they should be changed, how should this be achieved?

Are some uses of language inherently sexist?

Advocates of ‘non-sexist language’, including many feminists, argue that traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in society adequately. In general, they complain about a number of issues:

* Over-use of gender-specific pronouns like “he”.

* Use of “man” to refer to all people.

* Over-use of gender-specific job titles.

* Use of Miss and Mrs. (see Ms.).

* non-parallel usage, such as “man and wife”.

* Stereotypical words such as virile and ladylike

According to advocates of ‘non-sexist language’, there are various problems with these uses:

* They marginalize women and create the impression of a male-dominated society.

* They can be patronising, for example treating women only as marriage material

* They can perpetuate stereotypes about the “correct” way for a man or woman to behave.

Opponents of non-sexist language do not accept these arguments as valid.

* Some regard the whole thing as “political correctness gone mad”, as it was ridiculed in the 1980s British satirical show Spitting Image.

* Some people believe that while these usages may, on the surface, appear to be gender-biased, in practice most people think of them and use them as gender-neutral.

* Some people disagree with feminism and argue that men and women are sufficiently different that these differences are rightly embedded in the language. In this context, see masculism.

A deeper variant of these arguments involves the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the suggestion that our language shapes our thought processes and that in order to eliminate sexism we would do well to eliminate “sexist” forms from our language. Some feminists are dismissive of these ideas, viewing ‘non-sexist language’ as window-dressing which merely hides, not changes, sexist attitudes. They typically do not oppose such language, but rather see it as an irrelevance.

Enforcement, persuasion, or evolution?

A tiny minority of advocates for non-sexist language argue that these “sexist” usages should be banned. It is unclear how this would be achieved. Hate speech legislation does exist in some countries, but applies to much more clear-cut and widely accepted cases of perceived prejudice.

The majority of advocates for ‘non-sexist language’ wish to proceed by persuasion rather than enforcement. One tool of this persuasion is creating guidelines (see below) that indicate how they believe language should be used. Another tool is simply to make use of ‘non-sexist language’ oneself, and lead by example.

In addition to those who oppose any change, some opponents of ‘non-sexist language’ argue that a change in language should evolve organically from changing public attitudes towards gender issues, rather than be achieved either by enforcement, or by persuasion.

Neologising

While some terms, such as firefighter and singular they, are sometimes denigrated by opponents as neologisms, they in fact have a long history that predates the women’s liberation movement. At other times new terms have indeed been created, such as Ms. or womyn. The issue is confused by satirists who invent extreme examples of the supposed consequences of ‘non-sexist language’, such as epersoncipation.

Some critics accuse advocates of non-sexist language of “re-gendering” language, replacing masculine in some cases by feminine terms that are equally sexist. Other critics argue that non-sexist language violates the rules of proper grammar and style.

Guidelines

Many different authorities have presented guidelines on whether, and if so and where, to use ‘non-sexist language’. Wikipedia is not a style guide, so we present a selection of such sources here.

* The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association has an oft-cited section on “Guidelines to Reduce Bias in Language”. ISBN 1557987912

* American Philosophical Association - published 1986

* Linguistic Society of America

* University of Western Sydney - last revised 1995

* University of New Hampshire

* The Guardian - see section gender issues

* Avoiding Heterosexual Bias in Language, published by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay Concern, American Psychological Association.

* ...

Many dictionaries, stylebooks, and some authoritative guides now counsel the writer to follow the new guidelines.

These guidelines, though accepted by many, remain in some contexts controversial, and are applied to differing degrees among English speakers worldwide. often reflecting different cultures and language structure, for example American English in contrast to British English. They are also impacted upon, depending on whether a person uses English as their first language or as a second language, regional variants or whether their form of English is based on grammatical structures inherited from a no longer widely used other language (for example, Hiberno-English) or owes its linguistic structure to earlier Old English or Elizabethan English. In these cases, language structure from their native tongue or linguistic inheritance may enter into their terminology.

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Call her Mrs. – Phyllis Schlafly (020718)

EVEN TAKING INTO account the extraordinary capacity of the left for hallucinatory self-aggrandizement, the insipid blather about the feminists and the total radio silence on Phyllis Schlafly is astonishing.

The elite media cast about for women to praise, hailing any female who has achieved the amazing feat of having passed the bar exam, but treat the stunning accomplishments of Phyllis Schlafly like the publisher of the New York Times treats his SAT scores. (It is a dark secret that must not be revealed.) Schlafly simply cannot be mentioned – except for the occasional demeaning caricature.

About the time a young Hillary Rodham was serving as inspiration for the perfect little girl in the Hollywood thriller “The Bad Seed,” Schlafly was remaking the Republican Party.

In 1964, Schlafly wrote “A Choice, Not An Echo,” widely credited with winning Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president. The book sold an astounding 3 million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells 5,000 copies.) Goldwater lost badly in the general election, but the Republican Party would never be the same.

Goldwater’s nomination began the retreat of sellout, Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans who hoped to wreck the country with slightly less alacrity than the Democrats. Without Schlafly, without that book, it is very possible that Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president.

As the feminists spent 20 years engaged in a death-match debate over whether it is acceptable for feminists to wear lipstick, Schlafly was writing 10 books, most of them on military policy.

She co-authored “The Gravediggers,” accusing the elite foreign-policy establishment of cheerfully selling out the nation’s military superiority to the Soviet Union. That book sold 2 million copies. She also co-authored the extremely influential (and extremely long, at more than 800 pages) “Kissinger on the Couch,” methodically dissecting Kissinger’s foreign policy and attacking his beloved Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.

Meanwhile, the feminists moved on from the weighty lipstick debate to pornography. (As Irving Kristol has suggested, their primary area of agreement was that 18-year-old girls performing sex on stage should be paid the minimum wage.)

An early and vigorous proponent of a missile defense shield, Schlafly has written extensively about ICBMs and missile-defense treaties. Her work was a major factor in President Reagan’s decision to proceed with the High Frontier technology.

Having reached agreement on the necessity of a minimum wage for prostitutes (oops “sex workers”), feminists turned their inexplicable wrath on the titles “Mrs.” and “Miss.”

About the same time, Schlafly noticed that the Equal Rights Amendment was sailing toward ratification without anyone noticing. When Schlafly took up her battle against the ERA, the Senate had passed it by 84 to 8. The House had passed it by 354 to 23. The ERA was written in to both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. Thirty states had approved it in the first year after it was sent to the states for ratification. Only eight more states were needed.

But the ERA had not yet faced Phyllis Schlafly. Over the next eight years, thanks to Schlafly and her Eagle Forum, only five states ratified it – but five other states rescinded their earlier ratifications.

What the feminists lacked in linear thinking, they made up for in viciousness, control of the media and Hollywood glitz. As Schlafly said, feminists had “the movie star money and we have the voters.” With an army of women behind her, Schlafly defeated the ERA, beating both political parties, two presidents, the Senate, the House and a slew of Hollywood celebrities.

Soon feminists took up the issue of girl-firemen, demanding to know what possible arguments there were, pray tell, for women not to be firemen. (A short list: their inability to pick up the hose, their tendency to cry and panic when confronted with dangerous situations, the effect on families whose homes are on fire when they open the door and see the female equivalent of Michael Dukakis in a tank.)

Schlafly moved on to ludicrous United Nations treaties, the Violence Against Women Act, sexual harassment law, values-clarification programs and other monstrosities too numerous to catalog. People who dismiss her as a mere demagogue or rabble-rouser either don’t read her work or don’t have any idea what actual “scholarship” is.

She was nearly the first woman ever to attend Harvard Law School – though it did not then admit women, Schlafly’s Harvard professors found her so brilliant that they offered to make an exception for her. (She declined.) Instead, she married, raised six amazingly accomplished children and later attended law school in her 50s – all while fighting the establishment in her free time. She is brilliant, beautiful, principled, articulate, tireless and, most important, absolutely fearless.

That Phyllis Schlafly is the mortal enemy of a movement that claims to promote women tells you all you need to know about the feminists. That most people know more about Madeleine Albright’s brooch collection than Schlafly’s achievements tells you all you need to know about the media.

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Women’s evolving role confuses Canadians (Globe & Mail, 970917)

Results of survey suggest uncertainty over social norms

Canadians are deeply torn about whether women ought to be at home or at work, according to a ground-breaking survey published yesterday by Statistics Canada.

On one hand, the nation appears to embrace the idea that women have a rightful place in the work force. A commanding majority of Canadians even believe that women have a duty to contribute to the household income.

But on the other hand, a majority are convinced that preschool children will suffer if both parents are employed.

And both sexes were profoundly split over what women even want (assuming they had to choose): domestic bliss or jobs. Eighteen per cent of men and 11 per cent of women could not answer the question of which sphere women really long for.

The results of the survey are so ambivalent that they suggest Canadians no longer know what the social norms are, even as a majority of women take part in the paid work force, said Kerry Daly, a sociologist who is acting chairman of the department of family studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

In other words, he said, the conduct of Canadians has changed dramatically over perhaps 30 years of robust social change, but their cultural beliefs have not kept pace.

“I think we’re at an awkward crossroads,” he said. “We’re reluctant to go back to the way things were . . . and yet there’s a hesitancy on the part of both men and women to know what the next step is.”

The fallout from this is a disturbing inquietude: Whether women stay home with their children these days or go out to work, they cannot be sure they are doing the right thing.

“This is uncharted territory, culturally,” Prof. Daly said. “And when people look to previous generations for guidance, there is none.”

The Statscan survey, based on interviews with 11,000 Canadians in 1995, is the most comprehensive snapshot ever taken of attitudes toward these issues. The statistics were published yesterday in the quarterly magazine Canadian Social Trends.

Fran Cusack, 38, of Calgary knows how hard it is to figure out what is best for herself and her family. She was working full time as a microbiologist at the University of Calgary and trying to finish her PhD when her son Chris, who will be 7 this weekend, was born. She took about four months off and then went back, often starting as early as 5 a.m. and working evenings so she could spend as much time with her son as possible.

By the time Alexandra, 5, was born, she had had it with all the juggling. Her husband, a school teacher, was not prepared to take a hiatus. So she did.

One year off stretched to two and now to five. Ms. Cusack is eager to return to the work force -- she even feels a duty to do so because she is highly educated -- but she is still concerned about the effect her absence would have on her daughter, who has just started kindergarten.

She said she struggles mightily and continually with whether she has made the proper decisions. “It’s always: ‘Is it the right one?’ “ she said in an interview yesterday. “I’m very glad I stayed home. But I don’t know enough to say whether it will make a difference. Who can?”

At the same time, she knows it has become harder to re-enter her scientific field. During her most recent job interview, she felt she was being asked to defend her choice to stay at home with her children.

“It’s almost as if there’s the question: ‘You’ve left your career once. Are you going to do it again?’ “ she said. “It seems to me that most of the brunt of this is borne by women.”

The Statscan survey found that 68 per cent of men and 73 per cent of women agreed or strongly agreed that both men and women ought to contribute to household income. Just 19 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women said they should not. The remainder did not answer.

But just 49 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that having a job is the best way for a woman to be independent. Thirty-eight per cent of men and 36 per cent of women disagreed.

On the question of what happens to the child when the mother works, the answers suggested deep uncertainty, especially given that the majority of mothers with young children are in the work force.

Fifty-nine per cent of men and 51 per cent of women said that preschoolers suffer if both parents are employed, while 30 per cent of men and 37 per cent of women disagreed with that.

On the other hand, 59 per cent of men and 67 per cent of women said an employed mother can have a warm relationship with her children. Thirty per cent of men and 22 per cent of women said she could not.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the responses came to the vexed question of what women really want. Forty-six per cent of both men and women agreed or strongly agreed that “A job is all right, but what most women really want is a home and children.”

Thirty-four per cent of men and 41 per cent of women disagreed or strongly disagreed. Remarkably, 18 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women did not want to answer the question. Perhaps they simply did not know.

To Ellen Gee, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., the results paint the picture of a nation caught in denial and even fear. “It isn’t even ambivalence, it’s stronger,” she said. “It’s uncertainty about women’s roles and to some degree men’s roles. We really don’t know what we’re doing.”

A second piece of the survey, also published yesterday in Canadian Social Trends, paints the picture more starkly. In it, the interviewers asked people aged 20 and older about breaks in their employment history.

The survey found that women are still much more likely than men to stop work for family reasons, although women today are less likely to do so than previous generations.

As well, when women today interrupt their careers, they do so for a much shorter span than women in earlier decades, the study found.

For example, before 1950, 88 per cent of the breaks women took from work were for family reasons. In the period from 1990 to 1994, family accounted for 47 per cent of interruptions, still by far the most popular reason. (Others included being laid off and going back to school.)

But for men, family did not even hit the radar screen as a reason for interrupting a career, said Janet Fast, one of the authors of the Statscan paper and a professor of human ecology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Her part of the survey found that before 1950, 41 per cent of new mothers had been employed before giving birth. Just 1 per cent of mothers who took a break from work to have a baby ended up back at work by the time that baby was 2.

By the period 1990 to 1994, 85 per cent of new mothers had been employed before their first baby was born. Fifty-six per cent of new mothers who interrupted their work returned to a job within two years. The average length of the break from work was 10.6 years before 1950, compared with one year in the 1990s.

The following questions were asked of a representative sample of the Canadian population, aged 15 and over, in 1995.

Question: In order for you to be happy in life, is it very important, important, not very important or not at all important... To be able to take a paying job either outside or inside the home

Question: Can you tell me if you strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with each of the following statements?

** An employed mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work for pay.

** Having a job is the best way for a woman to be an independent person.

** Both the man and the woman should contribute to the household income.

** A preschool child is likely to suffer if both parents are employed. A job is all right, but what most women really want is a home and children.

Importance of being able to take a paying job

	Very important	Important	Not very important	Not at all important	Don’t know
Men	37%	49%	9%	1%	3%
Women	18	46	26	4	4
Total	27	48	18	3	4

Employed mother can have warm relationship with children

	Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly disagree	Don’t know
Men	8%	51%	27%	3%	3%
Women	14	53	20	2	9
Total	11	52	24	3	10

Having a job is the best way for a woman to be independent

Men	5%	44%	35%	3%	12%
Women	10	45	33	3	8
Total	7	45	34	3	10

Man and woman should contribute to household income

Men	12%	56%	19%	0%	11%
Women	15	58	15	1	9
Total	13	57	17	1	10

Preschool child will suffer if both parents are employed

Men	11%	48%	28%	2%	9%
Women	11	40	34	3	10
Total	11	44	31	3	9

A job is all right, but what most women really want is a home

and children

Men	4%	42%	32%	2%	18%
Women	6	40	37	4	11
Total	5	41	35	3	15

Data may not add up due to rounding.

======================================

Battered Women’s Syndrome: Science or Sham? (Foxnews, 021022)

By Wendy McElroy

As Domestic Violence Awareness Month nears its end, organizations like the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison are calling loudly for the mass pardoning of “battered” women who have been convicted of first-degree murder.

PC feminists should instead take a real stand against gender violence and abandon the Battered Woman Syndrome -- a legal defense used to exonerate women who kill abusive men in the absence of imminent danger.

BWS claims that battered women are psychologically traumatized and therefore not responsible for their violent actions. Thus, a battered woman is not held responsible for murdering her abuser in his sleep, as in the much cited court case State of North Carolina v. Judy Ann Laws Norman or in the movie The Burning Bed . BWS sidesteps the long established principle that only a clear and imminent danger to life can justify murder, especially the premeditated variety.

Controversy swirls over whether BWS even exists or is a creation of feminist politics. Whatever is true, BWS is a legal defense available to women and de facto denied to men. Both women and men should be held equally accountable for their acts of violence. The courts should not bar anyone from a valid legal defense -- but is BWS valid?

BWS is more than a demand for compassion. As a woman who was severely battered, empathy is my first reaction. But compassion toward a murderer does not justify her act. BWS is being politically used to make cause celebres out of women who make the most reprehensible choice possible -- the cold-blooded killing of another human being.

Consider the case of the self-confessed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute recently executed by the state of Florida for murdering seven men. Wuornos initially claimed that the men, all killed within a year’s span, were customers against whom she was defending herself. She later recanted and told the judge: “I am guilty as can be. I want the world to know I killed these men -- as cold as ice. I’ve hated human beings for a long time.” Wuornos’ motive was also robbery.

Seven human beings who were never convicted of a crime -- indeed, who were accused of one only by a murderess, thief and liar -- received private death sentences. They were dismissed by a media which would have eagerly examined every detail of the victims had they been female.

By contrast, Wuornos has been the subject of movies, a documentary, a play, and an opera sympathetic to the murderess and dismissive or hostile to her victims. The play, entitled Self-Defense (or The Death of Some Salesmen) , presents the murderess as a martyr. She is a symbolic reminder that men abuse women. Lest anyone miss that message, the policeman who arrests Jolene Palmer (the Wuornos character) states his motives, “White, middle-aged men are at risk!”

The opera, entitled Wuornos , is a self-consciously political justification of murdering men. Pointing a finger of blame at Wuornos’ allegedly abusive father and distant grandfather, the opera advertises itself as “the rage of one woman” speaking “for centuries of pain.” Wuornos is described as “a woman who makes the ultimate sacrifice for the love of her life -- another woman.” This refers to the fact that Wuornos had been persuaded to confess her guilt by her lesbian lover.

Such presentations hit hard upon the tragic childhood of Wuornos. But the goal does not seem to be compassion or understanding of the human condition. After all, no compassion or understanding is extended to the dead men or their families. The message is clear: the men deserved to die.

In her essay, “Sexual Violence Against Women and a Woman’s Right to Self-Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos,” the renowned radical feminist Phyllis Chesler provides “statistics” and theory to support this message.

Without citing sources, Chesler explains, “According to contemporary studies, 90 percent of all violent crimes are still committed by men. ... When those women who commit 10 percent of all violent crimes do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defense.” [Emphasis added]

Chesler’s statistics do not seem to apply to spousal killing. The Department of Justice’s “Murder in Families” study found “among black marital partners ... 47 percent of the black spouse victims were husbands and 53 percent were wives. Among white victims ... 38 percent of the victims were husbands and 62 percent were wives.” It is also difficult to understand how Chesler knows that battered women invariably murder in self-defense, not in anger or for revenge.

I keep returning to the least discussed aspect of BWS. The men who deserved a trial before being executed: Were they, in fact, guilty?

Wuornos did not endorse the opera that eulogizes the murder of men, although she was asked repeatedly to do so. Before she died, Wuornos expressed great remorse for the pain she had caused the families of her victims. What does it say about PC feminists when a serial killer who hates mankind shows more decency than they can manage?

==============================

Urban Legends (Foxnews, 021112)

By Wendy McElroy

Advocacy research refers to studies and reports produced by people with a vested interest in reaching a foregone conclusion. Politically correct feminism is notorious for its advocacy research and for the shoddy methodology that often accompanies political bias.

Theory is paraded as fact, anecdotal accounts as hard data. Those who raise contradicting evidence are slandered in ad hominem attacks.

Such “research” could be dismissed as worthless and irrelevant if it did not form the basis of so much public policy. Feminist smears could be written off as bad manners if it did not damage people’s lives. As it stands, PC feminism and the urban legends it creates hurt innocent people. And that can never be ignored.

In 1994, Christina Hoff Sommers exposed the urban legends feminism has perpetrated on the North American public in her book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Examples of feminist urban legends include:

-- 150,000 American women die of anorexia nervosa each year. Sommers went to the figure’s source and found that 150,000 people have anorexia, with yearly deaths ranging around 100.

-- domestic violence soars by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday . When the source was tracked down, the “researcher” refused to verify the data, claiming that the study was not “for public consumption.”

-- a March of Dimes study found that battery during pregnancy was the leading cause of birth defects. But the March of Dimes did no such study and was misquoted.

