Author |
Message |
Ocean_islands
Member
09-07-2000
| Monday, February 06, 2006 - 7:33 am
I saw a fascinating interview last night on BookTalk/C-Span with Kate O'Beirne, author of a book entitled "Women Who Made the World Worse". It's a book by a conservative woman who takes examples of four famous liberal women (Clinton, Ginsburg, Fonda and Streisand) to set up an argument about how the feminist movement has made things more difficult for women across the past forty years. I have not read this book and have no intention of reading it, but the interview was quite interesting and I have to say that she raises some interesting points and highlights some intriguing statistics about women's response to the liberal Democrats and the women's vote, in particular. For instance, Geraldine Ferraro as the VP candidate in the mid 1980s did not get the women's vote. I'm not saying I agree with her per se, and wouldn't pretend to be able to discuss the book (not havingt read it), but I was wondering if anyone has read this and/or what they think of this author. Here is a blurb from Amazon.com (Booklist):
O'Beirne, an editor with National Review and a former panelist on CNN's Capital Gang, takes the feminist movement to task, charging it with responsibility for assorted social ills from broken families to increased risk to the military with female recruits. She cites some of America's best-known feminists, including Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Maureen Dowd, Kate Michelman, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite defeat of the ERA, these women, and the feminist movement in general, have managed to influence American culture to the detriment of women. Lamenting the "totalitarian" methods of the modern women's movement, O'Beirne maintains that advancements for women should not be credited to the women's movement but to intrepid women--including Catholic school nuns--who were hard at work breaking down barriers without celebration or official causes behind them. O'Beirne catalogs all the ways that feminism has weakened families, coarsened culture, and burdened the government. Readers interested in different perspectives on women's issues will appreciate O'Beirne's strongly held viewpoint. link
|
Rupertbear
Member
09-19-2003
| Monday, February 06, 2006 - 10:46 am
Oooohhhhh...this really should make for a lively debate...even if people haven't read her book!
|
Cablejockey
Member
12-27-2001
| Monday, February 06, 2006 - 10:59 am
I haven't read it either but I can't agree that feminism has had a negative effect on our culture.I didnt see any totalitarian methods either. Many young women today proclaim that feminism has had no effect on them and they dont agree with it, which makes me wonder if we went anywhere at all in this area. As for weakening families, the family concept that we all look to as a model is a fairly new concept in the history of our species. Women of the poor classess have always had to work no matter what century it was and who knows who looked after their kids. I am a stay at home mother and live the traditional nuclear family comcept, but I would never like to see women forced into this lifestyle and forbidden to enter other areas of like that some people had the power to do for so long. You just have to look at other parts of the world to see how far we have come when women there are living the same way for hundreds of years.
|
Rupertbear
Member
09-19-2003
| Monday, February 06, 2006 - 11:05 am
Amen, CJ...very well put. 
|
Ocean_islands
Member
09-07-2000
| Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 7:04 am
One of the most striking features of "Women Who Make the World Worse" is its "I can't believe she said that" quality. Mrs. O'Beirne informs her chapters on the family, day care, education, politics, the military and sports with a review of the radical feminist dogma on her subject. Anyone still operating under the delusion that "feminist" is synonymous with "pro-woman" should find this a useful reality check. Where to begin? There's Robin Morgan, one of the founders of Ms. magazine, saying in 1970 that marriage is "a slavery-like practice" and arguing that "we can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." Or move forward a couple of decades to the 1990s, when University of Texas professor Gretchen Ritter, who favored then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's plan to "liberate" women by putting children in federally funded day care, expresses the view that stay-at-home mothers are shirking their duty "to contribute as professionals and community activists." .... One of the contributions of Mrs. O'Beirne's book is that she marshals data that effectively shatter the demeaning liberal myth that women vote on "women's issues." She notes, for instance, that when the Gallup organization polled voters monthly during the 2004 presidential election year about the subjects they cared most deeply about, "not even 1% mentioned issues like pay equity, child care, or discrimination and violence against women." Men and women polled equally in their concern about race relations, health care, military strength and so forth. ....Then there's the feminist myth that women are denied equal pay for equal work. No one doubts that this was the case several decades ago--and isolated cases persist--but today women's pay overall is on a par with men's. Discrepancies are generally explained by the personal-employment choices that many women make, such as flexible hours, part-time work or other family-friendly options. She lists 39 occupations--aerospace engineer, speech pathologist, financial analyst--where women earn at least 5% more than men. link
|
Cablejockey
Member
12-27-2001
| Tuesday, February 07, 2006 - 6:12 pm
I just couldnt help but be a tad skeptical about those statements coming from Mrs. O'Beirne's book, so I looked around a little and came up with this information on the equal pay thing. There are still facts supporting women make 75 cents less for every dollar men make. http://www.cluw.org/programs-payequity.html http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/paygapgrows.htm http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193820.html
|
Snee
Member
06-26-2001
| Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 11:45 pm
i am a feminist. i am pro-woman. i am pro-man. i am not deluded.
|
|