I'm ever amazed at the fanciful press that passes for fine journalism in today’s New York Times. The “old gray lady” ain’t what she used to be. On Mother’s Day, the Times ran a rewrite of history by Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, which made feminism out to be the savior of motherhood. The next thing you know the Times will be reporting that Adolf Hitler was a popular guest at Jewish Bar Mitzvahs.

Feminism’s denigrating of stay-at-home moms is well documented and undeniable. For instance, in her 1963 best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan critiqued the role of stay-at-home moms and concluded that “millions of American women” were being buried “alive.” No longer was a housewife and stay-at-home mother to see her good home, loving husband and healthy children as ideal, but as a crypt within which she was being buried alive.

Now as preposterous as it is to pretend that the sanctity of the home has been saved by a movement that redefines it as a sepulcher within which stay-at-home moms are being buried alive, what I found to be even more ludicrous about Coontz’s article is her assertion that the feminist attack on housewives has resulted in emotionally healthy women and better behaved children. Never mind that current studies show depression soaring among today’s liberated women or juvenile crime and delinquency statistics at frightening levels, we’re all suppose to shut our eyes, put our fingers in our ears, and envision ourselves in Shangri-La through the broken glass ceiling of corporate America.

Coontz continuously contradicts her own thesis, such as when she admits that women “felt they occupied a ‛nobler sphere’ than men’s ‛bank-note’ world” in the 19th century, when they had far fewer rights than the liberated woman of today. She even quotes the wife of the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, as being disinterested in the improving of women’s rights because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror [could] cope with.”

Still, Coontz insists that the Women’s Liberation Movement rescued women from poor self-esteem. According to Coontz, the culprit that redefined mothering as nagging, laid the blame for many of society’s ills at the feet of stay-at-home moms, and deflated the female “Ego,” not to mention the “Id” and “Psyche,” was Freudianism. It was Sigmund Frued who made stay-at-home moms out to be a menace to society, resulting in Philip Wylie’s coining of the unflattering term, “momism,” which was meant to describe sickening society’s “epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings.”

In light of Coontz’s contentions, one would expect her to conclude her article with the fact that Freudianism has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Therefore, women need only to be reeducated about the “nobler sphere” of motherhood. There is, after all, no greater profession or important work in all of the world. As the poet said, “For the hand that rocks the cradle, is the hand that rules the world.”

Yet, Coontz concludes her piece, as any modern-day feminist would, by advocating that women never return to that “nobler sphere,” but remain on an inferior one by working outside the home in search of some allusive self-gratification. This, despite Coontz’s own acknowledgement that “maternal depression is well known” to be “harmful to children’s development” and that the Council on Contemporary Families has just discovered that the lowest risk of depression among women today is among young stay-at-home mothers!

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