Such urban legends are used as scare tactics to support demands for laws and increased funding to benefit women. Meanwhile, anyone who challenges the PC findings of flawed or non-existent “studies” is likely to be slandered or worse. Three pioneering researchers on domestic violence -- Murray Straus, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz -- encountered this PC gambit for silencing dissent.

In 1980, the three researchers conducted a now classic study, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in American Families, that indicated men and women initiate domestic violence at about the same rate, although men receive fewer injuries. As a result of this study and continuing research, Straus’ career was injured by bitter personal attacks, including a false rumor that he was a wife-beater. As Gelles commented, almost every male researcher or writer who counters feminist urban legends is branded as a batterer.

Female researchers fare no better. Steinmetz’s family -- including her children -- were threatened with physical violence and a conference at which she was to speak received a bomb threat.

To this day, most of the people I know who speak out with any effectiveness against PC feminism are slandered and targeted for intimidation.

Certainly, I receive my share of strange libels and threats. Yet it is essential that thug-like strategies not be allowed to silence valid research and dissenting opinion.

It is important for people to regain confidence in the objective research that is fundamental to establishing facts. Scare tactics have been so overused by PC advocates that a “Peter and the Wolf Syndrome” is starting to set in. Inaccurate and shoddy “research” has been used to sound alarm bells so often that a cynical public is starting to ignore valid data. Who can blame them for this reaction?

But honest research is possible, and the media must cease being complicit in ringing false alarms and spreading inaccuracies. Even cursory attention to common-sense guidelines would allow journalists and reporters to filter out the worst of the legends that pose as fact instead of passing them on to listeners as “news.”

What are some of these common-sense guidelines? The media should ignore, or severely question, any report:

-- with highly emotive language;

-- with specific policy recommendations or funding demands;

-- with a “snapshot” approach rather than data over time;

-- with internal and unexplained anomalies or contradictions;

-- without collaborating empirical evidence;

-- without a statement of parameters, e.g. margin for error;

-- without disclosure of researchers’ relevant affiliations;

-- which has an unrepresentative or small sampling;

-- which does not attempt to verify the accounts;

-- which stresses anecdotal accounts

-- which does not independently verify accounts from subjects

Moreover, the media should stop treating slander as though it was a counter-argument. When men who question feminist data are bashed as batterers, reporters should demand hard evidence for this criminal charge. When women who speak out are threatened and slandered, journalists should expose the feminist preference to destroy lives instead of dealing with arguments.

If the media took that first step, perhaps then the public would regain confidence in another essential aspect of public debate. The idea of an honest disagreement is possible between people who respect each other instead of the mud-slinging matches that pass for dialogue on “hardball” talk shows.

I learned that respectful disagreement was possible from Queen Silver , a woman who was my best friend and inspiration up until her death a few years ago. We disagreed on almost everything political. From Queen, I discovered that someone who diametrically opposes me on important issues could have a good heart and care every bit as much as I do about justice.

A generation has been raised to believe that shouting is debate, defamation of character is argument and valid research does not exist. This PC legacy must not be allowed to stand.

==============================

Rights & Responsibilities (Foxnews, 021119)

By Wendy McElroy

Politically correct feminists seem determined to manufacture gender conflict by packaging women and men as separate classes with antagonistic political interests.

The truth is we are all just human beings with the same political interest: to have our individual rights respected so that no one is treated differently by law than the person next door.

A recent flap in the media captures how PC feminism is fabricating conflict and then refusing to deal with the consequences.

The controversy involves Martha Burk -- the virago who blasted the privately owned Atlanta National Golf Club for not admitting women members. An old article Burk wrote for the Nov-Dec. 1997 issue of Ms. Magazine has surfaced. In the piece, entitled “The Sperm Stops Here!”, Burk advocates the mandatory sterilization of men at puberty as a solution to the abortion debate.

“The Sperm Stops Here!” was allegedly intended as satire. The tip-off is Burk’s lead-in: “A modest proposal ...” This refers to Jonathan Swift’s famous 1729 satire “A Modest Proposal” in which he exaggerates British policies in Ireland in order to discredit them. He carries British callousness to its logical conclusion by suggesting that the English farm and eat Irish babies. Swift intends to elicit horror in his readers.

But is “The Sperm Stops Here!” really a hoax?

Kathryn Lopez in National Review and Rush Limbaugh on his radio program took the article at face value -- much to both of their embarrassment. But there is nothing to be embarrassed about.

For example, in contrast to Swift’s classic piece, Burk was defending a policy -- abortion -- by ascribing absurd positions to its opponents, which they have never held. She opens by stating that both sides believe “if all babies were planned ... women wouldn’t seek abortions.” If abortion is outlawed, therefore, men at puberty must be chemically sterilized. Then state tribunals (and women) could plan all babies. Burk is eliciting contempt for those who question abortion.

Then, those who object to this hamfisted tactic are doubly attacked as being so stupid or humorless as to not “get” that the article is a hoax.

Consider Burk’s Nov. 12 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire . Co-host Tucker Carlson asked Burk about the mandatory male sterilization. Burk responded, “Hey, if they’re going to restrict abortion, buddy, we’ve got to do it this way.”

When attorney Debbie Schlussel had the audacity to take that response seriously, Burk countered, “Do you guys know what a spoof is?” Thus, she was able to make her point and retract it at the same time. Burk’s point: The reproductive rights and responsibilities of women and men are in direct conflict. Her retraction: Anyone who objects doesn’t have a sense of humor. Burk’s “now I mean it, now I don’t” approach accomplishes one goal very well: It blocks honest discussion.

A real hoax is occurring. Ironically, the position Burk ascribes to abortion opponents is actually a logical and grotesque extension of her own beliefs -- namely, that women should have all the reproductive rights while men have only responsibilities. The position she is “spoofing” is her own.

According to PC feminism, the woman alone has the right of choice in carrying a pregnancy to term while the man bears legal responsibility for child support. Yet, in paying child support, he has no guarantee of joint custody or even visitation rights.

The idea of responsibilities without rights is taken to such absurd lengths that even men who do not father children are held responsible for them. Consider the case of Morgan Wise , as chronicled by journalist Cathy Young. Blood tests proved that only one of “his” four children were actually his, yet the court ordered Wise to continue all child support payments and prohibited him from contact with the children. His role in that family is now the biological equivalent of an ATM machine. Wise’s case is unfortunately hardly unique.

And, so, gender warfare becomes a political reality -- not because it exists naturally, but because it has been created. The legal system now assigns rights to women and responsibilities to men.

Disputes will always exist because the desires and claims of some people will conflict with others, especially in intimate relationships. This is natural but it is not a matter of gender. Husbands argue with wives, daughters with mothers, sisters with each other. The fact is that individuals often come into conflict. And a just resolution requires that those involved -- male or female, black or white, purple or polka-dotted -- have equal rights and responsibilities under the law. Otherwise, the law itself becomes the source of conflict.

Reproductive rights should not be uncoupled from responsibilities. I have seen the human agony caused by laws that privilege one parent over another based solely on gender, and there is nothing humorous about it. I have no doubt that individual women suffer injustice from the court system. But men suffer as a class . One travesty cannot be used to justify the other. Women and men must be equal as individuals under law in both rights and responsibilities. Only then will the suffering diminish.

==============================

Iraq War May Kill Feminism as We Know It (Foxnews, 030318)

By Wendy McElroy

Social transformation at home always accompanies war abroad, and its effects are felt for decades after the military conflict is over. The death of feminism as we know it may be a domestic consequence of war with Iraq.

Historically, war has exerted a defining influence on American feminism. World War II ushered women out of the kitchen and into Rosie-the-Riveter jobs. Feminism in the ‘60s grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement, to which current feminism owes much of its leftist bias. During the Civil War, feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony consciously subordinated “the woman question” in order to support the Union cause. When the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — a postwar measure — enfranchised black men, feminism reacted by becoming a one-issue movement: The cry was “votes for women!”

The war with Iraq and its aftermath will have an equally dramatic impact. One reason: Western feminism will be forced to confront its Eastern counterpart, which is, in significant ways, a mirror opposite: Islamic feminism. The encounter is likely to change the definition of feminism itself.

What is Islamic feminism? The superficial answer: It is the sum total of the feminist organizations that have sprung up in almost every Muslim nation, from Uzbekistan to Egypt, from Iraq to Palestine. Muslim women are networking, protesting and petitioning for relief from real injustice, such as the legal denial of education.

The ideology of Islamic feminism is more difficult to capture because the goals and beliefs of the women involved vary widely. The realities of a feminist like Benazir Bhutto , former prime minister of Muslim Pakistan, cannot be compared to those of a displaced Palestinian mother living in a refugee camp. Nevertheless, generalizations can be made.

Consider only two:

1) Most Islamic feminists base their demand for equality upon the teachings of Islam . They do not separate themselves or their identity as women from the larger context of religion. To them, the current inequality results from a misinterpretation of the Koran.

By contrast, Western feminists reject a religious basis for equality and argue from an entirely secular perspective. Indeed, they are hostile to religion, and especially to Christianity, which is viewed as an institution that oppresses women. The rejection of religion has deep roots within American feminism, dating back to Stanton’s “The Woman’s Bible.” In the introduction, Stanton writes, “all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her [woman], and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.”

This sentiment alone places Western feminism on a collision course with its Muslim counterpart.

2) Islamic feminism tends to be pro-family and not inherently anti-male. In her book In Search of Islamic Feminism , researcher Elizabeth Fernea reports that many Muslim women call themselves “feminists” but want to distance themselves from Western feminism because of its perceived antagonism toward men and the family. Haifa Abdul Rahman, deputy secretary of the General Federation of Iraqi Women, observed: “We see feminism in America as dividing men from women — separating women from the family. This is not good for anyone.”

Western feminism rests on the concept of patriarchy — the class system of male domination and female oppression. The traditional family and family roles are considered to be basic building blocks of patriarchy. This leaves little room for liberated women to embrace men or the family structure.

Western feminists seem to have three options with regard to their Islamic “sisters”: 1) open up the definition of feminism and accept them within it; 2) ignore them; and, 3) misrepresent Muslim women in such a manner as to make them politically acceptable.

The first option is unlikely. American feminism has fought with clawed nails to avoid expanding its definition. It has ignored women who are stay-at-home moms, pro-life, home-schoolers, or who disagree with them on virtually anything. It has discounted the majority of American women. Why would it treat foreigners with more respect?

The second option of simply ignoring Islamic feminism is more in character. American feminism is practiced at turning a blind eye, for example, to the current oppression of Iraqi women about whom they are virtually mute. And, yet, the incredible surge of Islamic feminism cannot be ignored. Indeed, it may be the most significant development in feminism within the last decade.

The third option of misrepresenting Islamic feminism is already underway. If you doubt this, ask yourself: Do you believe “Islamic feminism” is a contradiction in terms ... and is your belief based on equating the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban with the treatment of all women under Islam? If so, you have accepted the prevailing Western feminist view of Islamic feminism.

Ask yourself another question: Do you believe that “Christian feminism” is a contradiction in terms, that a Christian cannot be a strong, liberated, self-respecting woman? If you do not believe this of Christian women, why do you believe of Muslims? Again, perhaps you have accepted the prevailing view.

Western feminists cannot resolve their ideology with that of Islam. War and its aftermath will bring the two movements into intimate contact and conflict. The result is likely to be a recasting of the definition of feminism itself.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including the new book, Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century (Ivan R. Dee/Independent Institute, 2002). She lives with her husband in Canada.

==============================

Feminist Fighting: Aren’t We All Women? (Foxnews, 021126)

By Wendy McElroy

How do you view women who say they’ve been battered by their husbands, sexually harassed or otherwise victimized by a man? Do you feel a stab of skepticism at the accusation and wonder whether the man involved will be treated fairly in court? If so, you may be experiencing a consequence of PC feminism.

As a woman who has been severely battered and worse, I take issue, not with those who doubt but with feminists who have cheapened the real pain of women by attaching a political agenda to it.

The ideological opportunism of those feminists has made otherwise humane people look with suspicion on “victims.” If a woman says her estranged husband molested their daughter, is she merely trying to prejudice the family court regarding custody? If she claims harassment at work, do you wonder if a hapless man merely said the word “honey?”

At this point, too many people have had husbands, sons, brothers and male friends endure false accusations and anti-male courts. Reasonable people are now automatically skeptical of victimhood. Humane people now reserve their compassion until more evidence is in. After all, it is not merely the pain of women but also the compassion of those who sympathize that have been used to promote the feminist agenda.

What is this agenda? It rests on the assumption that all women are victims of all men. That’s the definition of patriarchy : white male culture, white male government that benefits every man at the expense of every woman. Women are everywhere and always oppressed by men.

Translating this agenda into practical terms ... It says that, in court proceedings on domestic violence cases and child custody disputes, men should be guilty until proven innocent. Society’s institutions, such as universities, should be organized to protect women against men: For example, through sexual abuse tribunals that do not allow accused men the right to such niceties as a lawyer or questioning his accuser.

Concerned parents are withholding compassion from your daughters because they are worried about justice to their sons. PC feminism has created a gender war in which daughters and sons are pitted against each other in the courts and institutions of society.

A growing number of women are objecting. They are refusing to bow before what has become an object of political worship -- the graven image of “woman as victim.” The price for heresy can be high. I know. For some feminists, any sense of decency or concern for women is suspended if the woman thinks for herself and disagrees.

Consider a recent incident. In an article last month, I expressed skepticism over the Battered Woman Syndrome -- a legal defense used to exonerate women who kill abusive men in the absence of imminent danger. The article is the last in a series that questions the prevailing domestic violence policies. How did feminists react?

The head of a feminist organization created a vicious lie about me and circulated it. The lie: I am a drug addict who supports the father’s rights movement because it supplies me with drugs. Her exact accusation was that the father’s rights movement is “providing you with drugs in exchange for positive publicity and a steady stream of attacks on their adversary.”

(I repeat the slander verbatim because, otherwise, it is difficult to convey the depths to which such feminists will sink to silence a woman who dissents.) The slander was circulated to an employer in what I must presume was an attempt to harm my career.

This is not an isolated incident. Three weeks ago, I talked with a younger woman who wants to become an established columnist. She advocates political incorrectness, and does it well. Well enough to receive threats to her safety that make her father fret. She now has to weigh her freedom of speech against possible assault and damage to her father’s health.

How many other women have been battered into silence by PC feminists? Especially in academia, where political correctness holds sway ... how many women have feminists intimidated into never speaking out at all?

At times I wonder whether the feminists who write harassing and threatening e-mails to other women ever pause and question their own decency. They claim to care passionately for women and to speak for womanhood as a category. But, to paraphrase Sojourner Truth:

“Aren’t we all women?”

When I contemplate such questions, I remember an e-mail I received from another prominent feminist. She responded to an article in which I described having lost sight in my right eye due to being battered. She literally crowed with pleasure, declaring that now she understood my political blindness.

What sort of human being delights in the damage inflicted on a beaten woman? Who uses a woman’s physical disability as a weapon to attack her? Whatever the answer is, it cannot be “a real feminist” or anyone who gives a tinker’s damn about battered women.

Real feminism aims at genuine equality and good will between daughters and sons. It eliminates the need for parents to choose which of their children are to be privileged by the courts and other institutions of society, and which are to be oppressed.

Perhaps then women who are true victims will be able to claim what they justly deserve: the automatic compassion of decent human beings.

==============================

Women of the World: Rallying around their common ideology (NRO, 030304)

By Melana Zyla Vickers

TALLINN, ESTONIA — For a woman supporter of a tough fight against terrorists and their backers, what could be better than a chance to rub shoulders with female political leaders from member states of the “Vilnius Ten,” a few days after the region’s ruling politicians expressed unequivocal willingness to back a coalition to “confront the tyranny of Saddam Hussein?”

Lots, it turns out.

At a conference held earlier this month, this region’s widespread support for the U.S.-led campaign was rather frustratingly absent from a high-profile, government-funded NGO and politicians’ conference on “Women in Democracy” in the Baltic region. Among the attendant Balts, Poles, Russians, and West Europeans, leftish, syndicalist, and pacifist views imported from Scandinavian, German, and American NGOs abounded, while the post-Communist good sense that pervades average Baltic and Polish society was harder to find than a smoke-free airport lounge.

It seems that in one short decade, a green — pro-union — pacifist coalition of women’s groups from the West has successfully seeded grassroots in the East, and built up a Social Democrat political base. The coalition-building has its origins in Reykjavik, Iceland, where in 1999 the then-First Lady of the U.S., Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with Scandinavian politicians with whom she shared an ideological girdle size, held the first such government-funded conference to introduce the East to the international feminist sisterhood.

Two generously funded conferences later, the strange result of Clinton & co.’s efforts is a class of East European, politically active woman who is loath to side with the U.S. on anything, who actively resists blaming her society’s troubled past on Communists, and who, eschewing her countrywomen’s half-century of unhappy experience in a worker’s paradise, calls quotas, unionization, and socialist economics the solution to all her nation’s woes.

This type of delegate wasted no time in Tallinn making her agenda clear. A panel on globalization of the labor force saw the Lithuanian chair call first for East-Europe-wide unionization, and then for a resolution against the Iraq war. A Russian chairwoman at a panel on how to run NGOs refused to let U.S. delegates speak, saying there was no time to listen to Americans. And the conference plenaries heard hissing at George Bush along with appeals for quotas, unions, and greater welfare nets.

To be sure, these women represent a minority of Baltic, Polish, and Russian citizens, let alone political leaders. To wit, the patron of the Women and Democracy conference, First Lady of Estonia Ingrid Ruutel told conference goers that “Our ministers for economics, foreign affairs, social welfare and education are women. Yet the Estonian voters, including women, will not elect anyone because of their gender, but according to their other qualities. Imposing a required percentage in any sphere would seem to us a relic of the Soviet period.” Regional opinion polls agree with Ruutel, indicating the left-leaning views are not making much of a comeback.

Not that you’d have known it at the conference: Ruutel’s speech met tepid applause from the 600-strong crowd assembled in the hall that once hosted meetings of the Estonian Communist party.

Is there reason to be alarmed at the high degree of organization among leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-American feminists in Eastern Europe? Well, at a minimum, their success brings to the fore the question why these are the groups attracting Western European and U.S. government financing and support, while other building blocks of civil society — women’s business groups, associations of former woman dissidents and anti-communists, and faith-based groups — are left to fend for themselves.

The saving grace is that the fire in the belly of this whole international sisterhood doesn’t seem to be burning as heatedly as it once did. As it covers more ground, its flames have grown smaller.

Not a single antiwar measure made it to the final plenary of the conference. Opponents of globalization were left balancing their criticisms with a resolution asserting that globalization has brought jobs and economic growth. And a perennial favorite issue of the West European feminist left — legalization and taxation of prostitution for the benefit of the welfare state — was rather surprisingly overturned, with delegates supporting a resolution calling for prostitution to be outlawed.

This may have been due to some fancy blocking actions by nontraditional U.S. delegates — we were flies in the ointment, to put it mildly — and to surprisingly evolved thinking by a handful of the Scandinavian delegates. It may also have been the result of infighting: Reflecting the wider mood, one Scandinavian delegate complained that there was too much emphasis on the problems of the impoverished, emerging East, while she wanted the focus to remain on her own, Western European struggles. And there was no mistaking the emerging schism between the conference’s founding Americans and their sisters across the Atlantic. With all that conflict, that favorite delicacy of feminists — consensus — was hard to achieve.

With any luck, the sisterhood’s drang nach osten will continue its current trend of growing thinner as it grows wider. In time, perhaps this trend will allow groups that support equally competitive women’s priorities — support for families and faith, support for women as business owners and consumers, support for strong national security, and support for equality of opportunity rather than outcomes — to assert their rightful place in the popular debate.

