Is movement feminism going to crumble as quickly as the old Soviet Union? Don’t count on it–feminists have a stranglehold on academia.
Nevertheless Inkwell is proud that it was a Los Angeles Times piece on the dearth of feminist intellectuals by none other than The Other Charlotte that sparked law professor and feminist leader Susan Estrich’s very public crack-up. Estrich’s tirade is the latest manifestataion of the feminist crack-up.
The City Journal comments on Estrich’s bizarre, TOC-inspired email attack (here) on L.A. Times opinion editor Michael Kinsley:
“Estrich’s insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous sex equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.”
City Journal helpfully explains why Estrich apparently doesn’t regard Charlotte Allen–TOC’s real name–as a woman:
“For Estrich, apparently, having a ’woman’s voice’ means being left-wing. She blasts the Times for publishing an article by Charlotte Allen on the decline of female public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. Allen had argued that too many women writers today specialize in being female, rather than addressing the broader range of issues covered by their male counterparts. For Estrich, this argument performs a magical sex change on Allen, turning her into a male. After sneering at Allen’s article and her affiliation with the ’Independent Women’s Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV,’ Estrich concludes: ’the voices of women…are [not] found within a thousand miles” of the Los Angeles Times.
“In other words, Allen’s is not a ‘voice of a woman’ because she criticizes radical feminism. Estrich does not disclose if she conducted this sex change operation on all conservative women when compiling her phony statistics on the proportion of female writers on the op-ed page….”