Customer Reviews

Feminist Fantasies

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I'm not surprised that the Publisher's Weekly review cited above is a slam....Phyllis Schlafly has been slammed in the media her entire career.

Yep...Phyllis Schlafly pretty much single-handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment. But before you label her a right-wing zealot, did you know that the ERA would have made young women (even young mothers) susceptible to the military draft?

The fact of the matter is that this is a very sensible book, written by a very sensible and intelligent lady. While the P.C. forces of the world try to convince us that women aren't really THAT interested in having kids, and that kids are just as happy to be in daycare as they are to be with their own mothers, Schlafly brushes aside the baloney and speaks the truths we all know so well (but some of us refuse to admit).

The fact of the matter is that "feminism" has been judging the success of females in strictly MASCULINE terms for the last 35 years...focusing more on material wealth and power than on children and family. Schlafly demonstrates over and over again how the so-called "sexual revolution" did more to HARM women than any other social movement since WWII, what with the explosion of no-fault divorce, abortion, and single motherhood.

This little old lady has some important things to say. I am glad that I gave her a listen.

If there is one name in America that strikes terror in the hearts of most feminists, it is Phyllis Schlafly. For over four decades she has championed the cause of faith and family, and has resisted the radical social engineering of radical feminists, the homosexual lobby and other coercive utopians.

She is perhaps most famous for almost single-handedly knocking down the feminist Equal Rights Amendment. Her 1964 book on what women really want, A Choice Not an Echo, sold 3 million copies.

This volume is a collection of her columns, articles and essays written over the years. Arranged topically, they cover a number of important issues, including affirmative action, women in the military, the importance of marriage and family, women in the workplace, and so on. The offer some of the most insightful and challenging remarks found on these vital issues. Each pithy essay (there are around one hundred) is a minor classic.

Take for example her 1987 piece, "Why Affirmative Action is Wrong for Women". The first two (of seven) reasons are worth citing: First, "the woman receiving the benefit is not a woman who was ever discriminated against. The benefits are not targeted for the victims. Nobody should be entitled to receive a remedy for any injury suffered by someone else."

Second, "it is based on a theory of group rights as opposed to the American tradition of individual rights. Women are not a monolithic, cohesive group in which a grievance suffered by one woman should translate into a right or a remedy granted to another woman."

Or consider the so-called glass ceiling. Says Schlafly, "Just because there is a small percentage of women in senior management does not prove discrimination. It proves instead that the majority of women have made other choices - usually family choices - rather than devoting themselves to the corporate world for sixty to eighty hours a week."

The short essays contained in this book will not take long to read. But they will provide much food for thouht, rattle a few cages, and cause much mirth (depending on where you stand on the issues). With the overwhelming proliferation of the feminist worldview in the media and elsewhere, it is reassuring to know that countering voices still exist. And this is one of the best.

This book is a very important publication. Finally women are standing up, speaking strongly out against unreasonable demands from feminists, who are nothing but a small, however verbally strong group looking for advantages solely out of the fact, that they are women.
Such feminism has nothing to do with gender equality, it is only a man-hating philosophy of life.

This book, written by a woman is really a great book, I recommend it to everybody.

Mrs. Schlafly has demolished feminism's fallacies with well-reasoned, practical arguments, many of which were published or congressional testimony. Only the chapter on domestic violence is incorrect, because the statistics at the time were misleading, as it ignores violence by women against men. This book is highly recommended for all men and women of good will, so we can start rebuilding civilization together.

I disagree with the Publisher Weekly critical review wherein the author is criticized by asserting that certain presumptions attach to her writing, i.e., that the subject is "white, middle-class, and educated." Again, it's the old liberal argument from subjectivity: if someone writes from a single perspective (which everyone does), it automatically invalidates the thinking for all other perspectives. False. Or, the other liberal falacy: if one disagrees with the lefty position on a given issue, that person is ipso facto white, middle-class, and educated -- as though these were themselves intellectually neutralizing characteristics. False. In point of fact, however, the author, Schlafly, was not middle-class or educated when she started out. She worked her way through college and became the first female student admitted to Harvard Law School. She was described uniformly by her professors as 'brilliant.' She is a real intellect insofar as she allows her disputation, her arguments, to stand for themselves, unlike the tireless feminist self-marketers like Sontag (who is this self-appointed "intellect" anyway? -- she has said not a thing that makes any sense in four decades and her prose is insipid and pretentious) and Gloria Steinem (who admits she slept with a powerful publisher merely to get a loan for her magazine -- a highly hypocritical prospect, given the feminist philosophy). These feminists market themselves. They want, one senses, more to make money than to find out intellectually defensible philosophies. Schlafly leaves them in the dust, intellectually. She's the real thing. The lefty media will have to resort to their primary debate tactics with regard to this book: name calling. It's logically unassailable.

