McMillan on Feminists

* Regarding the muddled and obtuse column by Susan Carpenter McMillan (“Conservative, Feminist and Proud,” Commentary, Oct. 27), I have to say I’ve seen more cogent arguments on the back of cereal boxes.

Ideologically, I am probably what McMillan would call a “radical feminist.” I’m vehemently pro-choice, I have a career (as she does, though she’d like to gloss over it), a child and a husband, and I shave my legs (usually) and wear a bra. I don’t happen to be a lesbian, though I have many close friends who are. I’m tired of waging battle against misinformed and misleading, thinly veiled anti-feminist diatribes such as McMillan’s, which spews hatred and intolerance toward any women not exactly like herself. If she wants to debate the issues in a rational way with a “radical feminist,” I’m ready.

First McMillan defines a supposedly mainstream notion of a feminist--as lesbian, the victim of abuse by her father, as anti-marriage, and so on. McMillan misrepresents contemporary feminism as extremist and necessarily linked to homosexuality (a notion frightening to many of her colleagues in homophobia) so that she can manipulate it to fit her own ends. Who are these “radical,” anti-social feminists McMillan is invoking here? After appropriating feminism for the cause of traditional family values and for those ideals set forth by the pioneering if misguided ideologues of a particular group of early feminist thinkers, McMillan spends the rest of her space pushing an anti-choice agenda.

AMELIA JONES

Riverside

* I would like to commend McMillan on her article regarding feminism and its history in this country. However, I have my own theory on the change in feminist philosophy on abortion.

Let’s be honest, children don’t enable women to gain financial wealth, political or social power in America. In fact, children are a financial and emotional link between men and women.

In addition, militant feminists perceive all men in general as solely responsible for the oppression of women. The hatred toward men is so embedded in their psyche that even the abuse of power, i.e., abortion, is a better alternative than the relationship that children create with men and women.

Unfortunately, militant feminists don’t understand that freedom is about responsibility through contraception and education. The abuse of power only destroys women, men and the unborn. Let’s stop abusing the human life process we all evolved from just to disconnect women from men.

JOHN A. WEISS

Newberry Park

* I was saddened by the column by McMillan. In her world people work, play and build homes together. McMillan’s world is a place where people are honored, listened to.

As a therapist who works with sexually abused children at the Pasadena YWCA Rape Crisis Center, it is my job and the job of many others whom McMillan would call radical feminists to honor and to listen. We honor and listen to about 18,000 women a year. And we hear accounts of unspeakable horrors.

My invitation to McMillan is to come sit with an 11-year-old, pregnant by her own father, listen to her, honor her, protect her. Perhaps then she would notice in this world, there are worse fates than dying unborn in your mother’s womb.

KAREN CARLSON

Pasadena