PBS APPEARANCE ON FANNING THE FEMINIST FLAMES:
THE FUTURE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN MOVEMENT

by Hermina Dykxhoorn

National Board Member, REAL Women of Canada

President, of the Alberta Affiliate of REAL Women of Canada

Alberta Federation of Women United for Families

Due to the international travels and unavailability of REAL Women's usual media spokespersons, I was asked to represent REAL Women in a debate on feminism on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program, "The Editors", which engages Canadians and Americans in a cross-border debate on issues of concern in both countries. The program has a viewing audience of 25 million. Although the panel on this program has been in existence since 1989, when it began, it did not include any spokespersons for moderate women's views. This time, however, three of the six panellists, including myself, were not supporters of radical gender feminism. That in itself is progress!

The Canadian panellists were:

Hermina Dykxhoorn,

National Board Member, President, Alberta Affiliate of REAL Women of Canada.

Maureen McTeer,

Lawyer and Author (wife of former Prime Minister Joe Clark).

Iona Campagnolo,

Director of the Arctic Institute, Chancellor of UBC, former MP and past President of the Liberal Party of Canada.

The American panellists were:

Suzanne Fields,

Syndicated Columnist, The Washington Times.

Ann McFeatters,

White House Correspondent, Scripps Howard News Service.

Daphne Patai,

Professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Author of Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women's Studies.

The debate revolved around such issues as women's progress over the decade, role models, the glass ceiling, real power, work, home and children, men and where do we go from here.

Not knowing if there would be any support for REAL Women's positions or where that support would come from in this assembled panel, I flew to Montreal for the taping with some trepidation. My fears, however, had been somewhat allayed when I obtained a couple of Suzanne Fields' columns off the Internet. They had titles such as "The Pleasures of Abstinence" and "Give Religion a Chance." Maybe, I thought, there just might be a kindred spirit after all!

During the debate it became clear that Suzanne Fields and I and, to a lesser extent, Daphne Patai agreed on most issues. Dr. Patai is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese literature, but it was her interest in South American feminist literature that put her in conflict with the Women's Studies Department at the University of Massachussets, where she is a tenured professor. She had been asked by Women's Studies to teach a course on this literature as a guest lecturer and when she was critical of what she saw as an attitude of anti-scholarship and anti-male advocacy in the department, the radical feminists, using their well documented nasty tactics, attempted to silence her and have her fired from the university. Not only did they fail, but Dr. Patai promptly wrote a book documenting the unbelievable situations in Women's Studies Departments all across America (see Reality, September/ October 1997, "Feminist Stranglehold on Canadian Universities", p. 10).

With these formidable opponents, Maureen McTeer and Iona Campagnola tempered their comments considerably. I pointed out during the program that those of us privileged to be sitting around the table participating in this debate were the "elite" and that the feminist movement had generally consisted of elite, university educated women, and had ignored the majority of ordinary women. To my surprise, Ms. Campagnola agreed, even admitting that feminism had not paid enough attention to the family or to women employed at the lower end of the wage scale. She even went so far as to decry what is happening in the Canadian feminist scene, saying it is now impossible to have a leadership role in organized Canadian feminism without being a so-called "woman-of-colour". She also pointed out that feminism is abandoning women like the early activists, such as Nellie McLung, who were good mothers and wives and who wanted changes to improve their families' lives. This was a first, coming as it did from a well-known Canadian feminist!

All in all, the experience was interesting and instructive in that we have made real inroads into the feminist mentality. Women such as Daphne Patai and Suzanne Fields are now questioning that ideology because of the excesses these reasonable women have found in their own experience with radical gender feminism. Daphne Patai's next book is coming out in 1998 and its title will be called Heterophobia. In the words of our radical gender feminist opponents, "We've come a long way, baby!"

The program is being aired in two parts. The first part was aired on October 25, 1997 and the second part is to be aired on January 10, 1998.

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