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Women Against Women (Part 3) by PATRICE LEWIS

(Part 1 of Women Against Women can be read here; Part 2 can be read here)

What feminists overlook in their single-minded pursuit of career is that men’s careers are mostly far from glamorous. Few people can claim that men who work as, say, miners or bus drivers or mechanics do so out of the sheer love of the job. Even high-status careers such as attorneys and doctors spend most of their time in mental drudgery. But men, regardless of the alleged glamour of the job, willingly give up a large portion of each day doing something they may not like to earn money out of duty and obligation and responsibility to support their family. These men are then bewildered to come home to a wife who laments her lost “career” and demands that he clean a few toilets, do a few dishes, and change a few diapers to somehow “pay” for the fact that he’s a man and worked all day at a job he may not like to let her stay home with the children. Go figure.

Feminists look at a woman’s career as all-powerful, all-important, the be-all and end-all of “completion” for a woman. They seldom consider how many men have jobs like that. To most men, a job is, after all, merely a means to an end – a way to bring in money so they can enjoy their family life. Most people derive pleasure from hobbies and vacations and family joys, not by filing briefs or administering pharmaceuticals or writing ad copy.

Feminists’ insistence on backing such punitive legislation as the Paycheck Fairness Act overlook the obvious concept that gee, women must be frail and vulnerable little things incapable of handling the big, bad working world. Any discrepancies in gender balance in the workplace are automatically assumed to spring from bias against women. Frequently a woman demands entry into a traditionally masculine field and then promptly demands that the bar be lowered to meet her standards, whether it’s physical stamina or mental stress. Feminists want all of the perks but none of the responsibilities.

Before the hate mail starts, please understand I have no objection to women in traditionally masculine careers. Indeed I admire them. But it’s when these women think they’re “better” than a woman who chooses a traditionally feminine career (nursing, teaching, homemaking) that I get pissed. Is a lawyer better than a housewife? Well, I don’t know. It depends on whether the lawyer has sacrificed her husband and children for her “powerful” career. Is a housewife better than a lawyer? Well I don’t know – it depends on if she feels so lowly that she makes her family miserable because of unrealized “career” ambitions.

In Flyover Country, most women have put their priorities in the right place. Even women who must work – and jobs are often low-paying in Flyover Country, necessitating both parents working to pay government taxes – they still understand that their job is a necessary evil, inferior to the option of staying home full-time. Because let’s face it, except for a very vocal minority, most women (given their druthers) would rather be home with their kids.

At a time when calls for government funding of daycare were increasing, polls were showing that’s not what women wanted. Even the liberal pollsters Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research, Inc. found in a May 2, 2005 report, “Only 8% of moms say they would still want to work full time if money were no object. 47% percent would stay at home and 44% would work part time.”

Most working mothers don’t want to work more; they want to work less. When mothers are forced to work for economic reasons, nearly 80% of parents choose to have relatives watch their preschool-aged children rather than using institutionalized daycare. We don’t need increased government funding for more daycare; we need decreased taxes so parents can afford to stay home. Duh.

Now there are statistics that indicate the trend for mothers working outside the home is reversing. Women – especially those who grew up in daycare – are not about to inflict that kind of deprivation on their own children. This reversal of the mantra of “day care good, mother care bad” sends feminists into a doozy of a panic.

Here’s the funny thing about Flyover Country’s attitude toward feminism. Most people don’t have a problem with the basics. Most people like the idea of women voting, women having the option to work, women having more opportunities than their sisters a hundred years ago.

The problem ruralites have with feminists is the feminists’ hatred of traditional families, of traditional values, of housewives and men who support their families financially. Hard-core feminists simply hate the idea of happy, traditional people.

Feminists, like all liberals, claim they want and respect diversity – though the only “diversity” they tolerate is that which advances their agenda. True diversity is antithetical to the feminist mentality. If you don’t believe me, try mentioning “traditional” and “values” in the same sentence to any professor of women’s studies at any university and watch her metaphorically spit on your shoes for uttering such heresy. And God forbid a woman should express admiration or respect for masculinity. Yuck, pitooey.

Feminists are taking the true inequalities of the past and using them to trap women in perpetual victimhood. They use the bullwhip of guilt and the sledgehammer of lawsuits to force society to adhere to unreasonable and unsustainable standards of “equality.” (I don’t care what they say, a 115-lb female firefighter can’t carry an unconscious 200-lb man out of a burning building.) And if you’re female, don’t even think about getting married, having a baby and staying home (particularly in that order), because pregnancy is tantamount to slavery. Women should be working, dammit. They should be productive citizens. They should contribute something to the Gross Domestic Product. The kids will be fine in daycare or given latchkeys.

And so, by crowbarring women out of the home, children have been left to fend for themselves. (Feminists seem unable to admit that one of the primary needs of children is supervision – and parents are the best people to supervise because they love their children and have a vested interest in how well those children are guided.) First it was latch-key kids. Then the daycare industry mushroomed into a massive enterprise designed to make mothers feel no guilt for dumping their babies on someone else to raise. And the children, deprived of a warm, loving, nurturing, warm-cookies-straight-from-the-oven childhood, now have sterile memories of a succession of faceless daycare workers and sterile classrooms punctuated by endless illness caught from the other inmates…er, kids.

Even more despicable are the feminists who decide fathers aren’t necessary for the proper upbringing of children. Feminism has done more to plunge women into poverty (by accepting and even encouraging single motherhood) than almost any other force at work in our society today. “A child raised by a never-married mother is seven times more likely to live in poverty than a child raised by his biological parents in an intact marriage,” according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. (Emphasis added.) It wasn’t until years passed that the aching, pathetic result of fatherlessness began to manifest itself – in a generation of angry, bewildered boys and girls who commit crimes and bring yet more fatherless children into the world.

To be continued…

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