Women and Gender

Shields: Women from Heritage Foundation have wrong argument against feminism, women’s happiness

While for many, feminism is a source of strength and power, for the conservative women of the Heritage Foundation, feminism is the source of the “high out-of-wedlock birth rate and a decline in women’s overall happiness.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, on April 3, the Heritage Foundation celebrated Women’s History Month by inviting Town Hall columnist Mona Charen, The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway and Karin Agness, founder of the Network of Enlightened Women, to a panel called “Evaluating Feminism, Its Failings and Its Future.”

However, instead of celebrating Women’s History Month, the three women completely bashed the feminist movement, focusing entirely on its perceived failures, and didn’t seem to want it to have a future.

Their first argument was that the feminist movement is directly responsible for the increased rate of children born out-of-wedlock. They believe that the career-focused mindset that some women have is steering away from marriage or the support of men. They believe that when a woman is starting a family, she should be turning to a man for financial and emotional support.

But why should that be a woman’s goal? Why should a woman seek to find a man to support her instead of building a career that she enjoys and makes her capable of supporting herself? In this economy, that mindset just isn’t an option for many women and even if it were, that should be a woman’s choice, not the default option.



The panelists also stated that career-minded women are contributing to the disintegration of the family structure. What they probably mean is that families no longer consist of a husband, a wife, two kids and a dog. Not that anything is wrong with that type of family, but that shouldn’t be their focus.

If these women are so concerned with family structure, then why aren’t they focused on increasing the amount of healthier families, free of abuse and poverty? It doesn’t matter what the family structure is if said family is wrought with these issues.

Their third, and perhaps most ridiculous, argument is that feminism is decreasing happiness in women. They’re saying that women should stop trying to attain economic and social strength and freedom because it will stress them out or make them sad. I think women are strong enough to handle a bit of discomfort.

Even if what they are saying is true, so what? The purpose of the feminist movement isn’t to make women feel warm and fuzzy. Feminism is about equality, not happiness. These panelists are basically saying that women should ignore all the hard issues in life, get married and raise their kids. In other words they want women to stick their head in the sand and hope everything works itself out.

Well it won’t. Many women don’t have the financial luxury of being able to stay with their kids and others simply may not want to. The feminist movement isn’t the result of this and even if it was, women should have the option to make decisions for themselves, not just follow the standard procedure. Women are people too, not just cut-out figures that fit neatly into a box.

Mandisa Shields is a freshman newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at meshiedl@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @mandisashields.





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