Turns out that textbook was RIGHT about Reagan and women in the administration
Remember the story about the University of South Carolina Upstate student who complained that her intro social work textbook claimed that Ronald Reagan did not appoint many women to positions of power?
That claim was on page 196 of the book Introduction to Social Work and Social Welfare: Critical Thinking Perspectives] by Karen Kirst-Ashman, and that passage about Reagan and women in the administration cited two sources, first the 2012 book The Reluctant Welfare State by Bruce Jansson (p. 330), which more clearly notes about Reagan: "As his 'frontier philosophy' accorded women primarily domestic functions, he did not appoint many women to policy positions during his terms as governor of California and as president." Kirst-Ashman also cited the 1983 book Gambling With History: Ronald Reagan in the White House by Laurence I. Barrett, who was then the Time magazine senior White House reporter. I can't read that book on Google right now, but I can run
So far the only rebuttals by right wingers have been bringing up Reagan's nominations of Sandra Day O'Connor to the US Supreme Court, Elizabeth Dole to the US Dept. of Transportation, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick to the State Dept. and this claim by the National Federation of Republican Women about nearly 1,400 women serving in Reagan's White House policy staff.
I found a copy of Barrett's book in the library. On pages 426 and 427 Barrett writes about Reagan: "As governor, Reagan would brag later, he appointed many blacks to patronage jobs. But at no time in Sacramento, in his campaigns, or in the White House did he ever have a black adviser close enough to him to be considered even moderately influential. The same can be said of women, with the single exception of Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose advice to Reagan never concerned matters of special relevance to women."
The IJ Review link I linked to conveniently deleted Kirst-Ashman's reference to Reagan's governorship in captioning the supposedly offensive part of the Kirst-Ashman book.
Barrett also writes regarding the Sandra Day O'Connor nomination that it "hardly indicated any serious effort by the Administration to bring more diversity to the federal judiciary as a whole" because among 72 fed judge nominations in Reagan's 1st term only 3 were women. Barrett also considered the O'Connor nomination "a good public relations ploy" that responded to Reagan's "low standing among minority and women voters."
And guess what? Aren't conservatives the ones pushing gender essentialism in the first place, so of course someone like Reagan would rather have a male dominated government?
I'd like to explore more about why right wingers are so hostile to the education system. On the IJ Review site I cited, there are all these crude, nasty, STUPID (so much for "Campus Reform"...derp) comments like "I know a Democrat president that thought women belonged under a desk" (they STILL are that perversely obsessed with Monica Lewinsky huh?) and "useful idiot" etc. But it shows that with right wingers, they insist on the sanitized sugar coated, spoon fed version of history. Thoughtful analysis of facts beyond rote memorization (which is so. f******. HARD. with modern people's expectations that everything should be as quick as the internet!!!!) takes a back seat.
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