Jonah Goldberg‘s latest column posted at National Review Online takes on the Democratic Party’s “war on women” electoral theme.
The “It’s On Us” PR stunt is not an exception; it is par for the course. To listen to pretty much anyone in the Democratic party these days, you’d think these are dark days for women. But by any objective measure, things have been going great for women for a long time, under Republicans and Democrats alike.
Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 63 percent of master’s degrees, and 53 percent of doctorates. They constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce and the majority of managers. Single women without kids earn 8 percent more than single men without children in most cities. Women make up almost half of medical-school applicants and nearly 80 percent of veterinary-school enrollees.
The recession — a.k.a. the “mancession” — hit men much harder, and women recovered from it much more quickly. When you account for hours worked and job choices, pay equity is pretty much here already. Sure, this is a snapshot, but few serious people think it isn’t a snapshot of a race in which women are surging ahead.
A broad coalition of feminist groups, Democratic-party activists, and the journalists who carry water for them refuse to recognize the progress women have made unless it is in the context of how “fragile” these victories are. Going by the endless stream of fundraising e-mails I get from the Democratic party, EMILY’s List, and other usual suspects — never mind New York Times editorials — we’re always one election away from losing it all. If Harry Reid isn’t the majority leader next year, it’s back to wearing corsets and churning butter for you.
Obviously, this isn’t all about elections. There’s a vast feminist-industrial complex that is addicted to institutionalized panic. On college campuses, feminist- and gender-studies departments depend almost entirely on a constant drumbeat of crisis-mongering to keep their increasingly irrelevant courses alive. Abortion-rights groups now use “women’s health” and “access to abortion on demand” as if they are synonymous terms. The lack of a subsidy for birth-control pills is tantamount to a federal forced-breeding program.
Sure, women still face challenges. But the system feminists have constructed cannot long survive an outbreak of confidence in the permanence of women’s progress. The last thing the generals need is for the troops to find out that the “war on women” ended a long time ago — and the women won.
