What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us About Feminism, Men & Motherhood with Danielle Crittenden
Click here to listen to the audio interview
About This Episode
“Danielle Crittenden is the co-host of the Femsplainers podcast where together with Christina Hoff Sommers they hold the gossipy, smart, witty conversation you’d have if all of your girlfriends were experts on the hot topics of the moment. High spirited and high minded, Danielle & Christina don’t argue or whine but seek to get to the heart of the matter, over cocktails (or wine).
A longtime contributor to the Huffington Post, Danielle’s numerous articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and the Ladies Home Journal, among other publications. A former columnist for the New York Post, she has appeared on NBC’s Today show, The O’Reilly Factor, ABC’s 20/20 and Nightline, and network news shows, as well as numerous programs for CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, Fox, NPR, CTV, and CBC.
She is co-author of the cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen with Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum, and the author of three previous books: Her non-fiction book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, resulted in Vanity Fair describing Crittenden as ‘one of the most important new thinkers about women and family’. She also has written two works of fiction: The President’s Secret IMs, originally published on the Huffington Post; and Amanda Bright @ Home, the first novel ever to be serialized by the Wall Street Journal.
Crittenden was born in Toronto, Canada. She is married to journalist and author David Frum, a former special assistant and speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and senior editor at The Atlantic. They have three children and live in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario.”
“There is a great yin/yang in femininity and masculinity when it works. The sexes really balance each other in a beautiful way… We each have our strength in our different sexes and it works as long as we don’t get insecure about them.”
Join us for a conversation about why your dating life is as important as your career and why choosing your spouse is the most important decision of your life despite what the modern feminism movement will tell you. Here are the details of our conversation:
- The ramifications of the Second-wave 70’s feminism
- The evolution of marriage and how it has made its comeback
- Why having children earlier in life is most beneficial for a woman
- How women are creatures of their biology and why it’s a beautiful thing
- How to preserve your identity as a mother
- Waves of toxic masculinity, female victimization, and oppression
- How sexual liberation has been detrimental to male’s commitment
- How mistrust between the sexes breeds distrust, division & exaggerated stereotypes
- How modeling marriage and family life counts the most for our children
- How having children makes women — women and men — men
- Why you have to be serious about your dating life just like you are serious about your career
- Why choosing your spouse is the most important decision of your life
- The backstory of Femsplainers
- And much more
Links
- Femsplainers Podcast — Join our weekly girl’s night out with some of the most fascinating and fabulous women on the planet. We dish on everything from #metoo and sex to, well, doing the dishes. No topic is off-limits — unless it’s boring.
Tools & Resources Mentioned
PEOPLE/BLOGS TO FOLLOW
- Christina Hoff Sommers on Youtube — an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
- What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden — Talk to women under forty today, and you will hear that in spite of the fact that they have achieved goals previous generations of women could only dream of, they nonetheless feel more confused and insecure than ever. What has gone wrong? What can be done to set it right? These are the questions Danielle Crittenden answers in What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us. She examines the foremost issues in women’s lives — sex, marriage, motherhood, work, aging, and politics — and argues that a generation of women has been misled: taught to blame men and pursue independence at all costs. Happiness is obtainable, Crittenden says, but only if women will free their minds from outdated feminist attitudes.
- Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women by Christina Hoff Sommers — Philosophy professor Christina Sommers has exposed a disturbing development: how a group of zealots, claiming to speak for all women, are promoting a dangerous new agenda that threatens our most cherished ideals and sets women against men in all spheres of life. In case after case, Sommers shows how these extremists have propped up their arguments with highly questionable but well-funded research, presenting inflammatory and often inaccurate information and stifling any semblance of free and open scrutiny. Trumpeted as orthodoxy, the resulting “findings” on everything from rape to domestic abuse to economic bias to the supposed crisis in girls’ self-esteem perpetuate a view of women as victims of the “patriarchy”.
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