Love ‘em, hate ‘em or clean the house

CALL ME A masochist, but I spent last weekend reading a book called “Women Who Make the World Worse: and How their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports.”

I knew I really should have been dusting the blades of my ceiling fan, but after months of hearing about author Kate O’Beirne and her “battles with the man-hating ‘sisterhood,’ ” I figured it was time I saw what the fuss was about.

O’Beirne, the Washington editor of the National Review and former vice president of the Heritage Foundation, is by many accounts a charming and witty person. In a recent interview with Salon.com, she justified her views by saying, “I think we were better protected by traditional mores and chivalry than we are by laws and lawsuits.”

Fair enough. But between the hard covers of her book (illustrated with caricatures of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw that border on the anti-Semitic), this sentiment apparently translates into the notion that all assertive women are litigious, motherhood-resistant and either oversexed or undersexed. Peppered with didactic pronouncements -- “the modern women’s movement is totalitarian in its methods, radical in its aims and dishonest in its advocacy” -- and chestnuts from the fringes of 1970s-era extremism (she refers to feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s line about all heterosexual sex being rape, which is actually a notorious misquote), O’Beirne’s book did for me what no book had done in a long time. It made me want to dust my ceiling fan.

Perhaps that was her aim -- sneaky gal! For a brief moment, I abandoned all my professional goals and castration fantasies, seized by the urge to clean.

But no sooner did I go in search of a feather duster than I stumbled on another book I’d been meaning to read. This was Karenna Gore Schiff’s “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America,” which studiously chronicles the achievements of women such as anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and United Farm Workers’ organizer Dolores Huerta. Realizing I had no feather duster, I lay back down on the couch, read about 50 pages and promptly fell asleep.

I had the strangest dream: The women who made the world worse were in a roller derby match against the women who changed modern America. The “worse” women, unencumbered by the Industrial Revolution-era corsets of some of their opponents, were at a distinct advantage. This was thanks not only to the athletic opportunities afforded them by Title IX (which O’Beirne believes “exacted a heavy toll on the despised sex” -- which is to say, men) but because of Carrie Bradshaw, who used her Manolos as a weapon (technically illegal, but man-hating sisters don’t care).

Meanwhile, Mother Jones and her posse, armed with monikers like MoJo Vixen and Ida B. Slammin’, skated haplessly around the rink like Tolstoy characters. Surely there’s a revolution to be fought, they were thinking, but what’s with all the exposed bra straps?

When I awoke, it occurred to me that if O’Beirne had gotten her hands on the nine women who changed modern America, she would surely charge them with making the world worse. After all, Mother Jones mounted child labor demonstrations that included putting children in cages to make a point about their enslavement. Huerta cavorted with Gloria Steinem and credited the women’s movement for alleviating her guilt over her two divorces, an admission that would have O’Beirne eating California grapes for a lifetime.

If O’Beirne’s book amounts to a shooting gallery with the slowest-moving targets of the last half-century (McKinnon plus Jane Fonda to the power of Hillary Clinton equals ... well, you do the math) Gore Schiff’s book, with its bland innocuousness, is a 512-page nap. At least “Women Who Make the World Worse” kept me awake, though I’m not sure I wanted to be.

Truth be told, what I really take umbrage at (how fun to use that word “umbrage,” it’s so strident and Carter-era, like “patriarchy” or “carob”) is the fact that despite the campaign for equality waged by the women in both books, the publishing industry still feels compelled to package their stories as if women are a special-interest group whose every thought and action is a manifestation of their pesky, capricious “gender” and its attendant “politics.”

Then again, the majority of book buyers are female, so I guess these authors and publishers know what they’re doing.

Interestingly, for all the powerful women into whom O’Beirne manages to dig her manicured claws, there’s one she leaves notably uncensured: Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey hasn’t had O’Beirne on the show, but, hey, a conservative pundit can dream. Besides, in O’Beirne’s book, female breadwinners may not be all they’re cracked up to be. But knowing which side that bread is buttered on? Priceless.