Victor Davis Hanson has a sparkling column today that will certainly be a finalist for the Vital Signs Top Ten. It's one of those "keeper" articles, one full of principle and insight that you'll ponder long after the headlines that inspired it have faded from memory.It's the kind of column you want to send to your friends -- a kind service easily performed by use of the "E-Mail This" feature at the bottom of each Vital Signs post.
And oh yes, the subject matter of Hanson's column? Feminism. More specifically, Hanson describes how the modern movement has attempted to monopolize the word, despite the historical record, the social costs, the inescapable biological realities, and the demographic fact that most women were never part of the modern feminist movement anyhow.
The article has sage observations about the Sarah Palin phenomena and the bias of the Western media but, like I said, it explores issues that go beyond the election season. You'll even meet Hanson's mom, a Proverbs 31 kind of lady that reminds us all just how womanly strength, intelligence, commitment, beauty and compassion can be...virtues that haven't counted for much in modern feminism.
...Feminism grew out of the 1960s to address sexual inequality. At an early age, I was mentored on most feminist arguments by my late mother. She graduated from Stanford Law School in the 1940s but then was offered only a single job as a legal secretary. Instead, she went back home to raise three children with my father, a teacher and farmer, and only returned to legal work in her 40s. She was eventually named a California superior court judge and, later, a state appellate court justice.
Hers was a common and compelling feminist argument of the times, and went something like this: Women should receive equal pay for equal work, and not be considered mere appendages of their husbands. Child-rearing — if properly practiced as a joint enterprise — did not preclude women from pursuing careers.
In such an ideal gender-blind workplace, women were not to be defined by their husband's or father's success or failure. The beauty of women's liberation was that it was not hierarchical but included the unmarried woman who drove a combine on her own farm, the corporate attorney and the homemaker who chose to home-school her children.
Women in the workplace did not look for special favors. And they surely did not wish to deny innately feminine differences. Instead, they asked only that men should not establish arbitrary rules of the game that favored their male gender.
That old definition of feminism is now dead. It has been replaced by a new creed that is far more restrictive — as the controversy over Sarah Palin attests. Out of the recent media frenzy, four general truths emerged about the new feminism...
Interested in reading what those four truths are? Here's the whole Victor Davis Hanson column fresh from the Mercury News.
