The Timelessness of Phyllis Schlafly

At 90 and counting, a feminine conservative icon is sharper than feminists who are half her age, particularly the ones who teach in college.  ““What they do is make women believe they are victims of the patriarch, and they are trying to abolish the patriarchy,” Schlafly told Anne Reed of the AFA Journal. “That is ridiculous.”

As it happens, seven years ago, this writer covered an English professor from Brigham Young University, Valerie Hegstrom, who told an appreciative crowd of her peers from across the country: “When people ask me how I can stand it, I say that I believe in striking out in the heart of the patriarchy.”

But let’s leave the ridiculous and go back to the sublime. Schafly told Reed that women in America “can do whatever they want in this country.” Nevertheless, “They are also taught that women shouldn’t be responsible for taking care of their own children, that it is a demeaning occupation and isn’t worth the time of an educated woman.”  Indeed, the president of the United States echoed similar sentiments recently.

“Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result,” he said on Halloween. “And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”

“The results of a 2012 survey of modern American mothers by ForbesWoman and TheBump.com are surprisingly inconsistent with the prevailing feminist view,” Reed writes. “Eighty-four percent of working women said they consider staying home to raise children a financial luxury to which they aspire.”

“Additionally, more than one in three women actually resent their partners for not earning enough to make their dream a reality.”

Schlafly also asserted that “The breakup of the family has resulted in the current welfare state. If a woman has children without a husband to support her, where does she go? To big brother government.”

As it happens, those who actually administer welfare and aren’t blinded by the process of it come to conclusions remarkably similar to Schlafly’s. “When I think of the war on women, this is the real war on women—births to single mothers,” Maura Corrigan, director o fthe Michigan Department of Human Services, said last month at the regional meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Grand Rapids.

“ Where did we go wrong?” she rhetorically asked a crowd of a couple of more than a hundred conservatives. “ We went wrong when we made the government the husband,”  Corrigan said.

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