Government, schools, businesses, even hospitals--all have suffered under the regime of political correctness. Where did these bad ideas come from? In February, the Independent Women's Forum presented Heather Mac Donald and Sally Satel, two prominent commentators, to discuss their new books tracing how political correctness has wreaked havoc in our institutions. The event generated significant interest and was repeatedly aired on C-SPAN’s Book TV.

Christina Hoff Sommers
IWF’s National Advisory Board Chairman

We’ve had more than a decade of political correctness: We have seen women’s studies practitioners refer to history as “herstory” and seminars as “ovulars.” For example, in order to accommodate oppressed groups, the National Women’s Studies Association first formed groups based on healing needs and grievances--ethnic groups, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian women, and Jewish women.

But these groups kept bickering and breaking apart. Eventually, they had to have a special group representing oversized women, women whose sexuality was in transition and disabled women...they even had a special group for marginalized allergy groups!

This was a group of self-involved, chronically offended women’s studies practitioners. As our speakers today will tell us, this same PC mentality has made its way into critical mainstream American institutions, our courts, our philanthropies, our hospitals, and our public health associations. Politically correct thought is an amalgam of bad ideas...with bad consequences in many areas.

Heather MacDonald

Whining, alas, has become something of a national pastime. The Independent Women’s Forum is the only organization in Washington with the guts to take on the most powerful, well funded, largest, and mediagenic special interest in America: women who whine.

A few years ago Lawrence Wallack, a Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley, wrote a letter to the New York Times regarding sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teens. “It is hypocritical,” he wrote, “to blame young people for STDs when we don’t provide the means of prevention.” His recommendations, of course, were universally accessible condoms, condom advertising, and sex education in schools.

Hasn’t Mr. Wallack missed the most obvious and effective means of prevention? Not have sex in the first place? This is not a social service that we can provide. It depends on individual self-control. In Mr. Wallack’s world, individual responsibility has vanished to be replaced by social interventions that presume self-destructive behavior on the part of their beneficiaries.

At the turn of the century, and for decades thereafter, America’s elites understood that the best way to help the poor, and society generally, was to stress those habits that had made them so successful, such as hard work and self-discipline. Contemporary elites by contrast, encourage the poor to think of themselves as victims, and justify anti-social behavior as the inevitable result of America’s terrible racism, sexism, and inequality.

The great philanthropies have undergone a similar revolution. Andrew Carnegie believed in helping those “who’ll help themselves,” and he warned that one man or woman who succeeds in living comfortably by begging is more dangerous to society than a score of windy socialists.

Today, foundations created by red-blooded capitalists seek to maximize federal entitlements for the idle. Henry Ford may have believed that the best way to help a man was to offer him a job, but in the 1960s his foundation sponsored the welfare rights movement.

The Carnegie Foundation bankrolls radical feminism on campus. The Rockefeller Foundation underwrites documentaries celebrating transvestite prostitutes with AIDS. This, from a foundation that made medical history by eradicating hook worm and creating the yellow fever vaccine.

The law profession is a particularly egregious case of ideological reversal. In the late 19th century, corporate law firms created the idea of free legal assistance for workers abused by unscrupulous employers, but there was a catch: You actually had to have worked. So strong was the stigma against something for nothing that, in 1896, the Legal Aid Society instituted a 10-cent fee for its services, just so recipients would not feel they were receiving a handout.

Today, the law profession is a sugar daddy for any advocacy group that strives to prevent efforts to make the long-term poor self-sufficient. The bar was once the country’s strongest proponent of limited government and separation of powers. Today, its pro bono work promotes transgendered rights, welfare rights, disability rights, children’s rights, and whatever else may be the cause du jour.

The firm of Cleary Gottlieb worked for free to try to force openly gay scoutmasters on the Boy Scouts, who had to pay big for their own legal defense.

This is the betrayal of the elites. They have stopped promoting traditional American values and embraced an anti-establishment ideology, which, alas, has enormous influence.

The elites’ embrace of grievance multiculturalism hurts the poor most of all. At El Puente Academy, an inner city public high school in Brooklyn, students rank near the bottom of New York’s already abysmal reading and math scores. Is El Puente working feverishly on reading and math drills? No, it’s teaching graffiti. Students in the course called Hip-Hop 101 are tested on how quickly they can produce a design for “roasting” a subway car! Alumni of Hip-Hop 101 have given presentations on how to teach students about racial oppression at Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier education school in the country.

