News flash: Women are leaving the workplace in droves to become
full-time mothers.
Two years ago Karen Hughes resigned as counselor to President Bush to go
back to Texas and spend time with her family. In response, New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd ridiculed Karen Hughes' exercise of free
choice: "Women will never get anywhere in this boys' administration, or
this boys' town, or this boys' world, if they're going to sacrifice
prime West Wing real estate every time their husbands and kids kvetch."
Not to ruin your day, Ms. Dowd, but Karen Hughes is not an aberration.
According to the recent March 22 cover story in Time magazine, the
percentage of married mothers with children under one who are in the
workforce fell from 59% in 1997 to 53% in 2000. And among women with
graduate or professional degrees, 22% are staying at home with their
kids. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 10% of the firm's female partners work
part-time.
This trend was confirmed in an article last October in the NY Times
Magazine which reported that only 38% of middle-aged female graduates
from Harvard Business School are now working full-time. Overall,
one-fourth to one-third of professionally-educated women are out of the
workforce.
Most people would explain this trend with the common-sense response that
the women's maternal instinct kicked in. As Joan Williams of American
University put it, women don't reach the top of the corporate ladder
because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''
But to radical feminists, that statement is heresy. To them, "maternal
instinct" is repugnant to everything they stand for.
Because to feminists, "equality" is not about equal opportunity or equal
choices. Instead, feminists believe that 50% (at least) of all elected
officials, 50% of all corporate CEOs, 50% of all Nobel prize winners,
50% of everything must be female. Anything short of that should be
blamed on patriarchal oppression.
To achieve that goal, feminists must pretend that there are no
biological or psychological differences between the sexes.
Think about it: If the Sisterhood admitted to the possibility of the
maternal instinct, then it would have to agree that women might want to
leave the workforce to nurture their offspring.
Then feminists would have to admit that women will never compose 50% of
the workforce. Next they would have to concede that the reason why
women's wages fall short of men's is because women drop out of the labor
market for years at a time. And when they do return, these women seldom
seek out the high-paying, pressure-cooker jobs that men as primary
breadwinners may feel compelled to take on.
And as you can see, the entire feminist ideology would soon unravel. So
why does the Sisterhood demand this unattainable notion of statistical
equality?
The answer is Marxism.
The Marxist creed preaches the utopian goal of absolute economic and
social equality. But human nature rebels against enforced sameness.
Which is why socialist governments inevitably resort to totalitarian
measures.
Go to the Women and Marxism
website,
and you can easily trace the unbroken line that begins with Karl Marx,
Frederick Engels, and Karl's youngest daughter Eleanor. Then read the
proto-feminist speeches and writings of Vladimir Lenin and his wife
Nadezhada, of Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung.
Scan Shulamith Firestone's 1972 book, The Dialectic of Sex, and see how
she took the Marxist theories and translated them into the shrill
rhetoric that permeates modern-day feminism.
Examine the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, and see how
these feminist icons freely and openly advocate socialist concepts. Then
peruse David
Horowitz's exposé about Betty Friedan's secret Communist
past.
The fem-socialist attempt to impose absolute statistical equality on the
sexes is doomed to failure. In any contest that pits human nature
against social ideology, it's women's maternal instinct that will always
win out.
