It’s time for conservative women to step up.
For years we’ve heard about “toxic masculinity,” yet what we should really be concerned about is “toxic femininity.”
As results of this year’s midterm election poured in, one thing became abundantly clear—the radical feminist movement of the 1960s has come to full fruition.
The number of single women in the United States is rapidly increasing, and a large majority of them are voting Democrat. Polling from this past week’s midterm elections shows that Democrats led by 37 points among unmarried women.
So what’s swaying these women to vote Democrat?
Women today are told that their happiness and their worth come from a corporate job. That raising a family will only hold them back. That the concept of marriage is an outdated and sexist concept. Women nowadays would rather be beholden to their jobs than to husbands and children because, after all, that’s true freedom. Right?
While the feminist movement of the 1960s preached equality, as the decades have passed by we’ve seen just the opposite occur. Feminists have waged an all-out war against the traditional family and traditional gender roles to create one type of woman — the career-driven, childless woman. Just last week on The View, host Sunny Hostin likened women voting Republican to “roaches voting for Raid.”
These women despise other women who reject the false promises of modern-day toxic feminism.
Look no further than Jefferson County, West Virginia. When myself and fellow stay-at-home mother Jennifer Krouse ran for two positions on the county commission, we were attacked for being traditional, conservative women.
Democrats railed against our campaigns, decrying that I was “tone deaf” and a “stay-at-home mom who posts homemade cookies on her campaign page” and that Jennifer’s love for her country and family was “too extreme.”
So much for the Left being the party of women’s rights and women’s voices.
Instead, the Leftists in my county chose to support two old white men with political careers that started nearly two decades before I was even born because they couldn’t stand the thought of two stay-at-home mothers on the ballot. Thankfully, Jennifer and I prevailed.
But the rest of the country isn’t like my wonderful home state of West Virginia.
If Republicans want any chance of winning future elections, they must engage in the culture wars head-on. And that means engaging the women of this country to embrace traditional womanhood and to reject toxic feminism. We need to build up families, build up communities, and rely on one another rather than the government.
It was Phyllis Schlafly and a group of housewives in the 1960s that stopped the ERA in its tracks. While Schlafly won that battle, we conservative women have been losing the war since then.
We need to build off of what Schlafly started and engage young women across the country. Our message to the women of this country should be to reject the Left’s hypocrisy and be a part of the party that truly promotes women. Women in the workforce, women at home, and the women who are juggling both!
In order to be truly pro-women, we need to be embracing a pro-family agenda and policies that support family formation and give women the option to stay at home. The stagnation of Middle-class wages and rising costs have created a scenario where essentials like housing, health care, transportation, and education cost more than an entire year’s income! In 1985 these same things would have cost a typical earner 30 weeks of income.
If you’re a mother, the time of being apathetic toward politics is over. You need to step up, get involved, and make your voice known. We need the next generation of little girls to see that marriage and motherhood are things to aspire to rather than detest.
To all the conservative moms out there, I did it in Jefferson County, and you can do it too. Get involved, join a board, run for office.
Let’s take back this country and stop toxic femininity in its tracks.
Clare Anne Ath currently serves as a County Commissioner in Jefferson County, WV. She is also a Ph.D. student at Liberty University, where she focuses her research on pro-family policies.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.