For the last two days, James Dobson has dedicated his “Family Talk” radio program to interviewing Phyllis Schlafly and her niece, Suzanne Venker, about their new book “The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say.”
While Schlafly was her usual cranky and out-of-touch self, rambling on about how all feminists had horrible childhoods and hate men and babies and husbands shouldn’t be expected to change diapers, Venker was the voice of today’s modern anti-feminist … the sort who tells her eleven year-old daughter not to become a brain surgeon because it’ll interfere with her baby-making:
The other, very taboo thing to say to young women is “you need to look for a man who can support you.” And the reason why you want to do that is not because you’re never going to make your own money and go out into the world; it’s because you’re going to hit a point – particularly in those years when the children are not in school, the first five years – when you are not going to want to be bothered with making an income because you’re going to want to be with those babies.
So that doesn’t mean you have to find a rich man, it just means you have to find somebody who is ambitious and capable of holding down a job and finding a path that is consistent and where he does not flounder.
Another point is why I say the reality is there are going to be some careers that are probably not going to be good options for you as a woman. I have an eleven year-old daughter and if we got into the conversation of what am I going to be in X number of years and she comes to me and says “Mom, I want to be a brain surgeon,” I would ask her “Okay, is there anything else that you want in your life?”
And if she presumably then says “well, I’d like to get married and have children too,” I’d say “then you’d probably better pick something else.” And here’s why: these two things are going to conflict majorly. You’re going to spend ten years preparing for this major life as a brain surgeon – which is one kind of life, all consuming – and then right as your body is winding down biologically, you want to get married and have children. That ain’t gonna work.
