Congratulations, Dr. Schlafly!
A correspondent who asked to remain anonymous sent me an e-mail, (bottom of this post) which they found on a listserv somewhere. Seems some of the radfems have their panties in a bunch because Washington University in St. Louis will be awarding an honorary degree (doctor of humane letters) to Phyllis Schlafly.
Although the writer claims to be a “growing academic,” whatever that is, I can fully understand her “great unease at what message this sends to our own undergraduates, both men and women, about women’s role in academics (and beyond).”
The way I see it, Washington University is sending a clear message that the time when the hate messages of feminism, allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged for decades, is over. This is a public announcement that halls of academia are once again, a place where ideas of all kinds can and should be examined.
It may well be that the feminist writing the e-mail, who is currently employed as a teacher of “Introduction to Women and Gender Studies” will need to think about looking for a real job in the not-too-distant future, and perhaps she realizes her experience in that program qualifies her for very little in the real world. Or maybe she’s not prepared to defend her little ideology in grownup discussion. Either way, you can be sure her concern is entirely selfish.
There are very few people alive today, who’ve had the stamina, the nerve, and the longevity of Phyllis Schlafly in fighting the soulless, anti-human movement called feminism over the past 30+ years. She recognized long before anyone else, that it was not about rights, not about equality, but about reducing the human experience to the lowest possible common denominator. Feminism is only a small part of the larger Marxist intention to manipulate and control the masses, for the benefit of a few.
The life work of Phyllis Schlafly has been hardly anti-woman. She has inspired many thousands of women over the years to make their own informed choices, based on the realities of their lives and the needs of their loved ones. She has recognized the value of women as essential partners in their families and communities, and taught them to embrace maturity and responsibility. (That maurity and responsibilty part is what really bugs feminists ;>)
An honorary degree from her hometown university is but a portion of the accolades Mrs. Schlafly deserves.
I’d encourage everyone to use the e-mails provided by the “growing academic” to congratulate the Chancellor and Board of Trustees of Washington University for their willingness to adapt to the times and re-open their doors to diversity of ideas.
As you may be aware, anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly is to be awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Washington University in St. Louis at the spring commencement ceremony (see http://record.wustl.edu/).
Many faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates (including a Facebook group of over 800 undergrads) have already expressed their dismay (to phrase it politely) at Washington University’s decision, and despite calls for rescinding this invitation to Ms. Schlafly, the Chancellor has of yet indicated he does not intend to yield.
As a female graduate student, an instructor of Women and Gender Studies, and as a growing academic, and I am sure you can understand my own disappointment, embarrassment, and disgust at this decision and my great unease at what message this sends to our own undergraduates, both men and women, about women’s role in academics (and beyond).
As I am teaching Introduction to Women and Gender Studies again next semester, I was wondering how to make this a teaching moment and include Schlalfy on my syllabus (I haven’t included her in my American Women’s History section before). Are there suggestions for excerpts/readings that would be concise, yet representative of her work, or would help teach and intro to the anti-feminist movements esp of the 1950-80’s? You can
email me [email address removed] Any suggestions would be appreciated.
In addition, if you feel, as I have, the need to voice your concern over this decision, please direct email to Chancellor Wrighton:
wrighton@wustl.edu and cc the Board of Trustees Secretary
ida_early@wustl.edu and coordinator Jane_Stone@wustl.edu.
I am hopeful that increased pressure will help convince the Chancellor that the consequences for the University of honoring such a person’s anti-woman life-work are too great not to rescind.
Note from Trudy:
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17 comments
How do you square Schlafly’s philosophy that a woman’s place is in the home caring for a husband and family with the fact that she spent half her married life away from home on the lecture circuit?
Willow, respectfully: before Trudy should be required to "square" that, the onus is on you to demonstrate that you have accurately portrayed Mrs. Schlafly’s philosophy.
One can be a working wife and mother and still not agree with the "philosophies" espoused by modern feminisim. We need look no further than Trudy for an example.
