HILLARY: Despite all the challenges that we face, I remain convinced that, yes, the future is female. Just look at the amazing energy we saw last month as women organized a March that galvanized millions of people all over our country and across the world.
GLENN: So which is it? Is there a war on women? Or is the future female? And what exactly does the future as female mean?
Hillary Clinton and others have expended a lot of time and energy selling the war on women. So this new phrase would seem a little out of step with that effort. But it's important to note that this new phrase and effort comes complete with another attempt to pass the E.R.A. the equal rights amendment. The initial effort to get the E.R.A. added to the U.S. constitution never happened. But there are many that would say it wasn't necessary in the first place.
>> If the equal rights amendment passes, we would have no choice. Women would be drafted and forced into combat.
>> And the president is staunchly against it. The club begins a new era. That's era not E.R.A. E.R.A. supporters have a tough time keeping the debate focused on what they see as E.R.A.'s main goal. Economic equality for women who in 1982 earn 59 cents to every man's dollar.
>> As a registered nurse, Carol makes less than men who fix cars, drive buses, or trim trees. That's why Carol wants the equal rights amendment ratified.
GLENN: There were several factors that wound up dooming the movement. First of all, there were already laws on the books that guaranteed women equal rights. In certain circumstances, such as when marriages break up, a case could be made that women's rights were and are superior to men's. Yet the perception on many is that there's an ongoing war on women and women are faring poorly on it.
>> What I would say to women who say there's already equality in our country, is look at our lives. Pregnancy discrimination.
GLENN: By all, please, let's truly open our eyes and look at each of those issues. The never-ending claim of those who are supposedly fighting for women's rights is that women make anywhere from 78 to 87 cents for every dollar a man makes. In fact, the 1982 news report claimed it was just 59 cents on every dollar. If we indeed are going to open our eyes to this issue, then we will find that even the liberal Washington Post has debunked this faulty claim every year since 2012, calling it false.
Study after study has found that when comparing similar experience, education, skill level, and commitment to job length of women and men, there is virtually no gender disparity in pay. None. In fact, in 147 America's largest 150 cities, young women make 8 percent more than men. All right. What about violence against women? Huge increase of rape in America. We're told now that things have gotten so bad that one out of every five women will be raped on a American College campus. If accurate, that would be a higher perjury of rape than what occurred during the Rwandian genocide.
The good news is it's not accurate. It's an outrageous falsehood. Sexual assaults in the United States have actually plummeted since the mid-1990s, falling by nearly 60 percent. Domestic violence is down 63 percent and partner violence has dropped by a whopping 72 percent. As for pregnancy discrimination, I'm not even sure what that is, quite frankly. In general, reproductive rights and pregnancy discrimination are nothing more than euphemisms for abortion on demand. It was about these reproductive rights that a law student Sandra Fluke testified a few years ago.
>> Contraception as you know can cost a woman $3,000 during law school.
GLENN: $3,000? Condoms are like 20 cents a piece. That is -- I mean, if you want to do the math, about 15,000 sexual encounters. Law school generally takes three schools to complete. To pull off 5,000 encounters a year, a woman would have to average almost 14 sexual encounters every day. So let's say 15 on a good day and maybe just 13 on a slow hookup day. Even on the days where you can't fulfill your normal allotment of hookups on tinder, that doesn't leave you a lot of time to study case law.
Now, for those who like to scream about the war on women, nothing gets them more angry than standing in the way of a woman's right to choose to abort her baby. The fact is nothing fits the description of war on women better than the actual killing of female babies. If pro-life advocates had their way, there would be 52 million more people on earth today than there are. Slightly over half of these would be women living, breathing, life experiencing women. Take a moment and hear them roar.
If pregnancy discrimination is really about benefits available for female employees, current U.S. law dictates that a parent, nearly always the mother, can take 12 weeks of leave from her job. Some employers offered paid leave. For others, it's unpaid. But almost exclusively it is women that take advantage of that benefit. Still, it's often claimed that the U.S. has the worst pregnancy benefit of any industrialized country on earth.
However, in a nation built on liberty and person responsibility, it's ludicrous to believe that the government would or should force employers to pay women who leave their jobs for three months, regardless of the reason. It's even more full hearty to expect that in a nation built on liberty that the government would or should impose maternity leave taxes on others. On the childless, on the single adults, on the elderly, on anyone other than those who have chosen to start their family to provide the benefits to the mothers leaving their jobs.
In the 1950s, only 19 percent of mothers with young children worked outside of the home. 81 percent of mothers stayed at home with their kids. The 1960s brought about a sexual and social revolution to the United States and to the American family. Discontented women like Betty began telling moms that they couldn't be fulfilled by raising a family that, in fact, something was wrong with them if that's all they did. Women, stay at homes suddenly under siege for not wanting to be more. They could have it all. But not by raising their family. They had to leave their family and enter the corporate world.
It's truly ironic to note that even as women were being encouraged to leave their homes and enter the world of corporate America, the same feminist movement as with so many other movements at the time quickly became mixed with the need for other women to do something outside the home, the anticorporate message of Marxism was also added to this mixture.
>> How did you account for women subordination? What was your opinion why women were suppressed?
>> We thought it was a mixture of men in capitalism. It seemed to me if you were going to change women's position, you needed to change the society.
GLENN: So somehow doing more than changing diapers became intermingled with Marxism.
>> I was in those small consciousness raising groups. But first with my characteristic arrogance I thought I was in them because I was suppressed. But because they needed real politics. They needed an economic analysis. And thank the goddess they got to me before I got to them.
>> I was in a group which was rather swaty group, actually, because we wanted to read about anthropology, and I had the idea that somehow anthropology provided some mystery key. Anyway, we all sat down and read angles. So we read things and discussed them, and then we would have these heart-rendering sessions about saying we're not a proper consciousness-group like the Americans. We need to talk more personally.
GLENN: So as with many movements in the 1960s and '70s, Marxism and radicalism poisoned the direction that this movement would take. What may have started out as a way for women to discover new talents that they never knew they had, and to spread their wings to fly a little, morphed into yet another way for radicals to infiltrate American society.
For those radicals, this movement had the added benefit of striking at the very foundation of American life. The American family. Whereas in the 1950s, 81 percent of mothers stayed home with children. By 2000, that number had dwindled to 23 percent. And in the meantime with no one, no mother or father in the home full-time, nearly every aspect of American life has suffered as a result.
But there is a silver lining in the story. In the recent years, the downward trend of mothers choosing to work inside the home has been reverse. As of the latest year that statistics are available, 29 percent of American mothers with children have chosen to stay at home and raise their young families. It just may be that a significant number of American parents are realizing that there is a war being waged in this country. And it is a war on children. And that someone needs to fight the battle in the home.