THERE IS far too much to comment upon in the public ruminations on Mother’s Day. Suffice to say, if you thought Mother’s Day was a time to actually celebrate sacrifice rather than pushy entitlement, you were wrong.

Even the supposedly conservative Phyllis Chesler, in a paean to motherhood, makes the ridiculous assertion that if only British poet Ted Hughes had been a good wife to Sylvia Plath, and tenderly served her every need, the doomed poetess might not have killed herself. For Chesler, Mother’s Day is an appropriate time to reflect on how self-sacrifice has made women unhappy. The narcissism of contemporary women observes no holidays. If veterans exhibited the same whininess on Veterans Day, we would have to retire our armed forces for good. 

Stephanie Coontz in The New York Times writes:

One of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today. All this changed, the story goes, when Betty Friedan published her 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which denigrated stay-at-home mothers. Ever since, their standing in society has steadily diminished.

She then goes on to prove that mothers who stayed home in the fifties  must have enjoyed higher status. Nothing else could explain why they would do something so demeaning. Housewives of the fifties, Coontz argues, were overworked, depressed and physically assaulted by their husbands. Thanks to feminism, the lives of homemakers are better. They are only depressed today.

Coontz fails to mention that there are relatively few full-time homemakers left. Feminism has not just destroyed the status of homemaking, it’s virtually eliminated the homemaker herself.

Robert Stacy McCain writes about Coontz’s editorial yesterday here. Here’s an excellent comment from him:

It is apparently essential to the success of liberalism that people believe what Coontz wants them to believe – that feminism has, in fact, vastly improved American life for everyone. And if any woman should be unhappy with some aspect of her life in this post-liberation paradise, it is not feminists whom she should blame, but rather the residual sexism that remains, and which requires renewed effort to extirpate.

This is why, more than four decades after the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement, feminists are angrier than ever: The logic of their movement prevents them from accepting the explanation that their unhappiness can have any cause other than patriarchal oppression. And no feminist can ever permit herself to wonder whether “liberation” itself is the cause of some problems that nowadays plague women. If equality has not solved all women’s problems, the only solution must be more equality. And if you question this logic, buddy, you’re part of the problem.

Coontz, by the way, is a popular feminist commentator. She is author of the book The Way We Never Were (1992), the thesis of which is that the traditional family was never healthy or happy.

                       — Comments —

Josh F. writes:

When we understand “feminism” for what it really is, namely, the political application of the devout dyke nature (devout dykism: a radically autonomous nature) then we can better understand the push for greater liberation by a fanatical minority leading to the mass depression of the heterosexual female. We can also better understand how “Happy Mother’s Day” is no longer about mothers who are HAPPY to sacrifice AS mothers for their children. It is simply deleterious to the conscience to continue to make reference to a “thing” called “feminism” that is completely lacking any essence of femininity. But  make no mistake, we need REAL happy mothers and we should celebrate them everyday.

Laura writes:

You are right that feminism is an extremely misleading word.

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