Ms. Mitty's New American Dream

...But must they treat this right as a privilege...

...A right to a job is not granted by God or government...

...The women of Cuba have a right to have their chicurritos cared for all day in government centers...

...If the Equal Rights Amendment were merely a superfluous special application of the Fourteenth Amendment its imitative nature would be nothing but a form of flattery...

...The Movement offers a new American Dream not unlike the old in the superficiality of its appeal, and one which may lead to even greater disappointment...

...The Libberal litany of "Do your own thing no matter what" demotes those options that are really most desirable for individuals and for society...

...Members of women's organizations forestall criticism of Libberalism by insisting that there is no one "Movement" but a variety of "movements...

...But by leaving out the phrase "equal protection of the laws" and seeming to snub its importance, it invites legislators to snub it as well and becomes a form of treachery against the working class...

...this verbal trickery gives their members carte blanche to court publicity by sensational pronouncements without fear of bringing criticism down upon the Movement as a whole...

...They ignore and indeed altogether deny the natural instinctiveness of these pleasures and suggest that such joys, if not sinfully possessive and capitalistic, are at least low-class and anti-intellectual...

...The simple wording of the Equal Rights Amendment is "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex...

...pointed out in his efforts to stop passage of the ERA by the U.S...

...The chance to become important and admired by those outside your home will be yours as soon as you find day-care for the kids," say the feminists to Ms...

...Perhaps what is needed is more, not less, sex discrimination by industry and the professions, in order that they may provide working mothers of young children with special, and better, opportunities than men can get for high quality jobs that take relatively few hours away from home...

...Yet they introduce the very presupposition they scorn to the civil libertarian level and pass it off as avant-garde existentialism...

...Where the Equal Rights Amendment says "on account of sex," future amendments might just as reasonably substitute "on account of age...

...Nor is a right necessarily desirable...

...But thoughtful critics should not be put off by this insistence on pluralism in the Movement to the point of ignoring certain common characteristics of feminist rhetoric, some of which are very dangerous...

...Until that day, we need to speak up for the importance of parental care of children and the preservation of private homes, not homes that are empty most of the day but homes that are used and enjoyed...

...And, she might have added, particularly the ties of mothers to children...

...Moreover, all of the Movement's solutions for the problems of the nuclear family involve Big Motherism by the government...

...The greatest evil of Libberalism is the threat its narrowness poses for the rights of children...

...At least one young woman writer, Arianna Stassinopoulos, sees the moral deficiencies of Women's Lib: "Women's Lib regards virtue, altruism and sacrifice as signs of weakness, as the marks of a slave mentality...

...With such a proliferation of possible causes of discrimination, it is laws, not amendments, that are needed...

...But their use of the word "right" carries deceptive connotations, first, that the right is a God-given natural one, and second, that the right is always desirable...

...The Fourteenth Amendment covers the same ground as the ERA and more, except it uses the word "privileges" instead of "rights...

...Their government grants this right, but is it a privilege...

...Any law preventing discrimination has the power of the Constitution backing it already...

...Or in place of the word "sex" or the word "age" why not substitute "race," "religion," "marital status," "personal appearance," "prison record," "emotional history," "socioeconomic class," "political views," "medical history," and so on...

...not the Kantian question, "What is my duty...

...As individuals we may lose the art of having fun with our children if we let thefeminists spread the rumor that taking care of children is a bore...

...They urge the establishment of enough government-sponsored day-care centers to accommodate every child whose mother wants to work, regardless of the responsibilities she is casting aside...

...This crude view of ethics underlies their concept of society as a whole as well as of specific personal ties...

...But many legislators have felt that to vote against ERA would be like voting against our existing Fourteenth Amendment...

...As Senator Sam Ervin (D– N.C...

...If it isn't fairfor a personnel director to hire a man instead of a woman for the job of night watchman, neither is it fair for him to hire a young girl instead of an old woman as a receptionist or a handsome man instead of an ugly one as a salesman...

...Like any other process of discrimination, sex discrimination is a sin when it harms anyone, either male or female, but a virtue when it helps them...

