If you’re like most Americans and too busy to read whiny feminist blogs, note that March is Women’s History Month. Christina Hoff Sommers has an article in the current Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute’s Policy Express on taking back the feminist movement and highlighting women’s history. It’s an absolute must read. She writes:

But today the movement has been taken over by aggrieved eccentrics. Marching under the banner of feminism, the current activists are fighting a gender war that few women support or understand. The potential for harm is enormous. Mainstream women are going to have to rescue feminism from the feminists.

We badly need a responsible, reality- based women’s movement. Women in many parts of the developing world are still struggling for their basic rights.
Egalitarian progressives—some would say radicals. They held that men and women, although socialized to different roles, are identical in their essential natures. By appealing to principles of social justice and universal rights, egalitarians sought to liberate women from the private sphere of the home—into the public spheres of politics, business, and work.

I came into this fight over feminism late. As a young woman and conservative college student, I purposely avoided anything relating to womyn’s studies or gender politics. After working at a nonprofit geared towards girls, I came face-to-face with the “egalitarian feminism” that Sommers discusses. Behind every rallying cry for “equality” there’s a scary agenda from the Radical Left to remake our society into a European socialist copycat that has taken over colleges, the media and our court system.

Since the left has demonized conservative women for so long, most females on the right avoid anything remotely resembling feminism. That leaves us woefully ignorant when it comes to the history for women’s equality. Please take a few minutes and understand that there is a need to fight for equality between men and women, but this can be done–and has been done–in ways that value and protect American traditions and capitalism.

As Sommer’s notes in the article, Clare Booth Luce was writing about women’s issues long before Betty Friedan ever felt bored in her affluent suburban home. Rather than fight to change society into some socialistic utopia, she understood how women operate. Sommer’s quotes Luce:

It is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to Mother Nature—a difficult lady to fool. You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women’s nature to do they will do, and you won’t be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won’t be able to make them do it.

Feminist arguments fall flat over “second shift” work, the so-called wage gap and complaints that we still have not achieved equality despite making up more than half of the workforce, as seen in the recent Shriver Report. Women don’t make choices to better the cause of women. Women make choices that better their individual lives and families. When you make women equal, as our society has largely done, women will reject what doesn’t work, even if this conflicts with the agenda of the left-leaning feminist movement.

H/T American Enterprise Institute

Tags: Christina Hoff Sommers, Clare Booth Luce, Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, equality, feminism, women's history month

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:36 am and is filed under Conservative Women, feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.