Feminists’ Double Standards About Child Care

Phyllis Schlafly
“When the feminist movement burst onto the American social scene in the 1970s, the rallying cry was “liberation.” The feminists demanded liberation from the role of the housewife and mother who lived in what Betty Friedan famously labeled a “comfortable concentration camp.”
Feminist ideology taught that the duties of the housewife and mother were (in Friedan’s words) “endless, monotonous, unrewarding” and “peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls.” Society’s expectation that a mother should care for her own children was cited as oppression of women by our male-dominated patriarchal society from which women must be liberated so they can achieve fulfillment in workforce careers just like men.
Articulating vintage feminism in the 1974 Harvard Educational Review, Hillary Clinton wrote disparagingly about wives who are in “a dependency relationship” which, she said, is akin to “slavery and the Indian reservation system.”
Demanding that husbands take on equal duties in child care, the National Organization for Women passed resolutions in the 1970s stating, “The father has equal responsibility with the mother for the child care role.””
Jenny Hatch