IN THIS previous entry, a female corporate executive stated that working mothers are good for business. Despite high levels of unemployment, especially among young men seeking entry-level positions and men in their 50s and 60s, she said she cannot find adequate workers unless she offers a good parental leave package. Here is her response to my comments along with further remarks of my own.

Maggie Fox writes:

I had mentioned following up on the issue of the separation of mothers from their children at an early age. I think the separation of family members during the work day is a product of industrial capitalism, rather than feminism. Gone are the days when extended families worked together in agrarian villages or tribes of hunter-gatherers. I am not advocating that we turn back the clock, as I am quite fond of supermarkets, flush toilets, and the like. Rather, I think we need to accept that industrialization (far more than feminism) has wrought inevitable changes to human relations, including the creation of the isolated nuclear family and a more anonymous, overwhelming society that easily leads to a sense of alienation among all too many people.

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ELIZABETH WRIGHT WRITES:

Laura wrote in the previous entry on women’s fashions:

“Most women feel the gaze of others on their exposed cleavage. It’s distracting. I don’t know how these women on television concentrate.”

How the women concentrate? I don’t know how the men concentrate. I’ve watched as a woman being interviewed by a man is sitting there in a mini-skirt that climbs half-way up her thighs with endless legs exposed. The male interviewer is supposed to concentrate on the subject matter, while confronted with a female body that is half undressed. With or without cleavage added to the scene, I’ve always thought this was most unfair. It’s as if women are saying to men, “Hey, we know how you’re made and understand your natural impulses, but we enjoy making you uncomfortable and watching you squirm.”

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ALEX A. from England writes:

Here’s an item concerning a traditional interpretation of dancing that might interest you. My source is The Book of the Governor, a sixteenth century guidebook to the acquisition of social graces. It was written by Sir Thomas Elyot and first published in 1531. Elyot gives advice on how to become a cultivated, well mannered, and virtuous member of the ruling class. Here’s what he has to say about the emblematic significance of dancing:

“In every dance of a most ancient custom, there danceth together a man and a woman, holding each other by the hand or the arm, which betokeneth concord. Now it behoveth the dancers and also the beholders of them to know all the qualities incident to a man, and also all qualities to a woman likewise pertaining. 

A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast. Divers other qualities of each of them may be found out, but these be most apparent and for this time sufficient. Read More »

HERE, IN a miscellaneous entry, are questions from readers from the last few days.

Lisa writes:

As my daughter and I were in the goat barn for many hours this past few days after nearly all our milking does “decided” to have their kids all at once, I looked around in amused amazement at all these gals’ very female behavior. These new mothers need quiet, peace, protection, good food, kind words, a little affection, a little diversion, and attentive observation to be good mothers and milk producers. Read More »

KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, here and here, writes about the long and often tousled hairstyles of female anchorwomen and Ann Coulter. She speculates that this loose, unrestrained bedroom look on women in power is an effort to recapture lost femininity. The more manly women become, the more they feel the need to flaunt their sexuality.

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IF YOU have never visited James Kalb’s website Turnabout, I highly recommend it, especially his Anti-Feminist Page. Kalb is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism, a thoughtful and absorbing book on the soft oppression of “equality by command.” I will never forget visiting Kalb’s extended essay on feminism at Turnabout years ago and feeling as if clouds had dispersed after a long storm. I agreed with every word. Rereading it now, I still feel the warming influence of its clarity and insight.

Kalb writes:

The aim of feminism, therefore, is to create a new kind of human being in a new form of society in which age-old ties among men, women and children are to be dissolved and new ones constituted in accordance with abstract ideological demands. In place of family ties based on what seems natural and customary and supported by upbringing and social expectation, feminism would permit only ties based on contract and idiosyncratic sentiment, with government stepping in when those prove too shaky for serious reliance. There is no reason to suppose the substitution can be made to work, let alone work well, and every reason to expect the contrary. Feminism does not care about reason, however, or even about experience of the effects of weakened family life. It is in fact ideological and radical to the core. There can be no commonsense feminism, because doing what comes naturally gets a feminist nowhere. Read More »

  HANNON WRITES:

Have you watched ABC’s “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution”? I watched two episodes tonight. Aside from the nutritional insights that many Americans need to have brought to their attention it is also a compelling, and chilling, snapshot of a “government program.” The setting is Huntington, West Virginia.

