The myths of feminism.

Feminism has achieved sacred-cow status, its claims on everything from how hard women work to how men treat them largely immune from criticism. But close scrutiny reveals serious flaws in

OVER THE past twenty years, feminism has successfully ensconced itself as the national philosophy of gender. In consequence, economic and cultural warfare against traditional sex roles virtually defines gender policy today. This onslaught is furthered by a series of false beliefs, which can be described as the "myths of feminism." Politically, five of these myths stand out:

Myth #1: Most women are now working." So the mainstream media have regularly informed us for several years. Often they give a specific figure, overwhelming in its bland finality: the Department of Labor (DOL) reports that 57.6 per cent of women with children under the age of 18 are now working (1986 data). But the category, on examination, turns out to be so broadly drawn that scarcely any woman can escape it. (My remarks on this subject are indebted to the excellent analysis by Cheri Loveless in What's a Smart Woman like You Doing at Home?) Of the 57.6 per cent of "working mothers," some are working part time only, leaving an actual residue of 41.2 percent who work full time. The DOL also classifies as "working mothers" women on maternity leave, as many as 40 per cent of whom elect not to return to work after their children are born; mothers who work from their homes; mothers who help out with a family business or farm; mothers with flexible hours (such as some airline schedules that involve only two days of intensive flying per week); and mothers who babysit the children of other mothers. Millions of American housewives would be astonished to learn that the government classifies them as "working women."

A subsidiary myth is that most women want to work. This is critical, because if most women want to work, who could in good conscience fail to support their aspiration? In reality, nine out of ten American women consistently report that they do not desire full-time employment outside the home.

Myth #2: "There is a day-care crisis." The myths that "most women are now working" and that "most women want to work" fuel the myth of "the day-care crisis," for if most women are working, who will mind the kids? The myth of the day-care crisis also rests on the myth that "day care is at least as good as home care." In fact, numerous reports in the medical literature indicate that children in day care have higher rates of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and other illnesses, including giardiasis, bacterial meningitis, cytomegalovirus, hepatitis A, cryptosporidiosis, and rotavirus.

In addition, study after study has shown that children in day care exhibit higher levels of aggression than home-reared kids. This is especially alarming in light of a major long-range study, recently reported in Child Development, which demonstrates that high levels of childhood aggression correlate strongly with emotional difficulties later in life.

Myth #3: "The divorce revolution means that women have to work. " After all, what is a woman to do when her husband deserts her, running away from a faithful wife of many years to shack up with a twenty-year-old blonde who just finished modeling for Playboy? While such a man does indeed deserve our condemnation, he is a statistical rarity, for more than 70 per cent of divorces of couples with children under 18 are instigated by the wife.

Thus, if we wish actually to reduce the incidence of divorce, we must concentrate on making divorce less attractive to women. Even if men were entirely prevented from initiating divorces, the divorce epidemic would continue to rage.

At this point, the denizen of Feminist America retorts: "Well, if women are leaving men, it must be because they deserve it." This leads us to:

Myth 4: "There is an epidemic of male family violence. "According to R. L. McNeely, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, reports on domestic violence frequently rely on studies of clinical populations, composed of women in shelters, rather than on survey studies that examine the general population. As a result, such reports inevitably overstate the relative incidence and severity of male-instigated violence.

A number of studies based on the general population indicate that women commit roughly as many assaults against spouses as men do. Women apparently make up for their lesser physical strength by using weapons more often. (There it is: culture can overcome biology.) Males commit 52 per cent of spousal killings, females 48 per cent-a ratio that has held constant for the past fifty years.

In general, the grim facts of domestic violence do not support the contention that, females are its especial victims, or males its especial perpetrators. Women commit two-thirds of child abuse. Boys are twice as likely to be abused as girls. A majority of the perpetrators of -infanticide are female. Most child abuse is committed in households headed by a single female. Statistically speaking, a child's best protection against abuse is the presence in the home of its biological father.

