Kate O'Beirne is what's called in certain circles a Monday Morning Quarterback. How easy is it to look back on the last 30 years of a movement that began a heckuva longer time ago than that, and find wrong turns, dead ends, dropped balls , and crossed signals.

If she really wants to have anything to say about feminism and its effects, she oughtn't be so quick to refuse to look where it is today, or to profess uncaring about where it's heading in the future.

As to the real effects of feminism in the last 30 years, I would correct her one one very specific statement: without the feminist movement, she would NOT have been a lawyer. She might have been a brassy, opinionated broad with a "duty" fixation, but she wouldn't have been a lawyer.

The problem with antifeminism for poor Kate O'Bierne, is that when you play to an antifeminist audience, you play to their rules and their tastes. And, Kate, I hate to tell you this, but the old "laugh-laugh-snort-snort-Femi-Nazi" gang ain't gonna buy a book from someone they'll see as a dried-up old hag with a cancelled show nobody watched when they can chuck out the same amount and get a book with a crazy-eyed vixen lunatic with great legs on the cover. O'Bierne, meet Coulter. She'll be the one benefitting from your worldview while you're sadly dusting off your 59 cents books in the Remainder bin.

Trotting out the old straw man accusation of Femi-Nazism gets bit tedious, but unfortunately many people still go for it, which I suspect is why this book, now, since there's a push to roll back the many changes that feminism did achieve, both culturally and legally.

I remember when my mother and father separated in the mid-70's -- it was impossible for a married woman to hold a bank account in her own name without her husband's permission, and because my father would not consent, she suffered sexual advances by the bank manager to get around that requirement until the divorce papers were signed. So I find it a complete aberration for Kate O'Beirne to think that without the changes brought about by feminism she would still have been able to achieve what she has. I also am dismayed by the general lack of understanding many people have of this history.

It's hard for most of us who came of age since the late 70s to imagine such a reality, but the truth was that, because a husband could control a wife's access to money, he could exercise undue control over whether or not she went to school, and who she socialized with. So, for example, if a woman made a bad choice when she was still young, she might not have any way to start over. She would have to suffer, and so would any children.

Sadly, it is all too easy for such advances as we take for granted to be eroded if not rolled back completely, and many people on the far right have been very diligently working on this for a number of years.

So I do think it's very pertinent to be aware of men who keep control of women's money, or even vice versa. I think all of us, men and women alike, need to keep our financial independence a top consideration. You just never know when you might have to make mortgage or rent payments on your own. Especially if you have kids, and regardless of whether you've chosen to work outside the home or not.

Caring for children and the home is valuable work and who says it should go unpaid whether performed by a man or a woman? In the case of a one-salary couple, there's no reason why a primary caregiver shouldn't be given some kind of salary out of the primary earner's take-home, to be put in a separate account. This can be done by proportion so it's adaptable to any budget.

As for the so-called Femi-Nazis, while some of their thoughts do fall outside the mainstream, they have also been noticeably caricatured. Here's a selected sample of what some of them actually said or did, according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_Mackinnon

MacKinnon has represented Bosnian and Croatian women against Serbs accused of genocide since 1992. She was co-counsel, representing named plaintiff S. Kadic, in the lawsuit Kadic v. Karadzic and won a jury verdict of $745 million in New York City in 2000. Kadic was the first case to recognize rape as an act of genocide; the lawsuit (under the United States' Alien Tort Statute) also established forced prostitution and forced impregnation as legally actionable acts of genocide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

In 1987 Dworkin published Intercourse (ISBN 0684832399), in which she extended her analysis to heterosexual intercourse itself, and argued that sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist system. She argued that depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture portrayed it in violent or invasive terms; that the cultural emphasis on heterosexual intercourse as the primary or only kind of "real" sex enforced a male-centric view of sexuality; and that the depiction of sexuality, when combined with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, made intercourse itself a central part of women's subordination. (Dworkin's critics often claimed that she had argued that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape" in Intercourse; Dworkin rejected this interpretation of her work as a serious misunderstanding [1].)

The world needs one more article about this clown's book the way it needs more dog droppings. If you had to discuss it, why not convene a panel of the women she loathes and ask them to defend themselves?

Giving this rightwing fool space to mouth off against a half-prepared interviewer is simply embarassing.

>The probable answer (as O’Beirne touches upon, but doesn't really get to), is because women are better carers, and men are more built for protection and working - we are probably simply 'wired' that way - society is shaped around that biology because it creates an optimal balance. Note that other species also tend to exhibit this same balance.<

Um, so every single woman out there are "better carers?" And every single man out there is built for "protection and working?" If so, why does society have any problem at all with abused/neglecting children--or men who bail on child-support? And I won't even get into how, if this is an "optimal balance," this country has a 51% divorce rate and the number of singles/never-married or childed-women is rising annually. It simply doesn't make sense to draw a norm from a sample of the population--and most likely a non-representative one at that. Nor are general statements that claim that all women do this and that nearly accurate enough to base one-size-fits-all public policy on.