The sheer comfort level of the Western Europeans may help this come about more easily than it would seem: At the conference plenaries where speakers droned on and on against patriarchy and globalization, half the delegates were absent from the conference hall. They would then reappear for the cocktail hour, their arms laden down with evidence of that other female priority… shopping bags.

— Melana Zyla Vickers is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C. and a columnist for TechCentralStation.com.

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True Feminist: Phyllis Schlafly gets it (NRO, 030304)

By Pia de Solenni

Feminist Fantasies by Phyllis Schlafly (Spence: 2003, $27.95) 256 pages

“Feminism” — Phyllis Schlafly made it a dirty word.

Well, actually, the feminists themselves did that. Schlafly just brought to light the truth about radical feminism. For more than 30 years, she has served as both detective and attorney, exposing the truth about the movement and its consequences for American women.

Schlafly’s latest book, Feminist Fantasies, provides an excellent resource for understanding the feminist agenda. She doesn’t concern herself with the philosophy so much as the practical applications, particularly the policies that govern the lives of every American.

Fantasies showcases pieces by written Schlafly throughout her professional career, beginning with the delusion of American women. Feminism, as has often been noted, disappointed a lot of women. Having followed the textbook formulae, line-by-line, female disciples have found (and are finding) themselves generally lonely and unhappy with their lives. They thought they were getting it all and instead got nothing.

Giving context to the debate and to the feminists themselves, Schlafly discreetly reveals the details of many of the feminists’ early lives. While their diatribe against patriarchal society has not rung true for most American women, it resonated for some particular women. They had grown up in left-leaning “intellectual” families where the men had little or no respect for women. Gleaning from Paul Johnson’s book The Intellectuals, Schlafly gives numerous examples to illustrate her point. She recounts how Picasso refused to take his mistress to the hospital to have their baby because he needed to attend the 1949 World Peace Congress. She also touches on the tragic life of Simone de Beauvoir, an educated and able feminist who chose to live the life of mistress, slave, and recruiter of other women for Jean-Paul Sarte. (Some scholars now suspect that much of Sarte’s academic work was actually Beauvoir’s.)

So began the lie of radical feminism. Some women were born into these situations and others chose them, but such conditions did not reflect the experience of most American women, starting with Schlafly herself. In fact American women were (and remain) the most privileged women in the world.

Schlafly reminds us that more than 160 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the singular prosperity and increasing strength of Americans was due to the superiority of American women.

Activists insisted on the rights of women to work, as if women made no other substantial contribution to society. But Schlafly notes that women were very much involved in society, although perhaps differently than men. And, yes, women were even involved in the financial operations of the family. In 1987, when one particular essay was published, women were writing two-thirds of the checks, regardless of whether or not they worked outside the home. Quite a different concept of power.

The last chapter of the book examines what most women want: marriage and motherhood. Schlafly writes, “If you want to love and be loved, marriage offers the best opportunity to achieve your goal…. Marriage and motherhood give a woman new identity and the opportunity for all-round fulfillment as women.” But these are distinctly feminine roles which radical feminism refused.

The lives of other accomplished women reveal the same theme, including women who never married and never had children. At age 66, Gloria Steinem walked down the aisle, leaving behind her mantra that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Amelia Earhart’s life story indicates that she wished she had a child. Germaine Greer publicly laments her childlessness.

Golda Meir, perhaps the most prominent woman of the 20th century, said that the most fulfilling thing a woman could do was to have a baby. Many of the aging feminists driving the fertility business with their quest for a child seem to agree at least in practice.

Radical feminism proposed a scoreboard approach to women’s rights: Whatever a man could do, a woman should do as well. Note well, the discussion wasn’t about whether she “could” do these things, but that she “should.” Femininity and its attributes were shelved.

Schlafly’s discussion reveals a paradox. She was able to have it all: family and career. And she did it by fighting those who said they were trying to get it all for her. The difference lies in the understanding of “all.” While Schlafly accomplished a great deal professionally, her essays reveal that having it all meant having a family. Happiness resulted from being a wife and mother and working with her husband to reach their goals. Her happiness lies in being someone, not simply doing things.

Being a wife and mother makes her the woman she is. Whatever Schlafly has said, done, or written, she has done so as a woman, as a wife, and mother. These experiences shaped her and became part of her. For radical feminists, life is about distancing women from marriage and motherhood. That’s why abortion plays such a central role in their agenda. Abortion covers up the fact that women are undeniably different. And yet, as they get older, many of them want what abortion destroys.

While it’s challenging to grasp the essence of woman or the essence of femininity, Fantasies exemplifies the life of one woman who’s done an excellent job of being a woman and incorporating her femininity into every aspect of her life. A true feminist, she’s got it all.

— Pia de Solenni is a fellow at the Center for Human Life and Bioethics of the Family Research Council.

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NOW vs. Laci & Son: A “women’s group” shows its true colors (NRO, 030423)

Over the weekend, a New Jersey chapter president of the National Organization for Women denounced the double-homicide charge facing Scott Peterson. Marva Stark said, “If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder.”

Wisely, former NOW president Patricia Ireland appeared on television Monday to attempt some damage control, conceding that this case is indeed a double murder.

However, when I called NOW to ask if Ireland’s position was the position of their organization, their spokeswoman was quick to point out that Patricia Ireland is no longer the president of NOW.

So instead of distancing itself from the views of Marva Stark, the Morris County, N.J. chapter president, NOW is distancing itself from Ireland who at least showed some common sense and conscience when asked about the case. Apparently, Stark had already shown the true colors of the organization.

From the perspective of NOW’s Garden State outpost, Scott Peterson should be charged with killing his wife — but should get a freebie on the murder of their child. By twisting herself into a pretzel to find the pro-abortion silver lining inside every conceivable cloud, Stark rushed to the defense of that hero of the feminist movement, Scott Peterson. And in so doing, she has made Connor Peterson a poster child for the pro-abortion position.

Everyone, no matter what their stance on abortion, should recoil in disgust at NOW’s view of this case. A group that purports to be protective of women’s rights has become so twisted on this issue that it is protecting a woman’s accused killer.

On Monday, Stark backpedaled saying that the “viability of the Peterson fetus...makes a great deal of difference.” Someone tell this woman to stop talking.

NOW won’t. “Out of respect for Laci Peterson,” said spokeswoman Rebecca Farmer, “NOW won’t comment.” No mention of the baby.

NOW makes the leap of linking the Laci Peterson case to the abortion debate, the right to choose, and Roe v. Wade. Which is odd since Laci Peterson wanted her child and chose to have it.

When NOW was founded in 1966, its purpose was scribbled on a paper napkin: “...to bring women into the full participation in the mainstream...exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”

NOW has strayed so far from their original intentions that they have finally drifted into obsolescence. Or insanity.

The Laci Peterson case has all the components of an American tragedy. Who could possibly look at this grisly murder and think anything else?

And yet, these women do.

To recap: A brutal double murder is committed, the alleged killer is captured, and charges are filed. A “women’s rights” group rushes in yelling, “Hey, no fair! You can’t say he killed two people! What about legal abortions?” I’d say it’s time to put the cozy on the teapot.

— Susan Konig, author of the book Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road and other lies I tell my children, is an NRO contributor.

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The Advent of Christian Feminism (Foxnews, 030902)

By Wendy McElroy

Who is a feminist? The answer is about to expand to include Christian feminists. Zealots who patrol the ideological walls of established feminism will not welcome the new arrivals at their gate.

Conservatives are not supposed to have a social conscience or be politically fashionable. But let me extend a warm welcome to the growing ranks of Christian feminism. The larger movement desperately needs an infusion of fresh perspective and I look forward to honest debate over our points of disagreement.

At this point, synapses may be colliding at the attempt to integrate the words “Christian” and “feminist” because the combination deviates from expected norms. Remember, however, that those norms were established over past decades by politically correct feminists, whose critiques of historic Christianity were specifically designed to discredit the church as anti-woman. Similar critiques were aimed at discrediting institutions such as the traditional family and the free market system. Just as PC feminists got it wrong in branding “men” a class enemy, they are wrong in dismissing the role of religion.

What is Christian feminism? It is a school within the broader feminist tradition that seeks to define woman’s liberation and her equality with man through reference to the Christian religion. This sounds odd to modern ears. But it is no odder than trying to define liberation and equality with reference to post-Marxist theory, the well from which PC feminism draws. Or by referring to the classical liberal tradition as does the school I favor -- individualist feminism or ifeminism.

The dominant voice within the current movement is PC feminism. And one of the myths that such feminists have successfully sold is that any woman who disagrees with their approach on a wide range of issues -- from sexual harassment to child custody, from abortion to affirmative action -- is anti-feminist. Perhaps even anti-woman. That claim is absolutely false.

The truth is, there are now and there always have been many schools of thought within the feminist tradition: from socialist to individualist, liberal to radical, Christian to Islamic. These schools offer conflicting views of what it means to be a woman on a personal level and in relationship to society. When you think about it, this diversity of opinion makes sense.

Feminism can be defined as the belief that women should be liberated as individuals and equal to men. It is only natural for there to be disagreement over what a personal ideal like “liberation” means and how a basic concept like “equality” should be defined. Indeed, it would be amazing if every woman who cared about liberation and equality came to exactly the same conclusions.

For example, what does equality mean? Does it refer to “equality under just law” -- under laws that protect person and property? Is it “socio-economic equality” that requires legal privileges for the disadvantaged and government control of the marketplace? Perhaps it is the cultural equality in which attitudes and social expression need to be controlled and “politically corrected?”

Disagreement on complex political terms and social issues is not only inevitable, it is healthy because it fuels open, honest discussion.

Yet PC feminists insist: There is no room for discussion on issues like abortion, on promoting diversity or on how the Bible oppresses women. They proclaim a specific position to be “feminist” and, then, declare women who fall outside that position to be “non-” or “anti-feminists.”

They know better. Concepts like equality and issues like abortion have been actively debated within feminism since the movement’s inception. The most cursory review of “inconvenient” feminist history reveals:

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two of the Founding Mothers of feminism, strongly opposed abortion. Victoria Woodhull, the first female presidential candidate, shared their opposition.

Many 19th-century feminists did not advocate diversity but elitism and racism. Even Margaret Sanger, who is lauded for bringing birth control to immigrant women, argued that the world would be better off without “certain types” of children -- namely, those who were “less fit.” Some prominent 19th-century suffragists advocated adopting educational or property qualifications for voting that would disqualify most black women.

Religion often constituted the backbone of belief for early feminists, many of whom were Quakers like Lucretia Mott who, along with Stanton, organized Seneca Falls -- the first woman’s rights convention in America. When Stanton herself blasted the impact of religion on women through “The Woman’s Bible,” the National American Woman Suffrage Association denounced the work.

My purpose in pointing to inconvenient history is not to slur the feminist past or to champion one position over another. It is to confirm that there has always been a wide range of opinion on key issues such as the role of abortion and religion in women’s lives. And there always should be.

Next spring, Vanguard University in California will open a Center for Women’s Studies, thus becoming one more evangelical Christian college to invite feminists to walk on its campus. I argue from a different perspective than Christian feminism. But I invite and I look forward to the new definitions of liberation and equality that will flow from women such as the young feminists of Vanguard.

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National Organization for Women: Liberal Feminists (Website)

What is NOW?

NOW stands for the National Organization for Women. NOW is dedicated to making legal, political, social and economic change in our society in order to achieve our goal, which is to eliminate sexism and end all oppression.

What does NOW do?

NOW strives to:

o eliminate discrimination and harassment in the workplace, schools, the justice system, and all other sectors of society;

o secure abortion, birth control and reproductive rights for all women;

o end all forms of violence against women;

o eradicate racism, sexism, and homophobia;

o promote equality and justice in our society.

NOW achieves its goals through direct mass actions (including marches, rallies, pickets, counter-demonstrations, non-violent civil disobedience) intensive lobbying, grassroots political organizing and litigation (including class-action lawsuits.)

What are NOW’s official priorities?

NOW’s official priorities are pressing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will guarantee equal rights for women; achieving economic equality for women; championing abortion rights, reproductive freedom and other women’s health issues; supporting civil rights for all and opposing racism; opposing bigotry against lesbians and gays; and ending violence against women.

The Drive for Equality

The National Organization for Women has a reputation for effectiveness and is the largest feminist activist organization in the country, with over 580,000 contributing supporters. NOW has decades of experience in political advocacy, training local activists and giving them the resources to organize and be strong advocates for women’s rights. The Drive for Equality is the logical next step—using that volunteer base to mobilize a political force of women voters that will win the 2004 election, and continue to work on issues and win elections for years to come.

Building on NOW’s powerful grassroots base, the Drive for Equality will identify, register and mobilize women voters to oust George W. Bush and seek progressive change. To succeed, we will dramatically increase the number and skill level of grassroots activists, build a stronger infrastructure for communication and action, and organize women community by community, campus by campus.

Why We Need the Drive for Equality

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians ... all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this [September 11, 2001] happen.’”

—Jerry Falwell

President George W. Bush has chosen a cabinet and advisors loyal to him and his conservative policy priorities. Congress is bitterly divided; in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats engage in daily battles since the margin of control is so slight. Even the judicial branch, non-partisan by design, is and will be at the center of a partisan debate. Conservative forces are using aggressive tactics to undermine basic rights, especially in the areas of reproductive rights and economic justice. Additionally, local activists are now fighting huge, nationally-funded, right-wing organizations who centrally-formulate “cookie-cutter” state legislation and export it around the country.

FOCUS ON MOTIVATING ISSUES

Reproductive rights and economic justice are two motivating issues that are both in great jeopardy. On each issue there are concrete goals we can set and accomplish that will significantly impact the well-being of women and families, and show participants concrete gains from the Drive for Equality.

Goals on Reproductive Rights

* Stop the confirmation of anti-choice/anti-woman judges to all federal courts.

* Influence the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court

* Expose the anti-birth control and anti-family planning agenda of the right wing.

* Win back the full privacy and reproductive health rights of girls and women.

Goals on Economic Justice

* Oppose Social Security privatization and make benefits more equitable

* Demand quality health care for all, including prescription drug coverage

* Support fair economic and tax policies

* Demand pay equity for women

* Advocate for adequate family supports, such as:

o quality child care

o paid family and medical leave

We will also need to contact and mobilize those groups of swing voters who are likely supporters of NOW’s issues. For example, many progressive candidates in the last election cycle did not turn out the votes of suburban women ages 35 to 49. These women, who are still in their reproductive years, are frequently juggling childcare, work responsibilities, the care of aging parents and an uncertain economic future. A targeted NOW campaign of voter education on issues such as the threat to birth control, safe accessible and affordable child care for all, universal healthcare and education issues (like Title IX for their daughters), could be effective in bringing this group out to vote for progressive candidates.

Single women are especially responsive to progressive messages about health care, job security, retirement benefits and other women’s issues, and over 21 million of them never made it to the polling booth on Election Day in 2000. Only 52% of eligible single women voted, compared to 68% of eligible married women—and because single women are more likely to support a progressive candidate, many election outcomes could have been changed in 2000 if only single women had voted at the same rate as married women! We need to find these women, register them and get them to the polls in 2004.

Campuses are another area where the key constituency of young women can be mobilized around the issues of reproductive rights and economic justice. We will coordinate efforts with other progressive groups to turn out volunteers and voters.

Of course, our strategies for choosing which of the various groups of swing voters to target and how best to reach them will vary from state to state, depending on local circumstances.

The main goal is to increase voter participation—to turn out our targeted constituencies to support progressive feminist candidates on Election Day. Our many years of campaign organizing experience—as well as field-testing done by both major political parties—have taught us that the most effective way to get voters to the polls is through repeated one-on-one contact.

The Time is NOW

Active involvement of voters in support of women’s rights candidates to federal, state and local governments is a primary goal of NOW and of the Drive for Equality campaign. Without the “Feminization of Power,” many of our accomplishments will remain in jeopardy.

NOW will need the active support of all our members and supporters to make the Drive for Women’s Equality possible. By working together as partners, we can empower and lead communities across the country to successfully change the political face of America and keep us moving ever forward on the road to women’s equality. Please join us.

Key NOW achievements over the past 15 years

* NOW brought over 500,000 supporters to protest an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. Just three years later in 1992, we organized an even larger event, bringing 750,000 to Washington, D.C. before the likewise crucial Casey decision.

* NOW successfully lobbied to include in legislation, for the first time ever, the right to a jury trial and monetary damages in cases of sex discrimination and sexual harassment, which became the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

* NOW provided the grassroots lobbying and organizing for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to appropriate the extraordinary $1.6 billion in funding, but a huge NOW campaign forced him to give in; VAWA was reauthorized in 2000 and funded at more than $3.5 billion.

* The racketeering lawsuit we filed in 1986 against anti-abortion terrorists, NOW v. Scheidler, eventually brought a halt to violent clinic blockades when a unanimous jury verdict resulted in an unprecedented nationwide injunction against the use of fear, force and violence to prevent women from using clinic services. Although the injunction was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, it protected the clinics for years and the lawsuit spawned additional protective legislation, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

* NOW’s electoral strategies have resulted in significant changes in the face of government. In 1992, NOW’s successful “Elect Women for a Change” campaign doubled the number of women serving in Congress and sent an unprecedented number of feminists and people of racial and ethnic diversity to state capitals and to Washington.

* NOW has taken on many institutions that others considered too powerful to cross—like the Promise Keepers—and revealed their true agenda. And our Women-Friendly Workplace campaigns, including the most recent Merchant of Shame campaign to reform Wal-Mart, have contributed to significant changes for women at major national employers.

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Radical Feminism: An Exposé (Libertarian Alliance Pamphlet No. 18)

A Joint Libertarian Alliance & British Association of Libertarian Feminists Publication

1. Summary

So-called “radical feminism” purports to be concerned with equality for women. The contention of this paper is that radical feminism is not really concerned with equality for women at all; that in reality it is a campaign of puritanical sex repression which uses the issue of women’s equality as a smokescreen; and that every success of the campaign is actually a step backwards from the point of view of women’s interests.

The structure of the argument is as follows. Radical feminists have campaigns against a number of things on the grounds of equality for women. Each of these things could be objectionable on grounds of sexual equality only if there were an asymmetry in the way the sexes were treated in respect of them. However there is no such asymmetry for any of these things. What these things do have in common is that, in some way or another, they concern -- or bring to attention -- the issue of sex. The radical feminist campaign against these things, despite its ostensible concern for women’s equality, is merely an attempt to suppress sex.

There are only two kinds of inequality between the sexes which libertarians would in principle want to remove. Inequality of rights (or negative freedom) is morally objectionable. Inequality of autonomy (or positive freedom, or “psychological freedom”, or rationality) is lamentable, and remediable through non-coercive rational means. Briefly, rational autonomy means making one’s choices about how to live, or what to do, on the basis of an honest assessment of oneself and a rational appraisal of the available options.[1] Any puritanical campaign of sex suppression is an assault on rational autonomy in matters of sexuality. The radical feminist campaign pretends that suppression of sex is a women’s issue, and thus specifically assaults the autonomy of women in matters of sexuality. This promotes inequality between the sexes in a way which runs directly counter to women’s interests.[2]

2. Introduction

In what follows I will consider claims made by radical feminists concerning a range of manifestations of sex. I cannot consider the radical feminists’ arguments for these claims, since they give none. Argument, logic and evidence are quite alien to the radical feminist, as indeed they are to repressive zealots in general. It will, however, be easy to show that the claims are false. The claims are made by the puritans merely as a means to give some spurious respectability to their objective of suppressing sex wherever it is wont to appear.[3]

However, before I consider the claims, I want to distinguish two kinds of objection to something on the grounds of sexual equality. The weaker kind of objection maintains that inequality is involved in the thing in the way in which it exists. The stronger kind of objection maintains that inequality is involved in the thing intrinsically. The first kind of objection is weaker because, if it is admitted, all that is required to remove the objection is to change the way in which the thing exists, while the thing itself can stay. The second kind of objection is stronger because, if it is admitted, then the objection can be removed only if the thing is abolished.

