After decades of telling women to burn their bras, divorce their husbands, shun motherhood, and pursue careers, feminists have now discovered how wonderful it is to stay at home with the babies.
“A growing number of women are dismissing the career-driven conventions they were raised with, saying no to full-time work; believing instead that every household needs one primary caretaker – the mother,” the Daily Mail UK reported this week.
And they are calling themselves “feminist housewives.” Titles are very important to some people. I pity their husbands.
New York Magazine recently published a story called “The Retro Wife, feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home.”
Who are these self-absorbed women who discover something natural and normal, and must proclaim it from the mountain tops as if they’ve found the secret to eternal youth?
Women who have been brainwashed by radical feminists through decades of federal, state and local level public policy, public and private education, and good old Hollywood — that bastion of reality.
“Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled,” New York Magazine said. “This is the revelation of the moment, hashed and rehashed on blogs and talk shows, a cause of grief for some, fury for others.”
“In her much-discussed Atlantic piece, Anne-Marie Slaughter, by profession a policy wonk (now at Princeton, formerly at the State Department), calls for better workplace programs: more parental leave, more part-time and flextime options,” New York Magazine swooned.
The Atlantic claimed, “It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. In “Why women still can’t have it all,” Slaughter, whined how while she was in Washington D.C. working her dream job in the State Department, her 14-year old son was having 14-year old issues.
“On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History,” Slaughter said. “I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him.”
I’m shocked. Truly shocked.
“Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me,” Slaughter said.
The biggest problem with feminists is selfishness. The feminist message has always been “me, me, me.” Women were told for decades they didn’t need men, shouldn’t be expected to have children, and deserved to be the Chairwoman of the Board. Remember all of the studies and news about breaking the glass ceiling? Female politicians still obsess about this.
And, even more importantly, the unmistakable message was a women should never let anything or anyone get in the way of the goals she so richly deserved.
But life doesn’t work that way. It’s messy and complicated, and rewarding and full of joy.
1960′s and 1970′s radical feminists
I am a child of the 1960′s, and a teenager of the 1970′s. The feminist message was everywhere — in all forms of media, popular music, school, home, extracurricular school activities, sports, church, Girl Scouts, Hollywood, and adult female family friends. Girls and women could not escape it.
By the time I got into college in 1980, radical feminist professors had finely honed their craft. I was required to take an upper division course outside of my major. I got stuck in a horrid class called “Victimless Crimes,” taught by an openly militant lesbian, who claimed that all sex is rape.
During this time period, churches were even getting into the radical feminist message.
Radical nuns
During the recent papal election of Pope Francis, CBS News appeared to go out of its way to find the only two radical feminists in the crowd of people at the Vatican.
“During CBS’s special coverage of the papal election on Wednesday, correspondent Mark Phillips singled out two dissenters from Catholic tradition in the middle of crowd of hundreds of thousands in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, mere minutes after the white smoke went out of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, and before Pope Francis emerged onto the balcony over the piazza,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The two activists, who wore pink ‘ordain women’ pins, not only sought to change the Catholic Church’s teachings on the all-male priesthood, but spotlighted “LGBT issues [and] reproductive health care” – a thinly-veiled reference to abortion and contraception – as issues that need to be drastically changed inside the Church,” said the WSJ.
Most of the papal event was covered in the same way by mainstream news organizations.
Last weekend, the Sacramento Bee ran an interview with a radical feminist nun. Sister Simone Campbell is executive director of NETWORK, “a liberal social justice lobby in Washington, D.C.,” the Bee reported.
NETWORK was founded 41 years ago in 1972, just before Campbell graduated Mount St. Mary College in Los Angeles in 1973, and U.C. Davis Law School in 1977.
NETWORK is really a a political lobbying group fighting for socially liberal causes. It has nine employees, most of whom are not nuns, according to Catholic media reports.
Campbell has become something of a media darling since she manufactured the media stunt “Nuns on the Bus” tour supporting Obamacare, and opposing Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Proving the group was just a media stunt, they received far more coverage from mainstream media than was warranted as they appeared in Washington D.C. on a Sunday, when there were no lawmakers working.
Interestingly, the nuns were investigated by the Vatican for their liberal views on abortion, birth control and gay marriage… views which are extremely unorthodox for women who claim to be nuns with the Catholic Church.
“A Catholic leader in the global movement for justice and peace, NETWORK educates, lobbies, and organizes for economic and social transformation,” the NETWORK website says. “NETWORK is a progressive voice within the Catholic community.”
When asked by the Bee why the Vatican investigated her and what the new Pope may do, Campbell said, “I’m hopeful the Italian way will be done, where the investigation just falls to the bottom of the drawer and nobody pays attention. That would be the best outcome.”
Secular feminists
Sister Simone Campbell can defy her church teachings and promote or be silent on the issues she chooses — it’s between Campbell, her Church and her creator.
But I just spent this past week attending Capitol legislative hearings, observing liberal Democratic politicians, state agency directors and top employees and lobbyists, work toward expanding the role of the state in the lives of preschool aged children, low-income families and the poor. California’s majority party is not advancing self-sufficiency and self-reliance, but instead, pushing a secular statist government on the most vulnerable in society.
And it was the women doing most of the talking. I wish they would step back and listen to their own feminist rhetoric at these hearings. It’s pure drivel and doesn’t work anyway.
Cross posted at CalWatchdog