Usually a man bemoaning the lack of positive role models for girls would receive feminist plaudits, but not from Bonnie Erbe and certainly not when he talks about role models for young women who want a family and a career.
Daily Beast's Peter Beinart ticked off Erbe, a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report, when he urged President Barack Obama in his recent column to nominate a mother to the Supreme Court because he thought that it would provide a good role model for women.
Nevermind the fact that Beinart argued his case partly because a woman nominee would help swing the Court further left or that the tenets of feminism teach that a woman can do anything she wants.
Nope, Beinart's opinion “annoys” Erbe and, according to her April 27 blog post, is “also dumb” and “offensive” because motherhood isn't a worthy option in her eyes.
“The fact is,” claimed Erbe, “women without children achieve, on average, more in their career lives because they spend more time at work than those with children to raise.”
To prove her point, Erbe said of her friend “with an Ivy League degree and a promising career” that she “flushed her chance at real world success down the drain and became a willing slave to her children.”
Beinart crafted a fairly convincing case in favor of nominating a mother to the Court. “It's important because otherwise,” he noted, “the message you're sending young women is that they can achieve professionally, or they can have a family, but they can't do both.” He cited Census Bureau figures that revealed “80 percent of the American women over the age of 40 have children,” and observed that in the last three presidential administrations, only a little over a third of the women who served in Cabinet positions also had children.
“There's nothing wrong, of course, with appointing childless women (or men, for that matter) to high office. But our government is actually doing a pretty a good job of providing role models for the 20 percent of American women who don't want kids,” wrote Beinart. “Where it's failing is in providing role models for the 80 percent that do.”
Erbe has again proven that radical feminists don't care about helping all women reach any goals – only the women who refuse to become “willing slaves” of motherhood are worthy of looking up to somebody.
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