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“Too often, much of late, the last couple three years, the mal-distribution of income in American is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America.”

                                                        — Senate Finance Committe Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) Read More »

Julia Lathrop

THE BEGINNINGS OF socialized medicine in America can be traced to the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which set up child welfare bureaus around the country. Messianic activism by wealthy spinsters and lesbians led to the bill’s passage against considerable opposition. Today’s liberals and proponents of Obamacare are heirs to this wave of genteel progressivism.

Such is the argument in this fascinating essay by economist Murray Rothbard. Readers of Henry James’ book The Bostonians will find the women he describes vividly familar, particularly Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in the Chicago slums, and Julia Lathrop, who set up the country’s first juvenile court and was later president of the National Conference of Social Work. The women, inspired in their activism by the English art critic and socialist John Ruskin, were believed to have been lovers at one point. Rothbard writes:

The most prominent of the Yankee progressive social workers, and emblematic of the entire movement, was Jane Addams (b. 1860). Her father, John H. Addams, was a pietist Quaker who settled in northern Illinois, constructed a sawmill, invested in railroads and banks, and became one of the wealthiest men in northern Illinois. John H. Addams was a lifelong Republican, who attended the founding meeting of the Republican Party at Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854, and served as a Republican State Senator for 16 years. Read More »

GO YE into the village that is over against you and immediately you shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her; loose them and bring them to Me; and if any man shall say anything to you, say ye that the Lord hath need of them; and forthwith he will let them go.     (Mat 21:2-3)

A READER WRITES:

I just had to write in as I really was appalled at the misinformation contained in the post from the ‘childless female manager.’

I am a 30-year-old male manager working at a large multi-national corporation and now have the joys of working with a large number of ‘working mothers.’ They are unequivocally a drain on productivity, time and resources.

Let me give you an example. One of the women who works for me had a child recently. This means she leaves work everyday at 4 p.m. and is unavailable for later meetings. She only works four days a week. In addition, she works from home at least one to two per week on top of this, especially if her child is sick. I’ve been on work conference calls with senior managers and had to shut them down because her child is crying in the background. I am lucky if I get a good 4-6 hours work from her on any given day, when she is in. Forget about ever working late – she is out the door at 4 p.m. on the dot each day. She disrupts the team, disrupts the office and more importantly, I cannot rely on her to get the job done. Meanwhile, she shows up in my team as a ‘full time resource’ – and my bosses wonder why I can’t the job done when I have such a big team.

However, the fact that she is failing in work is surely less important than the fact that she is failing at home. She is constantly tired, stressed and harried. How can anyone choose to live like this? In my experience of the workforce so far, childless women are fine to work with. Once the children are born it’s another story,

Businesses do things for profit. If it made sense to have these women in senior positions, business would have done it already. The fact is they only do it to appease so called ‘diversity’ regulations.

I fully support a discriminatory policy against working mothers – there is absolutely no way an organisation can have working mothers in critical positions given their dual responsibilities.

Laura writes:

The mass influx of women into the workforce has hurt business in many cases and it has hurt families. It has hurt women and it has hurt men. It has hurt the young and it has hurt the old. It has hurt individuals and it has hurt communities. Who is the winner here?

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THE AMISH are exempt from the new health care regulations. They also are not required to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes.

It is no surprise that most of America is now enslaved to government while the Amish are free. Look at the happy man and woman in this picture. This is patriarchy. No, not the buggy and bonnets, but the man and woman, secure in their separate identities and part of the march of generations. Look at the faces of these children. These people are alive. We, on the other hand, are in the process of a prolonged phase of cultural expiration.

