The notion of American women attending a conference with women from countries all over the world to discuss their common problems is so ridiculous that it could only happen in a comedy cartoon or in the United Nations.
American women are trying to get out of their kitchens, while the fondest dream of women in foreign countries would be to have an American-style kitchen. The conveniences American women take for granted are unattainable luxuries to women in other lands.
Call the roll of the great gifts which our private enterprise system has produced to liberate women from traditional “women’s work” — the supermarket, frozen foods, readymade clothes, washers, dryers, refrigerators, deep freezes, dishwashers, garbage disposals, sewing machines, and the telephone. We can even enjoy such additional extravagances as electric beaters, meat grinders, orange juice squeezers, ice cream freezers, hair dryers, and paper diapers.
In Africa, women do most or all of the hard work. They carry the water and firewood (on their heads), till the fields, and build the houses. The men use their energies for hunting, fishing, and fighting in tribal warfare.
In Africa, men show their manhood by how many children they produce by many different wives. That’s quite different from America where a man shows his manhood by getting a job and bringing home his paycheck every week to support his family.
In the Soviet Union and European Communist countries, the women work two jobs, one in the labor force and one to keep the household functioning, while men work only one job. Standing in line for the privilege of buying a head of cabbage consumes hours of every woman’s week. The average woman has eight abortions without anesthetics, while the average man is anesthetized most of the time with vodka.
In America, a man can bring his girlfriend or wife such treats as candy or flowers. In the Soviet Union, a special gift most appreciated by women is a roll of toilet paper.
In Communist China, a woman faces compulsory abortion if she dares to conceive a second child. If she persists in having her baby, she and her family are punished by a cutoff of food and housing allowances.
The status of women in Moslem countries is so many centuries behind the modern world that it’s hard for Americans to visualize it. However, the Iranian delegates weren’t complaining because they like their status and hung a Khomeini poster on a tree to show loyalty to their leader.
The best friend women ever had is the American private enterprise system, made possible by the economic freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. It has made American women the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth, and we should count our blessings every day.
When the 2,000 U.S. feminists attending the non-governmental forum in Nairobi berated the American delegation for failing to support their radical agenda (topped by government-funded abortions), Maureen Reagan aptly responded, “How fortunate they have the right to do that. Many delegates here don’t have that right.”
She summed up the conference’s dismal dynamics: “Within this UN Conference there are people who use it only to carry on the UN debate.” The same foreigners who manipulate the United Nations with our money simply shifted the debate to Nairobi at a cost of more than two million dollars, one quarter of which was funded by the United States.
International Planned Parenthood was very much in evidence in Nairobi, but the 14,000 pro-choice attendees must have felt insecure. They loudly complained that the pro-lifers (of whom there were only about 20) “disrupted” the Forum.
The official U.S. delegation wisely refused to support the Comparable Worth clause in the final document calling on all governments to adopt “equal pay for work of equal value.” It is not UN edicts but a free economy which produces high wages.
The only issue of unanimous consensus among the delegations was domestic violence — no one is in favor of husbands beating up their wives. The domestic violence resolution introduced by the Americans had more cosponsors than any other.
The UN Decade for Women pursued a bitter and divisive trail from Mexico City in 1975 to Copenhagen in 1980 and now Nairobi in 1985. They didn’t dare meet in the United States; if they had, most of the delegates would have thought they had died and gone to Heaven, and they would never have returned to their native countries.
