Conservative Women Celebrate Women's History by Criticizing Feminism
LatestIn a panel presentation Monday entitled “Women’s History Month: Evaluating Feminism, Its Failures, and Its Future,” Karin Agness of the Network for enlightened Women, conservative columnist Mona Charen and Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist discussed the state of women in America. We’ve come a long way baby, but it’s not thanks to the work of feminist women and men.
Agness spent time discussing how excluded she felt by feminists when she was in college, articulating that the government should be focused on “what women really want, not just trying to achieve parity in numbers,” and suggesting that we should be teaching women in the workforce to develop “a thick skin” instead of “Banning Bossy.” “Despite the failures of feminism today,” she said, “[women] have been tremendously successful in elections.”
“I don’t celebrate women’s history month,” said Charen when it was her turn to talk. “I don’t care. It doesn’t interest me whether a person who happens to share my chromosomes sits in the Oval Office, it doesn’t interest me how many woman members of the senate there are – none of that is important to me.”
What is important to Charen: love, sex, family, career, community, women, men and children. The fact that feminists only care about women’s success in terms of “women’s marketplace performance.” How Sheryl Sandberg has become our nation’s “part-time national scold, who is bossing us around by telling us we can not use the term bossy about little girls.” She called the glass-ceiling a “supposed barrier” and said feminists and the Obama Administration often use “much debunked statistics” to argue their points. She talked about how the decline of marriage has ruined society, how feminism has made it so that women can go to college, hook up with men and get date raped, how they’re being taught that they don’t need men and how that’s wrong because we should all rely on each other. Most blasphemous was this quote: “To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, women need feminism like a fish needs a bicycle.”
“It’s such a sad message that the biggest thing to come out of Women’s History Month was this ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign,” said Hemingway when it was her turn to talk about facts. “It’s humiliating as a female to be part of the group that came up with that,” before blaming American feminists for not caring more about women around the world who are suffering. This would be, by the way, the last time she would mention of women around the world; she’d continue to speak about how she and her husband talk all the time about how they wish they’d gotten married earlier. “If you care about income inequality at all, you basically have to care about marriage,” said Hemingway, implying that if all low-income people got married, their troubles would be instantly solved.
“We have a lot of the same numbers that appeal to us,” said Charen with a small laugh after Agness spoke, addressing the fact that all three panelists used the same small subset of studies to back up their claims. The only good thing about this panel is not only was full of inaccurate conservative spin, it was an utterly boring hour of talk that seemed to focus overwhelmingly on the Ban Bossy campaign. “It does sort of say something when you are down at the level of banning adjectives that you have sort of exhausted what you set out to do,” said Hemingway. Yes, let’s all stop now.