As an early childhood expert for over thirty years, I take exception to numerous pronouncements, opinions, and "statistics" tossed off by Kate O'Beirne in her interview. The Perry preschool project, which followed children from quality child care over twenty years found that for every dollar invested in such quality care, society benefited in a savings of seven dollars in terms of better adult adjustment, career choices, lack of social maladjustment among other factors. Ms O'Bierne's constant pointing to "opinion polls" is irrelevant as to the proper needs of children. In my experience, quality child care settings offer options, choices, socialization and learning opportinities that are far beyond the capacity of single parental care in the home.

If one wishes to engage in more in depth duscussions about choices and options concerning partition of time and cultural support to allow more time with family, perhaps we could talk about how the constant restructuring of the tax codes to favor the wealthy as outlined by Bartlett and Steele in their book "Who Pays the Taxes" has been a primary culprit in forcing families into two working parents.

But to have a nuanced dialogue with a rabid ideologue such as Ms O'Beirne is clearly impossible. Contrast her assaultive style with Dan Gottleib or Terry Gross on NPR and one sees the difference between truly adult behavior and the behavior of one who has no capacity for understanding anything beyond a strictly black and white vision of reality.

I find Ms O'Beirne frankly as toxic and noxious as some of the extreme feminists she sets out to discredit. Her perception and revision of cultural history is ludicrous. Whatever meaningful points she has to make are drowned in the rantings that put her in the O'Reilly-Limbaugh class.

This is why we have problems in America, power hungry predators who portray themselves as cultural saviors, whether from the left or right.

Ken Kaplan

Human action is never 100% nature. We are parts nature and parts nurture. There are many, many men who prefer staying at home and raising the kids, or who love to be an equal partner in raising the children. There are also many mothers out there who would far prefer to be persuing other endeavors and leave their husbands to do the child rearing or who welcome the equal parenting.

Next you'll be telling me that poster divamom is doing all the housework because of this same biological conditioning. Biology says she desires to stay at home to raise the kids. She may as well do the housework while there therefore housework is woman's work. In reality, she just has a husband who is stubborn and sees it as woman's work. Most men I know, married or not, do quite a bit of housework. 50% would be a fair average.

O'Beirne is socially conditioned and yes, women are part of the conditioning, but they were conditioned in their turn. This type of cycle is a hard thing to break as is all tradition and custom. That is why feminism is so needed and so surprising; it is a rebellion against all the custom and conditioning.

O'Beirne has the additional luxury of deciding to forgo the higher income and become a stay at home mom. And when her kids were grown, she had the luxury and connections to write a book. She could lie back and succumb to the conditioning. She could take the easy way out. And now we see her here arguing that women should all just give up the fight, give in to tradition and inertia. That somehow everything will work out fine in the end if they just trust men and wait for them to feel comfortable with treating them as equals.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm

Why did Kate O'Bierne not get called to task for a source for her attribution?

I have to agree that Traister was completely bulldozed. She seems to acknowledge this in her intro, and she didn't entirely miss O'Beirne rhetorical tricks, but I really wish someone a little more effective had interviewed O'Beirne. It might have been worth reading.

I learned many years ago in a political science survey course that the typical individual's view of the world is formed first by parents, then by peers, then by education and life experience. Perhaps it's simplistic, but it stilll is true that those who have a college education tend to be more liberal on social issues like abortion, for example. There are many conservatives with advanced degrees, of course; a child of privilege who goes to Harvard for his business degree and becomes a Fortune 500 CEO is unlikely to be very liberalized in the process of getting his MBA. But real learning -- reading the histories that tell us where we came from and how we got here, the literature that speaks of other experiences and other lives, the philosophies of all of the thinkers that tried to puzzle out what life is all about -- all of that can't help but broaden a person at least a little.

One of O'Beirne's biggest untruths -- and I suspect that it is deliberate -- is her underlying assumption that children fare better staying at home with their mother. Sweeping generalizations aside about how few women really want day care, I know that most working women carry around some amount of guilt about leaving their children to go to work. Anti-feminists target that sore spot and pummel it to death. The thing is, it's not true. O'Beirne likes to cherry-pick her statistics (not to mention her lies and her damned lies) and this is one set she's completely ignored: recent studies show overwhelmingly that children do better in day care; other considerations aside, a good day care situation makes children more confident and socially adept, facilitates early learning and gives them a good head start for school, and even makes them healthier. (Exposure to variety in germs encourages a healthy immune system, a nice analogy for the development of a healthy mind.)

This is certainly true of my children. Both are far more confident and outgoing than either me or my husband when we were children, and we both had the benefit of traditional families and stay-at-home moms. I suffered from all sorts of guilt when I worked full-time, but now that I don't, it's clear that I'm not providing my child with anything she missed. (I don't wear pearls and make cookies every afternoon, though; perhaps that's the problem.) My husband works longer days now, since I'm not working, partly because he can, and partly because we all rely on his job more. My daughter sees him less, and having more of my time does *not* make up for that. (Another fallacy of O'Beirne's: if a father is a necessary influence, as O'Beirne posits, why would you minimize that influence by having the father do all of the outside-the-home work, and be home as little as possible?)

So why would this woman, who is smart and educated, and privileged enough to work at something she enjoys, want to tell other women they shouldn't have the same thing?

The answer, I think, lies in the effect of education on opinion, and even how well children develop when they're in a good day care situation -- and in O'Beirne's personal self-interest. When she urges women to be housewives, she isn't concerned about the welfare of society at large; she is protecting her own privileged status. It's not just a lack of empathy behind her thinking (although if she has any empathy for the less-privileged, it's pretty firmly repressed.) It's much better *for her* if women stay home, putting up with things they wouldn't put up with if they weren't financially dependent, for the "sake of the children." If they work, they might also be out there exercising their rights to speak and vote. If children are better socialized -- if they are best friends with an African-American and a Hispanic kid in preschool, for example -- what dangerous kinds of tolerance might they learn later? If women are better educated and earn their own money and independence, what other mistreatment are they going to decide they won't tolerate any more? When more women can pay to educate their children, our society will become more egalitarian, with more opportunities for more people. It will have no niche near the top for O'Beirne's privileged class.

While many prominent Republicans are well-educated, the majority are not: if you have a college education or better, you are still more likely to identify with the goals of the more liberal party. If more of the electorate had college degrees, the Red base would be diminished. The largely-white privileged elite that manipulates them would be nowhere, and O'Beirne might be deprived of her status. Better that other mothers should stay home -- better yet, that they should prevent their children from going to school at all, and "educate" them at home -- than to threaten the small world of the privileged, and the pervasive cloud of ignorance that keeps it safe. I don't think it's any accident that O'Beirne and others like her *are* privileged; I think it has everything to do with their motivation.

O'Beirne may have a gift for sounding rational and intelligent and well-meaning; I just wish her interviewer would have been better equipped to push aside the tricks and expose the real issues.