Posted on 02/04/2003 12:37:34 PM PST by Remedy
The feminist movement of the 1970s was all about women and their wants -- it rejected motherhood and promoted abortion. But now the movement is taking its last breaths. That's the assessment from a professional pollster who was once recognized by Ladies' Home Journal as one of the 50 most powerful women in politics.
Kellyanne Conway is CEO and president and of The Polling Company, a Washington, DC-based research and analysis firm. Conway says the feminists' emphasis on promoting abortion and denigration of stay-at-home moms denied a physiological impulse in women. She feels that is the main reason the feminist movement is breathing its last.
"If [your entire debate denies] the fact that 80% of women alive today either have or will have borne children during their lifetime, that eventually catches up with you," Conway says.
According to Conway, when feminism exploded on the scene in the 1970s, the movement did not place any value on children. That fact was also reflected in the culture of the day, she says.
"Take account of what the movies were at the time -- The Exorcist; The Exorcist II, where the child is the Devil; Damien, the essential character in The Omen, is the Devil," she notes.
"Then, all of a sudden, in 1980 or 1981, you see those yellow stickers [on cars that say] 'Baby On Board.' Since then, we've become a culture [and] a nation that cherishes children -- even if we don't have any ourselves."
Conway says that denial of the physiological impulse of motherhood and the devaluing of children is why the feminist movement is on its last legs. She is convinced that younger women have seen the damage the feminist movement has done to families -- because they were reared in those families
Feminism n 1: a doctrine that advocates equal rights for women 2: the movement aimed at equal rights for women.
"I have taught feminist theory. I have debated gender feminists on college campuses around the country, and on national television and radio. My experience with academic feminism and my immersion in the ever-growing gender feminist literature have served to deepen my conviction that the majority of women's studies classes and other classes that teach a 'reconceptualized' subject matter are unscholarly, intolerant of dissent, and full of gimmicks. In other words, they are a waste of time." Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 90.
Book Review - The War Against Boys Sommers details how Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and other like-minded organizations have imposed their strange brand of feminism in the schools, and popularized the notion that girls are being silenced, subdued and subjugated, while boys are aggressors-in-waiting who must, for the good of society, be conditioned to be more nurturing and emotive-and less boy-like.
However dubious their arguments, they have managed to initiate numerous federally funded programs, which they then develop and administer, effectively cornering the market on school-based gender-equity programs, and ensuring a captive audience of children to promote their ideas. Disdain of Boyhood
But if Gilligan and others keep their data close to the vest, they wear their disdain of boyhood behavior on their sleeve. They portray boys as almost inherently pathological, claiming that "violence is gendered, and its gender is male." If one starts with the presupposition that all boys are potential, if not actual, criminals, it follows that the way to reduce violence is to recondition men. Reconditioning never comes easily, so boys' resistance is to be expected but overcome. One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Marxism and American Society"Feminism, then, was not born moderate and then radicalized by the 1960s. From its inception, the term 'feminism,' in the minds of both its proponents and its opponents, has been linked with radicalism and even socialism. 'Feminism,' as Nancy Cott explains, 'was born ideologically on the left of the political spectrum, first espoused by women who were familiar with advocacy of socialism." Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America, p. 194.
b) "Radical feminism's reliance on the structure and language of Marxism is particularly ironic in view of the statement of principles issued by NYRW [New York Radical Women] as well as the 1969 manifesto of the Redstockings." Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, p. 204.
c) "One of the primary institutional loci for the transmissions of radical feminist values and commitments has been women's studies programs. University courses on women were among the earliest fruits of the women's movement. Before 1968, courses explicitly about women were rare, yet by 1971-1972 there were over one thousand college-level women's studies courses in the United States." Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, p. 214.
d) "Judge [Robert] Bork also identifies Radical Feminism as 'the most destructive and fanatical' element of this modern liberalism. He further describes Radical Feminism as 'totalitarian in spirit.' Most Americans do not yet realize that they, through their institutions, are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the continuing destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new one. The revolutionaries are New Age Elite Boomers. They now control the public institutions in the United States. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearing completion. A key, or even a dominant element because purportedly it represents the largest political and social constituency among their potential followers, is Feminism. The Marxist movement in its 'quiet' cultural latter-day phase is seemingly sweeping all before it. With its sway over the media, fully in the grip of Feminism, it is hard to discern the stirrings of a counter-counter culture. Are the elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians, the most dangerous generation in America's history? William Strauss and Neil Howe suggest so, in their book Generations: The History of America's Future-1584 to 2069." Gerald L. Atkinson, "Radical Feminism and Political Correctness," Free Congress Foundation.
