Phyllis Schlafly Lifts the Veil on Feminist Fantasies By Georgia Pellegrini May 21, 2003 It is time for women to stop waltzing to the tune of victim-hood and acknowledge the reality of women in America.

Phyllis Schlafly with MassNews's Georgia Pellegrini

Alexis de Tocqueville once said, "I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position ...[and] if I were asked ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women."

This was Phyllis Schlafly's message last month, a wisdom that she has imparted to women for the last forty years. Schlafly, the mother of the conservative movement, spoke to an overflow audience at Wellesley College during a lecture entitled "Feminism vs. Conservatism: the Great Debate." The lecture, organized by the Wellesley College Republicans, was broadcast to every dorm across the campus and an additional lecture hall, drawing out of state audience members and media types from across Massachusetts.

"Feminism doesn't have anything to do with whether you're a career woman, a wife or mother, whether you're successful or unsuccessful, rich or poor, white or black. It only has to do with your attitude toward life. And attitude is what can give you a happy life or an unhappy life. And if you stew around making yourself a victim, you're probably not going to be happy.Feminism leads women to believe that their own selfish self-fulfillment is what's most important."

Schlafly is best known for her ten-year battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment that she asserted was an attempt to "abolish all of the differences between men and women." and turn a sex neutral Constitution into a feminized one. The push for the Equal Rights Amendment and other movements led by the sixties feminist radicals, would ultimately lead the country into the dreamy fog of "Feminist Fantasies," the title of Schafly's new book. During her lecture last month, Schlafly carefully laid out four such fantasies that she believes the feminist movement has tried to promulgate as truths.

The first is that a constitutional amendment is going to solve their problem. Recent legislation in the UN known as CEDAW (The Convention on Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women) is the most recent attempt to feminize law. Worse than the ERA, its aim is to enforce gender neutrality onto all legislation concerning marriage and other traditional customs and practices.

The second fantasy holds that women are victims, a repressed minority. Those who would believe this - the Gloria Steinems of our day - embrace an "ideology of victimology." Being born female is, according to the radical feminist thinker, a handicap. Shafly disagrees. "The American women are the most fortunate class of people who have ever lived on the face of the earth!" she declared pointing to the status of women in other countries. To bolster her point she pointed to statistics on occupational deaths every year in America to illustrate that, by and large, women in America have the resources in their own homes and the privilege of not having to work at hazardous jobs if they do not want to. The firemen lost in the World Trade Center were a perfect example she noted, where 343 firemen died compared to 0 firewomen.

This brought Ms. Schlafly to the third feminist fantasy: namely that there is more fulfillment in the workforce reporting to a boss than at home with a husband and child. A prime example of women's oppression in America, according to the feminists, is that they have to care for their babies. American society has been browbeaten into believing that perhaps they must lift such a burden off women's backs and delegate childcare to government-run daycare. Schlafly points out that the severe consequences of such a system on the lives of infants and children have now been carefully documented, although, not surprisingly, conspicuously ignored by much of the media.

The fourth fantasy is that women do not have a biological clock. Many sixties feminists who today are past child bearing age, have suddenly come out and spoken of the horrible "scientific discovery" that women do indeed have a biological clock. With no small regret they found they had become too old to have children before they realized the immutable reality of nature. "Was your ideology worth the empty womb?" asked one forlorn feminist, Ann Taylor Flemming.

"I went to law school after I was fifty, but I'm mighty glad that I didn't try to have my six children after I was fifty. It doesn't work that way," said Schlafly.

Schlafly's central message is that women today should look ahead and plan their lives realistically because they cannot have it all as the feminists have so loudly advertised. The truth is simply different. According to the Wall Street Journal, 52% of successful women are divorced or unmarried compared to only 5 % of men. Moreover, says Schlafly, feminism is just not compatible with happiness:

It is no surprise that the feminist movement is having "an identity crisis." It lacks successful, happy role models. Indeed the old role models - Friedan and Steinem - still try to sustain their dying cause by proferring the notion that someone "has dealt women a fowl blow by rendering them female." In truth says Schlafly, all that these women have left are their scrap books from old rallies, while Schlafly has photo albums of her fourteen grandchildren. "Family and children are the way to our future," she emphasized.