626 Elinor Burkett's So Many Enemies, So Little Time

She was an ardent 60s Leftist, a True Believer, you might say. She had helped establish two Women's Studies programs and had taught women's history. She had little use for Liberal Democrats, whose programs she thought of as band-aids. I can't remember why I checked out her book published in July, So Many Enemies, So Little Time; an American Woman in All the Wrong Places. However, it is a real eye-opener, regardless of your party affiliation or religion. She discovered in the post 9/11 years travelling and teaching in a former Soviet Republic, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, that her gender shaped the reality of everything she saw and experienced. Being a woman, she was usually where she shouldn't have been. She was sure the Feminists back home would applaud what the Bush Administration was doing abroad--freeing millions women from slavery, early death, illiteracy and imprisonment in their own homes--even if they had complaints about his domestic policies. Boy, was she wrong!

In an interview with FrontPage, she says: "So when I came home, I fully expected the feminist movement to be up in arms, demanding that the U.S. government do more to defend these women, marching on the United Nations in defense of their sisters.

Instead, I found NOW working on its annual Love Your Body Day. And if I didn't hit a wall earlier, I hit it several weeks ago during the March for Women's Lives. Whoopi Goldberg declared that "there's a war going on, a war against women." I agreed. Unfortunately, we were talking about different wars.

The marchers insisted that George W. Bush is the world's greatest threat to women. What I'd seen and heard during a year's travels was that Muslim fundamentalists were the world's greatest threat to women. That's certainly what the women I met - on the street, in the market, in the classroom, on buses and during interviews - told me. They weren't worried about access to abortion. They were worried about access to jobs, about the right to work, about the right to run to the store without having to cover themselves, about the right to select their own husband, the right to educate themselves and their daughters.

And a march focused on George Bush and access to abortion belittled their situations and their struggles. How can you care about women, as the feminists insist they do, and not care about the actual threats to their lives?

Fortunately, I discovered shortly after I returned home, the current administration didn't need NOW and the Feminist Majority to march down Pennsylvania Avenue in order to reach out to women who live under the threat of Muslim fundamentalists. They understand that we - Americans - share an enemy with these women. By defending them, we defend ourselves."

Writing about her time in Kryrgyzstan teaching basic Journalism, she takes aim at NGOs (practically a cottage industry for Americans and Europeans who want to live abroad on easy grant money) and Christian missionary groups. Before you donate that next dollar, do take a look at what is going on in the name of "modernization" and/or Jesus.

My copy was checked out through OhioLink from Southern State Community College, but this is a title that needs to be more widely available, and a woman who needs to be on the program at a college near you.

Burkett's new book 

Chapter One of So Many Enemies, So Little Time (HarperCollins, 2004).