Differences Between Men and Women
According to Schlafly’s social policy writings, “men and women are different, and…those very differences provide the key to…success as a person and fulfillment as a woman”. Schlafly’s stance was a reaction to feminist proponents of the ERA, who argued that men and women should be treated equally in all circumstances, from employment to home living, and that they should be referred to using gender neutral terms. Schlafly, however, exalts the differences between men and women: “Feminine means accentuating the womanly attributes that make women deliciously different from men. The feminine woman…knows that she is a person with her own identity and that she can seek fulfillment in the career of her choice, including of traditional wife and mother”.
Schlafly holds the position that men and women are fundamentally different, and resists what she terms the “feminist ” assertion that “we must redesign society to become gender neutral and that men must shed their macho image and remake themselves to become househusbands”. Instead, she believes that nothing can eradicate the differences between men and women. She says in The Power of the Positive Woman, “It is self-evident…that the female body with its baby-producing organs was not designed by a conspiracy of men but by the Divine Architect of the human race” Furthermore, “the Positive Woman looks upon her femaleness and her fertility as part of her purpose, her potential, and her power. She rejoices that she has a capability for creativity that men can never have”. Schlafly argues that although her feminist opponents seek to minimize the differences between men and women, “they will have to take up their complaint with God,” because “no other power” can alter the fundamental and necessary differences between men and women.
Read more about this topic: Phyllis Schlafly's Social Policies
Famous quotes containing the words men and women, differences between, differences, men and/or women:
“Men and women would be even more unhappy if they really understood one another.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)
“I saw the strange position of his hands
Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands
Of wire with something in it from men to men.
“You here?” I said. “Where aren’t you nowadays?...””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“At bottom there is in Joyce a profound hatred for humanity—the scholar’s hatred. One realizes that he has the neurotic’s fear of entering the living world, the world of men and women in which he is powerless to function. He is in revolt not against institutions, but against mankind.... Ulysses is like a vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)