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WELMAR writes at The Spearhead:

Both men and women do terrible things to each other. They betray, abandon, neglect and abuse. Honestly, I don’t think either sex beats the other when it comes to treating spouses like garbage. However, when men do something horrible, they are usually contrite. Often, they take the blame. In fact, in many cases men will take the blame even when they weren’t at fault.  Read More »

A PREVIOUS POST mentioned the case of  a former vice president at Goldman Sachs. The woman, who was fired during her second maternity leave, has sued her employer for sex discrimination. She claims she was penalized and relegated to “second-class status” at her workplace because she was a mother.

Maggie Fox writes:

I am a childless female manager at a company where success depends on the ability to serve clients well, attract new clients, and work a high number of billable hours. As an employer, my responses to your “Mommy Bomb” post and subsequent comments were as follows: 

1) In a business that depends on the quality of the workers, providing 12 weeks parental leave is a small price to pay to attract talent. That is why so many companies exceed the requirements of the law by providing longer leave periods and paying their workers during parental leave. Far from being a drain, my company’s generous leave provisions are a tool that helps us compete.  Read More »

MICHELLE OBAMA is campaigning for better dietary habits for America’s children, a seemingly virtuous and uncontroversial undertaking if there ever was one. But it is really one more instance of overweening paternalism. She recently lectured the Grocery Manufacturers Association:

“We need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children. That starts with revamping, or ramping up, your efforts to reformulate your products, particularly those aimed at kids, so that they have less fat, salt, and sugar, and more of the nutrients that kids need.”

Food companies are businesses. They do not act with maternal solicitude toward their customers, but who knows? Maybe Obama can force them to churn out low-fat granola or enact a law that every child must eat Caesar salad for lunch or pay a fine. Mrs. Obama would better aim her words at the mothers of America. They are the ones who determine their children’s diets.

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Cutbacks in government spending on libraries and after-school programs are to blame for the flash mobs of black teenagers converging on the streets of Philadelphia in predominantly white business districts, according to the director of a major youth advocacy group,

Shelly Yanoff, of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, said spending reductions have led to this youthful restlessness, which includes the game of “Catch and Wreck” in which children as young as eleven target street people to pummel and rob. The word is spread through text messaging and mobs converge in Center City. In a mob last Sunday, teenagers chanted “black boys” and “burn the city,” according to the New York Times.

If more libraries were open and there hadn’t been dramatic cutbacks in youth violence prevention programs, these teenagers might be sitting quietly reading Mark Twain. The city’s black mayor disagrees.

According to the Times, a senior editor at Harpers is “credited” with introducing the idea of a flash mob.

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THERE ARE TWO institutions that almost every American encounters in his life. They are the hospital and the school, the doctor’s office and the classroom.

Our central government already holds the school captive. Whatever local autonomy still exists for communities and their school boards is just window dressing. Real autonomy has been swept away by monopolistic government control. It’s true we are not forced to send our children to government schools, but we are still forced to pay for them and we are denied the free market and funds in which to cultivate alternatives. We are also compelled to live in a society shaped by the ideology taught in our schools. It creeps into every facet of our world, an invasive weed in every garden. There is no more powerful influence on the minds and character of our neighbors.

That’s why the government takeover of American health care is so significant. Here is the other major industry we must all encounter in a very personal way. Here is the other place where we interact as citizens and express our shared values. There will be almost no escaping it. Even those who can buy their way out of government-controlled medicine will still be affected by its values. The most important objection to nationalized health care is irrelevant to our physical health. Whether we can get the same kind of care from doctors amd hospitals is an important issue, but not the most dire one. The most pressing objection concerns not body, but spirit. We must feed from the hand of the state. We must eat the same gruel and profess the same barren religion. That affects our souls. Perhaps people in other countries like it that way, but it makes us no longer Americans.