J. writes:

I found this Facebook post so depressing and sad. In fact most young women say just what she has posted. These days it takes a rebel to declare she wants a home, a husband, and children. This woman is getting a lot of “atta girl” comments. I’m a simple woman so I haven’t said much, but I forsee a stressed unhappy woman in the future with no inner peace.

I included some of the reactions to her statement. I wish I had the words to express the sorrow I felt when I read what she wrote. Not to mention all the encouragement she is getting from her Facebook “friends.”

Most little girls dream of weddings, kids, and a house with a white picket fence. I dreamed of stillettos, [sic] power suits, and business lunches. I am about to graduate and I want a successful career so bad I can taste it. It’s a shame this is the worst time in history to be graduating, but let the best man or woman win, I… am ready to fight tooth and nail for what I want.

Go and get it, S.

5 hours ago

 Go for it, S.! Best of good luck to you, too.

5 hours ago

 You are miles ahead of the competition, just by standing on solid principle.

5 hours ago 

just remember, capitalism is good and profit is not immoral

4 hours ago

You are my kind of dame! So few broads know what they want! Keep us informed darling~

4 hours ago

That’s a great attitude, S., you’ll do very well!

4 hours ago

And you’ll succeed too !! You’ve got the “it” factor :))

4 hours ago

go for it girl! I’m cheering for you. I’ve been working since I was 17 been self employed since 22 and I’m on the flip side. I just want to be a wife now. Lol

4 hours ago

 if you ever want to borrow my ”boots”, just let me know

4 hours ago

 I wish you the best of luck. With your attitude, i think that you will be very successful.

4 hours ago

 Buy Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover book, read it cover to cover, and choose not to participate in this recession/depression. Dave quote: “Pray like it all depends on God…but work like it all depends on you.”

4 hours ago

 Congratulations and fight for your dreams. Be able to say that you gave it your best shot and be able to make paradigm shifts whenever you deem them necessary. It’s nice to meet someone who knows what she wants to be when she grows up.

3 hours ago

 I say infiltrate the Government with your vast knowledge! LOL

3 hours ago

 Go get ’em, girl! I wear stilletos, power suits and have a successful business career. You can too!

Laura writes:

It’s interesting. This girl is unabashed about what she wants. It isn’t the work itself. It’s the clothes, the fancy restaurants, the glory. She makes the 70s-era feminists, with their heady ideals of freedom, seem relatively likable.

Karen I. writes:

Put stilettos, power suits and business lunches together and what do you get? You get got a lot of pushing your food around the plate at your business lunch trying to make it look like you are eating when you’re not because you don’t want to look fat in your business suit with it’s required miniskirt. Then, it’s back to work hungry with very sore feet and sometimes a drunk boss hitting you for the rest of the afternoon. In a very short time, the dream is a nightmare. Right around that time, the village is calling you a success.

Michael S. writes:

Maybe you should call it… “It Takes a Village of Idiots to Ruin a Woman.”

Lawrence Auster writes:

Laura writes:

“This girl is unabashed about what she wants. It isn’t the work itself. It’s the clothes, the fancy restaurants, the glory.”

That’s exactly right. And if fits with something I’ve long noticed about feminist career women. When these women talk about advancing in their professions, they boast of the “power” they have or are going to have. I never heard a male executive, past or present, talk about his “power,” let alone boast of it. A man would be ashamed to speak in such terms. Men are interested in the actual work that they are doing, the things that they are accomplishing or plan to accomplish. But women are not interested—at least primarily—in the things they are accomplishing or plan to accomplish. They are interested in the “power”–meaning the glory, the prestige, the self-esteem—that comes with occupying a given professional position.

As we’ve often said, women in business or politics can do all right so long as they operate according to traditional male rules and standards—Mrs. Thatcher being the classic example. But once the male principle no longer rules, once women in business or politics or any aspect of public life are no longer guided by the male principle but by the female principle, they pervert everything about those fields into something they are not supposed to be. If they are in business, they don’t care about doing the job; they care about their vanity. If they are in politics, they don’t care about their responsibility to society; they care about their “power,” and about “breaking the glass ceiling.”

To boil it down to one sentence: feminism has done only harm to society, it has done nothing good.

Laura writes:

Feminism has brought nothing good. Except this. It has proven the folly in denying sex differences.

“I never heard a male executive, past or present, talk about his ‘power,’ let alone boast of it.”

