AT VFR, Lawrence Auster perfectly summarizes the emptiness of the typical liberal formula regarding the place of women in society, a formula embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike. He writes:

I’ve now looked at more columns on the Rosen / Romney issue, and it appears that, contrary to the first paragraph of the entry, conservatives were criticizing Rosen for attacking stay-at-home mothers, not just for insulting Ann Romney. However, it remains the case that the Republican side is terribly confused and compromised on this issue. They are unable to oppose the Democrats in a clear and consistent way, because their own guiding principle is not that it is good for a woman to stay home to care for her children, but that women should be able to choose whatever they want to do. In other words, Republicans are extolling the liberal principle of freedom as their highest principle, not the traditionalist conservative principle of the human and social good.

Another problem is that notwithstanding both sides’ support of women’s “choice,” real choice in our society does not exist. As the invaluable Laura Wood points out, women in our society are trained and prepared through their entire childhood and school years not to be full-time housewives like Ann Romney, but to have jobs and careers. Having a career is everywhere promoted as a positive good, a good further enforced by anti-discrimination legislation which punishes employers for not having an “equal” number of female employees, even in jobs such as long-distance truck driving. At the same time, being a full-time housewife is never promoted as a positive good. It is purely a private choice, a choice which, if a woman is so bold as to make it, she makes with zero moral and material support from the larger society.

Republicans embrace the idea that women, including married women with children, should work; as Laura points out, there is not a single male Republican politician in the U.S. who says that it’s good for women to stay home with their children. The Republicans are thus so bound up with liberal and feminist notions that they lack any substantive, conservative basis on which to oppose Hilary Rosen’s aggressive brand of feminism. They have only a liberal or libertarian basis: women should be free to choose. Even Ann Romney, the ultimate old-fashioned wife and mother, in defending herself from Rosen’s attack, declined to justify her life’s course on the grounds that it was good that she had stayed home to raise her sons; she offered only a libertarian justification: that staying home was what she chose to do.

                                                    — Comments —

Jane S. writes:

Mr. Auster writes:

Another problem is that notwithstanding both sides’ support of women’s “choice,” real choice in our society does not exist…. Having a career is everywhere pushed as a positive good . . . At the same time, being a full-time housewife is never pushed as a positive good. It is purely a private choice, a choice which, if a woman is so bold as to make it, she makes with zero moral and material support from the larger society.

Here are two relevant quotes:

… In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking. . .that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.

                        —- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

                        —- Simone de Beauvoir. Saturday Review, June 14, 1974.

John Purdy writes:

You, of course, are aware of the irony implicit in feminism: women are to attain status by imitating what men can already do as well or better than women but not by doing what only women can do (i.e. motherhood.) Thus feminists have conceded from the outset what the worst chauvinist/misogynist would claim, that it is what men do that is the true criterion of value. Yet this point is rarely brought up outside of a few very radical feminists who are otherwise loony misandrists.

Talk about selling your birthright for a mess of potage.

Jane S. adds:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known by various appellations as “The Godfather of the French Revolution,” “The Godfather of Totalitarianism” and “The Godfather of the 60s.”

It is less well known, that J-J had five children with his live-in girlfriend/domestic servant. He had each of those children taken at birth and deposited anonymously at a Parisian orphanage–against the bitter protests of their mother. This at a time when infant and child mortality rates for orphans were nearly 100%. This in spite of the fact that J-J had plenty of wealthy aristocratic admirers with big country estates who would have gladly taken in and fostered his children.

He admitted this years later in his Confessions, then excused himself by saying he thinks it’s better for children to be raised by the State anyway. Feminists and the rest of the left think so, too, they just don’t say it openly.

Laura writes:

Though he helped lay the philosophical groundwork for modern day feminism, Rousseau would have despised and utterly rejected it. He believed in distinct spheres for the sexes and insisted on the subordinate role of women, which he discussed at length in Émile.

Jane writes:

Regarding J-J Rousseau, you are so right. He believed in the subordinate role of women even though, until he made it big as a writer, he depended entirely on help from women. His foster mother Madame de Warens rescued him from poverty several times. When he became prosperous (by way of family inheritance) he did nothing for her and ignored her pleas for help. He treated his domestic partner, Thérèse Levasseur, like dirt and refused to let his publisher provide her with a pension. He treated the women who took care of him like dirt, so at least he practiced what he preached.

This is consistent with feminism, however, which is just a way of making female self-loathing look fashionable.

Laura writes:

Yes, on your last point.

However, to clarify Rousseau’s views on women, he thought women had an innate superiority to men in their own realm. In his writings, he emphasized the complementarity of men and women and their innate deficiencies and strengths. In Émile, he stressed that a woman governs over man by submission to him. He offered a lucid understanding as to why it is indeed right that women be subordinate to men in society.

Rousseau’s views were vilified by Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of modern feminism. She devoted a considerable portion of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman to rebutting him.

Jesse Powell writes:

Rush Limbaugh on April 12th dedicated the entire show to the Hilary Rosen affair. He strenuously avoided saying that women should stay home to raise their children, he kept to the libertarian approach of saying that women should have the right to choose to stay at home if they wish and be respected for their choice. He went on at length about how women have more flexibility in their work arrangements than men do. He focused on the hypocrisy of liberals attacking Sarah Palin for being overly ambitious and neglecting her children and then turning around and attacking Ann Romney for “never having worked a day in her life”.

Interestingly, Limbaugh mentioned Rosen’s lesbianism, that Rosen had a “female partner,” that Rosen and her female partner later split up, and that Rosen and her female partner were acting as parents to adopted children. He brought up this information to make comments about Rosen’s own choices and behaviors as a mother. The idea was to point out Rosen’s hypocrisy. Limbaugh, however, was not the least bit critical of Rosen’s choice to act as a mother with her lesbian partner to adopted children. The absence of criticism of the lesbian relationship in the context of parenting to me was the most disturbing part of Limbaugh’s commentary. It makes it seem like criticizing homosexual parenting is now “off limits” among mainstream conservatives. If homosexual parenting cannot be criticized then on what basis can opposition to homosexual marriage be sustained? Limbaugh normalized homosexual couples and homosexual parenting for no reason I could discern other than the desire to avoid controversy.

Limbaugh did however make an oblique comment that women choosing to raise their own children and as a result making less money is actually a good thing; in this comment however he was quoting from Suzanne Venker, he was not making an assertion on his own behalf. The assertion he made on his own behalf at the end was that the “government needs to keep out of it”; a typical libertarian formulation. The quote from the Rush Limbaugh show on April 12, 2012 that most strongly approached social conservatism was:

April 12, 2012 Hour 2 – 22:34 to 23:36

Rush Limbaugh: Her new book [Suzanne Venker] will be published in a year called “How to Choose a Husband” and she has an open letter to President Obama that was published and here’s the pull quote: “The bottom line is that the pay gap exists because of a voluntary division of labor, not discrimination by a conspiracy of male chauvinists, men simply work more hours than women, and people who work more hours or work at more difficult unpleasant or riskier jobs earn more, and they should. You’re wasting valuable time and money, Mr. President. There will never be male/ female pay parity so long as most women spend part of their lives caring for their children; and Thank God they do.”

And I tell you government needs to keep out of it.

Limbaugh was approvingly quoting from “An Open Letter to President Obama.”

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