Take Our Daughters to Work Day: Breeding Victimology in Girls and Leaving Boys Behind in the Name of Equality

Lisa De Pasquale
Featured Rightgrrl February 1999
Program Director, Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute
April 21, 2000


On April 27, radical feminists across the nation will celebrate the 8th Annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day -- a day when leftists ask Americans to take a young girl to work with them, but leave the little boys behind. This stealth feminist holiday breeds victimology in young girls and serves as a vehicle for radical feminists to hold up leftist women as "models for us all.’

Take Our Daughters to Work Day is yet another example of feminists’ desire to discriminate in favor of females at the expense of males and to divide the sexes in order to foster their ideological agenda. Feminists tell us that after age 11, girls self-confidence drops. What they don’t tell us is that boys experience the same thing and perhaps more severely! Boys are committing suicide as teenagers at a much higher rate than girls.

Take Our Daughters to Work Day materials explain that they are "designed to challenge limited-and limiting-views of gender roles." Suggested classroom activities include students imagining that they are lving in a box. Questions include "What do people say to girls to keep them in‘ boxes’?" and "Can you think of anything people have said or done to you to keep you in a box?" Teaching young girls that they are victims of a patriarchal society gives them a false view of society and is far from being liberating.

The Ms. Foundation, using the cover of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, distributes sets of trading cards featuring photos and descriptions of left-wingers and radical feminists. It’s easy to discern, by who is not included, that this celebration is nothing more than to advance radical feminism. Among Ms. Foundation’s women to admire are Melissa Etheridge, a lesbian rock star who performed at President Clinton’s Inauguration Ceremony and the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Angela Davis, a woman who ran on the American Communist Party ticket and Urvashi Vaid, an ACLU lawyer and Director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force who advocates special rights for prisoners, lesbians and gays.

Feminists’ efforts at indoctrinating our children doesn’t even make an attempt at evenhandedness. Noticeably missing are trading cards of Mother Theresa, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Clare Boothe Luce, or any of the great conservative congresswomen who have served and are now serving.

Children, girls and boys alike, will always benefit from attention from their parents and teachers. However, neither our nation’s families nor their daughters will be better off because we exclude our sons and teach our daughters that they are victims, all in the name of the feminists’ version of equality.

This article copyright © 2000 by Lisa De Pasquale, Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of its author. All rights reserved.