By Cate Plys
If I weren’t against book burning, I’d be recruiting some torch-bearing villagers to advance on the publisher’s warehouse right now. Instead I’ll have to content myself with torching Crittenden’s outrageously faulty logic.
Two prominent IWF members who have provided more than their share of commentary are Laura Ingraham, a former Reagan White House aide and law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University philosophy professor and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that often assists the IWF in compiling studies. Ingraham is an MSNBC news analyst, and until recently she filled the same role on CBS. Sommers wrote Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), a book feted by Rush Limbaugh and the National Review. The New York Times review noted that in it she “boasts of being a reliable antifeminist witness on any television show that invites her.”
And the IWF doesn’t confine itself to traditional women’s issues. It took the time and expense to file a brief with the Supreme Court opposing the use of statistical sampling in the 2000 census, a prototypical issue that divides liberals and conservatives. Liberals generally support sampling in order to count homeless and minority populations that would otherwise go unreported, while conservatives oppose it, since the adjusted figures would probably reflect an increase in the urban and minority (read: Democratic) population.
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Crittenden’s logic is rotten from the foundation up, starting with her advocacy of early marriage. If she wants to promote stable, happy marriages, she should advise women to marry later rather than earlier. The most recent report from Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project notes that a “large body of evidence indicates that marriages of very young people, that is, teenagers, are much less stable and successful on average than are first marriages of persons in their twenties and older. Indeed, age at marriage is one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of marital stability ever found by social science research. The probable reasons are fairly obvious; at older ages people tend to be more emotionally and intellectually mature, established in their jobs and careers, and usually better able to know what they want in a lifetime mate.”
Oh sure–it’s not disruptive trying to start a career from scratch in your 30s. I remember starting out at 24 rather than 22, because I’d gone to graduate school directly out of college. Employers already considered me too old for the entry-level or internship positions I needed to begin getting experience. I can just imagine applying for my first internship at 30. Also, Crittenden conveniently forgets that outside areas like medieval literature, much college course work can be completely outdated ten years later. I finished a public policy degree with a concentration in nuclear weapons policy just before the fall of the Soviet Union. Guess how much of that is still relevant.
I have no housekeeper, so I simply have to plan my time efficiently. I don’t go to a mall whenever I feel like it, for instance, so shopping gets organized accordingly. If I forget something during an infrequent shopping excursion, it doesn’t get bought. Other things don’t get returned for months. Big deal. The important thing is, if something new and unexpected gets thrown into the mix–say, an asthma attack or a skateboarding injury–all the other balls don’t drop to the floor as Crittenden would have us believe. That’s the whole purpose of a flexible schedule: One half (work) can give when the other half (kids) demands extra time. And when work needs some extra time, for a special project or to catch up, the kids can play with their dad, or at their friends’ houses, or watch Sesame Street. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even Bill Nye the Science Guy.
