31/3/02

Women Who Lie 

Kathryn Jean Lopez

The National Review

The empress with no clothes: Women's Studies.

Maybe you have a daughter who has decided to major in "women's studies" in college. Or it's your neighbor's kid, your roommate, whoever. You might figure it's a fairly benign discipline — "the study of women's contributions to and involvement in culture, politics, and literature throughout history," as one woman told me when I asked for a quick definition.

But enter the world of women's studies and you'll find a whole different reality. Its goal is to "transform knowledge." And there's nothing harmless about it.

In a study published by the Independent Women's Forum, "Lying in a Room of One's Own: How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students," Christine Stolba, a senior fellow with IWF, peeks into the classrooms — and primary texts — of the revolution. Stolba's treatment is not a worst-of list of outrages. It's something far more disturbing.

Stolba analyzes five core women's studies textbooks. You might expect that the texts of women's studies professionals might be a little more inventive — even, say, more reasonable — than the average feminist's talking points. Think again. After all, where else would they get the talking points? The wage gap. The glass ceiling. Ailing women's health. Poor grade-school girls ignored in the classroom. You name it, it's probably there. There's not one serious look at the extant body of work that debunks most of their reigning mythology. In other words, it's an entire discipline with its facts fundamentally wrong.

You might think it would be considered a good thing for women to be independent thinkers, especially among the college-educated sisters. Nah. As Stolba tells NRO, "What surprised me the most about the textbooks was the nearly universal absence of points of view (and often facts) that might undermine the theme that women remain victims of patriarchal societies."

Here's a sampling of from one of the texts, as Stolba documents in her study:

Margaret L. Andersen's Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender begins by warning readers that, although many people "conclude that women now have it made," in fact "women college graduates who worked full time earned, on average, 70 percent of what men college graduates earned"; and "despite three decades of policy change to address gender inequality at work, women and minorities are still substantially blocked from senior management positions in most U.S. companies." Later, Andersen calls it a "social myth" that women are achieving economic parity with men.

Women's Realities, Women Choices offers a similar assessment: "If we work for pay, we tend to work in gender segregated sectors of the economy… and to receive less wages than men in comparable jobs." The textbook further notes that "women earn less and have fewer opportunities for choice and advancement than men. In 1890, a woman earned 46 cents for every dollar a man earned. A century later, we still earn only 69 cents."

Though it's nothing new for feminists to downplay the role of women's familial choices in consideration of their career realities, these texts fail to note the prominent female critics of their claims. June O'Neill, recent head of the Congressional Budget Office, is only one of many who have long since debunked the "wage gap" whining. Nor do the women's studies cadres care that "equal pay for equal work" is the law of the land, thanks to the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

But then, of course — as Stolba notes — "equal pay for equal work" is not good enough. They want "comparable worth," that is, "centralized wage-setting based on categories of comparable skill levels." One wonders how these scholars propose to engage in a successful public-policy debate when they are incapable even of recognizing that they have legitimate opponents, with data and arguments of their own.

Wonder what the next generation of professional feminists are learning about men? In a section decrying the supposed lack of funding for women's health (you guessed it, filled with junk facts), one of the textbooks weasels out of acknowledging the disparities suffered by men, instead noting what's really sick: masculinity itself.

Mortality differences between men and women are determined by men's greater risk of death by accident… [but this is] itself a function of men's engagement in risky behavior, violent activity, and alcohol consumption.

Men — those damn uncontrollable drunk brutes! There are students getting degrees in this stuff.

All the subjective drama and lies that are fit to print go into making up some of these women's studies textbooks. How's this for an intro to coursework, from Thinking About Women:

Perhaps at school you see that most of the professors are men... or perhaps you notice that women are concentrated in the lowest-level jobs and are sometimes treated as if they were not even there. It may occur to you one night as you are walking through city streets that the bright lights shining in the night skyline represent the thousands of women — many of them African-American, Latina, or Asian American — who clean the corporate suites and offices for organizations that are dominated by White men.

And there's lots more drama where that came from. Try describing women in America today as slaves. From Issues in Feminism, another one of the texts:

An even more perfected form of slavery was one in which the slaves were unaware of their condition, unaware that they were controlled, believing instead that they had freely chosen their life and situation. The control of women by patriarchy is effected in just such a way, by mastery of beliefs and attitudes through the management of all the agencies of belief formation.

Coming from a loudmouth feminist talk-show host, this wouldn't be a big deal. It can even be expected from the typical "national organization of women" type lobbyist now guaranteed a seat at virtually every negotiation table in Washington. But this is the foundation of a serious academic discipline?

It is now.

Stolba found many more myths — and downright lies — while educating herself about the science of womenhood: concerning homosexuality, domestic violence, daughters and fathers (dad = a "foreign male element" who comes between you and fellow sister mom), and more.

And, unless the realities of motherhood manage to change them, as has happened with some of their foremothers, this could very well be an endless cycle. Talk about a cycle of violence — against reality. According to Stolba, when it comes to our most important institutions — marriage and motherhood — the former is viewed "with unwarranted suspicion and the latter as a burden to be overcome."

These women's studies textbooks ignore a body of work that has highlighted the ways women benefit from marriage — physically as well as mentally. But then, these books are also written by women who clearly must simply hate the concept. Yet another example of Stolba's findings, from Women's Realities, Women's Choices:

The institutions of marriage and the role of "wife" are intimately connected with the subordination of women in society ion general. It is the constraints on women to engage freely in various social activities, whether in sexual intercourse, economic exchanges, politics, or war, that make us "dependent " on men, that oblige us to become "wives."

"Remember that revolutions often wind up devouring their own children," Stolba warns. Seeing what the children of this revolution believe and what they're feeding their ideological daughters, perhaps that might be best.