Back in May, these same women reacted in a similar mean-female-dog manner to Phyllis Schlafly’s honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Washington University. Leading the pack were professors, like Mary Ann Dzuback, director of women’s and gender studies, and associate professor of education and history, who was quoted as saying, “The university has completely disregarded the concerns about anybody who cares about full and equal rights for women, who cares about the intellectual quality of feminist debate, and who cares about women’s desire to enter the work force.” Schlafly earned a law degree from that university and has had a very distinguished career in writing, speaking, and public policy.
The fact that she did it while raising six children enraged the harpies even more.
They are livid because Schlafly was able to do this before the “movement”—THEIR movement. She gives the lie to the notion that the 1950s was a time of oppression by the patriarchy. In my own field, academia, one would think that no women taught or wrote during that time, but a surprising number of women turn up as authors of scholarly works.
Yet, feminists cling to their conspiracy theories. Katha Pollitt, in a Nation Magazine column on Schlafly’s honorary degree, wailed: “sometimes I think we’re truly going backward, as Republican hegemony, conservative Christianity and anti-feminist media propaganda take their cumulative toll.” Those like Pollitt resort to misrepresenting Schlafly: “After four years of hard work, female seniors get to watch their school honor someone who thinks they should park their diplomas in the kitchen sink.” Pollitt’s most recent book-length work was a tell-all collection of essays, published originally in The New Yorker, about a liberated, live-in, abusive boyfriend who cheated on her with her friends.
Commentators charged Schlafly with hypocrisy for denying women career opportunities and keeping them subjugated by husbands.
The reality is that these feminists don’t care about women. They cannot recognize that it is Western (patriarchal) civilization that accords women the greatest rights in the world. It supports women and their children. It nurtures women like Sarah Palin. I’ve seen it personally with friends earning Ph.D.’s, who were supported by conservative blue-collar husbands. And I’ve heard too many liberal women complain about the poor treatment they get from liberal boyfriends.
The feminists are livid that Palin did it outside the movement, that—unlike Hillary Clinton--she began not out of her own ambition, but as a result of her concern for her own children, as a PTA mom.
I kept my eyes glued on the television all evening Friday.
On Saturday, I went to our local book festival in Decatur, Georgia. True to form, this festival, run by the federally supported Georgia Center for the Book, was heavily liberal in terms of books and authors. The official bookseller at author signings was Outwrite Books, our local gay bookstore and coffee shop.
I made my way past Revolution Books, the massage booth, and plethora of opuses on “spirituality” to a talk by a token conservative, Kathleen Parker on her latest book, Save the Males. The question-and-answer session turned to Palin’s nomination, and one angry woman in the audience commented that Palin knew that her baby had Down’s Syndrome and yet had him anyways. She said that it was irresponsible of her to accept the nomination when she had a special needs baby.
Well, we know what Hillary or any one of her pro-choice sisters would have done. We can imagine her crying out, “Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman breasts, / And take my milk for gall. . .”
These women have blood on their hands, and they are very angry and bitter.