It was just the teeniest bit naughty of the Post last Saturday to accompany a story about the 25th anniversary of REAL Women of Canada (“Muffins and family values”) with a picture of a 1950-era homemaker in an apron, smiling seraphically at her kitchen appliances. One might almost form the impression that the Post’s editors consider the conservative group to be out of touch with women’s issues.
As it happens, I was one of the speakers at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa for the conference that marked the occasion. Indeed, I was the one whose subject, mentioned in the article, was “the effect of feminism on Canadian society.”
The stereotypical image of a woman frozen in time is misleading. It plays into the received feminism-inspired wisdom that a traditionally womanly woman—think Sarah Palin or REAL Women founder Gwen Landolt, both of whom have five children and very little time for doctrinaire feminism—is “inauthentic” and even something of a joke.
Why should we care any more what superannuated revolutionaries think? Feminist doyenne Gloria Steinem dismisses Palin as inauthentic in the same way the Soviets called anti-communists mentally ill. But Gloria Steinem is two years older than John McCain, and she is the one frozen in revolutionary amber. Where’s her young and dazzling “vice-president” and successor?
What has always been so irritating about feminists—we saw it on full display with Palin, and it was the reason Landolt felt called to action in the first place—is their assumption that there is only one correct way to think about women, and that all other women are blinded by the Marxist style “false consciousness” they have inherited from the patriarchy.
Canada’s Judy Rebick, who’s made a name for herself leading women’s organizations on the public dime (unlike REAL Women, which thrives without government support through dues from its 55,000 members), has been disdainful of REAL Women from the beginning. “They represent a certain current in Canadian society that is the religious right—who have opposed a changing role for women from day one,” she told the Post. “They’ll never change, they don’t change. They’re ideologues.”
That’s pretty rich coming from the spokesman for an ossified ideology. (Sue me, Judy: When they start calling manhole covers “personhole covers” because of all the women trying to break through that dirt floor to be “equal” with men in the sewers, I’ll say “spokesperson.”)
REAL Women are not women who don’t personally grow and change to engage in today’s world. And you don’t have to be a member of the religious right—I am certainly not that—to believe the timeless family—father, mother, children—remains the cornerstone of a healthy society, and that the deliberate subversion of traditional family structures, the cornerstone of the feminist ideology, is the source of many of our current social ills.
Gwen Landolt, the most visible public face of REAL Women, personifies the group’s viewpoint. A lawyer, Landolt started REAL Women because radical feminists had been so successful in capturing the culture by means of “the long march through the institutions,” that they had crowded out the concerns and opinions of, well, real women like herself—in the media, government and courts.
Until REAL Women began, no one in Canada questioned the feminist claim that all women shared a commonality of experience, even though it should have been obvious that feminist activists were mainly speaking for an elite, urban, liberal enclave of women from the same socio-economic background as themselves.
From day one of its existence, feminists portrayed REAL Women as Stepford wives, intellectual hicks in thrall to the patriarchy. Yet, in the course of its work, REAL Women carried out groundbreaking research that, amongst other successes here and internationally, led to the happy demise of the federal government’s odiously discriminatory Court Challenges Program in 2006.
When Landolt attended a Law Reform Commission in 1989 (the one and only time she was ever invited), a feminist said to her, “I’m wondering what went wrong with you when you were growing up that you have rejected feminism.”
REAL Women wonder what went wrong with feminists when they were growing up that they never grew up.
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