- "But even among the secular conservatives, the difference in the historical baggage each age group carries creates an often dramatic schism. The older conservatives grew up at a time when America was discovering its own injustices, and many of them still struggle with a pair of long-held liberal assumptions: that equal protection under the law mean protecting groups rather than individuals, and that government inaction breeds or perpetuates social injustice. They might reject those assumptions intellectually, but their lives and politics have been indelibly marked by them. The young women, in contrast, came of age at the height of identity politics, with the culture of victimhood being explored ad nauseam on daytime television. They have emerged as rampant individualists who eschew the rhetoric of group empowerment for the philosophy of self-empowerment. They don't struggle with that critical pair of liberal assumptions; they struggle against them." pp. 30-31
- "As I wandered the halls of the Hyatt-Regency on Capitol Hill, I wondered at the scarcity of women. The Libertarian Party convention made the Republican convention look like an exercise in gender equity. " p. 47
- Quoting Libertarian Jackie Bradbury on the problem of the Libertarian Party recruiting women: "The problem is women's attitudes. Men prize independence, which pushes them toward libertarianism, while women are invested in interdependence, which inclines them toward socialism. When men see infants, they see potential. When women see infants, they see needs to be satisfied. So it is only natural that men relate to the concept of freedom while women have bought into the glorification of need." p. 47
- "Libertarian feminists love to invoke the early feminists to remind women that the mothers of their movement -- from Susan B. Anthony to Charolette Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger -- agreed that the true enemy of women was the state, no doubt as a way to bolster their argument that the liberation of today's women is equally dependent on redrawing their relationship to government. But resting their demand for a return to that philosophy and strategy on our foremothers places it on a shaky foundation. Obviously, the state was the enemy in the era of Anthony, Gilman, Sanger and company, since they lived at a time when the government gave women fewer legal rights than 9-year-olds. They could not vote, own property, or sign contracts." p. 50
- "Black Mississippians didn't vote against Judy Jefferson. They reaffirmed their position on a seventy-five-year struggle that was black America's greatest political debate, the historic clash between W. E. B. Du Bois, a Harvard-educated historian, and Booker T. Washington, a former slave. At that bleak moment in history, black Americans suffered the tyranny of segregation, the violence of lynchings and the hopelessness of economic marginalization. Washington, the cofounder of Tuskegee Institute, warned blacks not to look to whites for liberation from their despair. Work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, rely on yourselves and each other, he preached. Gain economic solidity, and social equality will inevitably follow. To the followers of Du Bois, the cofounder of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], Booker T. was the quintessential Uncle Tom. You don't have to earn white respect, Du Bois countered. It's your constitutional and human right. Demand legal rights and legislative changed, he insisted. Gain social equality under the law, and economic parity will inevitably follow. The black community turned its collective back on Washington's message of self-help and, for decades, channeled its considerable energy and meager resources into the struggle for an end to legally enforced discrimination, to the backs of buses, to segregated restaurants, and to inferior all-black schools." p. 58
- "Militiawomen aren't crazy; they're scared; and they're not scared because they believe conspiracy theories. Just the opposite. They've grabbed on to conspiracy theories because they are scared and don't understand why their husbands can't find jobs and their children are disobedient, why their taxes are rising and churches are empty. Nobody but the conspiracy theorists is offering them clear-cut explanations, and there are just enough elements of truth to the explanations offered by the conspiracy theorists to give desperate women something to hold on to." pp. 93-94
- "What's wrong with the leaders and their groups? "Think for five minutes," Mills says, impatiently. "If you do, you'll realize that these people have taken in hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of million of hours of volunteer time. What have they accomplished? Nothing. Everybody knows that with that kind of money and determination, if -- and it's a big IF -- the leaders were sincere, this nation would not be in the shape it's in." p. 118
- "Chey, who describes herself as "pretty much of a conservative Christian," wholeheartedly supports Mill's position, but worries as much about the allegedly secular wing of the conservative movement as about its religious side. These days her personal focus is on think tanks. "The American people need to understand that think tanks have been virtual shadow governments," she explains. "Politicians don't think for themselves anymore. As soon as they decide to run, they find a think tank that will think for them. They become puppets of groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Progress and Freedom foundation, on the right, or the Institute for Policy Studies or the Economic Policy Institute on the left. Who are these people? We didn't elect them. And if we didn't elect them, they're not supposed to have any power over our lives." p. 119
