"Another false premise of the feminist movement, according to Venker and Schlafly, is that it's given credit for moving women into the workforce. The real credit, they say, goes to the invention of laborsaving devices like washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. It was the Great Depression that forced women into the workforce when men couldn't find work. And it was the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that abolished wage disparity based on gender."First, I find it amusing that Schlafly and Venker try to claim that appliances gave women the time to enter the workforce. In fact, many studies have shown that since the advent of "time-saving" appliances, the average housewife's workload has actually increased exponentially. This actually makes logical sense, if it takes less time to do one load of laundry in the day, then this simply means you have time to do more than one load of laundry.
Furthermore, it wasn't the Great Depression that brought women into the workforce on a mass scale, but rather World War II. You think Schlafly would have gotten this right being as she grew up in the Great Depression and was amongst the women who worked in wartime factories. This actually again demonstrates more of Schlafly's own personal feelings on the matter rather than fact. As a little girl, Schlafly and her mother actually were for lack of a better word, forced, to work during the Great Depression and support the family because her father, an inventor, couldn't find a job.
Much is also revealed when we consider the term that Schlafly uses to describe women going into the workforce, "forced." Actually, most sources indicate that many of the women who entered the workforce during this period were more than happy to do it, not only because they wanted to support their country during the war, but also because they were personally curious about this concept of working. Many women also enjoyed the experience and found that when men came back they didn't want to stop working and return to the duties of housewife. In reality, Schlafly may have used the word "forced" in her book more so because she personally may have felt forced as a child to work and support her family during the Great Depression, rather than because all women somehow felt forced into working.
Furthermore, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was an idea and goal of the feminist movement. Feminists pushed for it, therefore they are responsible for the improvements that it made, albeit small improvements. Despite what is implied, the Equal Pay Act did not eliminate the wage disparity gap. Women still only make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.
To conclude, the entire article and the book that inspired it is based on the notion that feminism has made women self-centered. This seems ridiculous to me because while women have been entering the workforce at a tremendous rate in recent years, men have not been doing the same when it comes to child-rearing. Today's men primarily work and have little to do with the raising of their children, while women are still primarily responsible for caring for children and now also have the responsibility of full-time jobs. If feminists were as selfish and irresponsible as the authors of the book and article claim, you would think they would have been figuring out ways to reduce their all ready massive workload.
Finally, the authors continue to assert that it is feminists who claim that men and women are not equal and that they refuse to acknowledge that men and women are different. Actually, the basis of the feminist movement is that men and women are equal and that society must treat them equally. And no one has ever denied the differences between men and women, Steinem has acknowledged this her entire career. What feminists have argued is that men and women should be treated equally despite skin-deep differences just as the Civil Rights Movement argued that blacks and whites should be treated the same rather than treated differently based on skin-deep differences.
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