The President’s New Women’s Council – A Good New Deal for Mothers?

Article here. Excerpt:

'With one glance at the female companions surrounding the President during the photo op, including Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and other members of the Congressional Women’s Caucus, one might reasonably inquire about the content of the advice the President is likely to get. Will it include more health and reproductive services and safe and professional day care, followed by very early childhood education, after-school care, and a longer school year for women who have children, but can’t be with them? Will all this be subsidized even more with tax dollars requiring more double incomes and the emptier homes that come with them? One would not have to look far to see that these measures are at the core of the agenda of those who have taken up women’s issues (like Pelosi and Boxer), and, were more proof needed, that they have just received a massive economic jolt, thanks to the recent crisis.
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This manner of assessing and addressing the problem of girls and women is not unfamiliar, especially wherever equality is invoked. Equality, after all, has the job of flattening the differences. It is the great leveler. It has its place, to be sure. It is important, for example, to equalize the hot and cold water so that the baby is neither scalded nor chilled. But there’s something very curious about the whole business of equality, especially when used to resolve the kinds of problems that attend the differences between the sexes. Generally the equalizing of differences is done on the assumption that the difference in question is a problem to be overcome, and even worse, a matter of more or less, or better and worse. Thus, when “equality” is put to work on the differences between men and women, it tries to remove them, or, more precisely, the woman’s difference, the “lesser” one, as “difference feminists” point out; for it is, after all, her difference which is so problematic, she being the one who has to be unencumbered in order to become his equal, just like him. Indeed, if the problem of men and women must always be forced into the narrow straightjacket of equality talk, it is difficult to see how there would be any baby at all to put into the bathwater!'