Corporate home wreckers.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

I was in the Atlanta air-port recently, cruising a bookstore, when this catchy title leaped out at me: Women Who Make the World Worse." and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports. Since the author is National Review Washington editor and Fox News pundit Kate O'Beirne, I indulged my vanity and looked up my own name in the index. There I was, right up front on page four, credited with ruining our families.

If O'Beirne had done a little more research, she might have found me responsible for wrecking our military and schools, as well. But I can't complain: Destroying the family is a hefty accomplishment all by itself.

This isn't the first time I've gotten rightwing attention as a home wrecker. Back in the mid-'90s, James Dobson's Focus on the Family once described me as a woman who'd dedicated her life to the destruction of the American family, in more or less those words. Partly this is just the rightwing translation of the word "feminist." Some of you may recall Pat Robertson's attack on feminism during the controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment in the '80s. Feminists, he said, busy themselves becoming lesbians, killing their children, and advancing Marxism--a formidable agenda to say the least, especially if your children are fast on their feet.

What brought me to the Atlanta airport was not a trip to a convention of lesbian, Marxist, child-killers. I was returning from a holiday spent with my son and his girlfriend and my nephew and his wife, and I was rushing home because I was eager to rejoin my granddaughters (ages four and one), who are the light of my life. News of the Dobson attack had hit at a similar moment: I was returning from a visit to my grandmother and an ailing aunt in Iowa. My job may be to "destroy the American family," but I've never managed to destroy a single family member, even one of the more irritating ones.

If anyone is "ruining" the American family...