Kate O’Beirne, author of the new alarmist screed Women Who Make the World Worse : and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports (what haven’t we made worse?), makes kicking some strawfeminist ass just look too easy. Rebecca Traister interviews her, and unfortunately doesn’t call her out on her lies, misrepresentations and exaggerations. So let’s do it here.
I was raised in this women’s environment, a Catholic girls school. We ran everything in high school and college. You weren’t photo editor of the yearbook; you were editor of the yearbook. It was a fabulous opportunity for women, because we didn’t have to share anything with boys. So to be told that I am somehow the tool of the patriarchy or can’t think for myself…
I can’t believe that feminists object to single-sex schools. It may not be right for everybody, but few things are. But they act like its apartheid! [What about] the experimental school for women in Harlem? It has an impressive track record. Why would the feminists want to shut it down?
Feminists aren’t shutting down the experimental school for women in Harlem. Sorry. A quote from Kim Gandy questioning single-sex education, using the same framework that questioned racially segregated education, isn’t the same thing as trying to shut down single-sex schools. But it’s a nice stretch.
Further, lots of feminists support single-sex education. Kim Gandy might not, but we should remember that feminism isn’t a political party. We don’t have a single platform that we all ascribe to. It’s a diverse movement, and there are lots of different kinds of feminism. Lots of us suport single-sex education, for a variety of reasons. Lots of us don’t. We aren’t a monolith.
What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg think of single-sex? As you know from the VMI [Virginia Military Institute] decision [in which Justice Ginsburg, writing the majority opinion, ruled that VMI could no longer refuse to admit women, but that it is the mission of some single-sex schools to “dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications”], yes for girls, no for boys. I don’t want to exaggerate because she didn’t, but [she] almost talked about [all-boys’ schooling] as though it was like the remnants of slavery. [Male colleges have] got these evil institutional roots or some darn thing. Now girls, that’s a different thing. That’s a double standard.
First of all, it’s probably worth reading the actual opinion. It was decided overwelmingly — 7-1. I suppose that makes Justices Rehnquist, Breyer and Souter raging man-hating feminists. The major problem with VMI is that as a government-funded public institution, it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The goals of the school are not inherently incapable of including women. VMI offers a type of training not available anywhere else in the state, and so women had no similar option to what men had. The reasons that VMI offered for excluding women were weak and unsubtantiated. And a “separate but equal” remedy fails, for obvious reasons. VMI’s mission reads, “to produce educated and honorable men, prepared for the varied work of civil life, imbued with love of learning, confident in the functions and attitudes of leadership, possessing a high sense of public service, advocates of the American democracy and free enterprise system, and ready as citizen-soldiers to defend their country in time of national peril.” Women are not inherently incapable of fitting into this mission. While we still cannot serve in combat, we’re allowed into the military; besides, VMI focuses on preparing its graduates for “civilian life,” and indeed only about 15% of them enter military service. The state of Virginia attempted to establish a women-only school, but it differed academically from VMI, and had far fewer financial resources. “The average combined SAT score of entrants at Mary Baldwin is about 100 points lower than the score for VMI freshmen. See id., at 501. Mary Baldwin’s faculty holds “significantly fewer Ph.D.’s than the faculty at VMI,” id., at 502, and receives significantly lower salaries, see Tr. 158 (testimony of James Lott, Dean of Mary Baldwin College), reprinted in 2 App. in Nos. 94-1667 and 94-1717 (CA4) (hereinafter Tr.). While VMI offers degrees in liberal arts, the sciences, and engineering, Mary Baldwin, at the time of trial, offered only bachelor of arts degrees. See 852 F. Supp., at 503. A VWIL student seeking to earn an engineering degree could gain one, without public support, by attending Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for two years, paying the required private tuition.” Further, VMI is a long-established and well-respected institution; having a degree from Mary Baldwin just isn’t as well-regarded.
The question is whether Virginia offers women and men equal opportunities. Mary Baldwin does not offer the same opportunities to women as VMI does to men. The standard is whether a degree from an implemented program like Mary Baldwin is “substantively comparable” to a degree from the established institution (VMI). Here, it is obviously not. As Ginsberg writes, the standard for sex discrimination is that “Parties who seek to defend gender-based government action must demonstrate an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for that action.” Virginia lacks that.
It wasn’t until 1971 that the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s complaint that she had been denied equal protection rights. 1971. This is in a country where women were denied the vote until 1920; where the sex discrimination standard on the state and federal level was that women could be denied opportunities that men were afforded as long as there was a “basis in reason;” where the law in some states made men “head and master” of joint marital property until 1975; where, until the mid-1970s, the law in others required parents to support boys until the age of 21 but girls only until 18. It’s no coincidence that these major leaps in women’s rights came as a result of feminism; it’s frustrating that Kate O’Beirne herself benefited from these rights, and now seeks to attack the women who were crucial in securing them. Ok, moving on.
