"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Anastasia P. Lytle

My high school students and I were having a discussion about literature recently, and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web came up. One of my girls asked me, "Mrs. Lytle, how come in the book, the spider does all the work and the pig gets all of the recognition?" And before I had even consciously considered the issue, my mouth, as of its own accord, opened, and out spilled the words, "Men always get credit for the work women do." As soon as those words left my mouth, and I realized what I had just said, I was aghast.

What prompted me to automatically spew a bunch of feminist nonsense regarding a beautiful and touching story? Why would my mind automatically seek an answer that is illogical and perverts the entire noble theme of Charlotte's Web? What is so wrong with accepting that yes, Charlotte did give her life to save Wilbur's, and we should honor her sacrifice and aspire to be such a friend? I would argue that what we now find "wrong" in accepting the loving, giving theme of this novel has everything to do with the Feminist Agenda of Today.

The modern feminist movement would like to claim that it desires men and women to be "equal." But what is equal? Does that mean we have equal rights? Hopefully. But "equal rights" does not imply equal capability. I may have equal rights to applying for a construction job, in a traditionally male-dominated field, but if I can only lift forty pounds and a man can lift a hundred, should I get the job in the name of "equality"? And conversely, if a male is applying for a teaching job, which is a largely female profession, and a woman applies who is more qualified than is the man, should he get the job just to help even out the ratio between men and women? Certainly not!

Modern feminists, however, are seeking to utterly destroy the differences between men and women. The truth is, men and women are different. I will never, ever, be as good at video games or economics as my husband, and no matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to switch with ease between three languages or make a perfect piecrust, both of which I can do. This does not mean that he is superior to me, or I to him. It means that we are Different. And I am grateful that we are different, because I frankly don't want to marry another woman, and he doesn't want to marry another man. Our differences make for a good marriage, and we are able to value the uniqueness in each other.

Look at it this way. A college professor may be superior in many ways to a mechanic, but when he needs his car repaired, the mechanic is superior to him. In the same way a husband may be superior to a wife in the matter of headship. There is equality of value, but not function or roles. Superior does not mean "better" in this case; it simply means above, just as inferior does not mean lousy or pathetic, but below. A boss is superior to his employees. Parents are superior to their children. And in a biblical marriage, a husband is superior to his wife. These terms have been highly politicized and used as emotional propaganda by the extreme leftist feminist movement, to where even I automatically cringe upon hearing the words "superior" and "inferior" used to refer to people. But these words do not automatically connote "better than" and "worse than." Rather, when used in a biblical sense, they indicate positions of authority and the roles of men and women.

Recently the president of Harvard, Dr. Lawrence Summers, came under fire for noting that fewer women chose the mathematical profession than do men. Dr. Summers suggested that perhaps genetic predispositions were to blame for this occurrence.¹ "Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities." He did not, as the liberal media would seemingly have you believe, stand up and say, in a childishly triumphant manner, "Men are better at math than women! Nah na — na — nah!" Rather, he said, "Hey, there are some differences between men and women! Wow!" which disgusted certain women in the mathematical profession. Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT said to the Boston Globe that if she hadn't left the room, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

How incredibly professional of you, Dr. Hopkins. In fact, my opinion of all women just went skyrocketing through the roof because you didn't even wait to see if you could statistically prove this man wrong, but you instead decided to throw a hissy fit, and let a national newspaper document it. However, if a woman were to comment that fewer men go into languages or nursing than do women, would this be considered snide and derogatory? And yet NOW, the National Organization of Women, called for Summer's resignation, claiming that "Summers' suggestion that women are inferior to men in their ability to excel at math and science is more than an example of personal sexism, it is a clue to why women have not been more fully accepted and integrated into the tenured faculty at Harvard since he has been president."²

Blunt statistics can be hard to swallow. They tell us a lot of things that we don't like to hear — Asian children are better at math than their American counterparts. Blacks have a higher crime rate than any other culture in the U.S. Children of couples that stay married tend to be far more emotionally stable than their peers who play merry-go-round with Mommy and Daddy and Step-mom and Step-dad. Blacks are better than whites at almost anything that involves running or jumping, such as football, basketball, or track, but aren't great swimmers. There are some children, of whatever race, that are naturally more gifted than others. And yes, men are naturally more inclined towards the math and sciences, whereas women are more inclined towards languages and the arts.

What Dr. Summers was trying to say, and what Modern Feminism would like to eradicate from the minds of America, and the world, is that there are differences between men and women. Yet the feminists have told us for so long that any woman who does anything at all for a man, even having consensual sex with her husband, is being "violated." Women, apparently, should live in this magical feminazi kingdom where giant burly women build all the roads and aggressive, pushy business types are CEO's of all of the companies. No one, of course, should stay at home and raise children, because a) to have children, women need a man (or at the least, a man's sperm) and b) the Feminist Agenda thinks that staying at home with children is evil. This is the same organization that supports abortion, gay marriage, and over-the-counter "morning after" drugs for women. And yet at the same time, NOW openly mocks women that choose to give up a business career in order to enter another, and I would argue far more challenging, career — that of raising (and often educating, as well) their children.

