The careers of Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Benazir Bhutto do not reveal any deficiency in women’s ability to recognize facts and understand the real world. But those who teach something called “women’s studies” seem to have some problems in these basic areas.
Unknown before the 1970s, there are now about 900 women’s studies programs in universities across the country, including 15 doctoral programs. But according to a study of the most commonly used textbooks, the course materials in these programs bear little resemblance to scholarship.
One text teaches that science and medicine are the outgrowth of a “male culture,” something that would have surprised Madame Curie, who is the only two-time Nobel laureate. Likewise the notion that women should be leery of new medical breakthroughs, a staple of women’s studies texts, would have surprised former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders. The texts also charge that women are shortchanged in medical research, which is untrue. As it happens, women are 60 percent of all subjects in clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health, and since 1985, more money has been spent on breast cancer research than on any other cancer research.
In another text, women are told that they are slaves. That would certainly surprise Oprah Winfrey, one of the wealthiest women in America, who does pretty much as she pleases. Carly Fiorina, chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and the countless women starting their own businesses, would also find it strange. But according to the women’s studies texts, women are not even aware of their servitude. Apparently only professors of women’s studies have the ability to see such things.
Women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but women’s studies professors maintain that academia itself is simply another tool of male oppression. This should come as no surprise since the premise behind women’s studies is that truth is simply a social construct that reflects male domination, patriarchy, and “phallocentric” society. “No purely factual studies exist,” says one of the major women’s studies texts.
Many studies show that people who are married tend to do better financially. But not a single chapter in any major women’s studies textbook describes marriage as a good thing. In fact, marriage emerges as a major cause of mental illness in women. Men, of course, do not fare well in women’s studies material. One text portrays fathers as a “foreign male element” in the home. If men have any role at all, it is to unintentionally elicit feminist impulses in their daughters.
The women’s studies texts continue to maintain that women are paid less than men for the same work, and they continue to hold up I Rigoberta Menchu long after this work was exposed as a fraud. In every case, contrary evidence is ignored, which defies true scholarship. The full story on women’s studies can be found in Lying in a Bed of One’s Own: How Women’s Studies Miseducates Students, recently published by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). That women’s studies types have blasted this study as “right-wing propaganda” should serve only to confirm its accuracy.
Suffice it to say that the field of women’s studies is not genuine scholarship, but rather an axis of feminist superstition, a victim mentality, and anti-male demonology. But even with their distaste for facts and grudge against reality, women’s studies departments are, of course, politically correct on campus. That’s why they won’t disappear any time soon, though by all scholarly standards, and common sense, they should. Students who are required to take these courses should avail themselves of the IWF study.
Women are doing quite well in American society, with the trends all upward. They can further empower themselves by ignoring this bogus nondiscipline and instead pursuing degrees in engineering, business, medicine, or the law.
Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.