In each of the cases to be considered, the radical feminists are urging the stronger kind of objection, because they couple their claim with a call for prohibition or abolition. In other words, for each of the things to be considered, the radical feminists are claiming that the thing intrinsically involves sexual inequality.

3. Prostitution

Radical feminists denounce prostitution as an institution of male oppression of women.[4] This could be true only if all prostitutes were female and all clients of prostitutes male. However, not only are there male prostitutes with male clients; there are also male prostitutes with female clients, ranging from the “toy boys” of rich middle-aged women, to men who advertise to their female clients through contact magazines. On the Continent, of course, things are much more open: in Amsterdam women can hire men from Jan Bik, while in Hamburg they can go to the Crazy Boys male brothel. Jan Bik also, apparently, provides female prostitutes for female clients.[5]

In other words, prostitution is, in principle, indifferent between the sexes and so does not intrinsically raise any question of sex equality. There may of course be genuine questions of sexual equality surrounding prostitution as it exists at present, e.g. why are male prostitutes treated differently to female prostitutes? However, the radical feminists object to the very existence of prostitution, and not just to inequalities in the way in which it exists.[6]

4. Pornography

The problem with pornography, say the radical feminists, is that it is the graphic depiction of women as “sexual objects”,[7] as “vile whores”;[8] it “makes all women into cunts”.[9]

Hard core heterosexual pornography shows men and women enjoying uninhibited sex with each other. Hard core gay pornography shows men and men or, on the other hand, women and women, enjoying uninhibited sex with each other. Soft core pornography may show naked men and women together, or it may just show naked men, or it may just show naked women. In other words, there is no intrinsic asymmetry between the sexes in pornography, whether hard core or soft core. Consequently, if the radical feminist claims were true (which I deny), then it would also be true that pornography is the graphic depiction of men as “sexual objects”, as “vile (male) whores”, and that it “makes all men into pricks”. The radical feminist objection does not, therefore, raise a question about sex equality. They are just objecting to the graphic depiction of sex.

The radical feminists also claim that pornography encourages sexual violence against women, and they even claim that there is research evidence to support this.[10] However, the Home Office has commissioned two official investigations into this question, and both have concluded that there is no evidence that pornography gives rise to any kind of anti-social behaviour.[11] Indeed, anyone at all familiar with the research evidence knows this much: either the radical feminists are not familiar with it, or they do not understand it, or they are arrant liars.[12] Further, it seems absurd to me that anyone should even think that pornography should lead to bad behaviour. Clearly, one would expect that it may lead to sexual behaviour, but only someone for whom sexual behaviour is bad would make the inference to bad behavioural.[13]

5. Pin-ups

The radical feminist objection to pin-ups, page three girls, calendars featuring nude or semi-nude models, etc. is essentially the same as that concerning pornography: they claim that they degrade women, depict them as sex objects, etc. The reply to it is the same too: there are male pin-ups, page seven fellas, calenders featuring nude or semi-nude men. If the radical feminist claim were sound, then these things would degrade men, depict them as sex objects, etc. So once again, they are not objecting to sex inequality, they are just objecting to sex.

6. Gratuitous Sex

Another thing that stirs radical feminists into a rage is gratuitous sex, whether it be sex scenes in films or the use of sex in advertising. I don’t want to labour the point: it should again be obvious that there is no asymmetry between the sexes as there would have to be for this to be an issue of sex equality. For example, attractive men are used to sell things to women, just as attractive women are used to sell things to men. Only a sex puritan would object to this.

7. Forms of Expression

There are many forms of expression in common use that the radical feminists want to prohibit. One of these is the word “love” in the way in which it is often used by working-class men to call or refer to women, especially those whose name they do not know. In this use, the word is not intended to be an insult or abuse; if anything, it is a term of endearment. But the radical feminists denounce it as “sexist”.

However, this term is not only used by men in reference to women: it is also used by working-class women to call or refer to men in exactly the same way. So once again there is no issue of sex equality here: the puritans just take exception to any terms of endearment between the sexes!

The case is similar with respect to many other radical feminist linguistic prohibitions: the blacklisted expressions raise no issue of sexual inequality, they merely raise the topic of sex.

8. Conclusion

We have considered a range of issues where radical feminists raise objections to things ostensibly on the ground of sexual equality. In each case, we have seen that there is no intrinsic asymmetry between the sexes and so no ground for the radical feminist claims. In each case, all that the radical feminists are objecting to is sex. “Sexist” is just their pejorative term for sexy. Anti-sexism is just anti-sex.

I explained in the Introduction that the radical feminist objections considered do not concern merely the way in which things exist but rather the very existence of the things concerned. In relation to pornography, however, some radical feminists seem to be sensitive to the charge of puritanism, and have introduced the notion of “erotica” which would be “sexually explicit material premised on equality”.[14] This would alter the nature of the objection to pornography: the complaint would be merely that the pornography that exists involves sexual inequality. There are two problems with this. First, it seems plain to me that the definition of “erotica” applies to current pornography, especially the hard core material, which shows men and women enjoying uninhibited sex together in every conceivable way (I will say a bit more about this below). Second, the kind of objections made by the radical feminists against pornography appear to be based on the fact that the material is sexually explicit, and so they ought to apply equally to so-called “erotica”. So this attempt by the radical feminists to distinguish themselves from sex puritans, with regard to the question of pornography, seems certain to lead them into self-contradiction.

Some feminists have seen through the radical feminist smokescreen, at least with respect to pornography.[15] They have pointed out that the radical feminist campaign is puritanical, sexually repressive, and is more likely to impede than to advance women’s equality. Some have even championed pornography as a force for women’s liberation, since it does not tie women’s sexuality to reproduction or to a domesticated couple or exclusively to men.[16] Indeed, “it advocates sexual adventure, sex outside of marriage, sex for no reason other than pleasure, casual sex, anonymous sex, group sex, voyeuristic sex, illegal sex, public sex”.[17] Pornography, “in rejecting sexual repression and hypocrisy -- which have inflicted even more damage on women than on men -- expresses a radical impulse ... if feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt, and hypocrisy -- this time served up as feminism.”[18]

The point can be generalised to all the radical feminist anti-sex campaigns: every success of the radical feminists is a step backwards for women’s sexual liberation.[19]

Notes

1. I say a bit more about autonomy, specifically in relation to sexuality, in an earlier paper, Sexual Liberation, Political Notes No. 64, Libertarian Alliance, London, 1991, which includes an inchoate version of the argument of the present paper.

2. This paper focuses on a range of specific issues, but the following more general point can also be made. If you want to get yourself into a condition in which you are completely unable to understand anything about sex, it’s easy: just read, uncritically, the writings of the radical feminists. Their hatred of sex is only part of the problem. The other part is their superlative exaggeration of the differences between the sexes: so many of the “women’s problems” that they raise are actually human problems. There just does not exist the stark asymmetry between the sexes that the radical feminists assume.

3. I do not here mean to claim that all radical feminists are consciously practising deceit by cloaking puritanical sex repression with claims of sex equality. Some of them may be doing this knowingly; but in most cases it would probably stem from self-deception.

4. See, e.g., Jess Wells, A Herstory of Prostitution in Western Europe, Shameless Hussy Press, Berkeley CA, 1982, passim, but especially p. 79, pp. 89-91. This is probably the worst book I have ever read to the end.

5. See Tuppy Owens, The Safer Sex Maniacs Bible, Miss Tuppy Owens, London, 1990.

6. Some people respond to the claim that (female) prostitutes are the victims of (male) power, domination or “exploitation” by saying that it is really the men who are “exploited” by having to pay for sex. In truth, however, there is nothing in prostitution as such to make it an instance of power or domination or “exploitation”. In the paradigmatic case, the prostitute and the client enter into a voluntary exchange of a service (some form of sex) for money: a standard business transaction which results in a satisfied customer and an honest profit for the entrepreneur. It is just false that some kind of coercion or intimidation is inherent to prostitution.

7. Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in G. Hawkins and F. E. Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 154.

8. Andrea Dworkin, quoted in ibid., p. 160.

9. Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in ibid., p. 169.

10. E.g., MacKinnon, quoted in ibid., pp. 164-165.

11. Bernard Williams (Chairman), Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1979; D. Howitt and G. Cumberbatch, Pornography: Impacts and Influences, Home Office Research and Planning Unit, London, 1990.

12. If you ever hear a radical feminist refer to research evidence, then try this: (i) ask them to which specific research evidence they are referring (they probably won’t be able to answer); (ii) if they give a reply, look up the research, and you will find that it does not support the claims that the radical feminist has made.

13. And what sort of sexual behaviour might it lead to? Some people assume it will be masturbation. (Some even argue against pornography for precisely this reason; while others, e.g. Kenneth Tynan, “Dirty Books Can Stay”, in D. A. Hughes, ed., Perspectives on Pornography, Macmillan, New York, 1970, defend pornography for the same reason.) But it is also used in a variety of other ways, including: (a) as a stimulus to sex by couples watching together; (b) as a stimulus to sex by one or both members of a couple, separately, before they meet; (c) as a stimulus to sex by several people engaged in, or soon to be engaged in, group sex; (d) for the fun of sexual arousal itself, even though sex will not follow; (e) for mere enjoyment or interest when there is no question of sex or even sexual arousal, e.g. because of fatigue; (f) to provide material for sexual fantasy (such fantasies themselves being used in a variety of ways, eg. as a private mind-game which enhances sex with a partner or by oneself, or as the plot for a sex game played out with other people, etc.). Let me also add one other point: it seems to me self-evident that anyone with hang-ups about pornography has hang-ups about sex!

14. Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Hawkins and Zimring, op. cit., p. 154.

15. See Kate Ellis, Barbara O’Dair, and Abby Talmer, eds., Caught Looking, Caught Looking Inc., New York, 1986.

16. Paula Webster, “Pornography and Pleasure”, ibid., pp. 34-35.

17. Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter, and Carole S. Vance, “False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation”, ibid., p. 82.

18. Ellen Willis, “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography”, ibid., pp. 55-56.

19. The radical feminist fuss over sexual harassment is similar but different to the cases discussed. It is similar in at least the following two ways. First, sexual harassment does not intrinsically involve sexual inequality: men can be, and sometimes are, the victims of sexual harassment by women, as well as vice versa. Second, the aim of the campaign is anti-sex: the puritans want to inhibit people from making sexual advances, by stigmatising and/or prohibiting any such advance as “sexual harassment”. However, it is different in that genuine sexual harassment (of men or women), like any other bullying, is wrong (unlike all the other things discussed in this paper to which radical feminists object).

www.capital.demon.co.uk/LA/pamphlets/rad-fem.htm

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Radical feminism (From Wikipedia)

Radical feminism views women’s oppression as a fundamental element in human society and seeks to challenge that standard by broadly rejecting standard gender roles.

Radical feminism maintains that patriarchy is first and foremost the fundamental oppression that women face, and that while other oppressive factors such as racism do exist, that these are somehow secondary to gender oppression - naturally this has been criticized by non-Western feminists maintaining that this kind of universalizing attitude cannot apply globally to all cultures.

Womyn is a term used by many radical feminists to take the “man” out of the word woman.

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Main Tenets of Radical Feminism (Website)

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy.

2. Patriarchy is a hierarchical system of domination and subordination of women by men. It consists in, and is maintained by, one or more of the following:

· Compulsory motherhood and constraints on reproductive freedom

· Compulsory heterosexuality

· The social construction of femininity and female sexuality as that which is “dominated”

· Violence towards women

· Institutions which encourage the domination of women by men, such as the church, and traditional models of the family

3. To end the oppression of women, we must abolish patriarchy. This will potentially involve:

· Challenging and rejecting traditional gender roles and the ways in which women are represented/constructed in language, media, as well as in women’s personal lives.

· Fighting patriarchal constructions of women’s sexuality by banning pornography, and rejecting traditional heterosexual relationships.

· Achieving reproductive freedom

· Separation from patriarchal society?

http://students.washington.edu/intemann/radical.html

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Radical Feminism, Inclusive Language, and other Surds (Website)

“... but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man.” Interesting and thought-provoking, yes?

What is so compelling about this narrative is that God did not choose to create another man --- the creation of which He deemed to be consummately good. So good, in fact, that man is understood as the apex, the culmination of God’s creation .. a creation, paradoxically (and inevitably overlooked by feminists), that finds its most perfect expression in a woman: Mary, the Mother of God.

The question nevertheless stands. Given the goodness of His ultimate creation, why did God not choose to create another man, opting, instead, to chose creating a woman? In stating that none proved to be the suitable partner for the man, the indisputable keyword is “suitable”. According to the old adage, “why reinvent the wheel?” If another man were suitable for man, why would God have chosen to create ... a woman? Hermaphroditic creatures do, in fact, exist. If man were a perfect creation, why not duplicate perfection, or simply create it hermaphroditically ... rather than providing another creature perfect also, but possessed of complementarity? In what extremely significant way was Eve suitable for Adam, and Adam for Eve? In the same book we find, not surprisingly, the answer to this question of creation and complementarity, in the form of a mandate that would be impossible to fulfill through the sterile and euphemistic concept of “homosexual unions”. It would be ... well, very queer indeed were God to mandate that we, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth...” (Genesis 1.28) having not provided a complementarity necessary to its fulfillment.

It is also odd, in the way of abusing language to extrinsic ends, that in the Gospel according to Mark, we are, at least in lexicon of gender-neutralized text (as opposed to what has authentically come to us in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and English until circa 1970 , “admonished that what God has joined together, no human being must separate (New American BIble).” My question, my reflexive response really, is this: As distinct from what? “Let no vegetable matter put asunder”? “Let no anthracite or mineral mass put asunder?” Are extra-terrestrials exempt? --- if there are any. Here, to further highlight this absurd tampering with language to completely extrinsic ends, let us approach it synonymously and say, “no being of the human species”. Are we then to understand that species other than human have divine dispensation relative to the indissolubility of conjugal unions?

On the Horizon:

The proscriptions against bestiality are fewer in number in Holy Writ --- that is to say, the Bible in its many contemporary flavors --- than against homosexuality. In light of the controversy surrounding what we euphemize as “homosexual unions” it is, however, not entirely beyond speculation --- even anticipation ---that it will be argued that the Scriptural sanctions against bestiality will, in a given socio-political season, be regarded as yet another example of Catholic intolerance, insensitivity, and discrimination against those who, once again prescinding from, and taking exception to, Holy Scripture, find the company of animals more congenial to their “sexual persuasion”, than the company of women ... or, sadly, even men. Couple that with our penchant for genetic manipulation and corporate profitability and this becomes much, much more than speculative. Hetero-specifical sex.

Not to worry. The stridently feminist Church in Boston has very likely already developed a first draft to present to our children to appropriately desensitize them and disabuse them from any unenlightened, incorrect, and discriminatory notions. Parents will be notified after implementation. Contact the Chancery for further details. Just don’t hold your breath ...

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Concerned Women for America: Christian Feminist (Website)

Mission Statement

The mission of CWA is to protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens - first through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society - thereby reversing the decline in moral values in our nation.

Vision Statement

The vision of CWA is for women and like-minded men, from all walks of life, to come together and restore the family to its traditional purpose and thereby allow each member of the family to realize their God-given potential and be more responsible citizens.

Our Core Issues Concerned Women for America confronts many issues facing American citizens. We divide these into six different categories and have accordingly divided our web content here for you.

Definition of the Family

CWA believes the traditional family consists of one man and one woman joined in marriage, along with any children they may have. We seek to protect traditional values that support the Biblical design of the family.

Sanctity of Human Life

CWA supports the protection of all life from conception until natural death. This includes the consequences resulting from abortion.

Education

CWA seeks to reform public education by returning authority to parents.

Pornography

CWA endeavors to fight all pornography and obscenity.

Religious Liberty

CWA supports the God-given rights of individuals in the United States and other nations to pray and worship without fear of discrimination or persecution.

National Sovereignty

CWA believes that neither the United Nations nor any other international organization should have authority over the United States in any area, including economics, social policy, military, and land ownership.

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Hijacking a Noble Cause:

How Modern Feminism Has Abandoned Its Founders 9/26/2003

By Stephanie Porowski

Early and modern feminism are two completely different movements.

More than 150 years ago, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized a rally at Seneca Falls, New York, taking the first steps in achieving fair treatment for women. Many scholars and political commentators view the early feminist movement as one of America’s great success stories. However, in many respects modern feminism has deviated from the lofty ideals and moral underpinnings of its predecessor, with goals and beliefs that contradict those of the early feminists. Unlike the early feminist goals, modern feminism’s agenda is based on a foundation of separation and anger rather than equality and fairness. Today’s feminists wrongly claim kinship to feminism’s founders, thereby cloaking their radicalism in the early movement’s popularity and moral authority. Yet early and modern feminism are two completely different movements.

…

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Shutting Down the Feminists (Concerned Women for America, 030314)

United Nations Headquarters, New York City — At the close of each week of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Conference, the United States Delegation has held an NGO, or nongovernmental organization, briefing. Filled with feminists and anti-American sentiment, these meetings have given Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey, head of the U.S. delegation, an opportunity to dispel rumors and present cold, hard facts about how much the United States is helping women worldwide.

At the second NGO briefing, held Thursday (3/13/03), Mrs. Sauerbrey asked two U.S. delegates, Dr. Janice Crouse, Senior Fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, and Sherry Dew, to address the NGO representatives. This is a highly unusual request since delegates are seldom given a prominent role at the United Nations.

Discussions these past two weeks have focused on sex trafficking and providing access to media and information technology. But during all of the meetings, briefings, debates and late-night talks, radical feminism constantly reared its ugly head at CSW, demanding not only to be heard, but accepted.

It came from Angela King, special advisor on gender issues and advancement of women, who began the conference pushing for 50-50 quotas in gender representation at all levels of the United Nations. It came from the Bureau of CSW, who tried to cajole countries into ratifying and implementing the controversial Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW treaty, which supports universal abortion-on-demand, pushes for children’s autonomy from parental decision-making, and mandates sex education and gender mainstreaming.

It came from Switzerland delegates, who asserted that if men do not equally shoulder household responsibilities, they were guilty of committing violence against women. It came from European Union delegates, who refused to concede that women are vulnerable and open to attacks of violence and further demanded that “all women have a right to have control over and decide freely on their sexual and reproductive health.”

It came from Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand, delegations that refused to describe prostitution as inherently harmful to women. It came again from Swiss delegates, who declared that masculinity was among the root causes of domestic violence.

It came from Gloria Steinem, who used her position as co-moderator of a panel discussion to call President Bush “an illegitimate president” who used his position “to divide and endanger the whole world.” It came from far-left NGO representatives, who brazenly asked how the U.S. stance against violence directed toward women compared with our country’s march to war in Iraq.

And so when Dr. Crouse and Ms. Dew walked into the NGO briefing Thursday night, tensions were already high among the 75 to 100 attending.

“There were some pretty strong, militant women saying some very negative things about the United States,” said Joy Lundberg of the World Family Policy Center from the J. Reuben Bark Law School. “Sadly, many of these women were from the United States.”

A huge criticism of many was that President Bush had not given money for condoms to be used to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa and was instead pushing abstinence, which did not work.

“That’s when Sherry Dew stood up,” Lundberg recalled, “and in the most dignified and articulate manner — and so respectful — said that this administration recognizes that condoms do not protect against AIDS. They make it a little safer but not safe.”

Dew continued to say that the ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms) method used in Uganda is the method that will stop this disease-with the emphasis on abstinence since condoms do not work in most cases in the prevention of AIDS. Her remarks elicited great applause.