Well, I guess I have. I have known men who were absorbed in the vanity of their careers, with the actual work being a necessary evil. A woman too is unlikely to advance purely on vanity alone; after all she must compete with other men and women. 

I agree that this power trip is part of feminism. On the other hand, while there are women who revel in the success itself, in the clothes and the power, many are genuinely swept up in the work they do. I think this is important to recognize and is just as much a hazard of feminism. Having once been a career woman who cared about the work itself, and nothing but the work, I can attest to that and I met many others like me. The problem is a woman’s mind cannot be in two places. A career is demanding. It doesn’t just happen and unfold. It requires focus. It’s not possible for women to devote attention to real courtship, in which they are studying their prospects and controlling their sexuality, preparing themselves  for children and family, when they are consumed by work. Careerism creates promiscuous young women, obsessive mothers and unstable wives. Career makes women into children and men into adults. Men prepare for family life through their work. Women prepare for it by educating themselves in who men and children are. It seems wasteful and decadent in an age when anything unprofitable is suspect. Women once had jobs, not careers, or did very little before they were married. It was not a waste of time, but essential.

The idea that this period was intellectually stifling is another myth. Stifling compared to what? An entry-level position? Most careers only become satisfying after years of paying one’s dues and learning the ropes.

Lawrence writes:

I said:

“I never heard a male executive, past or present, talk about his ‘power,’ let alone boast of it.”

And you replied:

“Well, I guess I have. I have known men who were absorbed in the vanity of their careers, with the actual work being a necessary evil.”

Did you ever hear men say this publicly? Say, in a speech or a panel discussion broadcast on CSPAN? That’s what I was talking about. Women today publicly avow that their careers are about getting power—about fulfilling themselves by having power. Men do not do that.

The key is the distinction between private and public. I read a few years ago that in the early period of his presidency Richard Nixon was deeply satisfied and fulfilled in a personal sense by the experience of being president. Did he express this publicly? Did he talk about how great it was to be president, how much fun it was, how fulfilling it was, how much he enjoyed the power? Of course not. It would been completely inappropriate to let his personal feelings leak over to the public side in such a manner. But women don’t realize this. For them their personal feelings are what it’s all about.

And indeed women’s personal feelings are what it’s all about—in the personal, domestic, relational sphere where women belong. But when, as we have today, (1) the woman’s personalistic nature is brought into public and professional sphere, where it doesn’t naturally belong, and (2) the traditional, impersonal male standards are cast aside allowing women to “be themselves” in that public sphere where women don’t naturally belong and where they need to be guided by the male principle, two disastrous things happen. Women are perverted into something they are not meant to be. And the public and professional sphere is perverted into something it is not meant to be. Consider the various whack-job females who have been in the British cabinet in recent years.

So, how should a person express the nexus between his personal feelings and the satisfactions of his job?

I once saw a film of a press conference of President Kennedy’s. He was asked something like, “Are you happy being president?”

And Kennedy answered (rough paraphrase):

“Aristotle said that happiness is the exercise of our natural abilities along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. So, in that sense, yes, there is, uh, some measure of happiness in being president.”

That’s the way for a public man to deal with a personal question of that nature.

Laura writes:

Yes, this public bravado is characteristic of women and it’s the sort of vanity and showmanship one expects from anyone who is out of his element and trying to prove he fits in. And it is, as you say, the inevitable expression of the personal, in which women naturally exist. 

This bravado will never go away. No matter how many women become judges, university presidents, bishops and politicians, they will still be publicly bragging about what they have done and what extraordinary effort it took for them to reach the pinnacles of their fields. It’s distracting. It clogs up the gears of public discourse. I dread the day when the first woman becomes president. Unless she is unusually manly, which is extremely unlikely, we will be treated to the spectacle of a woman marveling over herself for four long years. 

Lydia Sherman writes:

One homeschool blog I ran across bore this sentence: I have seen the village, and I don’t want it raising my children.

The woman wanting success so badly she can taste it, ought to put marriage, children and housekeeping in the same determined fervor: Keep wanting it and praying for it with all her heart. Do all she can to get it. Once she does, stay with it for a life time as though her very life dependend on it. Fight for it and defend it. Keep it, preserve it, own it. It would be interesting to see such a desire posted on Facebook and the comments following. I dare anyone to do it.

I just read this article , which says what I have always thought: the man and woman both are home makers, each helping to form societal change through the family. Work is just something that enables that.

Feminism was engineered to give women careers instead of families. As a result, thousands of young women are displaced homemakers.

Please follow and like us: