Feminism & Freedom

January 1998

By Robert Stacy McCain

In the December 1997 issue of Harper's magazine, the editors produced a forum in which six women participated in a discussion of "women and their ongoing troubles inside corporations." In her initial remarks, Barbara Jones (whose "ongoing troubles" involve being a senior editor at Harper's) offers the sort of statistical data routinely used to "prove" the existence of widespread job discrimination against women:

“For the first time in nearly twenty years, the wage gap between men and women is widening (full-time working women make just under 75 percent of men's median income, down from 77 percent four years ago). Although 46 percent of the U.S. workforce is female, nearly 98 percent of the senior-level management of Fortune 500 companies are males. Less than 2 percent of Fortune 500 top wage earners are women. Under .5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.”

This is followed by nine pages of anecdote and analysis about these "ongoing troubles," concluding with comments from Barbara Ehrenreich that include the militant ultimatum: "We cannot have corporate America destroying American families, and that transcends gender."

Let us note that the focus is exclusively on "corporations," rather than the "workplace" -- the discussants were apparently uninterested in whatever "ongoing troubles" women might face in government employment, non-profit institutions or small business. And while working women undoubtedly face similar difficulties in other nations, Ms. Ehrenreich apparently saw no need to vilify "corporate Japan" or "corporate Belgium" in the same tones as she impugned "corporate America" for allegedly "destroying American families."

What is it about these major American corporations that makes them uniquely intent upon the subjugation of women and the destruction of families? Is this kind of oppression and destruction particularly profitable? If the ultra-successful Fortune 500 are such sexist enterprises, could it be that smaller firms are less successful because they are less sexist?

Questions like this multiply ad infinitum as one examines the feminist case against "corporate America." Were it not for the fact that American women (and men and children) enjoy a standard of living unequalled in the history of the world, a perusal of feminist literature might induce the belief that life for women in the United States is a nightmare on the order of, say, Stalinist Russia.

Ah, but this is not so! For the Soviet commissars of old were eager to tell the world about the glorious benefits that the Marxist-Leninist regime bestowed on women. "The woman occupied a more and more conspicuous place in the economic and cultural life," the Soviet statistical bureau reported in 1958. "Over 100,000 women manage kolkhoz brigades and animal farms. Among specialists with higher education, women represent 44 per cent. No state has done as much for the woman as has the Soviet."

It is impossible, of course, to know whether such claims were true. Whatever "conspicuous place" women may have occupied in the Soviet Union, they were in fact living in a totalitarian police state. Ascertaining the reality of life behind the Iron Curtain was not easy, and the Communist Party routinely distorted and falsified data in order to convey the impression that the Soviet economy was growing much faster than that of the capitalist West.

It was not until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s that we finally learned just how bogus those propaganda claims had been. Even now, Russia and other formerly communist nations are struggling to overcome the legacy of 70 years of socialist tyranny.

In the bad old days of communism, however, it was commonplace for the Reds to proclaim the inferiority of the West. "In capitalist countries the woman is shackled by chains of slavery," the 1958 Soviet report contended. "She has no political rights and as to social conditions, she is oppressed even more than man, since she is paid less for the same work."

Does this 40-year-old Bolshevik propaganda sound curiously modern and familiar? The politics of modern feminism is nothing other than warmed-over Marxism, and has done far more toward "destroying American families" than have the Fortune 500.

The vicious tone with which Ms. Ehrenreich and her comrades denounce "corporate America" is sufficient evidence of their hostile disposition toward free enterprise. At its root, feminism is merely another front of the Left's "permanent revolution" against economic freedom.

r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net

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