Feminists Keep Fighting the Same Battles

After Harvard University absorbed Radcliffe College and became coed, Radcliffe was left with valuable buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a pile of left-over funds. The feminists took over the building and money, called it the Radcliffe Institute, and began functioning as a headquarters for feminist ideology, hosting feminist speakers and graduate students who want to study feminism. The Radcliffe Institute publishes a glossy quarterly magazine promoting feminism.

The most recent issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly features an article about Susan Faludi, who made her name as a feminist author with a book called Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Faludi just completed a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute where she has been working on a new book about why the feminist movement has such trouble sustaining itself from one generation to the next. Faludi described how she attended a mother-daughter feminist event intended to celebrate the passing of the mantle from the older to the younger generation. Faludi found that the older women complained they were sick and tired of being swept into the dustbin of history, and the younger women complained that the older women should relinquish the stage and get out of their way, so they all kept fighting the same battles over and over again. Faludi discovered that most women don't want to call themselves feminists.

If they had asked me why the feminist movement cannot sustain itself from one generation to the next, I would say it's because feminism is based on the silly notion that men are their enemies and that American women are the victims of an oppressive patriarchal society. This ideology makes women bitter and unhappy. In fact, there are no legal or institutional obstacles to women's success in America today, so the feminists continue to cry about women once not having the right to vote, a problem that was solved so long ago that I don't know anybody who can remember those years.

Audio version of this commentary.