- " "Politicians who don't use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office," LaHaye preaches." p. 165
- "Feminists, of all people in America, should feel particular empathy for women of faith, since the two groups bear remarkedly similar scars. Like feminists, Christian women fell constantly besieged in a hostile world. They too have had to fight to make their voices heard in a society that often seems deaf. They too are regularly demeaned, degraded, and reduced to second-class citizenship -- not just as women, but as women of conservative faith. And, like feminists in the 1960s, after decades of passivity, they have begun to fight back, launching their own struggle for dignity and equality." pp. 168-169
- "What I learned the hard way from both Marianne, to a lesser extent from Kathy and Jackie Sue [his daughters], then from people like Lynn Martin and Nancy Johnson. . . . is that nondiscrimination is not the same as a level playing field. Nondiscrimination fairly well guarantees that white males will win, just because of the whole balance of they system. " p. 190
- " "Women here are hard workers," explained LaRee MacRae of Orofino, Idaho, who has been married for four decades. "We have to be, because you never know if it is going to be a bad logging year or if it is going to rain a lot in the summer. Men and women are interdependent. We have to be a team. The men work out in the woods and women have small businesses in town. We run stories, sell their crafts or do whatever. Or we drive logging trucks or skidders while our husbands log.
Back east it's different. Men don't treat women as if they have many brains. But here women have to have equal rights, because we have to go out and work right beside their guys just to make ends meet. So here, when a woman talks, the guys listen." p. 200
- "But if these women's attitudes toward government is suspicious, verging on the hostile, their attitude toward the women's movement is virtually dismissive. LaRee, for example, doesn't know anyone who doesn't understand that the rules simply are different for women who live in what is still remarkably, the Old West. "We all remember our grandmothers, who were pioneer women. They cleared the land with out grandfathers, they worked right next to them. The image of women as second-class citizens never took root hers." Although LaRee would never frame the issue in these terms, she is nonetheless harking back to the argument made by Friedrich Engels a century ago, an argument long popular in the women's movement. The relationship between men and women in an agrarian society was fundamentally different from what arose after industrialization, he wrote. In the agrarian world, there was no division between home and place of work. Husband and wife worked together, and that work produced a livelihood. No one thought to ask whose contribution was more valuable, since there was no clear line of separation between the contributions. In Engel's view, women's position plummeted only when the industrial revolution pulled men off their farms and into factories, leaving wives distanced from the place of labor and the source of income. Their work at home might have been socially necessary, but it had clearly, obviously, become marginal to the production of income.
In those societies, a woman's leisure became a sign of privilege -- proof that her husband had "made it" to the point that his wife didn't have to find work in a shop or a mill. And, in feminist thinking, the moment women bought into that sign of privilege, they marginalized themselves from the centers of power. But a long trip through the Old West put another face on the process. What might theoretically be dangerous for women as a group is most often a dream come true for the real woman who's been breaking her back herding cows, at least according to Joyce Byerly of Watford City, North Dakota.
"Just at the point when families around her got comfortable enough that wives didn't have to milk the cows, drive combines and fix fences, the women's movement came along and started talking about how women should work," says Joyce, sitting in her comfortable home, surrounded by photographs that testify to the changes in her life. "Well, we'd been working for almost one hundred years, the kind of work those feminist women could never have imagined. All we wanted was a chance to stop working. That was our idea of liberation." " pp. 210-202
- "Abortion has charged the atmosphere of women's politics with so much hostility and fear that both sides have been blinded to their common ground." p. 239
- "Abortion has squeezed the life out of women's politics, and the only way women will regain their political apace is for abortion to disappear as a political issue. That is a less fantastic possibility than it seemed when Whitney Adams mentioned it in San Diego in the summer of 1996. Technological advances have long bolstered the cause of antiabortion advocated, turning fetuses from anonymous creatures into living beings that are photographed, recorded and loved. Parents watch video sonograms of their children months before birth, making more difficult for them, and the public, to dismiss fetuses as subhuman parasites.
