Conservative Spokeswomen Claim Radical Feminism Has Hurt America
by Chad Groening and Bill Fancher
February 8, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative editor and television panelist says her new book attempts to warn Americans that feminism is alive and well in contemporary society, where it has produced catastrophic results. Kate O'Beirne is the Washington editor of National Review magazine. She has served as a panelist on CNN's "Capital Gang," and her recently published book is called Women Who Make the World Worse and How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports (Penguin/Sentinel, 2005).
O'Beirne says the modern women's movement "flies under this false flag," with its champions claiming, "Oh, we only believe in equal pay for equal work. We never denigrated men and marriage, we don't support quotas." However, the author insists, "None of that is true."
By quoting "the influential feminists who are active now -- the academics, the theorists, the activists -- in their own words," O'Beirne explains, she hopes to help others "appreciate what the [feminist] agenda is and the effect that these ideas have had on our institutions."
According to the conservative writer, far too many Americans think of feminism as a spent force, or as a movement that died with the Equal Rights Amendment 30 years ago. "It sounds so 1970s to talk about feminism," she observes, "and yet the point of the book is, that's not true. Destructive feminist premises have enormous influence in our schools, in our universities, in the military, in Congress, in our culture -- and too few people appreciate that."
O'Beirne says her book Women Who Make the World Worse exposes the truth about major feminist figures like Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Meanwhile, another feminist icon who passed away this past weekend is being lionized by the mainstream media.
Liberal feminist tributes to The Feminist Mystique author Betty Friedan have appeared throughout the press in recent days. However, many conservative women have nothing good to say about what she fostered. In fact, Michele Bernard, senior vice president of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), says Friedan's book actually changed the women's movement for the worse.
As a result, the legacy of 20th century feminism is a mindset that "is not only failing women but it is failing the American family," Bernard contends. "So much that the early suffragettes and the early feminists did we are so thankful for; but then feminism sort of got broken, so to speak."
"Thanks to Friedan and her followers, modern feminism today bears little resemblance to the original feminist movement," the IWF spokeswoman maintains. True feminism, she insists, promoted the individual rights of all human beings, without forcing anyone into a pre-designed mold.
"Organizations like the National Organization for Women [N.O.W.] started putting forth this philosophy and ideology that in order for women to be equal you needed to oppress men," Bernard says. "And now what we are seeing is that boys and men are not doing as well as women."
According to Bernard, the modern feminist movement has taught that for women to be equal, men had to be oppressed. She says radical feminists' dissemination of this kind of ideology has thrown American society into upheaval.
Chad Groening and Bill Fancher, regular contributors to AgapePress, are reporters for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
