Following the 1997 re-make of the movie Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, an amusing T-shirt began showing up about town. “THE SHIP SANK,” it read. “GET OVER IT.”

One could say the same for the feminist movement.

This thought came to mind as I attended a recent talk at DePaul University by Phyllis Schlafly, the Alton, Illinois housewife-turned-attorney, a visit organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance.

Having attended college in the ‘seventies, I knew a thing or two about Phyllis Schlafly, all right. She was the annoying blue-haired lady who led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and who wanted to keep women down. Never mind that I hadn’t ever read a scrap of her writing or heard her speak.

As a music student, I wasn’t interested in the grown-up working world anyway, and I’ve always liked men. But I was surrounded by feminist rhetoric.

So it was with fascination that I listened thirty years later to her ideas, which beamed clarity and refreshing good sense, and many of which weren’t what I expected to hear.

I am one of seven children, six of whom are female. My five sisters have provided a living laboratory for observing the real-life effects of the feminist movement over the past thirty years. “Feminism,” Phyllis Schlafly stated simply, “ is incompatible with happiness.” You know what? She’s right. The sisters who succumbed to its orthodoxies are divorced and struggling. They do have one source of enduring happiness, though: their children. Huh? The “movement” told us that having children should be your lowest priority because doing so gets in the way of your career and your personal freedom. Yet for most women, children are hands-down their primary source of happiness.

It turns out the woman had vision. Back in 1981, she predicted that the falling U.S. birthrate would bankrupt the Social Security system—common sense that was considered crackpot at the time, when everyone was worried about overpopulation. Early on she foresaw the consequences of no-fault divorce, which made it easy for men to dump their middle-aged wives, and predicted how other forms of engineered “equality” would harm people in the long run, women and children most of all.

To my surprise, Schlafly is fine with the idea of women succeeding in the working world and achieving all over the place, not that any person’s worth is measured by their achievements. Like Letitia Baldridge, though, she advises doing so after your children are grown. Schlafly herself earned a law degree after the age of fifty, after raising six children who clearly are her pride and joy. Her intellect is formidable. She holds a Master’s degree in political science from Radcliffe. Initially her area of expertise was foreign policy, not women’s issues. She has published twenty books, some of them influential. She’s now on the far side of eighty and she’s still achieving.

Last week the Chicago Tribune ran a story in its cooking section titled “Got 10 Minutes? We’ve Got Dinner!” The piece opens with a few modern-day scenarios: “By the time you get home after picking up the kids from school activities and day care, everyone’s yowling with the low-blood-sugar heebie-jeebies. Wouldn’t it just be easier to do drive-through again?” Or: “You and your significant other both work demanding jobs. At the end of the day, neither of you wants to spend an hour in the kitchen. It’s so much easier to let take-out Thai and a glass of wine serve as dinner.”

Is this really how we want to live?

The assumption that two incomes are always required in order to support a family is one of those falsehoods that’s perceived as true by way of frequent repetition, but that’s another article.

In short, Schlafly is the nation’s leading defender of the stay-at-home mother, a state of life we have scorned to our peril. And feminism has failed, she says, because it denies human nature, particularly the eternal (and delicious) differences between men and women.

“Want to see the difference?” she asked. “Put a mouse in the room at a family gathering. The women will scream, and the men will get rid of the mouse.” This is an oversimplification to make a point with humor, of course, but who can deny it? I am an educated woman and I WANT TO SCREAM at the sight of a mouse running loose indoors.

It appeared that very few students from DePaul’s women’s studies program attended the lecture. So much for the open and vigorous exchange of ideas on a university campus. Nonetheless there were a few detractors. Some young women were angry that male CEOs greatly outnumber females, for example. Poor lambs. They don’t know what a seventy-hour week in a cutthroat environment feels like. Contrary to expectation, Schlafly has no problem with women becoming CEOs. She merely points out the simple truth that most women don’t want to do what’s necessary to get there. They’d rather have babies. Well and good.

I close by describing a memorable sight I encountered by chance while on the University of Chicago campus in January. It was what I later learned to be the annual Polar Bear run, a sort of Oxfordian prank in which students cheerfully sprint naked in the cold and then dive into a lagoon, I suppose in defiance of both convention and Old Man Winter. Most of the participants were men, but perhaps ten percent were female. Now, how often do you see a large group of naked men and women side by side in public? Clothes mask our differences, but remove them and you are quickly reminded that those differences are startling.

Thank God. Androgyny’s a bore.

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Marie T. Sullivan is arts and culture editor of The Chicago Daily Observer and serves on its editorial board..