What is poisonous is “Women’s Studies” which encourages a separation from men.
Not really. Women’s studies just means a field of academic endeavour that focuses on women. Given that men have tended to be dominant in virtually all known human societies, it is useful to have people who are able to focus on the role of women in history, society, culture, and so on.
The MSt in Women’s Studies at Oxford, for example, includes an option on women’s writing and women in men’s writing during the First World War. Since virtually all combatants, politicians, diplomats, industrialists, and even war poets and war artists involved in the war were men, it is interesting to address the war from the perspective of women. I could summarise everything I was taught at school about the role of women during the First World War thus: women did jobs normally done by the men who were away fighting the war and lots of them lost their husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, lovers, brothers, fathers, and so on, many remaining widows or spinsters thereafter. If women’s studies is opening up fields of study such as this, that can surely only be a good thing.
As for the phrase “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, it was actually coined by Irina Dunn, later a member of the Australian senate, when she was an undergraduate at the University of Sydney. She was adapting the phrase “A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle”, although there are many similarly constructed witticisms. Gloria Steinem merely popularised the phrase. I think you are also taking the phrase rather too seriously. It was originally intended to be nothing more than an amusing phrase indicating that it is possible for a woman to live her life independent of a man. I think you may also need to learn a bit more about Gloria Steinem herself. She was a married woman at one time, although her husband tragically died from a form of brain cancer only a few years into their marriage. She also was no Marxist. On the contrary, she was actively anti-communist and was on the payroll of the CIA at one time. For this reason she is very unpopular with many of the left. She’s also come out against medically unnecessary routine circumcision of male infants, so she is hardly solely focused on women’s issues.
