Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly’s daughter Anne Cori guest-hosted this weekend’s edition of Eagle Forum Live, where she got to interview Schlalfy’s niece, Suzanne Venker, about her new book, How to Choose a Husband. Venker, who co-authored The Flipside of Feminism with Schlafly, is the sort who advises women not to become brain surgeons.
It was no surprise, then, that she and Cori blamed the rise of feminism for the problems women face while dating.
Venker denounces feminists for teaching women that relationships should be equal partnerships and that they should have skills for the workforce rather than tools to be a wife.
Cori: Are young women today too competitive when they look at their relationships?
Venker: I do thinks so. I don’t think they know any other way. I think they’ve been raised to have a life in the workforce and they’ve been given absolutely no tools for how to be a wife or how to even be a girlfriend. So they’ve inadvertently brought those tools that they’ve acquired for the workforce into their love lives and it’s not working. Men don’t want to be bossed around so if you’re the boss at work that’s fine but you’re going to have to shift gears at home because that doesn’t work for love.
Cori: You can’t say, ‘tonight’s your time to wash the dishes,’ because that will break a relationship, ‘I washed the dishes last night so now you’ve got to wash the dishes.’
Venker: Exactly. That’s tit-for-tat and that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s what equality demands. If everything is supposed to be fifty-fifty at all times and you’re keeping score, your marriage is going to fail.
She goes on to explain that feminists have corrupted the minds of women by making them think positively about “being single and being sexually free.”
Cori: When you go on a job interview attitude is the most important factor, and of course dating is just another form of a job interview, are single young women today victims of their own attitude when they date?
Venker: They are. You have to remember, this is the generation that was raised to ‘never depend on a man’ and not only never depend on one, really that you just don’t need a man period. So that’s a whole different life than the kind of life women were taught to inspire to in the past. What’s unfortunate about it is that it sounded I guess at some point empowering, I hate the use of that word the way feminists use it because it’s actually a very good word, but they use it to mean that being empowered is being single and being sexually free to do what you want and when you want and not being tied down to anything, but of course at some point that’s going to run its course.
Feminist moms are especially to blame:
Cori: Suzanne, women’s literature is filled with plaintive tales of bad guys or good guys who get away, do women today need happier stories or better role models in the society, or have their mothers just messed up on teaching them these rules?
Venker: Well I do believe it’s the latter. I believe that they came from a generation of baby boomer feminists who’ve taught them all kinds of negative thoughts about men and marriage. What I’m saying in this book, “How to Choose a Husband,” is you’re going to have to — as hard as it is — accept that your mother, if this was your story, doesn’t have the answers that you are looking for and you’re going to have a hard time finding them in the culture as well, which is why I wrote the book.
