The real cost of empowering women

FEMINISM has taken a toll on men and families, with mothering viewed as a waste of talent. So good on Jessica Rowe for quitting TV to put her children first, writes Miranda Devine.

INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day might be good for power breakfasts, but it is an embarrassing anachronism whose time has passed.

If we really are into gender equality, we can’t keep empowering women at the expense of men, families and our own fulfilment.

The war on masculinity now has ­entrenched widespread injustices for boys and men, from school failure to falling university enrolment to an epidemic of male despair and suicide.

This hurts everyone because women need intact men to love for our species to survive.

Having achieved all the equality Western women want, and then some, feminism has mutated into ever more ­destructive attacks on men, on the intact nuclear family, on women who believe their greatest role is being a mother, or on anyone who sees women as more than just non-men.

So that on Friday, when Channel Ten chat show host Jessica Rowe made the announcement that she was quitting the daily grind to spend more time with her children, it was no surprise when the ­attacks came thick and fast.

She must have been pushed out by Ten management, because no women in her right mind would put children ahead of career, was the general tenor.

But Rowe’s message could not have been clearer.

Jessica Rowe decision to Studio Ten came because she wants to spend more time with her children. (Pic: Supplied)

“My family need me.

“I want to be a more present mother for my girls, Allegra and Giselle,” she said on air.

“They need their mum. I want to be there in the mornings for them, to take them to school. It is something that I need to do, it is as simple as that.”

Good fathering is just as important, but it’s different. One statistic demonstrates just how important: almost all the school shooters in the United States come from fatherless families.

But Rowe knows, no matter how supportive her Channel 9 newsreader husband Peter Overton is, her daughters need their mother.

Overton, who is also the hands-on ­father of their daughters Allegra, 11, and Giselle, 8, was compelled to tweet in ­defence of his wife’s decision last week.

“Jess and I have had some long talks about this and the bottom line is our little girls need their mum. For breakfast, for the school run, for the family.

“Our daughters Allegra and Giselle were involved in the discussion. This morning, when I asked 12-year-old Allegra how she felt that Mum was going to be home in the mornings … she said ‘I am a billion times happy’ … and that says it all.”

That really does say it all.

It’s a sad indictment of where feminism has taken us that a mother has to be embarrassed and on the defensive over a decision to put the welfare of her children first.

If you’ve spent any time with children, you will know that they probably need you most at the very time they think they don’t need you at all. At puberty, when they are exploring the wider world and properly rebelling against their parents, is when they need to know you’re watching in the background, that you know where they are and who they’re with, that you are around and receptive at the very moments they decide you’re worth consulting, that you care enough to be their unseen safety net.

That’s what Jessica Rowe has decided to provide to her children as they navigate a world made more fraught and confusing for girls by the very feminism which purports to celebrate and ­empower them but really just cultivates neuroses and an unearned sense of ­entitlement.

So, good on Jessica Rowe. Children grow up fast. Careers can be reclaimed after periods of absence, and who, on their deathbed, values extra episodes of Studio Ten hosted by Rowe over confident, happy progeny, equipped to be good parents themselves?

Good mothering is something society used to applaud and support for obvious, self-serving reasons.

Now it is seen as a shameful waste of female talent, best outsourced to childcare centres.

What future is there for a society of emasculated men no woman wants to mate with, of miserable non-males aping what men used to be, who no man finds sexually arousing — or a bunch of unmothered children growing up neurotic and ­rudderless?

It is up to mothers of boys to defend the once stronger sex against irrational efforts to crush the fragile male ego, colonise male domains and disparage innate female desires.