The misanthrope's corner - annoyance with 'women's issues' - Column

National Review, March 11, 1996 by Florence King

READERS of this space often write me asking where I get my ideas and how I put a column together. It's a hard question to answer in a letter but I can tell you the genesis of this column here and now.

It was a morning in mid-January and I was enjoying my definition of heaven: coffee, cigarettes, and the Washington Times. The intense silence imposed by heavy snow made me feel even more alone than usual, and it was good. Peaceful and magnanimous was yours truly, sipping and inhaling and turning pages -- until I came to the story about the female Episcopal bishop who consecrated a slice of Wonder Bread.

A traditional parish in Maryland that opposes the ordination of women had boycotted the bishop's visit and stripped the church of wafers and wine to prevent her from offering Holy Communion. A minority of progressive parishioners rallied round her, one contributing an unpretentious little merlot, and another, who must be a convert, contributing a loaf of Wonder Bread. Her Grace made do with the substitutes and was photographed with arms upraised, 'breaking' the squishy slice (you can see her fingerprints on it).

Afterward, she was photographed receiving a violent, miter-threatening hug from a female supporter. Two traditionalists in the back of the church who had videotaped the event also were included in the love feast when another progressive female made a point of shaking hands with them, telling the reporter: 'It seemed to me that understanding could happen if we shook hands and touched each other's bodies.'

At that, the pin-drop hush of a snowy morning was shattered as I yelled 'Kill! Kill!' and a column was born.

I've always had a bleak opinion of my poor, feeble sex but I used to be detached and rational about it. Back in the Seventies I scrutinized arguments on the Equal Rights Amendment for logical fallacies; did the same with abortion arguments in the Eighties; and filled the margins of feminist books with austere little notes that would have done any bluestocking proud.

No more. I have turned into St. Jerome as he might have been portrayed by Jackie Gleason. I went ballistic when Anita Hill, professor of law, said, 'I look forward to the day when just one woman's word is enough'; and again when Enid Waldholtz said, 'I was tired of being the strong one,' and then cried for five hours. My reaction to the lady bishop was but the latest manifestation of the crumbling fortress that once was my nervous system. Any day now you will see me starring as the egg in a public-service ad, 'This is your brain . . . this is your brain on women.'

Looking back on the feminist movement, I wonder if it might not have been better if the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified. That way, the feminists would have disappeared, as the suffragettes disappeared after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Except for the remnant that formed the League of Women Voters, which quickly became an enclave of conventional matrons, it was hard to tell that suffragettes had ever existed.

But ERA was defeated and out of the ensuing frustration the horror show called post-feminism was born. The dependably middle-class Betty Friedan beat a hasty retreat; Susan Brownmiller and Germaine Greer, the most intelligent and talented of the Seventies' feminists, moved to the Right, leaving the field to the hot-gospel genderoids who are giving us ERA on a case-by-case basis.

All of the dire results that Phyllis Schlafly predicted are coming to pass, without the solemnity of a Constitutional amendment to discourage actions that are more ridiculous than dangerous. We already have gay marriages in Hawaii and unisex bathrooms in coed dorms, but would a ratified ERA have inspired a suit to force Hooters restaurants to hire men as cocktail waitresses?

When Mrs. Schlafly was campaigning against ERA she was often confronted by talk-show hosts who solemnly read out the words, 'Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,' and then asked her, 'What's wrong with that?' She always replied, 'Read the other part' -- meaning the second clause with its nightmarish scenario of eternal litigation: 'Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.'

Her technique caught on. When NRA members recited 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,' gun-control advocates demanded their favorite other part: 'A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state. . . .'

I HAVE a favorite other part, too. Feminist literary critters love to recite Virginia Woolf's plea for 'a room of my own,' but there's more. What she said was: 'Give me 500 pounds a year and a room of my own and you can keep the vote.'

We conservatives have a tendency to box ourselves in with Aristotelian formalism and a Jesuitical approach to argument, but when the subject is feminism the best thing to do is get right down there with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bill Clinton and just let it come.