FEMINIST FANTASIES

by Phyllis Schlafly

Spence, 2003 264 pages, $27.95

To order: (888) 773-6782 or www.spencepublishing.com

Feminism, it would seem, is collapsing from self-inflicted wounds. Today's generation of young women reject not only the lesbianism and abortion advocacy that characterize hard-core feminism but also the cost to their own happiness it threatens to extract for its goals. Young women crave what they know feminists scorn: loving marriages and fulfilling family life.

Though feminism has done much damage to men and children, it has hurt no one more than women themselves. Phyllis Schlafly details how in her new book, a compilation of columns selected from 30 years as feminism's No. 1 enemy. Schlafly doesn't jest, shock or exaggerate. On topic after topic — from the “wage gap” to women's studies programs, from pornography to family violence — she drives home her points with a battery of facts that simply cannot be argued away.

One of the most enlightening entries is the 1972 column that launched the successful movement, led by Schlafly, against the Equal Rights Amendment. “What's Wrong With Equal Rights for Women?” answers the feminist “woe-isme” lament about the raw deal done to American women with multiple examples of why we are, in fact, blessed among women. Schlafly points out that, in other civilizations, men hunt and fish and dress in feathers and beads while the women do all the hard physical chores, from tilling soil to carrying water. By contrast, “In America, a man's first significant purchase (after a car) is a diamond for his bride, and the largest financial investment of his life is a home for her to live in.”

In 1998 Spence released another book on feminism, a tour de force titled Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism, by lawyer F. Carolyn Graglia, who made the case that feminism's true target was never men but rather the happily married housewife. Many of Schlafly's articles echo this theme, making both books essential for navigating today's discussion on the brave new family.

While radical feminism has few new followers, this book soberly makes clear it has made its mark on culture. Consider that Schlafly herself stopped the ERA in the 1970s by pointing out that the amendment would, among other things, require military service of young women. Yet, without the order of the ERA, we witness today female prisoners of war and future mothers killed in combat.

Schlafly gamely tackles this subject in a section “A Gender-Neutral Military?” “When we look back on the Gulf War, one of the images that are seared into our memory is that of tearful soldier-mothers saying goodbye to their 2-month-old breast-feeding babies,” she writes. “How did this unnatural event happen? There was no shortage of able-bodied men to ‘man’ those posts in the Middle East. Those unhappy cases were the result of a deliberate Pentagon policy to acquiesce in the feminist doctrine that men and women are fungible, that military assignments must be made without regard to the sex of the individual, and that the U.S. armed forces should be an instrument of social experimentation to demonstrate total sex equality.”

Today's image is 19-year-old supply clerk Jessica Lynch, who joined the Army for an education and found herself ambushed in Iraq, taken prisoner and suffering a head wound, fractures in her right arm, both legs, her right foot and ankle, and a back injury.

While America is engaged in war, even feminist critics seem reluctant to take up the topic of women in combat — but it needs to be looked at soon, with seriousness. Schlafly's book is a good first shot.

Ellen Rossini writes from

Richardson, Texas.