Some things weren't so great "way back when" for women. But these "dreadful" times, which seems to be any time prior to approximately the 1960's were not, as feminists would have us believe, Pure Evil. Women weren't kept in chains and sold off into marriage with evil, vile old men, and beaten and forced to endlessly bear children and clean house, with never a fresh hour of sun. Maybe some were. And that should never have been allowed to happen. It still happens in a lot of places, particularly in Muslim countries, but oddly enough, I haven't heard a peep out of NOW about how Muslim women are treated. American women, for instance, have always had a voice, even before our foremothers won us a right to vote. The first woman to run for President of the United States, Victoria Woodhull, ran in 1872. Eighteen seventy-two, ladies and gentlemen. She was also "the first woman stockbroker, the first woman to own her own newspaper, and first woman to speak before the House Judiciary Committee in Congress."³ Now Mrs. Woodhull was by no means a perfect woman, but she definitely showed that not all women prior to the radical Feminazi movement of the sixties and beyond were meek, oppressed, bullied creatures.

From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth I to Florence Nightingale to Jane Austen to Helen Keller, history is simply littered with women who stood up and made themselves be heard. And yet none of them had to become men to do so. They all showed that women can be incredibly capable, brave, and resilient, and yet none of them demanded to be thought of as "equal" to a man. Queen Victoria adored her husband, Albert, and bore him nine children, yet this did not make her any less a queen. Joan of Arc inspired a nation of French people to actually stand up and fight. Jeanne Chezard de Matel, a French woman, stood up against Cardinal Richelieu himself to found the Order of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament in the mid 1600's. Florence Nightingale, far more than just a nurse (which is honorable in and of itself), also "revolutionized the idea that social phenomena could be objectively measured and subjected to mathematical analysis. She was an innovator in the collection, tabulation, interpretation, and graphical display of descriptive statistics."⁴

These were powerful and strong women, and yet none of these women asked to be treated as men. They wanted women to be treated fairly, and given equal opportunities as men, but did not seek to create one unisex gender, where women and men lost their distinct identities. My issue is not with women seeking respect and a place in the world, but with women who try to make a place for themselves by essentially becoming men. Women who seek to destroy the lines between men and women are, without realizing it, destroying the uniqueness of womanhood. There is nothing wrong with being female, and yet the feminists of today would have us believe that if we do not act "macho," somehow we are failures.

Let us look for a moment at the history of female knights. Yes, there were female knights in those dark and unspeakably evil days of chivalry. The order of the Hatchet in Catalonia, was founded in 1149 by Raymond Berenger, count of Barcelona, to honor the women who fought for the defense of the town of Tortosa against a Moor attack. The order of the glorious Saint Mary (1233), was the first religious order of knighthood to grant the rank of militissa to women. In the Low Countries, at the initiative of Catherine Baw in 1441, and 10 years later of Elizabeth, Mary and Isabella of the house of Hornes, orders were founded which were open exclusively to women of noble birth, who received the French title of chevalière or the Latin title of equitissa. Several established military orders had women who were associated with them, beyond the simple provision of aid. The Teutonic order accepted consorores who assumed the habit of the order and lived under its rule. Later, in the late 12th century, one sees that convents dependent on military orders are formed.⁵ Does this sound like all women were repressed and forced into a life of drudgery before Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who was a brave and valiant woman, but not the first of her kind) made her voice heard?

Anne Hutchinson, Priscilla Alden, Dolly Madison, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Sayers, Jane Long, the Bronte sisters, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Shelly, and right down to our own Miss Ima Hogg were all influential women in many different ways, and in many different time periods. Not all of them were perfect women, or even very nice women. But they all stood up for themselves and demanded that people respect them. These women did not meekly cower in the shadow of Men and Society, and were not content to be seen and not heard.

I am not attempting to deny that many cultures have suffered from a ridiculous historical vision of women as a weak, frail, squeamish sex (or that many woman have acted weak, frail, and squeamish). Cultures may have seen women that way, but that doesn't mean that women, up until today, have acted that way. We, as women, should not ignore the huge contributions that our foremothers have made to history. By pretending that Feminism has only ever existed in the misguided, hateful mentality that being a woman means that you have a right to promiscuous sex and third trimester abortions, we undermine the accomplishments of women throughout the entire historical timeline.

What feminists fail to see is that while yes, it was awful that some women weren't allowed to go to school or have a career or own property, it is just as awful that today's feminists seek to remedy the evils of the past by demanding that women be given "freebies". The current popular notion is that all the evils done to women throughout history will be remedied if we take everything away from the men and give it to the women. Take affirmative action, and employers being required to hire certain amounts of women, period, for their businesses. How is this any less degrading to women than not giving women anything? For one thing, it says, "We don't really expect women to be able to earn jobs on their own, so let's give them handouts and menial jobs and maybe they'll shut up about wanting to work." For another, looking at it from a business perspective. If, as an employer, I were interviewing a man and a women for the same position, and they were equally qualified, I would go by résumé and gut instinct. If the man was more qualified than the woman, I would hire him. If the woman was more qualified than the man, I would hire her.