It’s not entirely clear to me that Schlafley’s position could be best characterized by "a woman’s place is in the home caring for a husband and family." But I’m not a regular or avid follower, so maybe it is. It doesn’t sound right based on the few things I’ve read by her and the few times I’ve heard her speak.
I more than agree, Martin, although I wonder what you mean when you put ‘philosophies’ in quotes…whether you are not dismissing feminism in the same way you think I’ve dismissed Schlafly.
Schlafly has stated on many occasions that a woman finds the greatest fulfillment from her home and family. But she’s away from hers at least once a week. (Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945990,00.html) In one of her columns, she talks about the multiple benefits of housework for women, but neglects to mention that she herself employs a fulltime housekeeper. (Source: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2004/apr04/04-04-21.html)
Ironically I agree with Schlafly’s central premise: the idea that kids do better with one full-time, stay-at-home parent. However, she’s totally out of date–in today’s economy the average family can’t survive on a single income…it can barely survive on two. It’s not a matter of selfish women going to work and neglecting their kids–I’m sure a lot of women would prefer to stay home but can’t due to economic pressures. She’s catering to the rich and making the poor feel bad for having to live under different circumstances.
That to me looks like hypocrisy.
In August 2008, Phyllis Schafly will be 84 years of age.
So obviously, she is catering to the rich and making the poor feel bad.
May God bless Women and Gender Studies.
willow,
Your premise is flawed. People all over the world survive on much less then the kind of American family you are talking about. [And it was feminism itself that got women out of their homes and created the “2 income family trap” !] Americans demand a very high lifestyle, feminist influenced women abandon their children to daycare and work to find "self fulfillment". Thankfully earlier generations weren’t so bent on "self fulfillment" or many of us wouldn’t be here.
So much of what people "require" is keeping up with the Joneses. Let people put their children first, have Mommy stay home and be honored for it, live lower and, as a side benefit, with most women out of the work force, breadwinning men might get paid more to boot!
G-d bless Phyillis Schafly for having to guts to defend people against the raging feminists.
PS -
And if you should ask - what about single mothers etc , well, let’s change the no fault divorce laws. The partner that wants a no fault divorce walks away with nothing and none of the children. [To obtain sole custody or joint custody or child support, fault must be demonstrated.] Then we’ll have a lot fewer single mothers.
Really? You think a family of four can survive, after taxes and with mortgages and rising costs of fuel and food, on a single salary of, say, $40,000? That’s about what someone working in an automotive plant would make.
Does anyone commenting here live in what they would qualify as acceptable conditions (adequate food, medical care and education) on that much?
And just as a side note, Detroit, I’ve spent the last five years living in Africa–for a couple of those years on about $5 a day. So I know a little about living on a single income in circumstances far below the average 2 income American family–the result being a constant battle against intestinal parasites, vitamin deficiencies, and scrambling for basic necessities like shoes. Don’t get me wrong, this is totally normal in a lot of countries around the world, and people don’t complain about it–but would you? One survives, but it’s hardly preferable to a second income and a healthy body…
And McK, what on earth does age have to do with one’s prejudices?
willow,
I think there is a middle ground between African poverty and American standards. We lived on my 40K income while we had 3, 4 and 5 kids. It was difficult but it was certainly possible.
And McK, what on earth does age have to do with one’s prejudices ?
Willow, obviously at the age of 83 she ought not employ anyone to do the housework.
What a bitch ? Or have you not reduced her entire life to like six sentences ?
Now of course she’s out of date.
Cool.
Willow,
There’s a very large gap, though, between that subsistence living in Africa and a two-income lifestyle. Somewhere in that gap, many people manage to successfully find a one-income lifestyle with no intestinal parasites or vitamin deficiencies and adequate shoes. I’m not saying anyone is morally obligated to live more simply; and I’m certainly not saying everyone has that choice; but simple and healthy living is available to many people who think they have "no choice".