But the tables are turning, as medical advances allow women to know about their pregnancies days after conception and change the very nature of the act of abortion. For more than two decades, abortion has been a public act involving physicians and clinics and insurance carriers, which is precisely what has given the antiabortion movement its power. Imagine, then, an America in which abortion truly becomes a private act. No one would be able to calculate how many pregnancies are terminated each year, and no clinics would exist that could be targeted for protests or bombings. No one would keep a list of abortion doctors because there would be no way of knowing which doctors were performing the procedure. No one could was lurid photographs of aborted fully formed fetuses, because fetuses would be aborted before they bore any resemblance to human life. This is the America of the new nonsurgical abortions. Can the abortion wars survive such a brave new world?" p. 244
- "Feminism has discredited itself with American women because it is so intent on theory that it loses touch with reality. Women's lives are messy composites of work and relationships, responsibilities, dreams and desires that don't fit neatly into theoretical straightjackets. It's easy to create a theoretical framework that proves sisterhood across class and race lines, but few black women in urban ghettos experience solidarity with the suburban matrons whose toilets they clean. It's intellectually interesting to demonstrate how the patriarchy oppresses women and gives advantage to anyone with a penis, but such theory does little to explain Margaret Thatcher, or the shabby life of the homeless man. It's theoretically consistent to argue that men and women are natural antagonists, but such antagonism gives heterosexual women little comfort when they're lonely or sick or aging.
And when women's lives refuse to fit into these ideological superstructures created on university campuses, feminism's theoreticians don't reconsider the superstructures. They set themselves up as ideology cops and demand that women reconsider their lives. But American women have achieved enough empowerment -- to use the overworked word of the nineties -- to rebel against those demands, and to treat the new police force with that peculiar admixture of contempt and dismissal Americans reserve for most self-styled authority figures.
Furthermore, while feminism has convinced many men that women deserve the Oppression Sweepstakes, the movement has convinced fewer women, who know that their husbands have miserable jobs, that they too live in terror of being laid off. The gender card doesn't work among those who refuse to be straightjacketed by gender, and women have learned enough from feminism to shrug off externally imposed straightjackets, no matter who is imposing them.
Ultimately, American women have rejected the feminist movement not merely because it has become the home of humorless carpers, but because they sense that the movement doesn't really like or respect women -- not just the fantasy of women, not just women who follow the movement's leaders like lockstep Nazis, but that broad range of people of the female persuasion who inhabit American womanhood. The movement holds women to impossibly high, and absurdly narrow, standards and gives them no credit for being able to forge their own separate peace, treating them precisely as disapproving men have been wont to do. It disparages their choices and demeans their intelligence by bemoaning most of their decision as still further evidence that they are victims of backlash.
In a world heavy with uncertainty, confusion, and outright fear, women want and need to celebrate how far they've come, even as they need tax credits and safe streets and better math classes for their children. The last thing they want, or need, is the added burden of being asked to die on the front lines in a war they believe has been largely won.