But if the man was more qualified and yet I was required by the government-imposed quotas to hire the less qualified woman, my view of women would be slightly tainted. I could never look at that woman and be glad I hired her. Rather, my mentality would be, "I was forced to hire this woman rather than someone more qualified." Forcing people to hire or accept women based on ratios instead of qualifications and capability actually undermines the success of women in the workplace, because it ensures that more poorly trained and educated women are hired in order to reach affirmative action quotas, and therefore less women are promoted in the workplace, because who wants to promote an under-qualified employee? It is no less derogatory to assume that women are not capable of getting jobs on their own, and imposing restrictions on employers, than it was to assume that women would not be able to get a job at all, and to keep them out of the professional world. As a woman, I would be highly offended if someone offered me a job simply because I was a woman, rather than basing that decision on my education and experience. The world needs to step back, let women handle education and work for themselves, and let women actually earn themselves a place in the working world, rather than trying to hand it to them on a silver platter. It isn't helping women and it isn't helping business to impose quotas. Once women prove that they can stand on their own two feet, without screaming, "Discrimination! Sexism!" every time that something doesn't go their way, maybe men will stop seeing women as weak as and less competent than their male counterparts.

Certainly women should be provided with the same educational and social opportunities as men. This does not mean that all things should be "equal" to everyone, and that everything available to men should be available to women, or vice versa. If a private college that has been all-male for centuries chooses to exclude women, so what? Go form an all-girls college with a higher academic standard. If a woman applies to a job and a man with better qualifications gets the job instead, who cares? Go back to school and become even more qualified than he is, then come back and take his boss's position. Women need to stop whining about men getting everything, and the world being against women, and life being unfair. Life can be unfair. But it's up to women to use their God-given abilities to prove to the world how capable they are.

Maybe fewer women go into math and sciences. Maybe more women become teachers than become neurosurgeons. So what? Teaching is a profession that is losing a lot of credibility right now, and could use some dedicated women to restore honor to the profession. Being a stay-at-home mom is no less honorable than being the CEO of Microsoft, as long as you work hard and honestly in either profession. But you don't have to be "butch" to do either. There is nothing at all wrong with being female, and yet the Modern Feminist Movement wants to eradicate all traces of womanhood from our ranks. Being a woman does NOT mean we are weak. It means we are different than men, and need to use those differences to our advantage. No matter how hard I train, I will never be as strong as George Forman. That doesn't make me less of a person. It means that there are other areas, rather than brute strength, in which I can excel.

And what is so wrong with diversity? Isn't that what liberals are supposedly championing? And yet the liberal feminist movement wants to take diversity out of "traditional" gender roles. The truth is, women like men who are "men." That does not mean that we want men who beat us and drink incessantly. Far from it! But we want men that we know we can depend on to love us, support us, and (even as unpopular as this concept is now) lead us. I don't want to have to make all of the decisions because my husband is a spineless sop. And at the same time, I don't want a man that expects me to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen all the time. My husband respects my opinion, and I his, and we work together in our marriage. But when a decision has to be made and only if we are at an impasse, my husband has the final word. Our differences, and the respect we have for those differences, make for a good marriage.

Yet modern feminists, who very openly support gay marriage, sneer at a "traditional" family as being, in some way, unhealthy. What happened here is that women are afraid of being controlled by a domineering male, and they impose that viewpoint upon all males. Their solution seems to be emasculating all of the male population, and at the same time encouraging women to take the attitudes traditionally held by men, creating a society of crass, graceless women, and foppish, feminine men. In seeking to create a balance between men and women, modern feminism goes too far, instead tipping the balance the other way. But just the fact that men aren't always perfect either does not give us the need or even the right to feminize all men and create a matriarchical Feminazi war kingdom.

So what should women do to establish their place in society? In the first place, whining is not going to get us anywhere. Women need to stop seeing the world as "Us Vs. Men" and actually do something to accomplish their goals and establish their place as strong, capable, driven women in society, who are competent, and at the same time retain their femininity. Honor the accomplishments of all of the great women who have come before us by rolling up your sleeves and starting on your own mark in history, rather than sitting on your tail and whining about how men don't respect you. Why should men respect women that do nothing to merit respect? Get out there and prove your worth, rather than expecting it to be handed to you by someone else.

1. "Summers' remarks on women draw fire." Boston Globe, Jan 17, 2005
2. "NOW Calls for Resignation of Harvard University's President." January 20, 2005.
3. "First Woman Presidential Candidate Supported Free Love & Spiritualism"
4. "Florence Nightingale"
5. "Women Knights in the Middle Ages"

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