Pat Buchanan has written that women are “less equipped psychologically” to succeed in the workplace, and blamed the breakdown of the family, in part, on an increase in women working in professions like the media. Buchanan has suggested that the ideal place for a woman is not in a newsroom or boardroom, but at home, since the “momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be.”

In a 1983 column, Buchanan wrote that women are “simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.” Buchanan added that “women deserve an equal chance at the starting line. But, for women, there is an honorable and honored exit from the rat race - home, hearth and family”:

Rail as they will against 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism. Exceptional women can and do succeed; and women deserve an equal chance at the starting line. But, for women, there is an honorable and honored exit from the rat race -- home, hearth and family. It is an option closed, by social sanction, to the average male. By a ratio of eleven-to-one over men, women exercise this option of voluntary separation from the marketplace, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is.

Less equipped psychologically to “stay the course” in the brawling arenas of business, commerce, industry and the professions, women are physically unequipped to compete in the worlds of athletics and arms.

In his 1988 book Right from the Beginning, Buchanan wrote that the “real liberators of American women were not feminist noisemakers; they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer, the garbage disposal and frozen food.”

The real liberators of American women were not feminist noisemakers; they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer, the garbage disposal and frozen food. As soon as the remarkable conveniences of the Affluent Society were introduced, Mom could spend more of her time reading books, teaching public school kids their Catholic faith at CCD, organizing the Gonzaga Mothers Club, and, when the children started leaving home, operating Meals on Wheels in Chevy Chase. Until the feds nationalized that, too.

When the women's movement declared that women deserved equal opportunity, and equal pay for equal work, it was pushing against an open door in our household. When it started disparaging the role of wife and mother, and promoting “abortion rights,” the feminists lost every family like ours.

Buchanan repeated this theme in his 2001 book The Death of the West, where he lamented that “as women began moving into occupations that had been largely restricted to men - medicine, law, the media, the academy, the upper bureaucracy, and business - families began to crumble”:

As Allan Carlson, who also publishes The Family in America, writes, there was a consensus in America, not so long ago, that employers should pay fathers a “family wage” sufficient to support their wives and children in dignity without their having to leave the home to go to work. That was considered one of the defining characteristics of a good society.

[...]

In the 1940s and 1950s, the culture, with a good conscience, separated men and women in the workplace. In newspapers, the “Men Wanted” ads were run separate from the “Women Wanted” ads. Only rarely could working women be found outside such occupations as clerk-typist, secretary, nurse, school-teacher, or salesgirl. Carlson writes:

To an observer from the Year 2000, the most amazing thing about this system was that it was both understood by the average people and popularly supported. In opinion polls, large and majorities of Americans (85 percent or more), women and men, agreed that fathers deserved an income that would support their wives and children at home and that the labor of mothers was secondary or supplemental. This was seen as simple justice.

This system fell apart in the 1960s, when feminists managed to add “sex” to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been written to protect the rights of African Americans. This turned the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into a siege gun against the family wage. “Men Wanted” ads were declared discriminatory and outlawed. Gender equality replaced “moral contract.” The rights of individuals took precedence over the requirements of family. Women's pay soared, and as women began moving into occupations that had been largely restricted to men - medicine, law, the media, the academy, the upper bureaucracy, and business - families began to crumble.

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The young family with a batch of kids is now an endangered species. Only the young rich can afford that “lifestyle,” and they are uninterested. With the Democratic party so beholden to feminism that it cannot even oppose partial birth abortions, and the GOP in thrall to libertarian ideology and controlled by corporate interest, the call of the gods of the marketplace for more women workers prevails over the command of the God of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.”

During the July 6, 2007, edition of The McLaughlin Group, as noted by the Anti-Defamation League, Buchanan claimed that “the rise of women to power in a civilization is very often the mark of its decline.” In a section about feminism in The Death of the West, Buchanan similarly concluded: “In short, the rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”

In his new book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan bemoans the feminist movement's effect on America, writing on page 403:

In the depth of the Depression, in his first inaugural address, FDR said, “our common difficulties.... concern, thank God, only material things.”

Our generation is not so fortunate. For our difficulties go not just to the material but to the moral, to clashing beliefs about the most fundamental and critical of questions. Who are we? What constitutes a good society? What is good and what is evil? What kind of country should America be?

What took place in our recent past was a true revolution, a series of allied rebellions to overthrow the old order that came together to reach critical mass in the 1960s.

First was the sexual revolution, an in-your-face rejection of the moral code of Christianity on matters from promiscuity to fidelity to homosexuality to abortion. Your God is dead, said the rebels, take your morality and shove it.

The feminist movement, with its mockery of marriage and demands for absolute sexual freedom for women, unrestricted abortion rights, no-fault divorce, gender preferences, and mandated equality of men and women, was a frontal assault on the meritocracy and the traditional family.

Buchanan's complaints about feminism are also echoed in his political career. The Los Angeles Times reported in an extensive 1992 profile that as a Nixon aide, Buchanan referred to feminists as “the Butch Brigade”:

Presidential files from the Nixon years show Buchanan lashing out at the “left-wing drift” of public television, criticizing racial integration, attacking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and trying to promote disarray among Democrats.

In confidential memos he referred to feminists as “the Butch Brigade,” called one Democratic fund-raiser a “screaming fairy,” and speculated about a campaign to question the patriotism of Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota, Nixon's Democratic opponent in 1972.

Buchanan, who has a long history of bigotry, currently serves as an MSNBC political analyst.