Far Right/GOP to Women: Stay Home Barefoot and Pregnant

If one wants proof that the far right elements and the GOP want to drag America back to the "good old days" of the 1950's it can be found in a new Heritage Foundation panel that recommends that women be content to be at home mothers - barefoot and pregnant if you will.  Missing from the panel discussion are (i) any recognition that women may not choose such a life and (ii) the financial reality that in the new Gilded Age economy so loved by the GOP, a married working man cannot support a family on a single income.  But then again, today's conservatives and the GOP are not living in a world connected to objective reality.  What's frightening is that Heritage is what counts as an intellectual "think tank" for today's far right.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the backward thinking.  Here are highlights:

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.

The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

. . . .  “feminism has done so much damage to happiness.” And the solution to this damage, it turns out, is matrimony — the same thing that will solve problems such as income inequality and the Republican Party’s standing among women.

This, they argued, also would have the felicitous effect of making women more Republican.  . . .

As a matter of statistics, this is true: President Obama’s 11-point win among women in 2012 came entirely from his 36-point advantage among unmarried women. But Republicans will be waiting a long time if they think they can improve their fortunes by persuading more women to get hitched. 

Essentially, they’re saying that Republicans aren’t the ones who need to change — women are.

There’s a running debate on the trade-offs of feminism, but this sort of traditional assault on the movement is unlikely to boost the GOP’s standing among women. If Republicans want to appeal to more unmarried women, they might reconsider the no-exception opposition to abortion and, increasingly, birth control that dominates the party. Otherwise, a throwback strategy of convincing unmarried women that they have been misled by feminism is tantamount to convincing Hispanics that they have been led astray by immigration advocates or telling young voters that they have been deceived by the gay rights movement.

The reality, the panelists at Heritage said, is that women are less happy than they were before the feminist movement, that women enjoy domestic work, and that most moms would prefer not to work full time, if at all.

Maybe so. But it will take some convincing. The audience for these pronouncements Monday was small and mostly male, many of them apparently Heritage interns.

“Wow,” said John Hilboldt, Heritage’s lectures director, as he opened the session. “Where are all the ladies?”  It’s a question Republicans may be asking for a long time.

While not mentioned, I suspect the panel also would like to see gays to once again become invisible and for blacks to once again "know their place" and be content with domestic work and blue collar jobs.  These people are living in a fantasy world.