“It was like someone hushed the whole group and no militant said a word,” said Lundberg. “The opposition was suddenly aware it was not in the majority.”

The anti-American blather stirred again until, at one point, several women were speaking at once. Dr. Crouse gently said, “Ladies, let’s have just one person talk at a time so that we can hear all the comments.”

Several of the women were so incensed they had been referred to as ladies that they began muttering loudly.

“I’m NOT a lady,” one of them grumbled. She stood up and stormed out of the room.

Soon, Dr. Crouse stood to speak. She gave a brief but passionate speech about her love of America and all the good things the United States has done to help countries all over the world. NGO representatives again broke out in thunderous applause.

“Janice was magnificent,” said Lundberg. “She stood in defense of the U.S., and I was so proud of her when she said she was proud to be an American … and to represent this administration and the moral principles this administration supports.”

A couple of representatives from Australia were also quick to praise President Bush, saying, “We can be so glad that President Bush is leading the country in doing so many good things for the world.”

One thing was abundantly clear. The U.S. delegation had left an indelible impression on the United Nations. “These two women represented us very well last night,” said Lundberg. “The opposition realized that we are a force to be reckoned with.”

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Women’s Rights (Global Issues Website)

[liberal viewpoint]

Women’s rights around the world is an important indicator of understanding global well-being. Many may think that women’s rights is only a problem in countries where religion is law. Or even worse, some people may not think this is an issue at all. But reading this report about the UN Women’s Treaty and how an increasing number of countries are lodging reservations, will show otherwise.

Progress

It isn’t easy to change tradition overnight. Examples of success include:

* The gains made in South Africa

* Childhood concerns in Latin America

* Poor women gaining greater access to savings due to microcredit systems and more.

* Women winning the right to vote in Kuwait (This further pressures other Gulf nations to follow suit. Unforuntately, this was denied later in 1999 but pressure has been mounting.)

Lack of Progress

You would think that as the years progress, there would be more equality between men and women. Unfortunately, trends are moving in the other direction.

A Human Rights Watch report also describes how women’s rights have not been observed in some countries as much as expected; in some places claims were made that their rights would be respected more yet policies are sometimes not changed enough -- or at all, thus still undermining the rights of women.

As Amnesty International also point out, “Governments are not living up to their promises under the Women’s Convention to protect women from discrimination and violence such as rape and female genital mutilation.” There are many governments who have also not ratified the Convention, including the US. Many countries that have ratified it do so with many reservations.

In some patriarchal societies, religion or tradition can be used as a barrier for equal rights, as this link about the case in Bangladesh shows. In this case even the government can hide behind laws to deny women equal rights. In Pakistan for example, honor killings directed at women have been done for the slightest reasons. (There are different types of problems all over the world that women face, from the wealthiest countries to the poorest, and it isn’t the scope of this site to be able to list them all here, but just provide some examples. Links to other sites below document more thoroughly the actual instances, cases and situations around the world.)

Work

Did you know that women cultivate, plough, harvest more than half of all the food in the world? According to Inter Press Service, “On a global scale, women cultivate more than half of all the food that is grown. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, they produce up to 80 percent of basic foodstuffs. In Asia, they account for around 50 percent of food production. In Latin America, they are mainly engaged in subsistence farming, horticulture, poultry and raising small livestock.” Yet these women often get little recognition for that. In fact, many go unpaid. It is very difficult for these women to get the financial resources required to buy equipment etc, as many societies still do not accept, or realize, that there is a change in the “traditional” roles.

Also disturbing is the continued practise of trafficking of women, which has become a lucrative business for organized crime. As the Digital Freedom Network reports, “Ukraine has eclipsed Latin America as the top exporter of women into international trafficking.”

Feminization of Poverty

The “feminization of poverty” is a phonemenon that is unfortunatley on the increase. Basically, women are increasingly the ones who suffer the most poverty.

Professor of anthropology, Richard Robbins also notes that

At the same time that women produce 75 to 90 percent of food crops in the world, they are responsible for the running of households. According to the United Nations, in no country in the world do men come anywhere close to women in the amount of time spent in housework. Furthermore, despite the efforts of feminist movements, women in the core still suffer disproportionately, leading to what sociologist refer to as the ‘feminization of poverty,’ where two out of every three poor adults are women. The informal slogan of the Decade of Women became ‘Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 10 percent of the world’s income and own 1 percent of the means of production’.

-- Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p. 354

This then also affects children which makes the dire situation even worse. For example, even in the richest country in the world, the USA, the poorest are women caring for children.

The lending strategies to developing countries by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank have affected many women in those countries.

Poverty, trade and economic issues are very much related to women’s rights issues due to the impacts they can have. Tackling these issues as well, then also helps to tackle women’s rights issues. And, tackling gender issues helps tackle poverty-related issues. See also the Asia Pacific online network of women web site for more about issues relating to globalization and its impacts on women.

Population

As seen in the population section of this web site, tackling many population related causes involves tackling many women’s issues such as increased knowledge and access to better health care, family planning and education for women. The beneficial results of these get passed along to the children and eventually the society. In fact, as this report shows, providing women reproductive rights is part of their human rights.

Media

Even media attention on women who help and fight for certain causes is distorted. For example, they concentrate only on a few people like the late Diana and Mother Terresa and rarely report on the thousands of others who do similar work.

In other cases, the roles of women presented in the media, from talk shows, to entertainment shows as well as news reporting can often end up reenforcing the status quo and the cultural stereotypes, which influence other women to follow suit. This happens in all nations, from the wealthiest to the poorest (and happens with men as well as children). It can have positive aspects, such as providing guidance and sharing issues etc. but it can also have a negative effect of continuing inherent prejudices etc.

From June 5 to June 9 2000, there was a conference at the United Nations, New York, continuing on 5 years from a similar conference in Beijing, 1995. (The more formal name of the conference was actually “Women: 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the Twenty-First Century.”)

In 1985 there was a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, to formulate strategies for advancing women’s rights. This was followed by a “plan of action” defined in 1995, in Beijing.

The goals of this conference then was to reflect on the promised provisions of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere. It has been known and agreed for a while that successful development also involved gender equality.

Leading up to, and during the conference, many organizations had numerous issues to bring to the fore, including:

* Women’s reproductive rights.

* Abduction of girls

* Child soldiers and armed conflict

* Poverty and Economy

* Education & Training

* Health

* Violence

* Decision Making

* Institutional Mechanisms

* Human Rights

* Media

* Environment

* The Girl-child

According to a UN report, the international community had fallen far short of its commitments to empower women and achieve gender equality and that only eight out of 188 member states had certain global agreements.

It was also pointed out at this UN session that Women continued to be deprived of basic and fundamental rights because of measures imposed in certain countries.

In fact, some were even opposed to moving forward on such important issues, such as Holy See (the Vatican), Nicaragua, Sudan and Libya and sometimes Iraq and various other nations on particular issues such as reproductive rights, even freedom of expression (Libya and the Vatican opposed this). The Vatican, Iran and some other delegations even wanted to delete references to sexual and reproductive rights and health in the Current Challenges section of the review document.

Talking of the Vatican, there is growing concern at their role as permanent observer (more than a non-governmental organization -- NGO -- less than a nation) and influence they have had in many UN decisions affecting many gender related issues to be more effectively pushed forward. To see some of the criticisms check out this radio interview with some who suggest that the Vatican should be classified as an NGO instead.

Some were also left out of the conference.

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Dependency Divas: Feminist groups are not the key to women’s votes (NRO, 040202)

The presidential primaries turn national this week, with states as diverse as New Mexico and Delaware voting to select their Democratic challenger. Contenders must swap the retail politics of Iowa and New Hampshire for a campaign to build national appeal. One group sure to be courted is women. Yet for advice about how to appeal to them, candidates should look beyond the self-proclaimed feminist groups. These dependency divas sell a tired mix of victimization and big government that’s out of touch with most modern women.

But don’t take my word for it. In a recent interview, Martha Burke, chairman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, noted this discontent between the “movement” and most American women: “I think it’s a little bit sad that some women are not aware of what the women’s movement in general does for them, and some of the ways they’re experiencing discrimination. It’s my job to make them notice.”

What’s really sad is that Burke thinks awakening women’s sense of victimization is a worthy goal. Most people rejoice that American women are too busy succeeding to feel wronged. Women are thriving in schools and universities, and excelling in industries that just a few decades ago were almost exclusively the domain of men. Cause for celebration? Not for Burke and the women’s groups that feed on women’s sense of victimization.

Yet Burke does make one important point: Women ought to take notice of “what the women’s movement does.” So what does it do? The National Organization for Women (NOW), one of the most prominent feminist groups, advocates for government-provided healthcare, steeply progressive taxes, and more regulations of how businesses compensate employees. NOW fights Social Security reforms that give workers control over more of their retirement savings, and education policies that empower parents. Seemingly, NOW envisions a nanny government that provides for most of women’s needs — the clear implication being that women are incapable of caring for themselves.

NOW’s view is hardly novel. Throughout much of history, society assumed that women required economic support. Women were their father’s property until they married, at which time they became their husband’s charge. Early feminists fought this notion and for the right for women to live and compete on their own.

The modern feminist agenda steps back from the promotion of independence for women. Instead, it offers an agenda that replaces dependence on men with dependence on government.

Adding injury to insult, the big-government policies many feminist organizations promote often have unintended consequences harmful to women. Workplace regulations make hiring more expensive and job opportunities scarce. High marginal taxes discourage some married women from entering the workforce, while forcing others who would prefer to stay home with children to go to work to pay the bills.

Self-proclaimed feminists often use explicitly paternalistic arguments to justify their political and economic agendas. Consider the following statement of the Feminist Majority Foundation, arguing against the 2001 tax-cut package: “The economic well-being of women in the United States is severely threatened by President Bush’s tax cut proposal...women have little to gain and everything to lose from this plan.”

Allowing women to keep more of their money and reducing government’s take of the economy is portrayed as economic Armageddon for women. The Feminist Majority Foundation suggests that women — not just low-income women or disabled women, but women generally — so depend on the government to provide for them that their “economic well-being” was “severely threatened” by a tax cut.

So Martha Burke is right. Women need to know what the modern women’s movement does. The most prominent women’s groups have hijacked a once-honorable campaign for true equality and independence for women, draining it of its intellectual force and leaving only a husk of tired, big-government policies. In doing so, they spread an image of women as helpless children, dependent on government to care for them.

These dependency divas aren’t serving women’s best interests. The only ones truly dependent are the women’s groups themselves — dependent upon the perpetuation of a sense of victimization. Candidates who want to appeal to mainstream women shouldn’t assume these groups speak for most women. Women are better served by limited government and expanded spheres of personal freedom and choice. Candidates that recognize that will do more than win endorsements from women’s groups — they’ll win the support of women themselves.

— Carrie L. Lukas, director of policy at the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of “Dependency Divas: How the Feminist Big Government Agenda Betrays Women”, available at www.iwf.org.

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Anti-Choice Extremists! That’s NOW, when it comes to education (National Review Online, 040311)

The National Organization for Women (NOW) claims to champion “choice.” But when it comes to giving parents choice about where to send their children to school, NOW firmly opposes providing additional options.

Consider that even liberal stalwarts like Senators Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barbara Mikulski (Md.) supported the Bush administration’s decision to loosen restrictions on creating single-sex public schools and classrooms. Not NOW. NOW reacted to this announcement by accusing the administration of trying to segregate schools. “Sex discrimination in the classroom or the workplace is shameful,” said NOW’s president, Kim Gandy. “Segregation was wrong in the past — and it’s wrong now.”

In fact, giving more options to both parents and schools has nothing to do with the evils of forced segregation. No parent would be compelled to send her child to a single-sex institution and no district would be required to create one. The president has simply proposed relaxing regulations that prevent public schools from offering these choices to parents. Equating this with immoral Jim Crow laws is an insult to everyone who suffered under them.

Initial research indicates that children in single-sex education prosper academically. This is, however, beside the point. Higher test scores and graduation rates are wonderful, but the principle at stake is who should decide what kind of education a child receives. Time and again, NOW has opposed policies that would give parents greater control and options for the education their children receive.

Of course, many parents already choose single-sex education for their children. Numerous boys-only and girls-only private schools are available to families willing and able to pay tuition after paying the taxes that support local public schools. Many parents of public-school students also are able to practice some school choice when they decide where to live. Since home prices are closely tied to the quality of the local school district, wealthy parents often pay a significant premium to gain entrance into a desirable school system.

Low-income families rarely have the luxury of shopping for homes based on schools. Instead they are stuck with the local public-school system, which — especially in urban areas — often leaves much to be desired.

Education reformers have long recognized that condemning low-income students to abysmal, often violent public schools was unfair to those students and bad for society. Money has been poured into these failing systems to try to improve education services, but to little avail. Inflation-adjusted education spending has nearly doubled since 1972, but test scores have stagnated. Washington D.C. encapsulates this story: In spite of spending well over ten thousand dollars per student, the second highest in the nation, its test scores are rock bottom.

Over the past decade, parent-centered education reforms have grown in popularity. Giving all parents greater ability to select a school allows them to consider their children’s particular educational needs and forces schools to compete for students. Instead of having a captive audience and little outside pressure to perform, schools facing competition must, like a business, consider how best to deliver a quality product. If they fail to do so, they lose customers.

Empirical analysis of existing school-choice programs — from charter schools and public-school choice to vouchers and tax credits — suggests that market forces work. Dozens of studies have determined that students who switch schools are better off, as are their peers who remain in public schools that face competition.

Unfortunately, NOW remains stubbornly hypocritical in the face of such facts. They work closely with private women’s colleges like Smith and Mount Holyoke that increase the ranks of NOW’s embittered gender warriors. And, to my knowledge, NOW has yet to call for the elimination of similar private options for K-12 students. But NOW fights choice for families with children locked into often-failing government-run K-12 schools.

John Edwards’s presidential bid was fueled by talk of the existence of “two Americas,” one for those with means and one for the rest. Unfortunately, this is an accurate description of our education system: Families with means have options in choosing their children’s schools; too often, low-income families don’t. Ensuring that all families have choice should be a bipartisan principle.

As NOW continues its opposition to expanding choice for public-school families, it should be careful in using the term “segregation.” Those public-school families being denied options may start using that term themselves.

— Carrie Lukas is the director of policy for the Independent Women’s Forum.

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Now, a Masterpiece (National Review, 050328)

Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — And What Women Can Do About It, by Warren Farrell (Amacom, 288 pp., $23)

We’ve all seen the statistics that purport to show the raw deal women get in the workplace. But that raw deal simply doesn’t exist, writes Warren Farrell in this new book: It’s lifestyle choices, not gender identities, that determine salaries. If women choose more of the same professions as men, and follow similar career paths, they will earn salaries equal to those of their male counterparts.

Even within the limits imposed by their choices, women’s comparative wages have made great progress in recent years. According to a 2003 GAO report, women earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes — a significant increase from the 59 cents women earned compared with a man’s dollar back in the 1970s. But Farrell, author of such previous bestsellers as Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power, focuses on the bigger sociological picture — contending that women actually earn the same as men if they have equal experience and qualifications, and are doing a similar job in identical working conditions. In fact, he contends that — despite the numerous lawsuits launched by women every year against their employers — women are not being discriminated against in the workforce: They are being victimized not by their employers, but by their own bad professional choices.

Farrell’s extensive research is persuasive: Women generally earn less than men because they choose jobs that are more “fulfilling, flexible, and safe.” These jobs usually pay less. For example, the librarian with a graduate degree will earn less than a garbage collector who dropped out of high school. The same applies to the educated art historian working in a museum versus the uneducated coal miner working in a mine. The garbage collector and the coal miner get higher salaries because their work involves greater risk and less pleasant working conditions. Few workers are willing to accept the conditions in these blue-collar, male-oriented jobs — so employees willing to work in these fields are a more precious commodity than workers in lower-paying professions, including librarians and art historians.

Farrell suggests 25 ways women can level the salary playing field. Among his recommendations are that women choose careers in technology or science, work longer hours, accept more responsibilities, and take jobs that are more dangerous and in unpleasant environments. He notes, however, that these solutions — instead of empowering women — may leave them bereft of true power, which he defines as “control over one’s life.” He believes that “pay is about giving up power to get the power of pay,” and that by choosing to make more money, women limit their options. They forfeit the quality of life they enjoyed when they worked less and in better, non-stressful working environments. They risk relinquishing a profession they feel passionate about for one they dislike. They also will have less opportunity to have children, take maternity leave, or work flexible hours to take care of their children. If they do decide to have children and raise them, chances are they will lose their position and their high salary.

Farrell’s observations about women and the pay gap are bracing, but his proposed solutions are less than adequate for real-life situations. He suggests, for example, that a woman who wants children, or who already has them, should find a mate who is willing to stay home and be the primary caretaker. Such men, of course, are few and far between. And what about the single mother who can’t afford to relocate or work long hours since she must take care of her children? Or the woman who risks losing custody of her children if she pursues any of Farrell’s suggestions? Or the mother who is reentering the job market after a 15-year absence because she chose to raise her children? For them, Farrell has little helpful advice.

Farrell’s 25 solutions basically outline a philosophy of gender neutrality: To earn equal pay to a man, a woman must renounce the specifics of her sex. This is the ultimate goal of feminism, so we should not be surprised that Farrell is the only man to be elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW). His analysis reveals the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the modern feminist movement: Although appearing to champion the cause of women, Farrell finally sells them short by viewing them merely as units of production.

But he also lays bare the unpleasant truth about working women. For decades, feminists and Hollywood have perpetuated the myth that a woman can have it all — a successful, high-powered career, with time for a loving husband and children, all the while looking glamorous, sexy, and carefree. The reality, however, is that working women today are more stressed, overworked, and underappreciated than they were prior to the women’s liberation movement. Pursuing a career carries trade-offs and costs, which usually come at the expense of family and children. A similar dynamic holds true for women wishing to spend more time at home: The result will be less time and less productivity at the office. This book poignantly illustrates why feminism’s war on human nature is destined to fail: Instead of chasing the chimera of perfect wage parity between the sexes, women will continue to harbor the natural desire to be devoted mothers and wives.

— Loredana Vuoto is a speechwriter to the assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in this review are solely her own.

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Sister Sense: Phyllis Chesler moves on from the feminist Left. (National Review Online, 051201)

Phyllis Chesler is a gutsy woman. I have known her a very long time, since we both worked for a magazine for teenagers called Ingenue way back when baby boomers were teenagers. I always say Ingenue taught me my first lesson in publishing. Never name a magazine something its readers can’t pronounce.

Phyllis was a very young freelance writer at the time, and I was a very young editor. But what I didn’t know then and just found out from reading Phyllis’s interesting new book, The Death of Feminism, was that she had already had some amazing experiences in her life that have influenced her thinking ever since.

In the summer of 1961 she married her college sweetheart. She was a nice Orthodox Jewish girl from Brooklyn. He was a nice Muslim boy from Afghanistan who had been away from home for 14 years, attending private schools in Europe and America. She says she didn’t want to get married but he looked like Omar Sharif. Remember Omar Sharif? And so they married and she went home with him to his upper-class family in Kabul.

Afghanistan then was more modern than it would become years later under Taliban rule, and American women in the 1960’s were far less assertive than American women have become today. But even then, the rigidly constrained and isolated life women forced to live in Muslim Afghanistan shocked and frightened Phyllis.

She writes, “The Afghanistan I knew was a prison, a police state, a feudal monarchy, a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia... [It] was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, preventable and treatable diseases; yet that was not the worst of it [for women].... The overwhelming domestic and psychological misery was worse and it consisted of arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, the chadari, domestic slavery, and, of course, purdah.”