e) "Simone de Beauvoir, like the vast majority of feminists, regards the radical alteration of parenting as more than a utopian fantasy. She finds it 'easy to visualize' a world 'where men and women would be equal,' for 'that is precisely what the Soviet Union promised: women trained and raised exactly like men...[M]arriage was to be based on a free agreement that the spouses could break at will; maternity was to be voluntary; pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume charge of the children, signifying not that they would be taken from their parents, but that they would not be abandoned to them.' deBeauvoir is so far from alone among feminists in admiring Marxist-Leninism that this admiration, together with hostility to 'capitalism,' can be considered virtually a further distinguishing mark of feminism. The main criticism offered of the Soviet Union is that it has not gone far enough. To be sure, feminists are attracted primarily to the ideas that the Soviet state proclaims itself as embodying, rather than to the Soviet regime itself, but with that understood, a great many well-known feminists, including deBeauvoir, Millett, Firestone, Bleier, Mitchell, Chodorow, MacKinnon, Steinem, Sheila Rowbotham, Margaret Benston, Angela Davis, Eli Zaretsky, Evelyn Reed, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vivian Howe, and Rayna Rapp identify themselves as socialists or Marxists of some sort." Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom, p. 26.
f) "Socialism is clearly the theme which predominates women's liberation theology. Feminism is a political tool to promote world socialism. (1) The Document declaration of feminism states: 'Feminism rests on the belief that it is up to women to rescue the planet from the deeds of patriarchy and that women will join hands to build a Feminist Socialist Revolution.' 'In order to overcome the tyranny of racism it is necessary to establish a socialist order based on two further premises-An end to the oppressive 'male-female' relationship as it now exists and the creation of an egalitarian society based on collectivity' and 'The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men.' "The nuclear family must be replaced with a new form of family.' Shirley Correll, Body Snatching, p. 79.
g) "Why do political 'progressives' feel the need so often to lie about who they are? The question is prompted by a recent biography of feminist leader Betty Friedan, which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the woman who virtually created modern feminism is what may reasonably be called a political imposter. In her path-breaking book, The Feminist Mystique, Friedan presented herself as a typical suburban housewife not 'even conscious of the woman question' before she began work on her manuscript. But now Smith [College] professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) has shown that nothing could be further from the truth. Under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, the record shows that Friedan was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for nearly thirty years before the 1963 publication of The Feminist Mystique launched the modern feminist movement. There are probably a lot of interesting ramifications of this revelation. As Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist Marxist (or a fellow traveler thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicists working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Not at all a neophyte when it came to 'the woman question' (the phrase itself is a Marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the Communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union." David Horowitz, Heterodoxy, March 1999, p. 14.
h) "Friedan's version of feminism bears re-visiting in light of the new information. Her infamous description of America's suburban family household as 'a comfortable concentration camp' in The Feminist Mystique , it's now obvious, had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than with her own experience as a housewife and mother. Her husband Carl, also a leftist, once complained to a reporter in 1970 that, far from being a homebody, his wife 'was in the world during the whole marriage, either full time or free lance,' lived in a 'mansion' and had a full-time maid, and 'seldom was a wife and a mother.' Of course, no one paid much attention to the family 'patriarch' at the time, simply because as a male he was guilty before the fact." David Horowitz, Heterodoxy, March 1999, p. 14.
i) "Radical feminist crank Mary Daly, won't be teaching her feminist ethics course this semester at Boston College. A couple of young students of the male persuasion attempted to take the class, and it seems their 'phallocentric necrophilia' (which is how Ms. Daly describes the male min-set) would have been a threat to the purity of Ms. Daly's 'Elemental Sisterhood.' Refusing equal educational opportunities on the basis of sex, of course, is the sort of thing that gets universities sued; and so Boston College is letting Ms. Daly cancel the course altogether and take a leave of absence. Given Ms. Daly's demonstration that her version of feminism is nothing but dressed-up hatred of men, Boston College might want to think about making her absence from the faculty permanent...Ms. Daly isn't just a left-wing extremist, she is a walking, talking parody of radical feminism. Consider some passages from her new opus, Quintessence... Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto. Says Ms. Daly, "My Voyage into the Fourth Spiral Galaxy of 'Outercourse' brought me to the point of Discovering yet an Other Galaxy. As a consequence of my arrival in an Expanding Now/Present, the Way Opened for me to Leap into an Expanding Here/Presence. Moving more deeply into the Background Realms, I was ready to begin Spiraling into the Fifth Spiral Galaxy." Well you go, girl." The Washington Times, March 2, 1999, p. A14.
