Heather Mac Donald brilliantly skewers the federal lawsuit against Yale for supposedly permitting a hostile educational climate for women. What is puzzling, though, is why the women who are offended by frat boy antics don’t see the real cause of the problem — sexual liberation and the erasure of all restraints, not only on the Yale campus but throughout the popular culture; and, even more, feminism. The feminists have deliberately torn down all the traditional codes of gentility and have further insisted that women are the equal and the same of men in every regard, any sign of disparity being due only to male barbarity or societal injustice, both of which they demand that government address.

The reason that younger women don’t blame feminism for the chaos and perversity around them is the lingering belief that feminism has had a good side. Feminism is the reason they have more freedom and opportunity than women in the past, or so the feminist scenario has brainwashed us to think. Even powerful critics of feminism such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Kay Hymowitz evidently continue to maintain the idea of a good or moderate feminism that we should uphold, despite the fact that the radical element governs more and more of our lives, often shielded by the very idea of the good feminism that supposedly exists alongside it.

But in a new book, Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Volker are finally willing and able to call feminism in all its forms a problem in and of itself. The authors point to other factors, such as labor-saving devices, that have had more to do with freeing women than anything the feminists have done. Apart from the arguments of this eminently readable book, one could also note the irony in believing that a system of government like ours, based on the highest regard for natural right, and properly revered as the last best hope of mankind, required the addition of a resentful, hysterical, small-minded, man-hating movement to achieve the simplest form of progress, inevitable anyway given smaller families, greater prosperity, increased education, and so forth. Believing that is tantamount to accepting the whole of the quasi-Marxist leftist indictment of our society as consisting of oppressors and oppressed, where power is not derived from the people but has to be wrest from an ascendant class. Freeing ourselves from that falsity would be freedom indeed.