After about a year, sick with hepatitis, Phyllis managed to escape and return to America and to college. She divorced her husband and by the mid-Sixties had become a leading feminist writer and thinker. A professor of psychology and women’s studies, one of her books, Women and Madness became a worldwide bestseller.

But in the last few years, Phyllis, though she says she is still a feminist, has broken with many of her former friends and has become one of their most outspoken critics. She believes that many feminists, especially those who run women’s-studies departments as well as those who are part of peace and environmental organizations, have become far-left-wing extremists bonded more by an anti-Western, anti-Semitic point of view than by their support of women.

She chides them for, in their zeal for multiculturalism, ignoring the sad plight of many Muslim women. On this subject, Phyllis’s position, partly from her early experience, is very clear. She and another feminist co-author Donna Hughes (who has appeared on this site) wrote in a 2004 Washington Post op-ed: “Islamic fundamentalism threatens women all over the world. Wherever they have gained power, Islamists have denied women their essential humanity and dignity.”

But many feminists, she notes, are more critical of Israel and America than they are of reactionary Islamic regimes. Phyllis argues, “On the subject of terrorism, many feminists have been missing in action. Or they view America as the greatest terrorist power on earth.”

In her book, Phyllis describes many horrifying cases of “Islamic gender apartheid,” especially against Muslim women living in the West. She mixes this with constant rapid-fire condemnation of her former ‘sisters.’ For example, she writes, “I have not found one American feminist rant against the French over their sordid oil-for-food deal in Iraq ... Nor did I hear one feminist rail against jihad that the non-assimilated Muslim immigrants in France have declared against France’s highly assimilated Jews.... Nor did I hear one feminist complain bitterly about the French having sent a military jet to transport the dying Arafat the terrorist to the best hospital in Paris. And even when Arafat’s financial greed could not be denied, I did not hear a single feminist condemn Arafat or his high-spending wife for stealing billions of dollars meant to feed the starving Palestinian people....”

Needless to say, Phyllis is fiercely pro-Israel, and wears a large Star of David when she speaks before feminist groups. She has begun to study the Talmud. She is outspokenly pro-American. And a year ago she did the unthinkable: She voted for George Bush.

But, hey, as I said, she’s a gutsy woman — and who else could have positive blurbs on the back of a book jacket from such an eclectic group as Kate Millet, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, and David Frum.

Except for complaining about the fact her books no longer get reviewed by the New York Times, she seems happy to be speaking out. “I believe you should stand up for the truth,” she told me. “But,” she said, referring to her former gal pals, “Can you believe, if you stand up for America, you get booed down? Really, they ought to be ashamed!”

— Myrna Blyth, former long-time editor of Ladies Home Journal and founding editor of More, is author of Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America. Blyth is also an NRO contributor.

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Now, there’s proof: Men, women different (Washington Times, 051202)

Attention, Dr. Frankenstein, and maybe Gloria Steinem: There are girl brains, then there are boy brains. But there’s not one generic human brain, no matter what hand-wringing feminists may insist in their quest for sexual equality.

Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs.

“The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man’s brain and a woman’s brain really do work differently,” a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday.

After analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of 23 men and 10 women, the team found that the sexes use different areas of the brain even when working on exactly the same task.

“The larger implications of this work is that we may increasingly find out that there are differences in the ‘hard wiring’ of male and female brains,” said study author Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatrist.

Though Dr. Silverstone hopes that these revelations will lead to more innovative ways to treat depression and other mental illnesses, these findings might one day explain certain persistent behaviors that make for a more lively existence.

Why do men, for example, refuse to ask for directions while women are busy peering at maps and landmarks during the same automobile journey? Why do women cry and men sleep through a sappy movie? Could it be that old hard-wiring?

During the Canadian study, volunteers were given memory, language, spatial and coordination tests while their brains were monitored through the MRIs. The patterns revealed that men and women clearly met the challenges differently.

“The results jumped out at us,” said Emily Bell, one of the researchers. “Sometimes males and females would perform the same tasks and show different brain activation. And sometimes they would perform different tasks and show the same brain activation.”

Similar research also reinforces differences in the brains of men and women.

Psychiatrists at the Stanford University School of Medicine announced Nov. 7 that the sexes have different senses of humor as well. Using MRIs to monitor the brains of 10 men and 10 women as they scanned the newspaper cartoons, researchers found “sex-specific differences in the brain’s response to humor.”

Men want and expect a good punch line. But women have a greater appreciation for language and fewer expectations, but if the punch line delivers, they have a greater sense of “reward,” the psychiatrists found.

The sexes also differ in the intelligence department.

“Human evolution [comments by Kwing Hung: irrational] has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said psychologist Richard Haier of the University of California at Irvine upon releasing his study of male and female brains in January.

Again using MRIs, he found that men have more than six times the amount of gray matter — which controls information processing — in their brains as women do. But females have 10 times the amount of white matter, which controls networking abilities.

The findings “may help explain why men excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics) while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information ... such as required for language,” the study found.

There’s some reassuring common ground, though. A study of almost 700 adults released yesterday by Cornell University found that men and women are happier with each other, rather than alone. And the stronger the relationship’s commitment, the greater the happiness and sense of well-being of the partners, the analysis found.

“Being married is associated with higher self-esteem, greater life satisfaction, greater happiness and less distress, whereas people who are not in stable romantic relationships tend to report lower self-esteem, less life satisfaction, less happiness and more distress,” sociologist Claire Kamp Dushsaid yesterday.

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“Gender-Fair” Oppression: Our boys are hurting in school. Thank the feminists. (National Review Online, 051206)

In his welcome Washington Post “Outlook” piece, “Disappearing Act: Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good,” Michael Gurian reports that colleges and universities across the country are “grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male.” The author of books on the compelling brain research that reveals significant sex differences in learning styles notes that men make up only 43 percent of college students. Gurian laments that we have failed to react to a “significant crisis” that damages the life prospects of millions of young men. He marshals the evidence of boys in trouble and effectively demands attention to their plight.

But he doesn’t explain who is to blame for boys’ alienation from our current schooling regime. So I will. It’s radical feminist academics, theorists, and activists.

Gurian explains that boys “dominate the failure statistics in our schools” beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school. Boys lag behind girls in reading ability by 1 ½ years, a disparity that persists into college. This diminished educational achievement consigns young men to the lowest-level jobs, lands plenty in prison, and takes many out of the long-term marriage pool. He counsels that we abandon the “boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years.” No kidding. This “emphasis” that has so disadvantaged our boys is the fundamental tenet of feminist educational policy that is subsidized by tens of millions of public dollars in the name of a phony “educational equity.”

Take reading achievement, as one example of what feminism has wrought. With the federal government’s clout and cash, feminists have dictated the rewriting of textbooks to conform to their notions of gender equality. At its 1973 convention, NOW resolved to take “dramatic action” to see that dangerous sex-role stereotypes were erased from textbooks, and within a year they had the Women’s Educational Equity Act to advance their campaign with funding for alternative curricula. The editors, publishers, administrators, bureaucrats, and teachers’ unions that make up the feminized education establishment have eagerly adopted the feminists’ destructive gender agenda.

The result is what NYU psychology professor Paul Vitz calls “Wonder Woman and the Wimp” stories that little boys understandably have little interest in reading. Sandra Stotsky, a reading specialist and research scholar at Northeastern University explains, “Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound.”

Peggy Orenstein is one of the feminist theorists who welcomes the “gender-fair” regime that has turned our classrooms into reeducation camps for our sons. She has noted approvingly that “perhaps for the first time, the boys are the ones looking through the window” when classrooms are adorned with women’s pictures and bookcases are crammed with women’s biographies.

We parents of boys have meekly allowed gender warriors like Peggy Orenstein to treat our sons like unindicted coconspirators in history’s gender crimes, while parents of girls permit their daughters to be patronized as helpless victims of a phantom, crippling sex bias in America’s schools.

Michael Gurian notes the casualties without identifying who created the battlefield for their campaign of intimidation and indoctrination.

— Kate O’Beirne names more names in her forthcoming book, Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports.

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Debunking militant feminist orthodoxy (townhall.com, 060131)

by David Limbaugh

Kate O’Beirne’s “Women Who Make the World Worse” is one of the boldest books challenging the orthodoxy of political correctness to be released in years. Above all, it documents the real damage inflicted on our culture by radical feminism and the women who lead that destructive movement.

O’Beirne makes a compelling case, substantiated by copious research, that radical feminism has been driven largely by disaffected women, devoted to undermining the traditional institutions that are indispensable for a healthy, vibrant society: motherhood, fatherhood and marriage.

In their relentless assault on gender distinctions and Mother Nature herself, they have tried to eliminate all differences between men and women, labeling them as social constructs engineered by dominant males in furtherance of their conspiracy to oppress women.

This book is not merely a polemical counterpoint to the subjective propaganda with which radical feminists have bombarded society in the last three-plus decades. It marshals impressive evidence shattering the bizarre, counterintuitive psychobabble feminists have promoted to “deconstruct” the pillars of our culture.

Radical feminist torchbearers publicly condemn marriage as the “chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women” and a destructive institution that has harmed women’s mental and emotional health.

But O’Beirne shows that when confronted with the hard evidence that refutes their premises, radical feminists cavalierly dismiss it as just further proof of men’s successful subjugation and indoctrination of women.

For example, when study after study reveals that married women, on average, are happier, healthier and wealthier than their unmarried counterparts, feminists write them off as skewed because they don’t comport with their militant conclusions.

O’Beirne cites a female sociology professor, Jessie Barnard, who says, “To be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, women must be slightly mentally ill.” Another, Katharine Bartlett, the dean of Duke University’s law school, attributes women’s support for the traditional, nuclear family to deeply rooted ideology (read: brainwashing).

If anyone is blinded by ideological conditioning, it’s the feminists, who willfully ignore the stubborn data that refuse to conform to their prejudices. For their dogma to thrive, they have to discount such disturbing findings as “boys who grew up outside of intact marriages, were, on average, more than twice as likely to end up in jail as other boys, and twice as likely to use illegal drugs.”

While radical feminists hold themselves out as champions of women’s freedom and choice, they have sought to systematically undercut the natural bond between mother and child and put a guilt trip on mothers who would prefer temporarily to sacrifice their professional careers and stay home during their children’s formative years.

No less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be. To some extent, it’s a myth that men have created to make women think that they do this job to perfection.”

And lest you draw the wrong inferences here, O’Beirne’s book is not a condemnation of women who choose to pursue their careers while raising their children. Rather, it is an indictment of the radical feminists who insist on women marching in lock step to the monolithic dictates of the radical movement.

O’Beirne also makes quite clear that she has long opposed discrimination against women in employment and education and is a strong believer in women pursing academic and career excellence. It never occurred to her father, she says, that her chosen profession of law “was unsuitable for a woman.”

Though O’Beirne has been a fierce advocate of equal opportunity for women, she abhors the radical feminists’ goal of legally enforcing an equality of outcomes, which would include, for example, absurdly equalizing the percentage of cosmetology, welding and carpentry students between the sexes.

The feminists, O’Beirne correctly notes, are not about empowering women. They have no room in their utopia for accomplished conservative women, such as Margaret Thatcher or Condoleezza Rice.

“Women Who Make the World Worse” is, to be sure, an entertaining, often humorous expose of the modern feminist movement, but at the same time, it’s a sober wake-up call, highlighting its destructive “advancements” and naming its primary culprits, including our would-be president, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I have long admired Kate O’Beirne and her powerful work as a writer for National Review and a commentator on “The Capital Gang.” But she has outdone herself with this book, which is a must-read for all who seek to understand radical feminism and the danger it poses to women, men, children, families, marriage, education and other essential societal institutions.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously (townhall.com, 060123)

by Mike S. Adams

Dear Daisy:

First of all, let me tell you how thrilled I am to receive hate mail from a feminist named “Daisy.” I can’t think of many names – with the possible exceptions of Coco, Mercedes, and Jasmine – that could make you sound less like a feminist and more like a stripper in a club that offers two-dollar table dances. Nonetheless, I will try to answer most of your questions, sent via e-mail.

In your opening paragraph, you asked me, a) whether my wife hates me as much as every other woman in America hates me, b) whether I am against women voting, c) whether I am against women holding elective office, d) whether I think rape should be legalized, e) whether I think women should be banned from the workplace, f) whether I think all women should be barefoot and pregnant, and, finally, g) whether I support female genital mutilation.

The answers to those seven profoundly rational questions are as follows: No; No; No; No; No; No; and No.

Unfortunately, your final question, which consumed most of paragraph two of your e-mail, will take a bit longer to address. But that’s okay. The question “Why don’t you take feminists seriously” is an important one. It deserves a more complete response. So here are my primary reasons:

1. I do not consider 21st century feminism to be a political ideology or philosophy.

American feminists generally do not become feminists because of some well-defined political goal. For example, in your email you enumerate several important political objectives. You want to vote. You want to be free to hold elective office. You want rape to be illegal. You want to be able to work. You don’t want to be forced to get and stay pregnant at all times. You want genital mutilation (of females) to be illegal.

I have an important newsflash, Daisy: You have already achieved all six of these political objectives. But, nonetheless, you continue to rant. And you continue to live in the past. That makes it difficult to take you seriously.

2. Generally speaking, feminists get together with other feminists because it is less expensive than seeing a therapist.

Feminists are usually drawn together by an inability to deal with men. When they get together, whether in a small group or a large one, criticism of males tends to dominate the discourse.

Let me give you an example. A few days after I made an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor – to talk about race and class, not gender – two feminists gathered outside my office to criticize some pro-life bumper stickers that were posted on my door. One feminist stated that it must be difficult to have to come to work every day on the same floor with such a sexist professor. The other said they should keep their voices low because I might overhear them. Since I was actually in my office at the time (with the door shut) I did overhear them.

Despite the fact that the conversation began with one feminist trying to sooth another, they soon worked themselves into a frenzy. The mere repetition of words such as “patriarchal,” phallocentric,” and “male-dominated” has an effect like the one described in George Orwell’s 1984. If you want to see the “two minutes hate” in practice just attend an annual “Take Back the Night” march or The Vagina Monologues.

Regardless of whether it is a gathering of two, two hundred, or two thousand feminists, the dynamics are always the same. And those dynamics make it hard to take feminism seriously.

3. Most feminists don’t really want equality.

One good example of this phenomenon comes from a recent argument I had with one of the stars of The Vagina Monologues. She wrote me to complain about a column I published criticizing that infamous feminist play. She told me she was “offended” and “hurt” by my critique. I then asked her whether the flashing “vagina” sign in front of the school was offensive to the Greek Orthodox or Baptist churches located nearby. She responded by saying that she “didn’t give a sh*t” what they thought. It mattered very much that she was offended. It didn’t matter at all that she had offended others. (Take a moment to look up the word “sociopath” in the dictionary).

Another example comes from a former secretary in my department. One day she left work crying because I criticized campus feminists (for hanging racist posters on campus showing Condi Rice standing in a cage holding a bunch of bananas). The next week she was back in the office tearlessly (and tirelessly) criticizing her husband for his inability to maintain an erection.

Increasingly, these campus feminists strive to be a) constantly offended, and b) constantly offensive. One unanticipated consequence of the feminists’ unequal application of the “right to be un-offended” is that many people now deem feminists to be emotionally inferior.

That is another reason why people (myself included) don’t take feminists seriously.

4. The feminist love of postmodernism has resulted in widespread academic and personal dishonesty.

A few years ago, I began to realize that one can seldom trust a feminist to tell the truth. For example, I once asked a feminist to debate me on the issue of abortion. She told me she really wasn’t pro-choice. I did an internet search and found that she had repeatedly referred to herself as “pro-choice” on feminist list serves. She made those references to herself both before and after our conversation. In other words, she lied.

When I asked another feminist to debate me on abortion she said that she didn’t discuss such personal topics publicly. But then I read her biography. After talking about losing her virginity (including details about how she cleaned the blood off the couch afterwards) she dedicated countless pages to the issue of abortion and how a “lack of choice” adversely affects young women. After reading on, I realized why she didn’t tell me the truth. She revealed that she was a postmodernist who didn’t like to use the word “truth.”

The next time I got into an argument with a feminist – over whether a female student who lied about a rape to get out of a test should be expelled – I understood the postmodern feminist position better. Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.

Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth - because it doesn’t even really exist - I simply cannot take them seriously.

Those are just a few reasons, Daisy. I eagerly await your response, so I can treat my readers to part two of the series. After all, these may be the best tips you get all year.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, part II (townhall.com, 060125)

by Mike S. Adams

After I published yesterday’s column (Why I don’t take feminists seriously), a feminist who works in my building really gave me the cold shoulder. In fact, she didn’t say a word to me all day. It was meant to be a form of punishment. But, actually, it was a reward. And it provides a good introduction to my next point about feminists.

5. Most feminists do not have a sense of humor.

You’ve heard the one about the guy who asked a feminist “how many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb.” Her answer? “That’s not funny!”

I thought of that joke after an anti-feminist student (a woman) put a bumper sticker on my door saying “So you’re a feminist … isn’t that cute.” When a feminist was offended she decided that the whole administration – including the Board of Trustees – needed to know about it. She was furious. So she had her dad write the letter for her. I am woman hear me roar, and my Daddy fights my wars!

Speaking of war, there was the time I dressed as an Iraqi woman in order to sneak into an anti-war protest. I had it all. The burqua. The sandals. And, oh yes, I had a sign saying “I want to be raped, gassed, and tortured by Saddam’s thugs! So please don’t help me, America!”

Everyone who saw me in that outfit thought it was hilarious. The only ones who were angry were a handful of feminist faculty members. That story brings me to my next point.

6. Feminists are less concerned with women’s rights than they are with their own right to have an abortion.

George Bush has done more for women’s rights than any President in modern history. But feminists hate him because he is opposed to abortion rights.

Bill Clinton sexually harassed more women than any President in American history. But that’s okay. He supports abortion rights so feminists love him. If he were ever convicted of rape, feminists would still love him because he supports abortion rights.

7. Feminists really don’t care about racism.

Feminists often quote statistics about the under-representation of women in certain occupations as “conclusive proof” of sexism. They don’t need to rely on specific evidence in individual cases. However, when confronted with statistics showing that the vast majority of abortions are performed on blacks and Hispanics, they remain mute. Surely they know that most people in this country are white. And Planned Parenthood will play a much larger role in keeping it that way than the Ku Klux Klan.

Genocide is a terrible thing to most feminists. But the loss of reproductive choice is even worse.

8. Feminists generally lack the courage to act as individuals.

My first college free speech controversy (way back in 1997) involved a business professor who tried to stop the student newspaper from publishing a column called the “sexual horoscopes.” He claimed that the column was “indecent.” Then he tried to set up a panel to filter “indecent” material before the student paper went to press. I took him on in front of the Faculty Senate and won. In fact, I won big.

But before I won there was a vigorous debate on the Faculty Senate mailing list. It went on for days before someone made the observation that all of the participants in the debate were males. A few days later, a feminist group published a joint response signed by two dozen feminists.

I saw the significance of this pattern immediately. The men all had individual opinions. The feminists all had the same opinion. The men embraced individualism. The feminists embraced collectivism.

After I published my first installment of this series a funny thing happened – or didn’t happen, I should say. I didn’t get a single hate mail from a feminist reader. But somewhere in a women’s center over mocha java and pound cake, they are working on a joint statement condemning me for criticizing feminism.

But that’s okay. By the time they’re done, you’ll be reading Part III.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, part III (townhall.com, 060126)

by Mike S. Adams

Hello again. This is the third installment in my series on the decline of feminism and you’re still hanging in there. You’re still reading every word, I guess. I’m asking because you didn’t speak to me again in the parking lot yesterday morning. When I passed, you took a sudden interest in the cracks in the sidewalk.