We were fed an illusion that women, being the superior sex, have an inexhaustible supply of physical and emotional energy that enable us to juggle a career, family, friendships and volunteer service.
Men, for instance, tend to be more goal-oriented and competitive, where women are more relational and cooperative. Men are active; women are verbal. This is intuitively obvious to the adults in our audience, but it is often new news to high school and college students.
Men most appreciate a woman's unique feminine attributes: love, sensitivity, her abilities to relate. Women have been shocked to discover that their hard-won accomplishments haven't resulted in great relationships with men. Sometimes, being overeducated hampers a woman's ability to relate to men. Men's egos are notoriously fragile, and they are by nature competitive.
Instead of investing their life's energies in doing well those things they can do, they grieve what and who they are not. Just being good, or being good at what they do, isn't enough if they're not the best.
The truth is that women can't separate sex from love as easily as men can. For women, sex needs to be an expression of love and commitment. Without these qualities, sex is demeaning, nothing more than hormones going crazy.
Many women postponed marriage and childbearing to pursue their own personal development and career goals. This perspective denies the reality of a woman's reproductive system and the limitations of time. Childbearing is easier in a woman's 20s and 30s than in her 40s. Plus, there is a physical cost; science has borne out the liabilities that older women incur for themselves and their babies. Midlife women are more prone to have problems getting pregnant, staying pregnant, and then experiencing difficult deliveries.
The qualities that marked feminine women--softness, sweetness, kindness, the ability to relate well--were judged as silly, stupid and weak. Only what characterized men--characteristics like firmness, aggressiveness, competitiveness--were deemed valuable.
In his book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus(6), John Gray pointed out that men get their sense of self from achievement, and women get their sense of self from relationships. Feminism declared that the male orientation of what you do was the only one that mattered; who you are, and how important you are to the people in your world, didn't count for as much.
The next step after "women don't need men" was logical: women don't need anybody. We can take care of ourselves. Helen Reddy's hit song "I Am Woman" became feminism's theme song, with the memorable chorus, "If I have to, I can do anything / I am strong / I am invincible / I am woman!"
As men tried to be "good guys" and accommodate feminists' demands, the culture saw a new type of man emerge: sensitive, nurturing, warmly compassionate, yielding. The only problem was that this "soft man" wasn't what women wanted. Women pushed men to be like women, and when they complied, nobody respected them.
Decline of Feminism For example, the liberal Center for Gender Equity found that three-quarters of women surveyed say that religion is important to them (up 6 percent from two years ago). Half say that it would be better for politicians to be guided by religious values (up 14 percent since 1993). They also found that 70 percent favor more restrictions on abortion, including 40 percent who think it should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother. Another 13 percent would not permit it under any circumstances.
Another study found a change in attitudes about career. In 1979 nearly half of working women felt career was as important as being a wife and mother. By 1998 that number dropped to a third of women surveyed.
And what about wage inequity? NOW continues to beat the drum that women earn just 74 cents for every dollar earned by men. But a new book entitled Women's Figures compares apples to apples and concludes that women earn 98.1 cents for every comparable male dollar.
These surveys and statistics suggest that feminist thinking is on the decline, and it's not just because NOW has a PR problem. It's because American women have heard the rhetoric, but they've also looked at the facts and come to different conclusions than these feminist leaders.
The Goddess and the Church Rosemary Radford Ruether in her book, Womanguides: Readings Toward A Feminist Theology, states "It is to the women that we look for salvation in the healing and restorative waters of Aquarius. It is to such a New Age that we look now with hope as the present age of masculism succeeds in destroying itself." According to Starhawk, a feminist and practicing witch, "the symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world."(1)
Radical feminists believe that the traditional church must be dismantled. For example, in her book Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Naomi Goldenburg announced,
The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahweh....It is likely that as we watch Christ and Yahweh tumble to the ground, we will completely outgrow the need for an external God.(13)
The Debate Over Feminist Theology: Which View is Biblical?
Secular feminists are humanists who disallow God, revelation, and religion in the discussion of feminism. They view the Bible as a major source of chauvinist ideas and a relic of antiquity that has no relevance to the ongoing debate over the roles of men and women in modern society.
