The Curious Costs of Gender Equality
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Allan Carlson is the president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. Dr. Carlson was appointed in 1988 by President Reagan to serve as a member of the National Commission on Children, on which he served through 1991. Widely respected for his groundbreaking historical and sociological work on the family, his books include Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
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Does a great job of skewering a strawman, September 14, 2009
Reviewer: vwest
Dr. Carlson creates a strawman ideology, claiming that it is feminism, and then shows how it is costing us our health and wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of our children. If a majority of feminists were truly against breastfeeding, mothers staying at home to care for their children during their children's early years, families staying together, maternity and paternity leave, etc then he'd be right. However, he creates a false feminism, a strawman, using a smattering of carefully selected quotes of a small number of feminists with extreme views or even worse, feminists without such extreme views floating possibilities within academic discussions, and claims that this is the true feminism. That mainstream feminists, indeed, everyone who believes that women and men should be treated equally, are willing to sacrifice the well being of children and society to prove that women are exactly the same as men in every way. He completely ignores that it's been the women's movement that brought breastfeeding back to the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, that poor and working class women have always been in the paid workforce, that maternity leave (and by extension paternity leave) has been an issue that feminists have historically fought for, not against and that feminists have, on the whole, been a force for, not against, the consideration of wellbeing of children in government and societal decision making processes. He also ignores the fundamental difference between saying women and men should be treated equally and saying women and men are exactly the same in every way. Mainstream feminism, and most of the less mainstream versions, recognize that women are different and have different experiences, views and knowledge that should be acknowledged, given voice to and celebrated, rather than being silenced and ignored as occured in the pre-feminist status quo.
While Dr. Carlson is a good orator, the forensics of his argument are extremely weak. As such, I must give him a low rating.
- LearnOutLoud.com Product ID:
T021605
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Social Sciences
Gender Studies
Politics
Conservative Politics
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