To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t grow up in poverty. We were just working class. Dad was a blue-collar factory guy his whole life, with a major drop in income in the mid-70s when his plant shut down. Oh, our house was pretty large, allowing six people the luxury of four bedrooms. (No, that didn’t say one thing or another about our wealth. Mom and Dad built that house, over two decades, and spent three decades paying those outrageous $80 house payments. There were parts that were only finally finished the month before they sold it.) But the newest car we ever owned was seven years old when we bought it. I can scarcely remember a time when one of the two family cars or the utility truck or the tractor wasn’t in the garage for repair; and that meant our garage, with Dad and sons working to the wee hours to get transportation running in time for work and school. When the cars didn’t need repair, Dad was repairing something else: fixing the furnace or the water pump, mending fences, clearing drain fields, fixing wiring, replacing shingles, whatever. On all but the auto or plumbing or electrical work, Mom was right there doing the work with him. We "went out" (McDonald’s) maybe once a month. Our vacations, when we could afford them, were a week in a rustic campsite in the UP. We planted a garden, along with grapevines and strawberry beds and berry trees, and harvested them all diligently. Mom canned and pickled and preserved. Food from a box was possible, but food from the freezer or the canning shelf was just as likely. We raised our own beef a couple of years, until Mom got tired of chasing cows that were too stupid to stop for a fence. Pop (soda for those of you who aren’t from Michigan) was a sure sign that there was a party coming, and you didn’t see parties more than maybe four times per year. Candy meant you had been very good all week, and then you only got a small amount. For a treat, you went to the pickle crock: a big earthenware crock in the cold room, filled with last year’s cucumbers that had soaked in the brine all winter. Or maybe you pulled a potato or a carrot from the cold room and washed it and bit into it raw. (Me likey them pickles and potatoes and carrots!) We had a black & white TV (color only after I was 12 or so), but all the books we could handle. The one thing Mom and Dad never skimped on was buying anything we wanted to read. I may not have had pop in the house, but I just assumed everybody had the Encyclopedia Britannica (purchased one volume every month for nearly three years) to browse through for hours on end. (And it was the real Britannica, thank you very much! By age 5, I knew that the red "junior" books were for kids, and I wanted the grown up information.) We also had a pool, because Mom’s oldest brother drowned when she was young, and she was determined all us kids would learn to swim like fishes. And, luxury of luxuries, we had horses! And cats, and a dog or two; but to my brother and sister — and now to my wife — "horse" meant "home". That also meant buying a barn full of hay once, sometimes twice a year, with the whole family taking a day to pick it up off the field, stick it on the wagon, haul it to the barn, and then pitch it into the loft. (Oh, for the days when I could throw 50 pound bales across an 8 foot gap!)
Would I want to live like that today? Heck, no! I like my six cans of pop a day. I like the variety I get in different restaurants. I like my sporty red 2005 Mazda 3. I like my computers and my DVD player and my T-Mobile Dash. I like the fact that my wife can have all the horses she can care for. (But boy, I hope we hit the limit soon!)
But growing up, I almost never felt deprived. Once in a while the "rich" kids had some toy I was envious of, but the envy never lasted very long. (Somehow, the toys I really couldn’t get over would show up at Christmas or birthday time.) So when I see a family who has "no choice" but to have two incomes to "get by", and then I see one or two late model cars, multiple TVs with DVD players, gaming consoles, small stacks of DVDs and games, waste baskets full of fast food trash, cell phones, and more, I don’t call that "getting by". I don’t begrudge people the choice to live that way, but I do see it as a choice.
Now some people have less choice than others, granted. If you’re low income in the city, it’s hard to put in a half-acre garden, and pretty much impossible to raise a cow. If you never learned canning and preserving and just simple, basic cooking skills, then you don’t know how to stretch the food budget. If you never learned auto repair skills (despite years of Dad trying to yell them into me, the skills never took, in my case) or just can’t keep up with the new computerized systems, then a later model car will make more sense. If your job has you on the road a lot, then a cell phone moves from luxury to necessity.
But I know families of four living on less than $40,000. They live about the same life I grew up with, to one degree or another. They decided that their life choices are more important than some the luxuries they’re missing.