Traister: But if your thesis is that it’s not sex discrimination because mothers work fewer hours, but that married men are the biggest earners, then it doesn’t track. If it automatically falls to women to maintain the balancing act of parenthood, work fewer hours and therefore earn less, and married men aren’t expected to cut back — in fact they earn more — then that is gender inequity, isn’t it?
O’Beirne: No. For two reasons. The first is the idea behind the whole book: sex differences. We want to [stay home]. Hel-lo? We want to do it! Secondly, men show devotion to the family by working really hard. Women show devotion to the family by showing devotion to the family.
Any time someone starts a sentence with “Women…” or “Men…” and follows with a sweeping statement about what all women want, I’m skeptical. Some of us don’t want to do it. Some of us do. And it’s been feminists who have argued that domestic work should be more highly valued, going so far as to argue that so-called “housewives” should be paid for what they do. Similarly, some men have no interest in showing their devotion by slaving away at work and never seeing their kids.
But you also had the desire to work!
No, no. no. I had much more earning potential than Jim O’Beirne had. [Sotto voce:] I didn’t want to [work full-time]. Am I a weak-minded tool of the patriarchy because I didn’t want to?
I think you’re hard-wired. We’re better at it than they are. Famous joke: “She came home, the kids were alive. What more does she want from me?!” So no, it’s not sex discrimination. So many feminists are howling at the moon: “Gee, it shouldn’t be so.” [Pause, sardonic look:] Okaaaay. I don’t think it’s anything any movement’s going to fix anytime soon.
“I think you’re hard-wired.” No, you think you’re hard-wired, and that’s fine. But please don’t tell me that I’m naturally better at diaper-changing and floor-scrubbing than any man.
But I think it’s fair to cite the AAUW [American Association of University Women]; I think it’s fair to cite NOW; [criticizing stay-at-home mothers] is what they’re all about! … I say, “You’ve got to make your own choices for your own family.” They don’t say that. They say there’s one responsible choice: You’re hurting your child and yourself and women more broadly if you make the choice [to stay home]. So there is no choice for feminists. They denigrate motherhood.
They think there’s only one responsible choice? Allow me to remind you: “[M]en show devotion to the family by working really hard. Women show devotion to the family by showing devotion to the family.” Feminist and liberal groups have tried to secure things like universal healthcare, early childhood education, greater funding to public schools, an end to pregnancy discrimination, and financial aid to families with dependant children. Who denigrates motherhood, and who pushes a social agenda that supports children and families? Who thinks there’s only one responsible choice?
It’s a false flag. Corporately, mainstream feminists denigrate marriage and motherhood — they just do! They’re not the least bit interested in — and in fact sort of opposed to — the work-at-home stuff, the federal things you could do to encourage working at home, telecommuting or whatever, they’re not interested in that. They have one model. The fundamental thing they think is that you’ve got to follow the male career model. But to follow the male model, what the heck are they going to do with the kids? Damn!
Hirshman made the point that polls show women select certain jobs with a lot of personal satisfaction, a lot of people contact. And she says, “Would you knock off the self-regard? Does your job have to be so damn fulfilling? Why the hell don’t you go for what the guys go for? How about power and money and prestige!?” I have an answer for why so many women don’t go for that: nature.
Ah, nature. The same reason why blacks are often paid less than whites, or why other ethnic or racial groups statistically have certain tendencies: They’re hard-wired! Of course, this doesn’t explain the massive social shifts that occurred after women were given more opportunities, but whatever. Before women were allowed into most colleges and universities, it was popularly argued that learning was just against their girlish nature, and their uteruses would shrivel up and they’d be barren spinsters if they were exposed to some algebra. And look, now that we’ve let them in, they’ve succeeded — some of them are even writing books, which they can publish in their own (female) names without being rejected by publishing houses based on their sex (Hello there, Kate!).
Of course, we should also point out that many of these “corporate feminists” have pushed a model where childrearing and work can coincide more closely. But let’s just ignore that.
But a leading scholar like Jessie Bernard [who wrote in her 1972 book “The Future of Marriage” that “being a housewife makes women sick”], who wrote that to be happy in a marriage women must be mentally ill? I could have cherry-picked the “all men should have been castrated” stuff — you can sure as hell find those things. But I wanted to be honest.
