The book, a compilation of Schlafly’s essays and speeches written from 1982 through 2001, is accurately aimed at the flaws and faults of the radical feminist movement.
It is to her credit that readers can follow the string from the 1970s, when radical feminists encouraged women to leave home and hearth, to today’s unhappy working women.
In a chapter titled "The Revolution is Over" appears a column Schlafly wrote in 1987.
"Although we hear the daily drumbeat from the national media telling us that the American social structure is now permanently stratified with mothers in the labor force and children in daycare centers, a careful monitoring of newspapers reveals plenty of evidence that this is not a satisfactory pattern. There are two reasons: mothers don’t like it and children don’t like it."
She then tells the story of a successful television anchor who left her job at the height of her career to become a full-time homemaker and mother. The woman told a newspaper reporter "it wasn’t so much that I thought my kids needed me more than the job allowed, but that I needed them more."
But then Schlafly tells of a surgeon whose husband opted to stay home for eight years taking care of the couple’s two sons so she could continue her medical career. The surgeon admitted she was not happy with her arrangement. "I am not a liberated woman," she wrote in the Journal of American Medical Association. "I am incarcerated in a world and lifestyle far more complex and complicated than my great-grandmother, raising her 11 children in an apartment in the Bronx, could have imagined."
In another chapter, "Questioning a Woman’s Place," Schlafly eloquently reiterates the reasons for her opposition to passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Readers know that the failure of ERA is due mainly to Schlafly’s logical debates and tireless efforts opposing the amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But also credit must go to the American people who had more sense than to fall for a worthless amendment that offered women nothing and would have caused plenty of harm, as Schlafly put it.
Pity the poor radical feminists. Schlafly’s book shows that every misguided attempt they made to improve the conditions of women backfired.
For example, the easy divorce laws that were supposed to free women from so-called servitude actually made it easy for men who discard the tired old wife in favor of the younger, prettier trophy wife. What did women get from this? Schlafly’s book shows they got nothing but more drudgery.
Of course, the radical feminists are still fighting for their (lost?) cause. And Schlafly, sometimes with great humor, has a comeback for every angle of their fight.
In a 1991 column titled "Code Name: Glass Ceiling," Schlafly skewers the feminists' attempt to promote legislation to set up a "Glass Ceiling Commission to use taxpayer funds to conduct studies and research to prove their findings that women were underrepresented in executive management and senior decision making positions in business."
"Did you think that the demolition of the Iron Curtain and the liberation of Eastern Europe meant that the threat from George Orwell’s Big Brother is gone forever? Don’t be too sure," she writes.
Ah, but she also notes that even the feminists are aware that their so-called revolution has failed. Radical feminist Anne Taylor Fleming, in a debate with Schlafly in the 1970s, said, "If I were pregnant now, I’d go out and have an abortion." In a 1994 column Schlafly notes that Fleming had just written a book, "Motherhood Deferred," in which she says: "Hey, hey Gloria, Germaine, Kate. Tell us how does it feel to have ended up without babies, flesh of your flesh. Was your ideology worth the empty womb?"
Schlafly, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University, received a law degree from Washington University Law School and her master’s in government from Harvard University. She is the mother of six children and the author of 20 books on topics ranging from politics to child care.
For many decades she has been telling the American people that the ideology of feminism is at odds with human nature. Her "Feminist Fantasies" shows that she is right.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.