Men are, of course, typically far more aggressive and stronger than women. But violence by men is typically directed against other men. Within the home, male protectiveness and chivalry-obnoxious to feminists-appear largely to cancel men's violent propensities relative to women's.

This is by no means to deny the existence of habitually violent men. It is to say that the media's focus on violence by men misrepresents the causes of domestic violence, attributing it to "patriarchy." In reality, the incidence of domestic violence (and every other social pathology) is lowest in intact traditional families where the husband is clearly regarded as the head of the household.

But all of the foregoing pale into insignificance beside the crowning myth, the Big Lie that holds the whole structure together in the public's mind:

Myth #5: " Women suffer from economic discrimination. In the standard version of this myth, it is asserted that "women only make 59 cents on the dollar to men." This figure dates back to the mid Seventies and, though entirely outdated, is endlessly repeated like a holy mantra. A more recent figure, released by the Census Bureau in the spring of 1988, is seventy cents on the dollar.

In fact, without realizing it, feminists have always maintained that men work harder than women in the job market, and so they should expect men to earn more. For the one benefit that they have always promised men is relief from the stressful, grinding world of work which, as feminists have often emphasized, encourages ulcers, high blood pressure, clogged arteries, and cancer, with the result that men die on average eight years younger than women. Thus feminists tacitly admit that men work harder than women. Such being the case, it would be incredible if (in a free society) they did not also earn more.

But the myth of economic discrimination against women suffers from even more serious problems than this. The 59-cent myth, says Warren Farrell, author of a forthcoming book, The Ten Greatest Myths about Men, "is what I call an outcome statistic.' Another example of an outcome statistic is that black mothers with young children earn one dollar for each 59 cents that white mothers with young children earn.

"Before we can determine whether or not someone is discriminated against, we have to look at 13 major variables. One of the things that we find, for example, is that the full-time working woman works an average of eight fewer hours per week than the full-time working man. And that's just one of 13 variables that operate in the same direction. So to compare a full-time working woman to a full-time working man, without comparing the amount of education a person has, the amount of training in the workplace, the number f hours worked, and the number of weeks per year worked, is a very inaccurate comparison."

As Michael Levin points out in Feminism and Freedom, single women whose educational and work-history patterns resemble single men's earn similar amounts of money to such men-varying, depending on age bracket, from 93 per cent to 106 per cent of what men make. The main reason men make more than women on average is that, as George Gilder shows in Men and Marriage, married men utilize their "earnings capacity" to a greater degree than any other category of the population, while married women use it the least of any category. In short: If it's true that most women prefer to stay home and to raise their own children, as surveys clearly indicate they do, then we should expect that men will, on average, earn more than women. So far from being something to be embarrassed about, this wage gap is evidence of freedom. Conversely, the rapid shrinkage of the wage gap from 41 per cent to 30 per cent since the mid Seventies is presumptive evidence of coercion and discrimination.

THE FORMS that the myths of feminism take are not arbitrary. They have in common the assault on structure and authority that underlies leftism in its various guises.

The myth of male family violence delegitimates the primary representative of authority in the family. The myth of the day-care crisis suggests that women's family roles are unnecessary and obsolescent. The myth that most women are working seeks to persuade politicians that they will antagonize female voters if they oppose feminist programs. The myth of economic discrimination legitimates a whole bevy of socially corrosive actions: the discriminatory taxation of traditional families, "affirmative action" "comparable worth," the forced integration of private men's organizations, and the trend toward compulsory "anti-sexist" education.

Too often in the past, the Right has reduced itself to being the handmaiden of the Left's initiatives, accepting "change" as inevitable, and viewing its own task as merely to usher in that "inevitable" change as painlessly as possible. Instead of merely resisting this ongoing onslaught, let alone yielding to it, the Right should start to develop and aggressively promote its own agenda on these issues, centering on the restoration of paternal authority, the discouragement of single motherhood, and the revalidation of sex distinctions in all areas of life where they are necessary and beneficial.

Mr. Davidson is the author of The Failure of Feminism (Prometheus, 1988) and the editor of an anthology, Gender Sanity: The Case against Feminism, just out from University Press of America.