No, I have no doubt that in the car ride over today
that you warned your daughters that I am chairman
of national defense for the Daughters
of the American Revolution and, as such,
to prepare themselves for a lecture on the need
for an antimissile defense system
or the end of US nuclear superiority.
[LAUGHTER]
So it may come as a surprise to you
that today I am not going to talk about
the Soviet military threat but rather another threat, a threat
to the traditional American family, a threat that is just
as dangerous and even more insidious,
the threat of the women's liberation movement.
Let me be clear, I am not against women succeeding.
I am not against women working outside the home.
That's their choice.
But what I am against is a small, elitist group
of Northeastern establishment liberals
putting down the homemakers.
Now the libbers love to say that they're dedicated to choice.
But if you dare to choose the path of full-time mother,
well, there must be something wrong with you.
I mean, if you don't feel enslaved,
well, you're just dumb and unenlightened.
In fact, you're not even a person.
Because, you see, the women's liberation movement
is basically a very negative attitude toward life.
It tells women, sister, the cards are stacked against you.
When you wake up in the morning, you won't get a job.
And if you do, it won't be a good one.
And if you get a good one, you won't get promoted.
And if you get married, your husband
will treat you like a servant, and marriage is just a lot of
dirty diapers and dirty dishes.
But don't take my word for it.
Read their own literature.
Betty Friedan, mother of the movement,
wrote in "The Feminine Mystique" that marriage is,
and I quote, "a comfortable concentration camp."
It is not enough that they're demeaning us in the press.
Oh no.
Now they want to use our miraculous Constitution
to create a sex-neutral society through this so-called Equal
Rights Amendment, which will mean that that baby
girl will be drafted and the men will
be at home nursing the babies.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, can you imagine if Buck was left
in charge of your children?
Oh, God help us.
Yes, that's right.
It's ridiculous, and it's downright un-American
because women are the primary caregivers in the home
because we bear the children.
And if the liberationists have a problem with that,
they're going to have to take it up with God because what is
going to happen if you push women out into the workforce
is that women are going to find themselves with two
full-time jobs, and they're going
to be exhausted and unhappy and feel like they're not doing
either well until eventually they decide
not to have children at all.
Maybe that's the liberationists' goal.
I mean, after all, their hero is Gloria
Steinem, a single, childless woman nearing 40.
But she is the sort of miserable and pathetic
woman they aspire to be.
She wants some kind of a constitutional cure
for her personal problem.
And perhaps that is why the liberationists are trying
to sow these seeds of discontent among we happily married women.
They want us to join them in some new sisterhood
of frustrated togetherness because none of them
can find a man who wants to marry them.
[LAUGHTER]