In a hard-hitting piece published in The Edmunton Journal, Naomi Lakritz says that 50 years after the publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, too many women are still being abused and oppressed around the world while others remain hostages to “feminist groupthink”.
Even though some are celebrating the advances women have made since the publication of Friedan’s book, Lakritz paints a much more realistic picture of where women really are today, especially in the West, where, instead of being bullied by patriarchal societies, women who don’t subscribe to a certain kind of feminism are attacked by their own.
Real progress, she says, is “acceptance of the truth that you can be a feminist without subscribing to the views that other women think they have the right to dictate that you must hold.”
For example, it’s time to toss out the notion that you can’t be a feminist if you’re pro-life.
“Just because you are prolife does not mean you are the unwitting dupe of the patriarchal half of society, or that you don’t believe women have the right to self-actualization in the working world. It means that you think women, like all adults, ought to be responsible for the life they create as a result of choices they make for their behavior.”
She also takes issue with the so-called “mommy wars” in which women attack one another over who is the better mother, those who stay at home or those who work, calling this debate a total waste of time.
“The whole point of feminism, and of Friedan’s argument, was that women who wanted to work should be free to do so, and those who wanted to stay at home with their children should be equally free to do so, without having to face condescension, scorn or petty sniping from those who believe feminism is only about getting more women to be engineers,” Laksik writes. “Feminism also has to be about acknowledging that some women have zero interest in being engineers.”
In her opinion, this kind of futile backbiting “does not advance any cause except that of divisiveness.”
Instead, feminists should direct their outrage toward those who condone the slaughter of millions of unborn women in sex-selective abortions around the world, or who force women to their faces and “subsume their identities.”
“They’re stoned to death for being the victims of rape, they’re not free to choose their own husbands, they are denied education and kept from fully participating in the world outside the home on a par with men. They are raped, trafficked, beaten and starved.”
She goes on to cite other grim statistics, such as how the literacy rate for women in Afghanistan is only 13 percent compared to 43 percent for men.
In India, 25,000 women are murdered each year because of insufficient dowries.
In some parts of the world, more than 10,000 girls a day will get married before the age of 15.
Lakritz concludes: “Fifty years after Friedan, we’ve come a long way, baby, but other women haven’t advanced anywhere at all.”
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