When we released the briefing paper, "Free Markets, Free Choices: Women in the Workforce" at the end of 1995, we were surprised by the stir it caused. We believed the good news we had uncovered about women's success in the marketplace was liberating to women. It seemed a simple message: Women have made incredible progress over the last thirty years, but that success was due to changing personal choices, not programs or favored status. Our research presented a positive alternative to the stories of victimhood and oppression so familiar to us. And yet everywhere we went this past year to present our research, we met with disbelief, resistance and sometime outright animosity.

Of course, there were many who cheered us on, believing as we do that women today owe their success to their own choices. But we were puzzled by the vehemence with which our opponents rejected our case -- noting that most of these rejections took the form of personal attacks instead of legitimate questions about our research (the best example being the time that Bella Abzug, matriarch of the feminist movement, called PRI President Sally Pipes a "scourge on her gender" after a presentation on the success of women in the free market).

We discovered that we had hit a nerve. The groups that make their living "fighting for America's women" are deeply investing in providing a voice of despair; otherwise, there'd be no basis for their clout and moral authority. Blowing the whistle on something as misleading as gender wage gap statistics treads on sacred ground, and not without penalty.

The deeper we got, the thicker the misconceptions and untruths. In partnership with the media, feminists advocates like Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority and Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women (NOW) have succeeded in convincing thousands upon thousands of women, particularly young women, that they are prey to prejudices and unfair treatment so pervasive as to be virtually undetectable. Therein lies the harness of victimhood, and that's the mindset that can destroy an individual's potential for achievement. Millions of women are succeeding despite the feminist doom and gloom reports, but the campaign to convince women of their victimhood is far from over.

That's what this newsletter hopes to attack: in little bi-weekly arrows, we will keep nicking away at the misleading statistics and untruths perpetuated by the other side. We've never said there aren't real problems for women, but as Christina Hoff Sommers has written, the hysteria and half-truths of activist feminists undermine the credibility and seriousness of individual problems. We plan to clear away a few of those cobwebs.

We'll keep you up-to-date on how women are really doing in the market, doing some statistics-busting to give you the story behind the story. The success of our weekly fax, Capital Ideas, led to the creation of this new piece, and we see it as another way for us to keep you in touch with our latest work. You'll hear from me here in Washington, D.C. and from Sally Pipes, the Institute's president in San Francisco and a Board Member of the Independent Women's Forum.

We hope you pass it along, and let us know what you think and what you'd like to read about. We'll be back in two weeks.

-by Katherine Post, Public Policy Fellow