The title of this review is a statement that feminist author Robin Morgan once made to a Phil Donahue show audience. She certainly chose the right forum for it, seeing as how Phil Donahue himself had long before become the kind of woman that his Dad's generation of men once wanted to marry.

My favorite antifeminism book is MANHOOD REDUX by C. H. Freedman, and in that book he wrote: "I consider Phyllis Schlafly to be the most outstanding American in our history. Notice I did not say the outstanding American WOMAN." Naturally, being staunchly opposed to Feminism myself, I too have great respect for the lifework and intelligence of this American icon who practically singlehandedly defeated the potentially disastrous Equal Rights Amendment.

FEMINIST FANTASIES is a collection of 92 essays, all of them one to five pages long, written over parts of four decades, and covering a vast array of feminist-related topics. Although I highlighted passages in nearly all of the essays, I consider 22 of them, in their totality, to be truly essential reading.

Before telling you some of the many reasons you should acquire FEMINIST FANTASIES, let me first tell you about some of my own fantasies....uh.....well...no. On second thought, let me tell you about the rare times where I thought Mrs. Schlafly went a little wrong:

1) The first section of this book is titled, "The Revolution Is Over." Here, Mrs. Schlafly wants to give the reader the impression that the Feminist Movement has been running out of steam as "last year's models" begin to concede the foolishness of their youthful ideals (e.g., An op-ed piece written by a feminst in the Chicago Tribune in October 1982 started out, "Let's face it. The revolution is over. I just turned 31 and all I want is a husband." ~pg.3). Well, let's REALLY face it, if the revolution is over, it's only because the revolutionaries have declared victory! It's a very easy thing to call off the revolution (and even proclaim that the "revolution was a mistake" ~pg.80) after you've taken and now possess nearly every piece of ground you ever coveted! For the most strident TWISTED SISTERS, the war may never end until every man is lying naked at the end of a leash held by a female soldier (think Abu Ghraib military prison which coincidentally [?] was under the control of a female brigadier general.)

But for the more moderate feminists (Yeah, I know that's an oxymoron) - the ones who share the ideology even if they shun the label - it's easy to yell "truce" when you own the judiciary, the congress, academia, and the media. They may have lost the E.R.A. but they got nearly everything they wanted anyway. And we may not be a full-blown matriarchy just yet, but the snowball is still rolling. And if you don't think they're justified in declaring victory, try reading LEGALIZING MISANDRY by Paul Nathanson. While a handful of the old guard members of the movement may have died off or tempered the "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" verbiage, the feminists are still in high gear, and after four decades of indoctrinating youth, they have even increased their numbers. If Mrs. Schlafly wants to give us the impression that the tide is moving back out, she's mistaken; men are now standing neck deep in it and it's still rising!

2) On page 112, she writes, "The true answer to the pay differential is to have open access to all occupations so that women are not barred from any." Well, Mrs. Schlafly is playing a bit loose with her words here since we know that she (rightly) opposes women in military combat, and yet a ranking officer who leads soldiers into combat IS engaged in an OCCUPATION. Should women have open access to that position? Even Mrs. Schlafly would say no. Furthermore, I could give at least four very sound reasons why women should NOT be employed as police officers even if they were capable of passing all of the physical requirements previously demanded of men before those standards were lowered, enabling women to pass the police academies.

3) On page 208, Mrs. Schlafly writes, "What is presumptuously called `the women's movement' has supposedly `liberated' women from the drudgery of housework and given women new opportunities for careers in the paid labor force, especially in non-traditional (formerly all-male) occupations (from astronaut to coal miner)." And on page 55, concerning the feminist college student Linda LeClair, she writes, "No, Linda didn't do something constructive based on personal achievement like Dr. Sally Ride."

