Radical Feminism Colleen Carrol Campbell

The New York Times recently released an article in first page about the increase in the number of women from the Ivy League [NdT] that willingly sacrifice their careers in favor of their future family. This study was partially based upon a survey among 138 students (women) of Yale, reveling how more than half of the surveyed women were planning to reduce their working day time out of home or definitely quit if they had children. The article also mentioned that recent studies in Yale showed that almost half of graduated women under 40 did not work a complete working day time. Reactions to this article were intense. Experts and feminine “bloggers” went out to the streets in bunches demonstrating against this article, they questioned the methodology and made fun of the “backward movement” of these “unconscious” and “vain” women of Yale.

Karen Stabiner wrote in Los Angeles Times: “Those future mothers showed a surprising combination of naďve ingenuousness and privilege”. “In order to plan such a future, a woman needs to have a stock of potential rich husbands, they must remain married in this time and age where half of marriages end in divorce and must ignore the history of the feminist movement”. Most women do not have the opportunity to graduate from Ivy League and many of them who work out of home do it because of financial pressures that those graduates from Yale will not ever have to face. If feminism is really in favor of free choice, then why those who have the opportunity to devote more time to maternity are criticized and condemned for that? Why should they sacrifice their right to educate their children as they wish, simply because their style of life does not fit with the ideals of the “feminist movement”? What kind of feminist movement is this that stimulates this retrograde idea that mothers who decide to be full time mothers are guilty of being ungrateful because to their first class education, or even worst that they are unworthy of it. The first feminist were against this idea, Mary Wollstonecraft, unanimously considered “the mother of feminism” she criticized in her well known treatise of 1792, “Demand of women’s rights”. Immersed in a society that considered irrelevant the women’s role in higher education, because according to them their only role was to be mothers, Wollstonecraft discussed that women’s education was most important since mothers were responsible for the vital task of forming the next generation.

She wrote: “Children education, that means, promoting a healthy body and mind in the new generation, is closely related to women destiny, the ignorance that disables them must be considered totally anti natural. I will always hold that their minds can embrace much more, and must do so or they will never be sensible mothers”.

Today’s feminists seem to have forgotten Wollstonecraft observations about the intrinsic value of education. This new feminists feel resentful against these women that have received a higher education and decided to stay home as mothers. Such attitude shows a deficient understanding of education and maternity. J.H. Newman described knowledge in “Idea of a University”, as “its aim itself”. A kind of Education that offers the knowledge and the ability to think in a critical way have a great value, independently of the direction we choose after graduating. Graduates who decide to share the benefits of their education first of all with their children, are making a significant contribution to society. They form citizens and orient moral and intellectual development of the next generation. So, instead of being criticized, these women should be congratulated for weighing and considering in a realistic way the demands of their career and maternity, achieving in this way a convenient balance for their families in the future. “A feminist movement” that criticizes them does not deserve that name.

NOTES

[NdT] The Ivy League is an association of eight northeastern universities in the United States of America. The term involves certain academic connotations of excellence as well as a certain amount of elitism. This eight universities are also referred as the old eight.