It reminded me of our conversation in 2004. You said my columns were too caustic, too inflammatory. But now it’s 2006 and you’re still reading them, even though they make you angry. That brings me to my next point about feminism.

9. Feminists have been angry for so long that they no longer feel comfortable being happy.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. Like the time you got mad at me for opening the door for you. You thought it was a “patriarchal” gesture. So now I just let the door slam shut in your face. I’m trying to make you happy but it – the joy, the happiness, the peace of mind - just won’t take hold.

Of course, there is a simple solution to your problem. You could just stop reading my columns, couldn’t you? Some nasty Texas woman named Molly made me mad with a column one time. So I just stopped reading her columns. Now, I can’t even remember her last name. It was Ivans the Terrible or something like that.

But, of course, you can’t stop reading my columns. You’ll run off copies and take them with you to The Vagina Monologues in early February. You’ll lace up your boots and march across the stage chanting the various names for your genitals. And while you’re there, I’ll be wearing boots, too - hunting boots, that is. I’ll be shooting quail 150 miles from here with some buddies from Charlotte. I’ll have my new Browning 20 gauge in hand.

I earned the money for the new shotgun from speeches and columns criticizing feminism. That’ll give you something to be mad about. And, of course, later I’ll offer you some free meat from the hunt. And that’ll make you mad, too. But, I promise, I won’t hold the door for you again. I know the threshold of your tolerance.

10. Feminists care more about sex than sexual harassment.

At first it was just annoying. The older feminist started asking him over to her apartment to drink wine and listen to classical music. But after he politely declined she kept trying. Just a couple of more requests and a couple of more excuses and she stopped. But that’s not the annoying part.

The year was 1994. He was an untenured professor. The juicy part of the story begins with the revelation that she was on a committee reviewing a proposal he had written. Sounds like a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? Now, let’s make the Office of Campus Diversity happy and give the players sex changes. Here goes:

A young woman is finishing her first year as a professor. She has submitted a proposal to a committee. One of the committee members approaches her with an offer to come over to his apartment. He has some wine and some classical CDs. She declines, but he asks again. If she makes him mad, she fears her proposal will get buried. What does she do?

The feminists would call the hypothetical scenario “sexual harassment.” They would call the real one a “polite invitation.” And the double standard speaks volumes about their own subconscious sexism.

But that isn’t the point of the story. The real fun began a couple of years later – around 1996 - when a professor took one of his student employees to a conference. They slept in the same hotel room and all hell broke loose (as it should have).

So committees were convened on every campus in the university system to decide how to limit improper relationships between professors and students (or student/employees in this case). And that’s where our wine-sipping, Mozart-loving friend re-enters the story.

She led the charge for a ban on relationships between employees where there was a clear conflict of interest. An employee should not be making decisions about another employee if the two are romantically involved – perhaps sipping wine and listening to CDs - she boldly proclaimed. And her very sensible argument won. It became official policy.

But then she got greedy. She pushed for an absolute ban on student/professor relationships – even where no conflict of interest was present. When it was revealed that some professors had spouses enrolled in courses, she lost. After all, it was reasoned (by non-feminists) that a business professor shouldn’t have to resign his job or divorce his wife because she decided to seek a teaching certificate in the School of Education.

If you are trying to synthesize the feminist professor’s stance on those two issues, let me offer some help. She wanted to create a policy to ensure that the male employees were more likely to have sex with her - even though she had violated the parameters of her “ideal” policy in the past.

It wasn’t about ethics. It was about sex. With feminists, it usually is. I’ll pursue that point in more detail in Part IV.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, Part IV (townhall.com, 060130)

by Mike S. Adams

After Parts I, II, and III of this series, I have finally started to get a few hate males from feminist readers – letters usually known as “hate mails” when sent by non-feminists. One hate male writer said she couldn’t take me seriously because I am a hunter. That brings me to my next point about feminists.

11. When faced with uncertainty, feminists have less self-control than hunters.

Once when I was deer-hunting in Ivanhoe, North Carolina, I saw something moving in the brush about 100 yards away. It was foggy outside and I was looking through a 4 X 32 scope mounted on a Marlin 30-30. I never take a shot over 100 yards with that little brush gun. And I never shoot at anything unless I know exactly what is out there.

That day I got to thinking about the feminist approach to abortion. Feminists often justify abortion by saying that the procedure is no different than picking a scab. That’s when I start asking questions.

I often ask feminists about a film I saw of a fetus in the so-called “first trimester” of development. The baby (sorry, that is my opinion) was yawning, rubbing its eyes, and even rolling around and playing in the womb. I like to ask feminists whether they have ever seen a scab yawn.

When I press them on the issue, they seldom admit that the fetus is a person. But they seldom state unequivocally that it is not. They usually say they “don’t know for sure.” And they say that I “don’t know for sure” either.

That really epitomizes our differences. When I know it is a deer in the brush, I pull the trigger. When I know it is a human, I hold my fire. When I don’t know, I also hold my fire.

The feminist who “doesn’t know” whether it is a person, has the abortion anyway. She just pulls the trigger. That really says it all, doesn’t it?

12. Feminists cannot grasp the importance of gradual self-disclosure.

Long before I earned a Master’s degree in Social Psychology, I learned that one of the keys to successful relationships is choosing the appropriate pace of self-disclosure. If you too rapidly reveal intimate details of your personal life, people tend to devalue your friendship. If you reveal things more slowly, stronger relationships tend to follow.

People are often turned off to feminism because feminists tend to reveal intimate details of their lives very quickly. This is especially true of feminist professors in the classroom. The following complaint I received from a college student is illustrative:

“Dr. Adams: I agree with your observations on feminism. I took an English class taught by a feminist who I liked very much at first. When she started complaining about her first husband I felt sorry for her. By the time she started attacking her fifth husband I wanted to withdraw from the course. I have no idea how many different times she’s been married. I just know that none of the divorces were her fault.”

Sadly, it gets much worse than that in the feminist classroom. Feminist professors also discuss their sexual experiences – consensual and non-consensual – in excruciating detail in public. Venues include the classroom, books, and sometimes in “scholarly” articles. The First Amendment gives them the right to reveal what most people would say is “too much information.” But it does not give them the right to be taken seriously.

13. Feminist-sponsored Masturbation Workshops on college campuses.

No explanation necessary. But see the example from Grinnell College, if necessary.

14. Feminists would rather solve a problem by changing “society” than by changing their own behavior.

One obvious example of this is “love your body day” - not to be confused with masturbation workshop day. At many universities, “love your body day” concludes with feminists holding a beauty pageant featuring overweight models – usually with pretty faces. The purpose of this is to convince us that bigger women are just as attractive as smaller (by this, they mean thinner) women.

Sociology professors often pursue the notion that beauty is not objective but “socially constructed” by showing their students medieval paintings of nude, pudgy women. The argument is that fat used to be considered attractive. Therefore, it can be that way again with enough social engineering. So, feminists seek nothing less than to change societal perceptions of beauty with millions of dollars of tax-payer funded programs.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to exercise?

Along the same lines, have you noticed how chic it has become for feminists to claim that they are Marxists? Feminist professors spend a good bit of time trying to persuade their students that Marxism is the answer to America’s problems.

If a woman’s opportunities are better under communism, wouldn’t it be easier to get a job at the University of Havana than to start a bloody Marxist revolution?

I’ve never seen a bunch of poor, oppressed feminists board a leaky boat in Miami in order to paddle their way to freedom in Castro Cuba. But I do have a few friends in South Florida who escaped from communism. They still have their boats. And we’d be proud to give these Marxist feminists a lift to Havana any time.

So think about my offer, ladies. In the meantime, I’m going to smoke a good Honduran cigar while I’m writing Part V.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, Part V (townhall.com, 060131)

by Mike S. Adams

This woman named Lavender keeps writing me 1000-word hate males to remind me that she can’t take anything I say seriously. She did it after Parts I, II, III, and IV of this series. I guess Lavender will just keep writing until she’s blue in the face. As for me, I’m just tickled pink.

In her last letter, Lavender said that my series on feminism just proves that I hate women. That brings me to my next point about feminism.

15. Feminists can’t understand the difference between anti-feminism and sexism.

If men were the only ones opposed to feminism, Lavender might have a point. But feminists must surely be aware of data indicating that, among adult females, non-feminists outnumber feminists by a ratio of three to one. And that is unlikely to change in the favor of feminists for two reasons: a) feminists are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the 21st century, and b) feminists keep killing their babies at a higher rate than non-feminists.

16. The four most common words a feminist uses are “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine.”

I really get tired of hearing these four words from feminists. “I feel this” or “I feel that.” “Keep your laws off MY body.” “It’s MY body, MY choice.” Feminists are the only people in society who actually use these four words more in adulthood than they did when they were two years old.

It is especially irritating when they say that the man should have no right to be involved in the decision to abort. They remind us that a man’s opinion is irrelevant by simply repeating the phrase “It’s MY body.” But should that logic apply when the aborted baby is a male? What happens after the abortion is performed, and one looks into the bucket and sees a little penis? Whose penis is it? Is it the woman’s penis?

17. Feminists’ positions on abortion and capital punishment cannot be reconciled.

As I’ve mention before, feminists often support the decision to abort a fetus - even though they admit that they “don’t know” whether “it” is a person. They will admit that “it” eventually becomes a person with rights. But now that partial birth abortion is becoming more defensible in the minds of feminists, it is hard to tell when they think personhood begins. I can hardly pin a feminist down on this issue. All I know is that “it” can count on feminist support after “it” commits “its” first murder.

18. Feminists’ husbands are even more irritating than feminists.

In an earlier installment, I mentioned a free speech debate on my campus. A bunch of men debated a point for several days. When they were done, a campus feminist coalition issued a joint statement of their “collective” opinion.

But there is a part of the story I omitted. After the feminists issued their statement, the husband of the head feminist issued his individual opinion on the matter, which happened to reflect complete agreement with his wife. This spineless sissy was afraid to express his opinion until after he knew what his feminist wife thought – or, more accurately, felt.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps he just thought that a little more a** kissing would make him different than all the other men his feminist wife had previously divorced. What a pansy.

But he’s not the biggest pansy I’ve ever seen. That award goes to a guy whose feminist wife was rumored to be sleeping with one of my colleagues. After he got a few drinks under his belt one night, he told me that he didn’t mind if his wife was having an affair – that their friendship was strong enough to endure it. How liberating. He’s going to support her through thick and thin - even if another man is hiding his hoo-hoo dilly in her cha-cha.

I know I said it just a minute ago but it’s worth repeating. What a pansy.

19. Feminists can’t face the reality of “gender-ocide.”

It’s bad enough that feminists are silent on the issue of minority over-representation in abortion clinics. But their heartlessness is compounded by the fact that they seldom discuss the fact that more girls are aborted worldwide than boys. There is no question that this is the case. The only question is exactly how many more million girls are aborted per year.

And so they leave it to the anti-feminists to ask the hard questions, to combat sexism, and to combat what some now call “gender-ocide.”

But, I guess the feminists have more important things to think about. They’re really upset about Part V of my series. And they’re wondering what can be done to stop Part VI.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, Part VI (townhall.com, 060207)

by Mike S. Adams

I’ve really gotten myself into trouble with some feminists at Grinnell College. In Part IV of this series, I listed “feminist-sponsored masturbation workshops on college campuses” as one of the reasons I cannot take feminists seriously. I then stated that no explanation was necessary to indicate why such workshops make feminists look silly.

But, after reading my column, several Grinnell feminists are demanding an explanation. Of course, I’m happy to oblige. In fact, the explanation leads directly to my next point about feminists.

20. It doesn’t take much intellectual firepower to become a feminist scholar.

I once told a feminist that the term “feminist scholar” was an oxymoron. She asked me what I meant by oxymoron. I should just rest my case but the masturbation workshop controversy really takes things to a different level. I’ll try to spell it out for the Grinnell feminists with one succinct paragraph:

If you need to hold a workshop to learn how to masturbate, you aren’t terribly bright. Remember, you’re trying to make the case that a woman can do anything as well as a man. That’s the main thesis of feminism. Yet, somehow, men are fully capable of masturbating without taking a seminar. For men, it’s a natural talent. For campus feminists, it’s another excuse to seek funding from the university administration. It’s also another sign that feminists are really uptight and angry.

21. The feminist alliance with communism.

I used to get really angry with feminists over their chic alliance with communism. After all, I’ve had relatives who risked their lives to fight in wars rolling back the forces of communism and fascism. Many of you know people who gave their very lives to defeat such forces. When you see these historically ignorant feminists embrace the very ideas that once threatened our precious freedoms, you probably get mad, too.

But, now, I kind of like the idea that these feminists are waving flags that feature a sickle and hammer. It really makes sense to me. After all, the communists killed 100,000,000 innocents in just 72 years. One-third of a century after Roe v. Wade, the feminists are on a pace to kill even more innocents. To be precise, the projected total of abortions in America by 2045 (that’s 72 years after Roe) is 102,545,450.

Maybe after they break the communist murder record feminists can come up with their own flag. Instead of a sickle and hammer it can feature a scalpel and a suction tube.

22. Feminists are literally trying to destroy the American family.

Peter Kreeft wrote a great book a few years ago called How to Win the Culture War. In the book, he argued that attacking marriage was essential for those who wished to radically transform (read: destroy) the foundations of our society. You can’t just tear down a whole society. You have to weaken individual communities. But that involves weakening families. And that, in turn, involves weakening marriages. And, for Kreeft, the best way to weaken marriages is to encourage adultery. This is easy to do when people begin to worship sex.

So when you drop your kids off at some school like Rice University for orientation there is always some feminist there to encourage them to “explore their sexual freedom” (read: have sex with anyone and everyone). And when they take Sociology 101, the feminist professor is there to tell them that marriage is a good deal for men but not for women.

The fact that the feminist sociology professor has usually been married more than once lends further validity to point #20.

23. Feminists are the biggest censors on college campuses today.

Maybe it was the time that a feminist tried to kick one of my former students out of her women’s studies class for laughing at one of her ideas. The professor didn’t even hear him. But another feminist did and reported him to the professor.

Or maybe it was the time I ridiculed a feminist Marxist’s essay on 911 and the author’s mommy spent three weeks tying to have me disciplined by the administration.

Or maybe it was the time I ridiculed a feminist for filing a false sexual harassment report. She responded by saying that the First Amendment did not allow me to make fun of her. In fact, she said that my ridicule was also sexual harassment.

Or maybe it was the time I made fun of an anti-war feminist. I said that if she would shave her armpits, people would be more likely to read her anti-war sign when she held it up. As it stood, people were just staring at her hairy armpits. I was just trying to be helpful. But, unfortunately, her feminist friend sent someone into a Board of Trustees meeting with a plea to have me disciplined for making fun of her friend’s armpits. Of course, the plea was ignored.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know when it was. But I have definitely realized that feminists are the biggest censors on my campus. And they are always driven to censor those who do not take them seriously – just to punish them for the crime of not taking them seriously.

And that is really why I wrote this series. The feminists will never have my respect as long as they continue to “demand” it. That just doesn’t work in a free America. But it might work in communist China, which is where most feminists belong.

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Why I don’t take feminists seriously, Part VII (townhall.com, 060209)

by Mike S. Adams

I had planned to put an end to this series with Part VI but, unfortunately, the feminists never take a day off from their antics. Of course, this keeps me in the business of documenting those antics in my column in a brazen attempt to capitalize (read: profit financially) off of feminist extremism.

Along those lines, I got a letter yesterday from a feminist saying that my publication of a six-part series on feminists proves conclusively that I do, in fact, take them seriously. That leads me to another point about feminists.

24. Feminists frequently confuse positive and inverse correlations.

This idea that the more one ridicules a group, the more one takes it seriously provides an example of the frequent inability of feminists to spot the direction a given relationship takes. Here are some other examples:

*The number of abortions a woman has is positively correlated with her personal happiness.

*The number of sex partners a woman has is positively correlated with her self-esteem.

Sexual freedom and reproductive choice are, in fact, related to happiness and self-esteem. But the feminists have the relationships backwards. That’s why the key to raising a happy daughter is to focus on two things: 1) have her watch everything feminists do, and 2) tell her to do the exact opposite.

25. Feminists are among the cruelest and most heartless members of our society.

One Grinnell College feminist wrote the following to me just two days ago:

“There is only one … thing that I want to say, and it’s concerning abortion rights. You said that the penis in the bucket (lovely imagery, by the way) is a man’s penis. But whose penis was it when it was inside the woman, was it a man’s penis then? Was the male baby on his own, supporting himself, giving himself life? No, he wasn’t, biologically, a baby is a parasite. As a learned person, you ought to know this: a baby, in his or her mother’s womb is a parasite. Thus, the woman has a right to do with it as she pleases, much as her finger or her leg; she is physically giving it life, and thus she has control over it.”

There you have it, readers. I see a baby yawning, rolling around, and rubbing its eyes in its mother’s womb and I see a miracle. I see an act of the Almighty God – the only One capable of giving life. The Grinnell feminist sees a parasite. This kind of heartless stupidity requires even less elaboration than the Grinnell College Masturbation workshop.

26. Feminists often see critical thinking (and logic overall) as a “male thing.”

The feminist I just quoted had this to say in her next paragraph:

“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in abortion. I think it’s cruel, and I would never have one, but I still believe that a woman has the right to do whatever she pleases with her body. And the baby, when it is inside of her, is her body. Whenever you develop a device that will keep the baby alive to term outside of his or her mother’s womb, go ahead and tell me, but until then, you’re not going to convince me that she shouldn’t have the right to stop giving it her lifeblood.”

When you read this feminist’s first paragraph – the one that twice referred to the baby as a “parasite” - did you get the feeling that having an abortion was much like using anti-bacterial soap or just taking a shower? When you read the second paragraph – the one that referred to the cruelty of abortion – did you get the idea that the feminist was aware of the “parasite’s” humanity?

There is seldom an occasion that a feminist remains logically consistent from one paragraph to the next. The only consistent characteristic of each paragraph is a very strong personal feeling – one that the feminist always describes in excruciating detail. “I feel that it is a parasite.” “The lifeblood belongs to me.” “The decision is mine.”

All the day long, three words dominate her thinking:

I, me, mine. I, me, mine. I, me, mine.

27. Feminists are gradually destroying the English language.

This one is simple. Almost all English professors are feminists. Because feminists believe that they can do whatever they want to do (whenever they want to do it), these feminist English teachers rarely actually teach English. The following note from a feminist (received yesterday) is illustrative of the consequence of teaching feminism when one is actually supposed to be teaching English:

“look [sic] little boy...let me 1st clear something up too [sic] you...the color of someones [sic] skin does not matter, there [sic] race does not matter, we’re all having sexual intercourse, so it doesnt [sic] matter how many “black babies” get aborted each year...that has nothing to do with Ms. Margaret Sanger...they just need to learn sex aint [sic] all bout [sic] pleasure! it was their choice, and white people get abortions too. heck [sic] i [sic] praise dearest Margaret, because i [sic] would be a mom right now if it wasn’t for her... I’M ON BIRTHCONTROL [sic] ...you’re probably just mad because you can’t have children...and how and why is that, do you ask?!...because [sic] you are not having sex, you can’t get you none! and if you have had sex (which i [sic] highly doubt because you’re so hypocritical) have you ever used a condom?!?! FORM OF BIRTH CONTROL!!! OFFERED TO EVERYONE...also to prevent STD’s...no she did not invent the condom but she did inforce [sic] it...i [sic] have so much to say to you..but you disgust me so much i [sic] dont [sic] even want to waste any m!ore [sic] of my time. Eliza.”

I don’t know how Eliza managed to confirm so many of the points I made in this seven-part series in one, single sentence. But, of course, I’m glad she did. In fact, I hope she writes back. As it stands, I might not have enough material for Part VIII.

