It might have been good to ask why the US is 'forcing' women to get educations in Afghanistan and bombing and burning babies in Iraq so men AND women can have the vote, if feminism is so bad? It's education that leads to feminism and women's desire for equality for men which is why the fundmentalists don't want their women educated. This hypocrit's arguments, however couched in modern terms, are as old as the hills.Anti-feminists have been around forever. Happily, you cannot turn back the clock, or reverse the changes brought on by new technologies, although there appears to be cycles - and times of stress and war muddle up things. The fifties happened after one of great feminist movements at the turn of last century. I don't think it's ever been a case of what women want(no human being seeks a position of subservience but will put up with it if the alternative seems dangerous) but what the economy can stand.

I posted this article from the Ladies' Home Journal on the vote.. Women just plain didn't want the vote, said the 1909 editorial.

http://www.tighsolas.ca/page27.html

As always, single mothers are left out of the equation - having somehow to find the money to pony up for daycare and summer camp on a single salary, and under the same pressure to be an ubermom as every other mother is. I'm a single mother who does not get child support, does not share custody, and is sick and tired of being unacknowledged, except as being deficient in not providing a father (who buggered off to shoot illicit drugs into his system). I'm a somewhat cagey feminist - I applaud the principles, heck, I LIVE the principles, but I feel royally shafted too, because being a mother is chronically under-valued, and it takes strength to keep valuing it yourself when you will get more strokes from society for being an over-excercised career woman, even to the detriment of your family. Don't see this changing soon, unfortunately.

I read the whole interview looking for an idea, and what I got was opinion pushed agressively. Hey!I'm right was behind everything O'Beirne said. And I recall the groupie behaviour on Capitol Gang with O'Beirne shaking her head no at any idea different from hers. O'Beirne is clearly incapable of reasoned discourse (or clever enough to know it doesn't sell), and she probably knows the book market well enough that her kind of rant will find an audience and make her money. But is such an interview with a big mouth really what Salon should be about?

This author doesn't bother me because her spewings are so far from reality that very few people are going to pay attention.

What she thinks has no impact on my life as a woman, or the equality I and my peers continue to value. We're out there in the trenches, working, living, loving, volunteering, and she's in her fancy rich lady white tower making up things about women's lives while we're living the reality.

She's a female Pat Robertson, squaking out for attention. Thinking if she says something extream she'll get attention.

Maybe she'll blame Hurricaine Katrine on feminism. That would be new.

There are so many old, rehashed, inconsistent and simply untruthful arguments brought up by O'Beirne regarding I'm surprised there's still a forum for their 'discussion'. After all, this isn't actually a 'discussion', it's a rant.

People want to go back to the days when women were put up on a pedestal and honored and protected by men? Fine. Move to any number of countries around the world where women are prevented from gaining an education, having any say in what happens to their lives, bodies and souls, are prevented from holding any property or passing any on to their daughters, not even allowed to go outside alone without losing their respectability.

Sound appealing? Sound far-fetched? This was most of the Western world until not so very long ago. Within the lifetimes of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Talk to them - my grandmother is 95, and she has some very eye-opening stories about growing up in the early 20th century.

Conservatives and anti-feminists always act as if feminism is a movement intended to create demanding, uppity women (hm, sort of like O'Beirne...) who will bring Woman's much vaunted position on the pedestal crashing down while simultaneously castrating men. Women like her want to cherry-pick the bits of progress that they like while keeping the rest of the old system intact - it's just easier and safer that way.

One of the defining characteristics of oppressive societal conditioning is the defense of the oppressing rules by the very people being oppressed. Look at all the women who cart their daughters off for genital mutilation, or who abort female fetuses, or who condone wife-beating as a valid means of marital communication. At least they know where they are in society, even if it's at the bottom of the heap. And revolution is just so darned unpredictable, messy and filled with unforeseen consequences.

Because feminism is just that: a revolutionary societal movement - meant to change all aspects of society, empowering both sides towards more mutual respect, strength, responsibility and productivity. It's a work in progress in plenty of places (several European countries) where women are women and men are men - they are equal without trying to become one another - this is the goal of feminism. Not that there isn't a long way to go. Do some feminists go too far? Sure. That's in the nature of a revolutionary discourse.

There is no arguing with someone like O'Beirne. She is there to create a lot of dust around a completely different and socially conservative agenda that has little to do with talking about feminism or "what women want". As long as she is doing interviews about the F-word instead of her real cultural/political goals, she has succeeded.

Traister should have listened to Dr. Laura or read some Coulter to prepare for this interview. Their diatribes--like O'Beirne's--rest largely on straw men (sorry, guys!), which shows how truly light they are. Feminists 30 and 40 years ago fought different battles under different circumstances and won most of them. O'Beirne's desire to re-fight them is anachronistic, and Traister shouldn't have let her get away with it.