in brief: feminism criticised by women at panel presentation – women’s history month: evaluating feminism, its failures, and its future

This sort of thing may not be surprising anymore, but it’s still worth mentioning that yet again, women have disowned feminism.

This time, it was at a panel presentation set up by The Heritage Foundation of America entitled ‘Women’s History Month: Evaluating Feminism, Its Failures, and Its Future,’ in which conservative women stepped up to discuss the state of feminism. And it doesn’t look pretty.

First up, Karin Agness discussed how she thinks that women in the workforce should develop a ‘think skin’ instead of ‘Banning Bossy.’

Then, Mona Charen spoke up stating that she doesn’t even celebrate Women’s History Month (even though the panel presentation was set up for Women’s History Month) because it is just not important to her that there are more or less women making history – ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t interest me whether a person who happens to share my chromosomes sits in the Oval Office, it doesn’t interest me how many woman members of the senate there are – none of that is important to me.’

So just what is important to these conservative female figures? Well,  it’s ‘love, sex, family, career, community, women, men and children.’ Charen continued by pointing out that the fact that (apparently) feminists only care about women’s success is usually just seen in terms of ‘women’s marketplace performance,’ of which may not be a good indicator of what’s actually happening to women in everyday life.

You can check out more of what Charen and the others stated here, which includes rants about why the decline of marriage has ruined society and about how Sheryl Sandberg’s Ban Bossy campaign has created yet another bad image for women.

I’m curious, though, as to what our Lip readers think about all of this. I, for one, do agree that feminism should not just be all about women thinking about women – it should be women, men, well, everyone really, thinking about women, men and everyone. It should be all about equal opportunities.

However, I’m not too sure these respected ladies are expressing their concerns correctly, especially since they’re doing so at a panel about Women’s History Month. That’s just a tad debasing towards women, don’t you think?