New Age feminists are pagans who are typically involved in the worship of a feminine deity or goddess. (The upcoming Fall issue of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL will feature an article by Norman L. Geisler on neopaganism and feminism.)
Liberal Christian feminists operate within a Christian framework but approach feminism (and theology in general) from a very liberal perspective. They believe the Bible writers were simply men of their times and were limited in their perspectives. Liberal Christian feminists employ a "hermeneutic of suspicion" -- that is, they "systematically assume that the Bible's male authors and interpreters deliberately covered up the role of women in early Christianity."[9] Using such a hermeneutic, it is easy to sift out from the Bible anything one finds offensive to one's feminist tastes.
Evangelical feminists are those who generally (not always) hold to conservative views on the Bible and theology but who nevertheless embrace the feminist ideal of abolishing gender-based roles in society, church, and home. They believe the Bible is authoritative and, rightly understood, supports their feminist views.
In January 1993 newspaper and television networks reported an alarming statistic. They stated that the incidence of domestic violence tended to rise by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday. NBC, which was broadcasting the game, made a special plea for men to stay calm. Feminists called for emergency preparations in anticipation of the expected increase in violence.
Feminists also used the occasion to link maleness and violence against women. Nancy Isaac, a Harvard School of Public Health research associate specializing in domestic violence, told the Boston Globe: "It's a day for men to revel in their maleness and unfortunately, for a lot of men that includes being violent toward women if they want to be."
Nearly every journalist accepted the 40 percent figure--except for Ken Ringle at the Washington Post. He checked the facts and was able to expose the myth, but not before millions of Americans were indoctrinated with the feminist myth of male aggression during Super Bowl Sunday.
Verbal Plunder: Combating the Feminist Encroachment on the Language of Theology and Ethics Not long ago, a small and vocal band of feminist thugs tried to pull off one of the greatest acts of verbal plunder in the history of the Western world. By means of a linguistic subterfuge that prohibited any term that happened to strike them as sexist, they tried to abscond not only with one- third of all our generic personal and possessive pronouns (no more he and his, for example), they also tried to swipe any and every descriptive term beginning with the letters m-a-n. And because crime breeds crime, they fell quickly from larceny into slander by identifying as sexual bigots and chauvinists anyone, past or present, who failed to pay homage to their idiosyncratic rules of usage. As much as I hate to endorse anything to do with Freudianism, it seems to me that some feminists suffer from acute pronoun envy.
Dee Dee Myers: Hillary's a B - - - h Once Hillary even tried to kick an Arkansas state trooper bodyguard who got in her way, according to Clinton biographer Christopher Andersen.
And one-time White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich reported in 1996 that junior White House staffers were ordered not to make eye contact with the first lady lest they anger her.
But during her New York senate campaign, the media never touched on these and dozens of other accounts about Mrs. Clinton's temper, portraying her instead as a warm and genuinely likeable personality.
Hillary homosexuals' Person of the Year New York Senator-elect Hillary Clinton has been selected as "Person of the Year" by a popular San Francisco-based homosexual website. PlanetOut.com says it asked its 1.7 million visitors to vote for the most "important, inspiring, groundbreaking and newsworthy" individual or group among homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual and transgender people.
The Hillary Project - AmeriPAC A brief look at the history of Hillary Clinton will confirm what columnist Camille Paglia said in a recent article in Women’s Quarterly: "That woman should not be anywhere near our government . . . That woman is an authoritarian who should be kept out of government. She’s a tyrant who thinks she knows what’s best for the people. She’s Orwellian in her attitude toward the rest of humanity." One should not, and need not, judge her by her husband’s actions— she is a corrupt radical in her own right.
half of the NFL Linebackers would be women
Hillary could be a Linebacker trapped in a woman's body?
I always thought that the core belief of feminism was a woman's right to choose any profession that she wanted. Obviously, this is not the case as professions that 'further the cause' are the only ones acceptable. CEO? Sure! Homemaker? No way!
Speaking only for myself, and without trying to honk my own horn, the main thing to which I owe most of my success is the fact that my mother stayed home with me as a child. She took an interest in my schooling and education, was PTA president, etc etc etc. I wonder what will come of all the children that are raised by daycares......I don't care how good they are, no one does as good a job as the parents.
Well size isn't everything (or so I've heard these college educated gems claim). Anyway, all the differences are caused by how they are brought up. If parents and society didn't unconscously undernourish girls and discourage them from sports, some 51% of NFL Linebackers could be women. You believe that, right? :-) (unfortunatley, too many people do)
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