GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has previously provided her take on modern-day feminism. Today only about 20 percent of Americans identify as feminists. Predictably, when Fiorina gave her view on the matter, some of them were none-to-pleased about what she had to say.
In an article for Politico on Wednesday, American Enterprise Institute scholars Christina Hoff Sommers and Christine Rosen wrote that what Fiorina said about feminism would make her an “equity feminist.”
“Equity feminism does not view men and women as opposing tribes. Theories of patriarchal oppression are not among its founding tablets,” Hoff Sommers and Rosen wrote. “Put simply, equity feminism affirms for women what it affirms for everyone: dignity, opportunity and personal liberty.”
Fiorina has previously described her preferred view of feminism as “a woman who lives the life she chooses.” But as the Left, which has co-opted the term to describe specific women who espouse liberal viewpoints, disparaged Fiorina’s definition of the word, Hoff Sommers and Rosen praise her.
“Indeed, Fiorina is not blind to the challenges women still face, but she comes to them with an understanding of the history of women’s progress as a bipartisan movement of expanding opportunity and often mentions solutions that are not ideologically driven,” the two wrote. “Doing so challenges traditional feminist shibboleths.”
Hoff Sommers and Rosen give an example from Salon, where a feminist writer called Fiorina “delusional” because the former Hewlett-Packard CEO dared to suggest that workers should be rewarded for their performance, not their sex, and that it is wrong for the government to push such ideology on the economy.
Republicans like Fiorina, the authors note, in part because she can’t be dismissed as easliy as former GOP stars Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. “[I]t’s hard to imagine either giving a TED lecture or moderating a panel at Davos,” Hoff Sommers and Rosen wrote.
I encourage you to read the entire article here, just in time for the third GOP presidential debate.
