February 09, 2006, 8:16 a.m.
Get Over It, Girls
Women Who Make the World Worse whine.

The theme song of the modern women’s movement, “I Am Woman Hear Me Whine,” was most recently sung in two op-ed pieces in the New York Times. Judith Warner, whose book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety perfectly captured the ineffectual fretting of those disaffected women who thought their older feminist sisters had arranged for them to have it all and who now find life so darn frustrating. Maureen Dowd railed about the “ruthless” Republicans who had successfully feminized Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards, who now set their sights on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (Bear with me here and give a break to Ms. Dowd. It’s not easy stringing together random incidents in order to make a big point about the big bad GOP).

Warner explains that the desperate plight of the housewives living in “comfortable concentration camps” chronicled by the late Betty Friedan seemed like ancient history to her, until she became a mother who works part-time. You see home life hasn’t caught up with the equal opportunity women now enjoy outside the home. For mothers in particular, they can participate fully in the world of work, but at what cost? Warner asks. “And with what soul-numbing sacrifices made along the way?” She challenges her readers to think about the unfairness of her plight. “Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts away the laundry and picks up the socks in your house?” Answer: The one who cares whether dishes are piled two feet high in the sink, who hates seeing wrinkled piles of clothes on top of the dryer or dirty socks on the bedroom floor. In my house that’s me. In Warner’s view, I am living in a “gender caste system.”

Women like Warner claim the mantle of the suffragettes for their modern crusade. So women’s advocates have gone from fighting for the franchise to fretting over who wields the furniture polish.

Maureen Dowd attacks Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman for his “misogynistic attack” on Hillary Clinton because he labeled her an angry candidate. According to Dowd, this “hoary tactic” is used to dismiss a woman as “unstable and shrill.” She clearly sees what the Republican guys are up to. Obviously, they “think that men who already have nagging, bitter women in their lives will not want for president the sort of woman who gave W. a dyspeptic smile or eye-rolling appraisal during the State of the Union addresses.” I doubt it. (See above.) Men married to feminists are already in Hillary’s camp.

Dowd notes “A man who wants to undermine a woman’s arguments can ignore the substance and simply dismiss her as unstable and shrill.” A woman can, too. All the more easily when there is no substance worth refuting.

— Kate O'Beirne is the author of Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports.

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