Harsh women.(Scan: short news and commentary)(Women Who Make the World Worse)(Excerpt)

Our friend Kate O'Beirne has written a new book called Women Who Make the World Worse, just out from Sentinel. Here is a taste:

Having been raised with three sisters, and educated by women in a girls-only high school and all-female college, it was jarring when I found myself labeled a traitor to my sex. I simply never believed that men and women were interchangeable, that women's equality rested on abortion rights, or that marriage and family life were a patriarchal plot to keep women in their submissive place. What I thought were pretty sensible, widely shared views were said by feminists to be heretical. I learned that the sisterhood intended to enforce a strict orthodoxy in the name of liberation. Their tactics made me wonder how we were ever labeled the fairer sex.

When the Bush administration lent its support to single-sex public schools, Eleanor Smeal protested, "You are doing girls no favor by putting them in all-girls schools." Women like Smeal, the former president of NOW, and current president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, regard my education as morally akin to apartheid. Yet through high school and college we ran our own little female societies, while the patriarchy was handed the bills. Isn't that an arrangement feminists long for? We girls were in charge of everything.

When self-pitying Anne Wilson Schaef echoes a familiar feminist lament by declaring, "To be born female in this culture means that you are born 'tainted,' that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority," I think: She should have been on Knickerbocker Road in Manhassett, New York. In our conventional 1960s middle-class culture, we girls ran the neighborhood. We'd jump rope by the hour, with one end of the rope anchored to the bumper of a Rambler and some hapless little boy turning the other end until we released him from his duties.

At that girls' high school Eleanor Smeal believes didn't do me any favors, I was active in speech and debate, and we regularly competed against both boys' and girls' teams. The nun who coached our team trained us to go for the kill. My parents wholly approved of the verbal combat. "You enjoy arguing; maybe you ought to be a lawyer," my father would suggest. No fan of lawyers ("they'll be the ruination of this country"), he may have wanted to see one he could love. It never occurred to him that the practice of law was unsuitable for a woman.

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