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No Slam-Dunk For the Mommy Wars


Email Kathryn Lopez
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Could politics end the mommy wars?

What mommy wars, you ask? One short answer is: the ones that make for awkward silences at cocktail parties when a woman is asked what she does and she responds that she raises her children. The feminist revolution would have us believe this undignified.

That's bunk. It always has been.

With the increased media presence of women of all political stripes, especially in politics -- as candidates, as tea party players and participants -- that lie is being exposed in the mainstream, crowding out the delusion of the lamestream (to borrow one woman's word). Exposing that deception in a reasoned, well-researched, sober way was the goal of a panel presented by the Susan B. Anthony List -- a group that supports pro-life politicians -- on the 90th anniversary of the day women were granted the right to vote.

At the heart of it all was, as moderator Helen Alvare of George Mason University put it, "women's lived experience." You can only mess with reality -- and the natural law -- for so long before your feminist fantasy is revealed to be misery.

The event, billed as "A Conversation on Pro-Life Feminism," was a both a primer on the existence of such a thing and an attempt to replace the conventional approach to so-called women's issues.

And it was a real conversation, one aiming for real answers about real life, not life as Ms. Magazine and academy radicals portray it.

W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia delved into the myths of the mommy wars during the panel, and continued the discussion with me afterward: "Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

"This is particularly true for women who self-identify as gender traditionalists -- who believe men and women are fundamentally different, and that men should focus more on breadwinning and women should focus more on homemaking -- or maternalists -- who believe that infants and toddlers do best when they are cared for by their mother. It is also more likely to be true for women who have children currently in the home."