Feminist Fantasies

January 13, 2003
In her foreword, Coulter asserts that Gen-X conservative divas may have sprung from the femme fatale–cum–right-wing wellspring Schlafly established over four decades ago with her group, Eagle Forum. Schlafly's conservative thinking might have been razor-sharp 38 years ago when she wrote her ideological groundbreaker A Choice Not an Echo. In this volume, her rhetoric has retained all of its harshness but lost its intellectual edge; her writing and cant are murky and overwrought. The short essays, written throughout the 1980s and '90s, from the woman Coulter claims singlehandedly defeated the ERA, have snappy titles reminiscent of Coulter's recent Slander
but lack substance, cohesion and contemporary knowledge. Schlafly presumes certain ideological and demographic traits (white, middle class, college-educated) to force her arguments that the majority of women neither have to nor want to work. Marriage and motherhood cannot sustain the travail of women working, Schlafly declares; it leads to the disintegration of the family. She cites jobs in general and military jobs in particular as a huge threat to maintaining gender difference. Rammed home in over 50 essays in which she cites unnamed and undated studies, Schlafly's thesis is this: feminism tried to destroy femininity, masculinity, marriage, motherhood and the security of both the economy and family, but has succeeded only in damaging the foundations, not crumbling the whole. Schlafly's politics, while passionate, are as out of date as Trent Lott on race.