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 men, differences, men and/or women:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“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)
“Generally there is no consistent evidence of significant differences in school achievement between children of working and nonworking mothers, but differences that do appear are often related to maternal satisfaction with her chosen role, and the quality of substitute care.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)