Well, perhaps she was talking about all the studies which show that unmarried women are psychologically healthier than married women. Or that working women are healthier than women who don’t work. That isn’t necessarily an argument that all women must work, or that women who don’t work or get married are stupid or universally unhealthy.
I am a veteran of the ’88 day-care fight. The “family-friendly workplace” — very clever title! It ain’t so friendly to the family. Very friendly to employment for women. That’s what you’re subsidizing: employment for women, [by giving] companies a bunch of tax breaks for maternity leave and day-care centers on site, yadda yadda. Why don’t we, given the choices women make — and we have a pretty good idea 30 years later how that’s shaking out — subsidize the ones who are electing to stay home?
Something was really getting under my skin about this interview, and it finally hit me with this quote: O’Beirne seems to be operating under the idea that all women are white, middle or upper class, working in career-track jobs, and making choices completely freely out of selfishness or individual desire as opposed to basic necessity. I would be fully in favor of subsidizing stay-at-home parenthood, but why not also subsidize childcare and maternity leave so that women actually have choices — and to give a little help to the many women who must work to financially support their families? And if we’re looking at “the choices that women make,” the fact is that most women work.
Opinion data shows if you ask women with preschool children, “What do you want to do?” some percentage want to be home, I think 10 percent want to work full-time, and the rest want to work part-time. But most influential [feminist] organizations are not interested in that sentiment. They’re only interested in the 10 percent who want to work full-time.
Uh, no. They’re interested in making it possible for women to make their own choices, but also recognizing that we don’t live in a feminist utopia. Women don’t get paid to stay home. Many women don’t have a partner who will pay the bills if they stay home. Many women who do have a partner still need a dual income to keep their heads above water. That’s the reality of the country we live in, and suggesting any sort of aid to families in need is “socialism.” O’Beirne needs to turn the microscope back on her own side.
But why is that parent necessarily the mother? Why can’t we get used to the idea that it would be just as good for kids to be home with dads?
Who wants that? Why would we do that?
Uh… wow. I’m not even going to get started on this one.
You’re accepting that society won’t ever validate a man who stays home! That’s a big trade-off!
But it’s not my opinion! Find me one. Find me one in the history of recorded mankind. You know what’s funny to me? Whatever men do, as I understand it, is the status job in that society. Like if they gathered [instead of hunted] in some damn society, then gathering would be the status job because men were doing it.
But that’s exactly the problem! To say that it’s been true historically without exception doesn’t make it right!
They care more about [status] than we do. But that’s also why they care more about paid work. And obviously I’m talking broadly here. There are women who dance circles around guys, make them look like slugs. But [there are] recent stories about women being handed keys to the executive washroom and going, “Eh, I really don’t want it!”
On a whole, men care more about status and paid work? Women like being second-class citizens and unpaid laborers? Right. And just as there are recent stories of women not wanting to head up companies, there are stories of men doing the same thing. That doesn’t make it a universal truth.
I’ve also been told I wouldn’t have a law degree if it weren’t for Betty Friedan. I don’t get the connection, personally. I don’t feel beholden to feminists for anything.
I was just getting to that. You don’t feel beholden to them for anything?
No, I don’t.
If the feminist movement had not taken place —
I would be a lawyer.
And you would be making the same amount of money you do now?
Uh, yeah! You don’t think they can take credit for that! There was a natural revolution underway! My timing was good.
Wrong, sister. Without early feminist movements, law schools and universities would never have let women in in the first place. This is my favorite thing about anti-feminist women: They seem to take particular pride in the delusion that their lives would be exactly as successful and exactly as good if feminism hadn’t happened. That just is not the case. And the “natural revolution” she talks about was created by feminists. This argument simply boggles the mind.
In your chapter about divorce you write, “when the traditional values of self-sacrifice and duty lose to conflict with the feminist doctrine of self-fulfillment and personal autonomy, children pay a very steep price.” Is your take that people in unhappy marriages should stay in those marriages?
Depends on how unhappy. My understanding is, and it comports with research and common sense: open conflict? Bad. Seething sorts of resentment that people can weather? Not so bad.
I’ll tell you where the loss has been. There used to be an overwhelming sentiment that you should stay together for the sake of the kids. We don’t have a majority believing that anymore. And that’s a loss.
Now people probably give up too easily. What kept you making the effort was social disapproval. Now you talk yourself into the idea that the kids will be fine, and more — they’ll be better off! I am in the camp that children of divorce, as we know, suffer. We’ve lost that sense of self-sacrifice.
Except that in O’Beirne’s view, only women are supposed to be the sacrificial lambs of the family. When men seek self-fulfillment and personal autonomy, they’re being good men. When women seek it, we’re selfish.
