Phyllis Schlafly has been giving sage advice to government for decades, and now she’s inadvertently provided a solution for cutting spending from the University of North Carolina’s hefty, taxpayer-funded budget. With the publication of her new book, Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser can cancel the catering for the committee charged with searching for an enlightened book to follow Approaching the Q’uran as required reading for incoming freshmen.
Schlafly’s Feminist Fantasies fits the bill perfectly. Students will learn more policy background and gain more insight from the reasoned analysis in this collection of essays and congressional testimony than they will ever pick up in a university women’s studies course.
This book represents 30 years of Schlafly’s activism on behalf of women and families. It’s an easy read, yet its message is serious. That makes it a worthwhile investment of time, regardless of your gender or age. It’s divided into broad topics, each containing commentaries written between the 1970s and 2002. The arrangement is inviting. Even a policy-averse reader can enjoy this book by sampling as few or as many pieces as interest dictates.
Schlafly’s work deftly exposes what she argues is the real agenda of the women’s rights movement: to create a gender-neutral society in which feminists exercise complete power over the men they say create an oppressive society that denies opportunity and equality to women. In reality, she explains through her writings, feminism at its core is antimen, antiwomen, antimarriage, proabortion, and above all else, politically correct.
Schlafly’s writing is clear and her tone emphatic as she eviscerates feminist doctrine. At times I was amazed by the havoc created or narrowly averted as the reasonable-sounding goal of “equality for women” mushroomed into illogical and ill-advised law, policy, and behavior.
The most visible feminist effort to deny the inherent differences between women and men was the much heralded Equal Rights Amendment. My introduction to Phyllis Schlafly occurredat the height of the debate as I watched an interview conducted by an overtly hostile female. True to form, Schlafly was calm and uncompromising, and when I read the book’s commentary “Why the ERA Failed,” it brought back this memory and secured the essay’s place as my favorite.
Despite the relentless assault against Schlafly during the ERA fight, her logical argument that the proposed constitutional amendment was unnecessary (women have enjoyed equal employment opportunity since 1964) and ultimately negative for many women, connected with America. That irritated feminists, who continued to name call rather than refute her contentions. In 1982 she had the last laugh. As she recounts in Feminist Fantasies, the ERA died without the required ratification by three-fourths of the states. Many credit Schlafly with defeating it, including columnist Ann Coulter, who writes a witty foreword about the woman she calls “one of the most important people of the twentieth century.”
The ERA policy debate is part of the section “Questioning a Woman’s Place.” Feminist favorites including comparable worth, the glass ceiling, gender-neutral speech codes, and sexual harassment law are debunked on these pages. In “Paula Jones and Anita Hill,” Schlafly leads the reader down Bill Clinton memory lane, reminding us of the hypocritical support feminists gave to the man who has consistently demonstrated contempt for women.
As Schlafly wrote in 1998, ironically it was feminist dogma that exposed Clinton. “Without the feminists’ campaign against sexual harassment that began with Anita Hill, and their claim that it is a pervasive problem, there would be no Paula Jones lawsuit. And without Paula Jones’ lawsuit, we never would have known about Monica, Kathleen, Dolly, Clinton’s perjury, Clinton’s obstruction of justice, and the intimidation of Clinton’s bimbos who didn’t keep their mouths shut,” she wrote.
In other words, what goes around comes around, and as Schlafly demonstrates, this policy came back to bite feminists in the you-know-what.
Equally intriguing are pieces in “Marriage and Motherhood” that chronicle the feminist push for federalized day care, no-fault divorce, and other questionable policies. Turn first to “Politics and Daycare,” a 1989 commentary that includes the unbelievable response from a day-care activist testifying before the U.S. Senate. Asked whether an employed mother whose children are cared for by a family member should receive the same benefit in proposed federal legislation as a mother who puts her child in day care, the activist responded that it would be appropriate only if grandma was licensed, regulated, and received government training.
The book’s remaining sections — “The Revolution is Over,” “The Media: Mirror or Maker of Trends,” and “A Gender-Neutral Military” — will have you nodding your head. The essay “Women Don’t Belong in Combat” is particularly thought provoking at this time in history.
If Feminist Fantasies has a weakness, it’s that Schlafly didn’t separately reflect on her life for this book. We can use more wisdom from this defender of true choice for all women.
Donna Martinez is an assistant editor of Carolina Journal, newspaper of the John Locke Foundation.