If you think about it, aren't Tony Snow and his FOX commentator buddies the ones who just set back the cause of feminism?
Senator Boxer said her children and grandchildren were not in jeopardy from the war, and then said that Secretary Rice could lose no one from her immediate family either. This is an exchange that could have transpired between any unmarried man and a grandfather, but Mr. Snow and John Gibson of FOX News choose to see it as a feminist issue because two women were involved. Herein lies the true prejudice.
Tony Snow's statement that Senator Boxer's words were "a great leap backward for feminism" have caused quite a stir, but the more frightening statement was made by John Gibson in his "Barbara Boxer Owes Condi Rice an Apology." He said: "If I had said what Boxer said about a black woman secretary of state in a Democratic administration I'd have a pack of libs calling for my head." That is the statement of a man who feels women and minorities have impinged upon his freedom of speech, and thinks that women and minorities got rights by taking them from others.
We were among the first generation of women to become FBI agents, hired after J. Edgar Hoover died. His agency's sex discrimination policies took much longer to die. We are painfully familiar with men feeling a sense of loss because they were forced to work with women and minorities as equals. That line of thinking is insidious and dangerous.
A long time ago, there probably were some feminists who believed that a woman should put herself and her career first above marriage, husband and family. But the Condi Rice model of feminism, while still a perfectly acceptable choice for a feminist career woman, is far from the current standard which embraces a whole host of different lifestyles, including those of married women, mothers and grandmothers who are able and encouraged to balance their family responsibilities with demanding careers. The true goal of feminism always has been to make women equal with men in all aspects of life.
The only ones who apparently don't know this are the Rush Limbaugh types. It suits Limbaugh to live in the past with his long-outdated, simplistic ideas, calling feminists "Femi-Nazis." This may be how Tony Snow came to associate Barbara Boxer's statement about Rice not having children with "setting back the cause of feminism." In fact, Snow made an outrageous linking that offends us, and potentially a host of other career women with and without husbands and children.
Who knows whether Snow really gives two hoots about the "cause of feminism," but someone ought to tell him that, ironically, it is precisely his linking of the childless Rice with the cause of feminism that sets it way back.
Co-written by:
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent/legal counsel and unsuccessful candidate for Congress in Minnesota's 2nd District; and
Rosemary Dew, former FBI Agent, author of No Backup: My Life as a Female FBI Special Agent (Carroll & Graf, 2003) and In Mother Teresa's House: A Hospice Nurse in the Slums of Calcutta (Booksurge.com, 2006).