For even while women reject feminism, the movement, they have embraced the fundamental ideals of women's liberation more thoroughly than even the most idealistic feminist of the 1960s could have imagined. Equal pay for equal work, equal educational opportunities, respect and pride -- demands that seemed like dreams less than three decades ago -- are assumptions, not to mention the law, in most of the land. American women know that paradise has yet to be achieved, but they also know with full certainty that they don't live in the world of their mothers, for better and for worse. They no longer have to confine their job searches to the employment section for women in their daily newspapers. They no longer have to worry that their daughters won't be admitted to graduate school in math or physics. When American women refuse to characterize themselves as feminists, they are rejecting the terminology, not the activity, because they don't like the company they'd be keeping if they put themselves in the former category." pp. 250-252
- "Mostly, feminism's reputation suffers because it has cocooned itself in a self-protective ghetto that makes it impossible for the movement to communicate back. Much of the problem is, ultimately, a matter of social class and of regionalism. But the upshot is that few feminist leaders spend enough time with anyone who fundamentally disagrees with them to be forced to confront their own inconsistencies, or their intellectual laziness. They rarely even overhear disturbing conversations, since few even live in the same neighborhoods as their antagonists." p. 253
- "The movement arose and flourished during a moment of dizzying change, both technological and human. The American economy began reshaping itself from manufacturing and industry to service and technology, and the workforce was dragged into the shift, often kicking and screaming. Wages dropped, prices rose and families suddenly needed two incomes to finance even a middle-class standard,. At the same time, the link between sex and procreation, already weakened by the introduction of effective birth control, became increasingly strained, at least in the minds of the participants. The divorce rate, which had been rising steadily throughout most of the century, veered skyward, at the very moment that the rising number of elderly placed ever-greater demands on already shaky families.
Blowing into this dizzying mix of social and economic change came the wind of human rights, unleashed in the years after World War II. Anticolonialist movements toppled great empires, and minority groups within the seats of those empires and their sister states, brushed by the rhetoric and vision of liberation, exploded in pride and determination. In the process, the balance between individualism and community, which has shifted repeatedly throughout American history, teetered once more, as the pride and determination gradually ceded to anger and resentment that engendered, in turn, identity politics and the cult of victimhood. Those psychic changed eroded all of the nation's illusions, and a good deal of its civility. The volume was turned up on every conceivable debate as 10 million minds closed and stridency became the dominant zeitgeist of the land.
Feminism was not the least of these cosmic changes, but neither was it the greatest. Even without the movement, male-female relationships would have changed as the birthrate dropped, the institution of marriage frayed and men gained a stake in women's extrafamilial economic activities. And no movement was necessary to provoke a national schism over the nature of the family, sexual responsibility and who owes what to whom in compensation for whatever." p. 254-255
- Quoting Jenny Westberg:
" "At some point, apparently, the feminist establishment determined that they needed a great deal fewer adherents, and began systematically excommunicating one another for violating a standard of Total Philosophical Purity. Excluded (or highly suspect) groups include: prolifers; Republicans; Libertarians; conservative Democrats; members of most organized religions; stay-at-home mothers/ wives; and anyone who dissents from whatever unwritten agenda is currently in force."
So the issue is no longer whether this emerging reality is an accurate reflection of women's thinking, or how it arose, but what this reality -- a reality which cuts across class, race, and regional and generational lines -- means for American women and their politics. Dismissing it by bemoaning American women as victims of backlash, as the dupes of misogynists and a brain-washing, antifeminist media is tempting, but doing do creates a feminist nightmare, rife with contempt for women's intelligence and integrity, reeking of the sort of blithe dismissiveness with which men have traditionally treated women. And while theories about quasi-conspiracy by media, industry, and political leaders against women's advancement might be deliciously fun to contemplate, ultimately, conspiracy theories are like hot fudge sundaes -- not all that good for you. The time might still be ripe in American for countering unpleasant truths by casting aspersions on the sincerity and social consciousness of the truth makers. But shooting the messenger does not kill the message, or the fact that neither side in women's debates has a monopoly on integrity.
After spending two years talking to American women, I have come to realize that feminists need not bemoan, distance themselves or even wrack their brains trying to figure out how to reverse this new reality, for the rising visibility of conservative women and the mounting rebellion against the feminist movement are not signs that feminism has gone astray, as many conservative pundits, and many women, suggest. Rather, they are the clearest possible evidence that feminism has been successful, so successful that women no longer need to cling to one another in the type of solidarity which is inevitably a reflection of oppression. After all, even the most committed self-styled conservatives aren't pawns of powerful men trying to send women back into the kitchen. In fact, despite their antifeminist rhetoric, they are living up to the highest feminist ideals by seizing control over their own lives, by refusing to be confined or manipulated by anyone else's definitions of who or what they should be, by examining the choices open to them and following their own hearts and minds in selecting their path." pp. 256-257
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last updated Dec 1, 2000
