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The Media

December 1999

A child's view of the world

by James Bowman

It seemed a happy coincidence when Ken Burns’s two-part series, “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” began its brief run on PBS (where else?) on the same day that Naomi Wolf appeared on “This Week” on ABC to explain a report in Time magazine that she had been hired by the presidential campaign of Vice President Gore at $15,000 a month (later reduced to $5000) to advise him on how to look more like an “alpha male.” This he was to do by (among other things, presumably) wearing suits in “earth tones.” The juxtaposition was too delicious. What, one wondered, would Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony have thought about the seemliness of this young celebrator of female “promiscuities” explaining the principle on which the hard-won women’s ballot is to be cast in the next presidential election? More recent feminists have told us that the personal is the ...

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James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, also published by Encounter (2008)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 December 1999, on page 55
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