I have to admit, my family was living on my one income, and by world standards we were fabulously wealthy living on a single middle class wage. We had our own living quarters, two beat up but usable cars, electricity, and food. Yet the stress of this was more than I could bear. Economic insecurity was a constant.
"Self-fulfillment" isn’t the reason a lot of women work. Indeed, it strikes me as almost mythological to think that there was ever a time when women never worked out of the home.
From reading Schlafley–and again, I’m not encyclopedic on her by any means–it seems to me that she opposed the ERA because she believed it would take privileges away from women (a strong argument that most women found convincing, by the way), and she had great pride in being a homemaker, but didn’t think working part time while the kids are in school, or working before having kids or after they left the home, was objectionable.
That’s my impression.
Dean,
I agree. If a woman works part time outside of the home to get a break from the home, that’s ok. If she is truly forced to work full time, and she still has her priorities straight, that’s tough but that’s life. But when women happily leave the home in droves and call it normal and daycare a fine replacement for Mommy then we get what we have now. Women who don’t even want more than one kid. The real point is, what do women consider their career - nurturing their family or being a (lawyer, editor etc).
McK: Agreed. And the 20+ years she had school-age children and a working husband? What’s your outraged excuse for that?
Dean and Martin,
We agree on the premise that kids (and the working parent) benefit immeasurably from a stay-at-home parent. But I don’t think buying DVD players and late-model cars (which I also agree are extravagant) are necessarily everyone’s goal with a second income. They probably are for a lot of people–ie there are probably many families that prove your point–but what about to save for the children’s college educations? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to to–be less reliant on the government for loans and scholarships–and find ways to pay for things ourselves? I say this because this is why my parents both worked when I was growing up (during which time I wasn’t even allowed to watch much television, let alone play expensive video games), and I was one of the only people I knew to graduate from college debt-free. That gift was, to me, beyond price, because it let me pursue a career I loved instead of having to be shuttled into something I hated just to pay for school.
My mother would have preferred to stay home with us–she’s told us that on many occasions. But I’m grateful for what she gave me by choosing to work. What I’m saying here is that extremes are unhelpful…we shouldn’t pretend there’s never any reason for a woman to work, just as we should never demonize the necessary and wonderful work stay-at-home moms do.
I don’t think we disagree at all on any of that, Willow. As it happens I’m the first in my family to ever get a college degree, and I didn’t get it until near 40. And getting it damn near killed me. There’s no way I’ll even have time to save money for my kids’ education.
If the subject is Schlafley, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if she actually had a response to her critics, like, "I stayed at home most of the time, and being a political activist was only part time for me." Which is quite believable I think. I mean, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me that writing a syndicated column and making occasional speaking and television appearances, and running a non-profit organization out of your house, are at all inconsistent with trying to be a stay-at-home mom.
Again I’m not trying to be Schlafley’s advocate here, because maybe there’s more here than I am aware of, but it doesn’t strike me that I’ve ever read or heard her saying women should never work, that all women must and should be full-time homemakers with kids. I know vanishingly few people who think that way at all, including an awful lot of very culturally conservative people.
And sometimes the economics of two incomes just won’t work. Around where I live, decent childcare is as much or more per hour as my hourly wage, so it literally makes no sense for me to go back to work full-time once the kid comes. (I am, however, going to be doing part-time work, primarily through telecommuting, because my temperament is going to be the better for me getting out. Plus I have local grandparents who want to look after the kid once a week.)
So I’ll be staying home. On the other hand, my eldest sister has a job where the commisions push her income into the six figures, and her older child is in school, so it makes sense for her to take the second income. (Hers is the second even though she may be making more than her husband; his is the more stable job.)
Anyway. When we decided to have kids, my husband was very tentative about bringing up the idea that I was going to be the stay-at-home parent. This in spite of the fact that we’ve been married for years and all; I am still a little bemused by the idea that I might somehow be offended by being put in the position of homemaker. Especially since he’s the one that ended up with a career to follow to various locations.
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