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Betty Friedan and the “Feminine Mystique” (townhall.com, 060209)

by Suzanne Fields

Like it or not, we live in a world riven by polarities: black/white, red/blue, left/right. Our emotional responses to subjects that demand reasonable debate but show us to be blinded by rigid points of view can even be measured by the latest technology of brain imaging. We cheat both the record and ourselves when we overlook the hard truths embedded in the ideas of people we dislike (or think we should dislike).

There was considerable gnashing of teeth among some conservatives the other day on the occasion of the death of Betty Friedan. When certain of her critics paused to consider her legacy, they focused only on what they didn’t like about the revolution she midwifed.

There was, to be sure, lots not to like. Betty Friedan was one tough mother. She overstated her case about the boredom of the 1950s American housewife, and she indulged in vicious and damaging hyperbole, describing the suburban housewife as living in a “comfortable concentration camp.” But she transformed certain female realities that would benefit generations that came later, whether pleasing to liberal or angering to conservative.

Before she wrote “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, many women who aspired to work in certain trades or pursue careers in the professions were consigned to the closets of their suburban homes, both literally and figuratively. She blazed a way out into a world of expanded opportunities that young women today expect as their natural due. It’s important not to confuse Betty Friedan, the mother of modern feminism, with all that came after her. When she saw the damage wrought by radical feminists, she challenged the movement she founded, confronting the lesbian conspirators who would ignore the emotional wants and needs of women who yearned to be full-time mothers, or who wanted to mix family with work. She was denounced by some of the sisters as “bourgeois.”

In her 1981 book, “The Second Stage,” she examined some of the not-so-good changes her revolution had wrought. She told of the “executive assistant” she met in the office of a Los Angeles television producer. The woman, in her late 20s, beautiful, accomplished and “dressed for success,” liked her work and saw it as a rung on the ladder to greater opportunity. “I know I’m lucky to have this job,” she told Betty, “but you people who fought for these things had your families. You already had your men and your children. What are we supposed to do?”

Like most revolutions, feminism pushed the culture a few inches too far, ignoring the iron law of unintended consequences. Women who put their careers above all often found themselves listening to the remorseless ticking of their biological clocks without a man to love or child to nurture. Feminists had ignored Mother Nature, and Nature is the toughest mother of all.

The number of childless women in their early 40s doubled over two decades. One study found that 42 percent of successful women in corporate America were childless after 40. The numbers grew in other professions as well, as women became workaholics like the men they had railed against. By the 1970s, Betty Friedan’s famous “feminine mystique” had hardened into conventions that deprived women of the warmth and caring that had marked their sex as la difference.

Betty Friedan made the mistake of imagining that all women were alike. She underestimated the passion of the conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly, who almost single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. In one debate, Ms. Friedan screamed at Mrs. Schlafly: “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” Phyllis, who never loses her cucumber-like cool, replied: “I’m glad you said that, because it just shows the intemperate nature of proponents of ERA.”

Betty Friedan and Phyllis Schlafly clarified the issues for women, issues that still teeter on the seesaw of public opinion. Betty had the media with her, but Phyllis had a grass-roots movement of her creation that’s still alive and well. John Kerry won the majority of single women in 2004, but George W. won the overwhelming majority of married women, who figured he would be more likely to keep the home fires ablaze.

Betty Friedan was contemptuous of the radical feminists who set women against men, women again women, feminists against family. She warned young women of the peril of distorting the priorities of women and starting a war nobody could win. She was right about that, too.

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The ‘Feminist’ V-Day (townhall.com, 060209)

by Noel Stanger ( bio | archive )

The first day that I walked into the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (CBLPI), I was simply an intern coming from a small private college in western Pennsylvania. Fortunately for me, this meant I had not been impacted by V-Day as other students across the country had. I was vaguely aware of The Vagina Monologues (TVM), but couldn’t have told you who wrote it or what it was about. I could, of course, infer from the title some meaning, although I assumed that it was a metonym of sorts. I had no idea that the title of the play was almost as literal as titles can get, or that the work had sparked a movement of such stirring proportion and questionable validity.

Then I landed smack-dab in the middle of CBLPI’s campaign, V-Day Unveiled, and I was quickly educated on the event. My first action, in the interest of forming my own opinion and avoiding hypocrisy, was to read the book. I imagined that it had to be compelling, deeply controversial, or possess some other quality that could have conceivably inspired all the excitement that it apparently has. One hundred and twenty-five pages later, I was at a loss.

Three weeks later, I am involved even more thoroughly. I have seen the V-Day websites, I have read the testimonials, I have heard the facts, participated in the discussions, and to tell the truth, I am still at a loss. Wisdom dictates that we must look at an argument from all sides to get the clearest picture, but no matter what angle I approach this topic from, I simply cannot explain how a person can find this work enlightening, empowering, or even entertaining. If there is some great cosmic truth contained in the pages of TVM then I fail to grasp it. In fact, I imagine the work has the potential to do more harm than good.

The play is composed of a selection of soliloquies centered around the female anatomy that could be based on stories recounted to the playwright or could be, by Ensler’s own admission, something that she fabricated almost entirely. Page after page, this play spews one vulgarity after another, glorifies statutory rape, portrays men as violent or strange, and reduces the meaning of women down to their genitalia.

The idea is that if we can “reclaim” the word “vagina,” we can somehow find our inner power and use it to cure the ills of the world. I find no difficulty in saying “vagina.” I can say it till I’m blue in the face, but it yields little more than strange looks. The magical sense of empowerment that is supposed to come with this magnanimous feat of vocalization fails to materialize in me. Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong. Although, I doubt that the ability to articulate “vagina” is of any more consequence to the millions of women and children who are victimized globally.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume momentarily that the meaning of the play and its ability to empower, educate, and affect positive change is simply a matter of opinion; can’t we all agree that the result of V-Day is one we can all support? We would all like to end violence against women, and if the proceeds of the play go to organizations with this aim, isn’t the justification clear?

Well, the Ku Klux Klan built orphanages, supported education, and donated to needy elderly, but I won’t be running out for my sheet-fitting anytime soon. Now, my intention is not to say that the contents of Ensler’s play are morally equivalent to a KKK pamphlet, but it is difficult to defend a work that, in its original form, contained the words, “If it was rape, then it was good rape.” Granted, these sentences have since been removed, making the play’s content more pointless than offensive. What is truly offensive is the hypocrisy of the claim that a day that was inspired by TVM aspires to end violence against women. The only thing this play has managed to accomplish is trivializing a very serious problem, and to giving the work’s proponents a chance to dismiss their adversaries as prudish or anti-woman.

Inasmuch as I have gone from ignorance to bewilderment to disgust, I occasionally wander onto the V-Day website, which never fails to inspire eye-rolling disdain. Today, I noticed the “Vagina Warriors” describe among their goals the creation of V-World. I realize this is supposed to be a touching abstraction, but I was deeply immersed in the utter ridiculousness of a world where a woman is defined in the strictest of physical and literal terms. With this mindset, I began to picture V-World: an amusement park built in homage of Ensler and her work. It could have graphic rides and games, maybe a caricaturist who draws the patron’s vaginas as “flirty” and “huggable”. I’m sure that I could come up with a great deal of analogies and puns that would come in handy (but won’t because I’m familiar with the concept of tact).

Bizarre? You bet. But if we as a society are going to be ridiculous and invest our time, money, and energy into something absurdly counterproductive, we might as well go whole hog.

I recently had the opportunity to confer with not only my vagina, but all the other parts of my body as well, and the conclusion is unanimous: They all think that V-Day is absolutely ludicrous and in very poor taste.

Noel Stanger is an intern at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute.

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Academic Frauds: Serious Students shouldn’t take women’s studies. (National Review Online, 060828)

Summer vacations no longer consist of lazy days on the beach or income-generating jobs. Many college students now dedicate these months to unpaid internships or meagerly compensated opportunities that supposedly provide real-world experience and build impressive résumés. Ambitious undergrads heading back to school should be just as careful in selecting their courses as they were planning their summers. One tip for the serious student: Avoid women’s studies.

One might assume that women’s studies courses are no less relevant to real life than your average college class. A semester of medieval poetry or art history certainly seems like poor preparation for a career in marketing or sales, undoubtedly where many humanities majors end up. But at least in these types of classes students are taught forms of analysis and critical thinking that come in handy in the future.

Women’s studies courses are different. They tend to abandon rigorous analysis in favor of consciousness-raising exercises and self-exploration. One textbook explains that women’s studies “consciously rejects many traditional forms of inquiry, concepts, and explanatory systems; at the same time, it is developing new and sometimes unique traditions and authorities of its own.” Those “unique” traditions include providing students with “credit for social change activities or life experience, contracts of self-grading, diaries and journals, even meditation or ritual.”

This is too flaky for some students. The textbook warns of potential resistance to these teaching methods. Students may commit such sins as challenging facts in an effort to “undermine the credibility of feminist reading materials and instructors.” In other words, students aren’t supposed to read texts critically and reach their own conclusions. They are supposed to accept without question the materials and views of their instructors.

It’s no accident that women’s studies is so different from other subjects. It has an explicit agenda, and the agenda is not simply to provide young women (and men) with knowledge and tools for future learning. Women’s studies is unabashedly political and intermingled with the feminist movement. The National Women’s Studies Association’s constitution, written in 1982, made this link clear: “Feminist education is a process deeply rooted in the women’s movement and remains accountable to that community.” One textbook author writes: “Women’s studies is faced with a vast responsibility…. We must prepare the next generation for its participation in the women’s struggle…”

Recruiting women into the organized feminist movement begins with convincing women that they are victims. Recruits are told that women suffer because of an oppressive societal structure—the patriarchy—which gives men power over women. Marriage lies at patriarchy’s core: Traditional marriage and family is a trap for women. Men are viewed with suspicion, potentially violent and looking to oppress. Salvation lies in an enlightened workplace, with generous paid maternity leave, free onsite daycare, and salaries that ignore factors like the number of hours you work or your job responsibilities, but ensure men and women are all paid the same.

It’s no surprise that women’s studies courses are often unabashedly political. Republicans are described as “overtly opposed not only to women’s rights but to advances in civil rights in general.” Students learn that the 1990s have given us “The Contract on America, the virulent racism and misogyny of the religious and political right, attacks against the poorest and must vulnerable among us — welfare mothers and children…”

Students should hear such a view. But there should be balance: Students should read and hear alternative perspectives. Balance is something most women’s studies classes sorely lack.

Serious students shouldn’t waste their time in women’s studies classes. For a taste of what women’s studies has to offer, pick up the latest issue of Ms.e or read NOW’s latest rant. But use limited class time on something more relevant to the real world, like a course on Beowulf or East Asian art.

— Carrie Lukas is the vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Forum and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism.

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A New Path to Theological Liberalism? Wayne Grudem on Evangelical Feminism (Mohler, 061023)

Are American evangelicals charting a new path into theological liberalism? That is the serious question posed by Wayne A. Grudem in Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? This new book is one of the most urgently needed resources for evangelical Christianity, and it represents one of the most insightful and courageous theological works of our times.

Wayne Grudem is no stranger to controversy. Currently Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, Grudem is the author of several important volumes on a range of theological issues. Most importantly, he is the author of his own Systematic Theology and Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth. He also co-edited the landmark volume, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, with John Piper.

In Evangelical Feminism, published by Crossway Books, Grudem argues that evangelical feminism now represents one of the greatest dangers to the continued orthodoxy of the evangelical movement. “I am concerned that evangelical feminism (also known as “egalitarianism”) has become a new path by which evangelicals are being drawn into theological liberalism,” he explains.

In this new book, Grudem considers twenty-five different patterns of argument put forth by evangelical feminists, and demonstrates that every single one of them either contradicts or compromises the authority of Scripture.

In considering the arguments put forth by evangelical feminists, Grudem is careful to avoid ad hominem attacks on egalitarian scholars and spokespersons. Instead, he considers each of their arguments with considerable scholarly care and attention, drawing the logical conclusions from the methodological assumptions the egalitarian scholars embrace.

At the same time, Grudem is careful to specify and name the scholars whose proposals he considers, and the book is carefully footnoted and documented so that readers can follow the arguments for themselves. Grudem’s use of the term “theological liberalism” is certain to be controversial. After all, the very genesis of the evangelical movement in North America was grounded in an effort to avoid the errors of theological modernism and liberalism that had already, by the midpoint of the last century, overtaken the mainline Protestant denominations. Grudem defines theological liberalism as “a system of thinking that denies the complete truthfulness of the Bible as the Word of God and denies the unique and absolute authority of the Bible in our lives.” In defining evangelicalism over against theological liberalism in this way, Grudem returns to the Scripture Principle that stood as foundational to the evangelical movement.

Grudem is equally careful in defining evangelical feminism as “a movement that claims there are no unique leadership roles for men in marriage or in the church.”

A work like Evangelical Feminism has been desperately needed, and Grudem’s new book arrives just in time. A new generation of younger evangelicals is facing the challenge of evangelical feminism just as the current and the larger culture are moving even more swiftly against biblical authority. Grudem understands that the temptation toward evangelical feminism is the same as that which has attracted so many theologians, pastors, and denominations in recent decades. As a matter of fact, he correctly observes that “evangelical feminists today have adopted many of the arguments earlier used by theological liberals to advocate the ordination of women and to reject male headship in marriage.” Interestingly, Grudem provides an historical overview which traces the emergence of evangelical feminism and egalitarian theory to 1974, when Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty published their work, All We’re Meant to Be and Paul Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary published Man as Male and Female. As Grudem observes, “While egalitarian positions have been evocated since the 1950s by theologically liberal Protestant writers, no evangelical books took such a position until 1974.”

The mainline Protestant denominations began to ordain women in the mid-1950s, and it took some evangelicals less than twenty years to move in the same direction. Grudem’s concern is to demonstrate that the hermeneutical moves necessary to justify the ordination of women to the pastorate subvert biblical authority. Furthermore, these same interpretive maneuvers open the door for a complete reshaping of Christianity.

In a brief historical analysis, Grudem demonstrates that denominations move through “a predictable sequence” of theological liberalism. First, biblical inerrancy is abandoned. Then, in turn, the denomination endorses the ordination of women, rejects biblical teaching on male leadership in marriage, sidelines pastors who are opposed to the ordination of women, approves homosexual conduct as morally valid in at least some cases, ordains homosexuals, and elects homosexuals to “high leadership positions in the denomination.”

As Grudem observes, the Episcopal Church USA has, to this point, been alone in taking this sequential progression to its ultimate conclusion with the election of an openly gay bishop. Nevertheless, virtually all of the mainline Protestant denominations are embroiled in deep conflict over these very same questions. Indeed, these denominations have already moved so far along this line of progression that stopping at any point short of the ordination of homosexuals to ministry appears purely arbitrary.

The heart of Evangelical Feminism is a consideration of the patterns of argument put forth by advocates of egalitarianism. Some evangelical feminists simply deny the authority of the Genesis account of creation, at least as this account deals with the creation of man and woman. Some, like Rebecca Groothuis argue that the Genesis account tells us “nothing about God’s view of gender” because the gender issues are simply rooted in the “patriarchal” nature of the Hebrew language. Of course, this means that biblical inerrancy is now compromised by the assertion that we cannot actually trust the language accurately to convey what God intended. Similarly, other figures argue that Genesis 1-3 can be relativized on the issue of gender relations by arguing that parts of the Genesis account are nothing more that literary devices.

Egalitarian theorists must deal with the Apostle Paul, and Grudem traces the move of Jewett and others in claiming that Paul must be understood as limited in his understanding of gender relations due to his own rabbinical training and the fact that he had not carefully resolved these issue by the time he wrote his epistles. Grudem documents how some figures make this argument by suggesting, for example, that Paul incorrectly understood Genesis 2-3, or that he willingly presented what he knew to be a false argument in order to reach his audience. As Grudem explains, if the Bible is the Word of God, then Paul’s interpretations of the Old Testament are also God’s interpretations “of his own Word.”

Again and again, Grudem allows the advocates of egalitarianism to reveal their own efforts to get around the clear teachings of Scripture on the different roles assigned to men and women. Gordon Fee, for example, argues that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 are “certainly not binding for Christians” because these verses, he argues, were not actually written by Paul, but were additions of a later scribe. As Grudem demonstrates, not one single ancient manuscript has ever omitted these verses.

One of the most important sections in Evangelical Feminism is Grudem’s consideration of the so-called “trajectory hermeneutics” now gaining favor in many evangelical circles. Grudem traces this hermeneutic to Krister Stendahl, a former dean at Harvard Divinity School. As far back as 1958, Stendahl was arguing that the church must not be trapped in a first century understanding of gender issues, but must press forward to a new reality, even as the New Testament pressed beyond the Old. Thus, evangelical figures such as R.T. France have argued for the ordination of women on the basis of a “historical trajectory” traced from the Old Testament through the New Testament and pointing beyond to the present age.

This approach is made clear by David Thompson in a 1996 article: “Sensing the direction of the canonical dialogue and prayerfully struggling with it, God’s people conclude that they will most faithfully honor his Word by accepting the target already anticipated in Scripture and toward which the Scriptural trajectory was heading rather than the last entry in the biblical conversation.”

As Grudem observes, “This means that the teachings of the New Testament are no longer our final authority. Our authority now becomes our own ideas of the direction the New Testament was heading but never quite reached.”

At this point, a crucial question arises. If this hermeneutical method is legitimate, how can we stop at the ordination of women? This is the very argument made by proponents of normalizing homosexuality and ordaining homosexuals to the ministry. If the New Testament is to be superseded by a later reality based in a more modern understanding, how can the church justify relativizing some texts without relativizing others?

Grudem also offers a careful critique of William Webb’s “redemptive-movement” approach, which, as he observes, casts the entire ethical structure of the New Testament into doubt. Grudem goes to some length to demonstrate that Webb’s approach undermines the church’s ability even to understand the New Testament text. Webb’s cumbersome and elaborate criteriology for deciding these issues puts the question outside the reach of all but a tiny priesthood of scholars. Even more importantly, it points to something outside the New Testament as our authority. As Grudem notes, this is “a huge step down the path toward liberalism.” In other chapters, Grudem considers the fact that many evangelical feminists claim the right to prioritize certain biblical texts, while relativizing others. Others attempt to dismiss certain passages as “disputed” in order to eliminate their functional authority in today’s church. Grudem effectively undermines these arguments, showing once again that the acceptance of these arguments requires the subversion or outright rejection of biblical authority. These maneuvers are absolutely incompatible with an affirmation of biblical inerrancy.

In a series of capable considerations, Grudems looks to a host of alternative arguments made on behalf of the ordination of women, ranging from those who claim an authority of experience or “calling” above Scripture to others who claim that women can teach and preach in the church so long as they do so under a male pastor’s authority.

Finally, Grudem returns to the issue of homosexuality, arguing that the hermeneutic employed to advocate egalitarianism leads, if pressed consistently, to the normalization of homosexuality as well. “The approval of homosexuality,” he notes, “is the final step along the path to liberalism.”

The great value of Wayne Grudem’s new book is its combination of cogent argument and fair presentation. Grudem is careful to acknowledge that many, if not most, evangelical feminists have not moved completely along the trajectory toward the full embrace of theological liberalism. Nevertheless, his surgical approach to their theological arguments and hermeneutical proposals reveals the clear and present danger to evangelical orthodoxy posed by egalitarian theory and practice. Evangelical Feminism is truly a tract for the times—a manifesto that should serve to awaken complacent evangelicals to the true nature of the egalitarian challenge. Furthermore, the book serves as an arsenal of arguments to use in revealing the crucial weaknesses of the egalitarian proposal.

Nothing less than the future of the Christian church in North America is at stake in this controversy. Evangelicals no longer have the luxury of believing that this controversy is nothing more than a dispute among scholars. Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? has arrived just in time. Get this book quickly—and read it with care.

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