You quote Karl Zinsmeister as describing how men need to be “lured” and “corralled” into being nurturers, using that quote in a passage about the centrality of men in the family. If fathers are so naturally central to the family, why do they need to be lured or corralled? Isn’t that a darker view of men’s impulses than you argue feminists have?
No, no. Impregnating women? Really natural! Hangin’ around? Not necessarily natural! That was [the woman’s] job. Her job was to hang around.
Now if I were a men’s rights activist (or just a man), a quote like this would really piss me off. Men aren’t naturally inclined to nurture, or to “hang around” with the families they help create? They’re only natural lifestyle is to impregnate women and leave?
I call bullshit. And how, exactly, does O’Beirne know what’s “natural” in the first place, versus what’s socially codified? I know a lot of men who are exceptionally nurturing and good with children. I know a lot of men who are great, involved fathers. Are they genetic freaks?
In the chapter about VAWA [Violence Against Women Act] you describe some of the signs of abuse — like having a partner who monitors what you’re doing, humiliates you in public, and controls your money — as trivial. Do you really think those things are trivial?
I think they are potentially trivial. Could any one of those things rise to the level of a real abusive situation? I suppose so. But it strikes me as a sort of alarmist [attempt to define] domestic violence down in order to find some epidemic of it. [If those were true] every dating relationship in high school would be abuse. I mean constant, constant humiliation in front of people? It’s all so subjective: like every time I go out he asks me where I’ve been?
What I see there is an attempt to define it down because it has to be an epidemic — because there’s a lot of money in it being an epidemic.
My word. A partner who publicly humiliates you, controls your money, and moniters your behavior is abusive. It doesn’t matter if they only humiliate you sometimes. And no, not every high school relationship involves public humiliation, financial control and stalking.
You write about your dismay when your son was read a story about a princess killing the dragons while the boys did nothing. Why shouldn’t the girls defend the castle?
Men protect women from the physical threat. You’re going into a movie theater with your husband or your boyfriend and you see two guys tussling in the parking lot: You walk a little faster. You see a guy shoving a girl around: You want to be with a guy who wouldn’t go over to the parking lot and see what was happening? I wouldn’t want to be with a guy who didn’t. Good men rise to defend women in the face of a physical threat.
Christ. Ok, fair enough, many men are physically larger and perceived as more physically threatening than many women. But how is that an argument against a children’s book which tells little girls, “You are powerful, too”?
The most inflammatory passage in the book is when you suggest that if women are going to be in the military, mothers are going to have to start teaching their sons to hit girls.
It’s a sort of flip way to do it. It is very difficult for men raised with what we should still regard as the right traditional values — this doesn’t mean that a woman doesn’t dance circles around him in every other area of American life, get used to it — but he defends her from the face of physical threat.
But the notion that it would be OK to hit girls — this would carry over into civilian life?
Well, aren’t we going to have to? These are real-world choices. We’re going to have to have the kind of guy who continues right into the movie theater whether it’s a girl pushed around or two guys in fisticuffs. It’s like my Jessica Lynch thing. The stories about her being beaten up and sexually assaulted dropped out of all the yellow ribbon stories because we wanted a sweet, thank-god-she’s-safe, 19-year-old blond. We didn’t want to read about the fact that she was physically and sexually abused by foreign soldiers. We don’t want to know.
Well, women already are in the military, genius. And mothers aren’t yet teaching their sons to hit them. Even when the military was all-male, mothers weren’t training their sons to hit other boys.
Feminized is bad?
Oh, yeah. I’ve had it both ways, and I think we were better protected by traditional mores and chivalry than we are by lawsuits and laws. Men behaved better. And bring back the date! These juvenile men into their 30s who are unmanageable, and frustrated women who can’t find anyone?
I don’t know about her, but in my world the date still exists. And sorry, but I’ll take self-reliance over chivalry any day. “Chivalry” left us without voting and property rights, without access to education, and without access to the workplace. You can keep that.
Even as women have more financial and professional and political opportunities?
I back all of that! Equal pay! Great! They wouldn’t lose me on opening up law schools and med schools [to women]. What I’m saying is I wouldn’t have brought you all the other stuff. I’m not a caricature. I would have been the first at the head of the parade.
In other words, I would keep all the stuff that benefited me personally. The rest — you know, the stuff that benefits other women whose experiences or worldviews differ from mine — can be left behind. Things that help the working poor? Get rid of it. Programs that focus on abuse survivors? Who needs ’em.
And she says feminists are selfish and narcissistic.
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