Now, I find that just a shade disingenuous because, truthfully, Sally Ride gained her notoriety primarily as a result of the feminist movement. I believe that since 1983, every major NASA mission has included at least one female on the flight crew. This has clearly been NASA's way of throwing a bone to the bulldogs in N.O.W., et al. Although I do respect their dedication and their hard work to get there, the fact remains that every time a woman has donned her space suit and climbed into a rocket for a high profile mission, more technically and physically qualified male astronauts have been passed over in the name of a politically correct quota. I'm sorry, but I don't think bashing feminist Linda LeClair with Sally Ride in an antifeminism book is a good idea. I say, hit her over the head with Amelia Earhart - now there's a famous female flier who needed no assistance from the feminist movement in order to reach new heights.

But these are the only noteworthy complaints I have about Phyllis Schlafly's erudite book. Otherwise, FEMINIST FANTASIES is a clearheaded examination of the illogical and unnatural arguments that serve as the shifting, hypocritical foundation of one of this country's worst diseases. Mrs. Schlafly comes at this false religion from every angle and the aggregate force of her keen mental swordplay slices right through the movement's crapola to expose the heart of truth. (As I've written elsewhere, "crapola" is a Liberal landscape colored over with an excrement-hued Crayola crayon.) Just a few of the essays I particularly enjoyed are:

*SEXIST SOFTWARE ("I discovered that one of the software programs will search material on the word processor, identify `sexist' words, and instruct the operator how to purge all sexist words and substitute different words...A busboy is a clearer. The next time you dine in a restaurant, ask the `server' to have the `clearer' remove your dishes.")


*THE INTELLIGENT CANDIDATE'S GUIDE TO THE WOMEN'S VOTE (Mrs. Schlafly gives us a list of dos and don'ts for candidates who want to prepare themselves for traps laid by feminist reporters. Number 9 is: "Don't use expressions that some women find obnoxious. Don't call any woman a `women's libber'; call her a feminist." When I worked for a magazine publisher in `93/'94, we had a card-carrying N.O.W. member in the Art Dept. I remember her once expressing great displeasure at being referred to as a "gal.")


*THE FEMINIST ASSAULT ON V.M.I. (In 1990, the fems insisted that women be admitted to the all-male Virginia Military Institute because we are forbidden to recognize the differences between men and women. But once they got in, Janet Reno's feminist Justice Department went to court to argue that failing to make adjustments for female recruits would amount to "discrimination" because it would discourage women from applying or lead them to drop out. Whoa! How do they pull these stunts off with a straight face?! Well, maybe "straight" wasn't the right word.)

In closing, let me also point out that I even like the photograph on the dust jacket of FEMINIST FANTASIES. It's a shame that she turned out the way she did, because the "women's libber" in the picture has pretty eyes. Yeah, I gotta say, once you get past the Indian war paint, that little "gal" is kinda cute.

Author, Phyllis Schlafly, tells a compelling story about the feminist movement and details how their empty promises have misguided and disappointed thousands upon thousands of women. It is a "must read" for all high school and college women as they plan and make choices for their future.

Phyllis Schlafly's newest book, Feminist Fantasies, provides the reader with everything anyone would want to know about the feminist movement over the last 40 years. It is well written, fully documented, and provides insight into why ERA was never ratified and the feminists agenda failed. It's classic Schlafly at her best.

Feminist Fantasies eloquently presents timeless principles that every woman of every age should read. If it is possible to share Phyllis Schlafly's brilliance, it is through reading her wisdom gained from first-hand experiences that span more than three decades.

Schlafly's work will profit any woman with the courage to compare and contrast her accomplishments with those of the feminists. While many of them never married or had children, they now face devastating regrets, which underscores Schlafly's incredible success as the inventor of the pro-family movement that aims to defend and protect traditional families.

Feminists would like modern women to overlook their foolish history, but smart women would do well to read Schlafly's book and then introduce future generations to it in hopes of preventing them from repeating the same mistakes.

This book is AWESOME to say the least. Bravo for a woman who is not afraid to be feminine! Usually a book that creates such anger from other raters is a good read and usually has much convicting truth in it. No one likes to be convicted. I am an honor graduate of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and put aside an $80,000/year job to stay home with my children. Why? Because they are priceless - worth much more than 80k a year. Thank you Phyllis. I am not afraid to be a stay at home mom!! I feel so honored and priveleged that God has given me this opportunity to do so.