My lunch with an antifeminist pundit

Kate O'Beirne, author of the new book "Women Who Make the World Worse," says most women don't want the things feminists are fighting for.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Feminism, Rebecca Traister, Life

Jan. 17, 2006 | My lunch interview with Kate O'Beirne, Washington editor of National Review and author of the new antifeminist book "Women Who Make the World Worse," was on a Friday. I had stayed up Thursday night reading the 200-page galley copy of the book (published by Sentinel, Penguin's conservative imprint), and taken copious notes. I arrived at the old-school Manhattan restaurant with 51 typed questions about "Women Who Make the World Worse," which takes on second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, Bella Abzug and Catharine MacKinnon with an energy not seen in decades. O'Beirne blames the feminist movement for the breakdown of the family, the feminization of society, a weakened military, an exaggerated sense of the epidemic of domestic violence, an invented wage gap, and the degradation of motherhood. We were joined by a publicist, whom O'Beirne used as a convenient whipping boy whenever certain pesky questions about the book's sensationalist packaging came up. But O'Beirne and I had lots to talk about on our own.

Emerging from lunch an hour and a half later, I didn't have much memory of what had happened. I knew that I'd found O'Beirne immensely likable -- in the way that you might find someone likable if you disagreed with every word that came out of her mouth. A tall, brassy broad, she's the kind of woman you wish you had on your team, a woman who immediately joked that she didn't want to order anything "girly" and that she should pretend to be disappointed that there was no venison on the menu. In short, she had been a fun lunch date.

On the following Sunday, I watched O'Beirne take on Kate Michelman, former head of NARAL, on "Meet the Press," in what Tim Russert cheerfully termed a "Kate on Kate" matchup. (Study question: If George Stephanopoulos were talking to George Tenet, would it be "George on George"?)

It was a blood bath. Michelman, typically an articulate, precise speaker, took a nose dive. Attempting to be nuanced and thoughtful, she came off as slow and confused, ceding ground to O'Beirne on almost every point, even talking for no particular reason about how many young women feel alienated by the term "feminism." "Pull up, Kate!" I was yelling to myself. "Sure, that's interesting! But now is not the time!" Next to her, O'Beirne was practically licking canary feathers from the corners of her mouth.

My interview didn't go as badly as that. But it was a sharp introductory course in the challenges of debating a right-wing pundit.

O'Beirne is nothing if not prepared. She machine-gunned rat-a-tat-tat polling data at me, the kind you could only repel if you had some sort of Cyrano-style hookup to Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal back in the feminist polling cave. But even then, you wouldn't win. Because why trust Smeal's numbers any more than Phyllis Schlafly's? They say marmosets, we say bonobos. Skirmishes in the current culture war seem to be less about provoking debate than killing it.

O'Beirne is trained as a lawyer, and her rhetorical skills are formidable. Listening to the tape, I admired her panache in beginning sentences with "I know you'll agree that ...," "I'm sure you'll remember that ..." and "I'll refresh your memory about ..." She could have ended each phrase by describing how bands of feminists roam the earth, plunging their fangs into the bodies of boy babies, draining their blood and their will to live, and it would have been hard to react with anything but stunned paralysis.

O'Beirne, who declined to give her age but graduated from high school in 1967, is married to a retired Army officer with whom she has two grown sons. She worked intermittently during their young childhood, as a part-time undergraduate law professor in Germany where her husband was stationed, for the Reagan administration while her husband did shift work for the Pentagon, and part-time for the Heritage Foundation, of which she later became a vice president. Formerly a regular panelist on "The Capital Gang," she has been at National Review since 1995. Below, edited for space and cleaned up for grammar, is our conversation:

So let's begin by talking about your career. How did you start?

All of us, with respect to so many things, are the product of whence we come... It helps to explain why I believe the things I do at this stage, and it helps to explain my enormous frustration, because you can imagine what other women say in response to my opinions.

I may say some of these things to you later ...

No, you won't. [I'm talking about things like] "weak-minded," "tool of the patriarchy," "self-loathing." I was raised in this women's environment, a Catholic girls school. We ran everything in high school and college. You weren't photo editor of the yearbook; you were editor of the yearbook. It was a fabulous opportunity for women, because we didn't have to share anything with boys. So to be told that I am somehow the tool of the patriarchy or can't think for myself ...

I can't believe that feminists object to single-sex schools. It may not be right for everybody, but few things are. But they act like its apartheid! [What about] the experimental school for women in Harlem? It has an impressive track record. Why would the feminists want to shut it down?

I have heard feminists who agree with you about the benefits of single-sex education.

I suppose you could hear that from some feminists. But I've got to look at what the heck NOW says about it! Who's working to shut the [Harlem] place down? What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg think of single-sex? As you know from the VMI [Virginia Military Institute] decision [in which Justice Ginsburg, writing the majority opinion, ruled that VMI could no longer refuse to admit women, but that it is the mission of some single-sex schools to "dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications"], yes for girls, no for boys. I don't want to exaggerate because she didn't, but [she] almost talked about [all-boys schooling] as though it was like the remnants of slavery. [Male colleges have] got these evil institutional roots or some darn thing. Now girls, that's a different thing. That's a double standard.

I was surprised that so much of your book was about Gloria Feldt, Ellie Smeal, Catharine MacKinnon. Only at the very end do you mention someone like Rebecca Walker.

Are you asking about [why I didn't discuss] twenty- or thirty-something feminism?

Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how "all heterosexual intercourse is rape" is old news. [It is also incorrectly cited. MacKinnon never said or wrote it.] There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that.

I know you'll do me the favor of talking about the book I wrote. And "What Does the Future of Feminism Hold?" ain't my book. I've been arguing with them since the '70s. That's where I got onboard. It's been 30 years. What has feminism wrought? It's not "What will the third wave look like?" Not "What are the promising movements in feminism?" It's "What has feminism wrought over the past 30 years?"

So why this book and why now?

You'll spot some of my frustrations in the book.

I spotted many of them.

The wage gap's not a bad one. How do they [feminists] get away with this? How could the media be so uncritical that they lavish attention on this "Equal Pay Day" and uncritically repeat that women make 72 cents on the [male] dollar. Doesn't it occur to anyone: How come anybody ever hired a man? Who the heck would hire a man if a woman, similarly educated, skillful and experienced is going to work for 72 cents on the dollar? It's ridiculous. They [the media] oughtta be shot! Forget for being sexist -- for being idiots! There's no skepticism at all. If you look into it at all you'll find a never-married single woman makes more than a never-married single man.

Next page: Feminists say you're hurting your child and yourself if you choose to stay home. They denigrate motherhood