Cleta Mitchell: 'Feminist Club' Excludes Conservative Women

The women's movement, which she helped found, has gone full circle and now excludes conservative women such as herself, lawyer and activist Cleta Mitchell writes in a New York Times opinion piece.

Mitchell notes that she helped found the Oklahoma Women’s Political Caucus as a college student in the early 1970s, and that the equal opportunities sought by women at the time have largely been achieved. Young women today need simply to walk through the doors she and others opened, she writes.

"The women's movement has ebbed because it succeeded," Mitchell says, but has now "has been so hijacked by post-millennium feminism that declaring victory is unforgivable."

The original fight was for "respecting women’s choices, whatever they may be," she said, but added that the modern women's movement doesn't respect those who choose not to go into business, politics or the media.

If they choose to be "moms and wives and attend Bible study or bake cookies, they are 'bitter clingers' and 'deplorable,'" she writes. "And if they happen to be conservative professional women, they are invisible."

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