...The feminist woman need ask herself only the hedonistic question, "What is my pleasure...

...Even the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which they support is nothing more than a copy of the old equal rights amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution...

...In any event, the construction of a special amendment ibr a special application of the Fourteenth Amendment is an absurd precedent to initiate...

...It weighs up the world in terms of sheer utilitarian egotism...

...They unjustly equate Adam Smith's economic theory with the simplistic presumption that self-interest at the corporate level is bound to work for the good of all...

...Our government discriminates against wealthy people by making them pay proportionately more taxes than the poor, yet we consider this discrimination a virtue...

...By insisting that every woman has a "right" to be an engineer, surgeon, dockworker, coal miner, and so on, the feminists exert a commendable influence against the old-fashioned sex stereotyping of jobs and professions...

...Senate, sex discrimination has already been specifically outlawed by court interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, the language of which goes like this: "No state shall .. . abridge the privileges...

...The establishment of government day-care centers will lead invariably to the obsolescence of home ownership and private property, and a derivative of this homelessness will be a bland mediocrity of personalities and abilities for succeeding generations...

...To promote the new, female version of the American Dream, they slight the delights a woman gets from identifying with her own children and watching them grow and develop...

...The most positive aspect of this rhetoric is its effect in broadening the image of feminity, expanding vistas of women limited in the past by rigid preconceptions and discrimination...

...Enjoying child support payments from divorced fathers is sex discrimination, but is it wrong...

...The fault ff the new Dream, like that of the old, is its emphasis on money and status instead of on deeper and more enduring rewards...

...Isn't the do-yourown-thing advocacy a personalized imitation of the laissez-faire economics that the Libberals decry...

...This demand feeds both guises of the Janus-faced goal of the liberals, which is to collect more and more taxes, and to provide more and more government services...

...In fact, one of the foci of the Women's Movement is the demand for day-care centers...

...By picturing the married woman as a slave to her husband and children, the promoters of the new American Dream drive a wedge between women's rights and children's rights...

...No one of course, but our country's Constitution already contains such a statement...

...If we have to single out each important cause of possible discrimination and write an amendment to emphasize it, we will need at least this many for a start—and maybe a dozen more...

...They can leave them early in the morning on their way to work and pick them up late in the evening...

...of citizens of the United States...

...Politically as well as culturally, imitation is the feminists' method...

...Who can disagree with a statement like that...

...Some of the Movement women apparently think so...

...And as a society we may be doomed if we ignore the evidence—e.g., the research of New York psychologist Matthew Besdine—that creativity and genius are more often the products of overmothering than of under-mothering...

...Thus the Women's Movement reveals the double b in Libberalism by bringing new revenue from theenlarged female work force and buying a new voting block of women who have been successfully seduced by promises of free child care...

...It is acquired by bringing motivation, hard work, and commitment to meet opportunity...

...Mitty and her husband have a right, for example, to attend the opening night of the symphony dressed in reverse to custom—he wearing a long gown and she wearing one of his suits...

...But is sex discrimination always bad...

...A movement that was not elitist, that cared about women of all socioeconomic levels, would not treat "protection" as unimportant, considering the long struggle that workers engaged in to get protective legislation for women...

...The feminists prefer the word "rights" to "privileges" partly in imitation of the natural rights theory which gave liberalism its historical start, but also because "rights" suggests something to demand while "privileges" suggests something to be grateful for, and gratitude supposedly is a feminine weakness...

...Granting some flaws in the program of Aid to Dependent Children, its value is not the less for being based on sex discrimination...

...When the day comes that technological development reduces the fulltime work week for all men and women from forty to twenty hours, or when variations in the hours and days available for interesting employment at all levels of prestige goaround the clock and around the calendar, then it will make sense to speak of a family environment in which children are not neglelcted even though both parents work full-time...

...Whoever finds ground for an amendment that singles out gender as a cause of discrimination can find grounds for a whole string of amendments, each specifically naming another frequent cause of unfair bias...

...nor shall ally State . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws...