ONE WOULD think that women chief executives were flooding American corporations, judging from the constant press about the needs, desires, whims, career advice and amazing, totally breathtaking and awesome accomplishments of female CEO’s, such as the darling of the business world, Marissa Mayer, above, who recently returned to work as CEO of Yahoo just two weeks after giving birth to her first child at the age of 37. One would even think, given the press, that women make better top executives than men. A recent issue of Fortune magazine actually made this claim and it has been repeated elsewhere, most notably by EU bureaucrats who want to mandate that 40 percent of all directors of European corporate boards be women. There is a pervasive myth that female-headed companies are more stable and better-performing, a conclusion that not only flies in the face of the documented history of free enterprise but cannot possibly be proven given the low numbers of women at the top. For despite decades of celebration of women in business and decades of pressure to discriminate in favor of women, they still occupy less than four percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. This year, the total is 18 out of 500. According to the research firm Catalyst, women occupy about 14 percent of executive officer positions in all companies and the figures in general for women in corporate leadership have not risen in six years. Six years! Six years of glowing encomia to women executives.

The truth is, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the comparative performance of women executives except the obvious one: There aren’t many women at the top. All the profiles of glamorous CEO’s such as Ginni Rometty, of IBM; all the breathless stories about whether Marissa should have left her son so soon and all the aggressive affirmative action in favor of women haven’t made that much difference. Women are still interesting novelties in the chief executive suite, and everyone wants to know how they do it because everyone knows, though no one will say it, that women will aways be anomalies at the top. Barring some dramatic and overwhelming revolution in human nature, women are not as competitive, or as comfortable in positions of authority, as men. They do not wish to make the grueling climb to the top. Everyone knows this, except, of course, feminists, who claim that women are still discriminated against or lack “sponsorship” or “on ramps and off ramps.” Many millions in consulting fees have gone into various forms of flexibility and “on ramps and off ramps” for women in business but these efforts have not changed much at the top. What they have done is keep the tantalizing dream alive that women can have everything. What they have done is create positive discrimination against men and a stifling fear of offending feminist groupthink. What they also have done is create a culture in which fewer and fewer women can find men to support them so that they can do what they want to do most.

By the way, in case you were wondering, Mayers has named her son, Macallister. She asked for suggestions for a name on social media after he was born. One wonders how Macallister will feel years from now when he digs into the archives and finds that his mother bragged that she would only be taking a week or so off from work after he was born and that the above cover photo appeared when she was nine months pregnant.

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This is a bed rug completed by Mary Foote (1752-1837), in Colchester, Connecticut in 1778. According to The Magazine Antiques, it was made in preparation for her wedding:

This is one of four spectacular bed rugs made to commemorate the weddings on November 5, 1778, of three siblings of the Foote and Otis families, prosperous farmers and landowners in the Connecticut River valley. The women likely spent the prior year spinning, dyeing, and sewing the rugs, all of which contain a center of stylized flowers enclosed within a reverse-curved border. The outlines are sewn with a running stitch and the designs are filled in with a darning stitch, requiring careful planning.

This beautiful rug is now in the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Given that poor Mary was obviously very oppressed, I wonder why this rug conveys such a sense of happiness and delight in the floral world.

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DANIEL S. writes:

I was reading several essays by the late philosopher Josef Pieper (perhaps my favorite philosopher of the twentieth century) about art and music tonight, which can be found in his book Only the Lovers Sing: Art and Contemplation. His observations are ever timely, and I thought I would summarize a few of his ideas and observations that stood out to me. (more…)

IN A CULTURE where women are encouraged to take out massive debt for higher education, it is not only difficult to become a housewife, it’s hard to become a cloistered nun. Tara Clemens is trying to pay off more than $100,000 in loans she took out for law school so that she can enter a convent.

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  AT HenryMakow.com, a Frenchman named Darcel vents about the aggression and self-centeredness of contemporary French women. The piece is short and roughly written (or translated), but he makes some good points. He writes: French girls used to be famous for coquetterie," a behavior that made them charming and above all lovable. Needless to say it's not the case anymore. It's seems that all the good old qualities that used to make a girl desirable as a mate as well as worthy of devotion and respect, have simply disappeared. I believe that comes mainly from education or lack of it. As the matter of fact, most of the girls of my generation (born in the eighties) are the product of divorce. Between 40-50 per cent of French marriages end in divorce. Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of French feminism and author of The Second Sex, said at one point: “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” French women have followed in her footsteps. Even though they surpass women in earnings and accomplishments, men are the second sex in…

THIS SHORT video depicts Génération Identitaire’s non-violent occupation of a mosque in Poitiers, an historic act of protest against mass non-Western immigration and the growth of Islam in France. Read about it at Galliawatch.

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HERE’S another outstanding comment — a comment that’s too good to leave buried in a thread — about the Boy Scouts sexual abuse scandal. Texanne writes:

Our children are victimized every day by people who don’t touch them or even get near them, but who constantly bombard youngsters’ minds with sexual thoughts and images and generate anxiety about what kind of sex they might prefer or even what sex they might be. There are no secret files kept on these predators — they abuse openly and with public funds, with the endorsement of school authorities and even with parental approval. And yet, somehow, the protective glow of victimhood remains.

Perhaps the Boy Scout abuse story will help to dispel the victimhood myth.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in this entry:

I was never a Scout, but I hope that Scouting survives. What fascinates me is not so much the revelation about Scouting as the revelation about liberalism, which is willing to switch positions diametrically, systematically ignore evidence, and exploit whatever is of momentary advantage against the objects of its perpetual scorn and hatred.  For decades the Boy Scout organization made the point that permitting homosexuals to serve as group leaders would be to invite abuse.  The Scouts based their position on the well-grounded assumption that male homosexuality is essentially pedophiliac and that it would be crazy to put pedophiles in charge of boys and adolescents.  The American Left sustained a relentless culture-war against the Scouts that rested on categorizing that perfectly reasonable assumption and its argumentative consequence as a bigoted fantasy.   (more…)

A READER writes:

It’s over for the Boy Scouts. There’s going to be no balanced coverage of this old story. My view is that they could have done worse and they could have done better, but certainly it was the custom of the time not to talk about it, or report it, but just try to get rid of the problem.

The condemnation will be deadly. (more…)

NATASSIA writes:

I have been reading a lot of old newspapers in my genealogy research. I came across an article in The Washington Post dated March 4, 1907 on page 40:

KEPT HUSBAND ON $3 A WEEK (more…)

PLANNED PARENTHOOD, which is taxpayer subsidized, is spending $5.7 million total on the U.S. election, with close to $1 million in anti-Romney advertising in the swing states of Virginia and Colorado, according to LifeSite News. Obama mentioned Planned Parenthood five times in the debate the other night and falsely claimed, as he has claimed before, that the organization provides mammograms.

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  JEANETTE V. writes: We have all seen how homosexuals and blacks are over-represented on television shows. Here is the latest butchering of a well-known story. Lancelot has been recast as a black man in the show called Once Upon a Time.  The show is a clever reworking of fairy tales. An evil witch  transported everyone from the enchanted land to modern world; so we are treated to flashbacks of the heroes when they were in the enchanted land.