Sally Satel

In the summer of 1998, a group of nurses gathered at a university taking a graduate course. A groundskeeper working outside in the heat came in and told the nurses he was feeling faint. He mentioned that earlier that week he had suffered a hard blow to the head. Full of sympathy and concern, the nurses rushed into action. Numerous pairs of hands began waving a few inches away from the groundskeeper’s body, as the nurses assessed his “human energy field.” Finally, and thankfully, one nurse thought to put together the man’s symptoms with his history of recent head trauma and suspected, correctly, that a blood clot--a subdural hematoma--might be forming around his brain.

What on earth were the other trained nurses doing? Therapeutic Touch, TT, allegedly cures ailments from yeast infections to high blood pressure, and increases the rate of wound healing. The nurse lets her hands hover a few inches from the patient to “unruffle the energy field.” The idea is that a lack of balance in this field, or a backing up of energy, impedes wound healing and can cause disease.

This is nonsense, of course. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association really disturbed the good vibrations of these TT enthusiasts. The author recruited TT practitioners to participate in a study, looking at how well they could detect the presence of a human energy field. They stood behind a barrier through which they put their hands. Their task was to tell over which of their hands, right or left, the examiner’s hand was hovering.

The TT experts could not tell which hand with any accuracy greater than chance. Who was the perceptive researcher doing this study? It was Emily Rosa, a nine-year-old doing her fourth-grade science experiment!

Good nurses are out there and they’re worked to the bone. Even so, however, the politically correct nurse is part of a growing and worrisome trend.

According to the PC nurse, the medical establishment conspires with patriarchy in general to keep the nurse submissive and ignorant. According to nurse A.J. Baumgart, the doctor has “rightful knower status,” but that must be challenged.

This is not fringe. Therapeutic Touch is endorsed by the American Nurse’s Association and the National League for Nursing, which is the accrediting body for nursing colleges in this country. A former president of the National League for Nursing was a vocal promoter of Therapeutic Touch. Eighty nursing schools in North America offer it.

Is it harmful? Consider the woman with abdominal pain who went to a nurse practitioner who was a devotee of TT. Instead of working her up for appendicitis, the nurse performed Therapeutic Touch. Three days later the woman died from a ruptured appendix.

Overall, one would never know that “equity feminism” has triumphed in medicine. Women are almost half of all graduating medical students, about half of all high-ranking hospital administrators, and women medical researchers get grants in proportion equal to those awarded to men.

“Gender feminism” by contrast, looks for the power struggles within the medical profession and perpetually sees women as short-changed. In the words of former Congress-woman Pat Schroeder, when you have a male dominated group of researchers, they are, of course, more worried about prostate cancer than breast cancer. She couldn’t be further from the truth.

Breast cancer actually receives more research funding from NIH than any other form of cancer. Meanwhile, only one in four women seem to know that lung cancer, not breast cancer, is the biggest cancer killer of women.

Other myths abound; one of the more enduring myths is that women have been left out of clinical trials to determine the efficacy of devices or new medications. The truth is that women have been included in clinical trials funded by the federal government and by private industry for decades. Now women represent over 60% of all subjects in clinical trials funded by NIH.

Another example is that money will be siphoned off to pay for the wrong thing. Women’s health groups continue to lobby for government funding to study the effects of “endocrine disrupters,” again on breast cancer. But this research will be meaningless because endocrine disrupters do not exist as carcinogens.

Meanwhile, women are led to think that it is their breasts that are at risk, when they should be more worried about their hearts. Heart disease kills women at five times the rate that breast cancer does. While there is little right now that we can do to prevent breast cancer, there is a lot women can do to prevent heart disease, stroke, and hypertension.

Misinformation and aggrievement largely fuel the modern women’s health movement. There are responsible advocates who want to get the straight facts out, but too often the media and Congress get their information from women’s health activists who put politics before the facts. 

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. Heather Mac Donald is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Sally Satel is a W. H. Brady, Jr., Fellow at AEI.