Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller has been active in politics as a spokesperson, staffer and currently podcaster. Like so many other right-wing professional women, she’s decided women should stay home with babies: “Feminism failed to liberate women. Women were told we needed to work to be as successful as a man. We were told we had to chase the next pay raise and climb the corporate ladder. The most fulfilled a woman will ever be is raising babies in a house full of love.”
Setting aside that “a house full of love” doesn’t quite mesh with the vicious anti-immigrant demagogue she married, Miller is reciting an undead sexist cliche. Actually two: that feminism has failed that women are happiest staying home with their little angels.
This reminds me of a quote (I can’t locate the author) to the effect that under patriarchy men are free to tackle any job or field they can make a place in. They can build, heal, teach, study, explore. Women get one option: stay home with babies. And that’s a perfectly good option, one lots of women might take … but not all. Women are not innately hardwired to want that above everything. Women are not innately good at it or happy with the option — I’ve known several women who have zero interest in kids. That’s as valid a choice as any other. Human skills spread over a huge bell curve — some women will be great caregivers, but not all. Some husbands will be better caregivers and happier with the job than their wives would.
Then there’s the first point that “feminism failed to liberate women.” Um, how? Since modern feminism got going we’ve made tremendous progress as a society. Not enough, but a lot, as this post about women’s rights in the 1950s discusses. It’s not just about a married woman being unable to get a credit card of her own, it’s about men having absolute control over the family finances, where the family lived, the freedom to beat their wives without legal consequences (as long as it didn’t require too many stitches), marital rape not being a crime, sexual harassment being more common.
We’re a long way from equality but that’s because we’ve been fighting a backlash against women’s equality for the past 45 years. And Katie Miller’s side of the political aisle is all in on backlash and more backlash (as witness the Heritage Foundation just welcomed odious misogynist Scott Yenor to their team). Feminism hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t won yet. It’s like complaining in 1942 that the Allies have failed because the Axis wasn’t beaten yet.
There is a lot of debate in feminism about whether climbing the corporate ladder in the face of so much sexism is a solution or whether some kind of systemic reform is necessary. And some women certainly don’t want to climb the ladder, just like some men don’t. Saying “therefore you should all go home and be housewives” is as misogynist as telling black people to go back into the fields as sharecroppers is racist.
But feminism for right-wingers has always been failing. In the last century it was failing because women who chose careers or political activism would never find a man and now they were at home alone, crying softly with nobody to hold them (I saw this one quite a lot). More recently there’s the “women like alpha male heroes in romances therefore feminism has failed!” argument. Or some variation of Katie Miller’s claim — feminism has failed because women don’t want equality (that one was around as far back as the early 1970s).
We live in a country where Columbia University turned a blind eye to a massive, monstrous blind eye to Dr. Robert Hadden, an ob/gyn who preyed upon his patients. Hundreds of patients. As noted in the article, he wasn’t a superstar or a college leader, just one average employee. They still did nothing. Lots of his patients stayed quiet, nurses stayed quiet, but some spoke up. It’s a horrifying case but the little justice the victims would have been zero around the time I was born.
Feminism may fail. The misogynist slime may yet drown us all. But then again, equality might win. And that’s what scares people like the Millers. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, the people saying feminism has failed are really saying “stop trying to win! Stop now! Stop it!”
