Posted on 10/29/2001 1:42:36 PM PST by independentmind
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
Wendy Shalit
The Free Press, 1999; 291 pages, $24.00
Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism
F. Carolyn Graglia
Spence Publishing, 1998; 451 pages, $29.95
What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
Danielle Crittenden
Simon & Schuster, 1999; 202 pages, $23.00
Feminist author Susan Faludi must be having a heart attack. When she wrote Backlash in 1991, she had thought that things had become bad enough, with feisty, ambitious, attractive, young talented women under attack by regressive forces who wanted nothing more than to confine and to oppress them by decrying license, restricting abortion, and extolling the pleasures of home and commitment. Backlash was filled with lists of terrible people: Randall Terry, Phyllis Schlafly, Reagan appointees, clerics, old women, white men in suits — all jealous, neurotic, embittered, and terribly menacing. Now, nearly a decade later, opposition to feminism as Faludi defines it is coming from an unexpected source: from feisty, ambitious, attractive, young talented women — better writers than Faludi and frequently much better looking — who are not all that thrilled with the world she has created for them and want to take some of it back. Like Faludi, Wendy Shalit, Carolyn Graglia, and Danielle Crittenden think an organized war is being waged against women, but waged by Faludi and her feminist sorority, not by men.
The opening of the professions to women or urging them to work and express themselves is not the complaint of A Return to Modesty, Domestic Tranquility, and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us. Rather, the books lament the collateral sexual baggage that has come along with the newfound freedom of women: the idea that men and women are not only equal to, but actually interchangeable with one another, that commitment to others smothers identity, and that the female instinct to take care of others is, as Gloria Steinem claims, women’s "compassion disease." If women today have the freedom to work, to express themselves, and to earn their own livings, they also have some freedoms that they may not want: the freedom (or pressure) to sleep with men they do not like much; the freedom to be dumped by the men that they sleep with; the freedom to abort the consequence without social stigma; the freedom to deposit their children in day care; the freedom to be dumped in middle age. Different in kind from the old sort that kept women penned in the kitchen, this kind of misogyny is still an oppression of women, the books maintain. As feminism rebelled against the old kind of repression, they are rebelling against a feminism that tends to make war on the feminine nature of women and that treats such things as the longing for bonding, love, nurture, fidelity, as outmoded baggage, and womanhood as a "condition to be cured." Feminists love fighting angry white men, as they make such good targets. The authors of these books, however, are angry white women (though whiteness has nothing to do with it) expressing displeasure with feminist doctrine. Feminists have long urged women to speak out, find voices, and express their anger. Now, women are expressing anger at them.
All three writers agree that the feminist project of sexual license — of freeing young women from the expectation of chastity — has not quite worked out as was thought. The reason: while some women may feel empowered by many random and fleeting encounters, many more feel diminished by them, believing that being pressured into frequent sexual acts, not only without love, but often without even a significant degree of attraction, can be destructive. Shalit quotes noted psychologist Mary Pipher as saying that she sees a "deadness" in her adolescent-girl clients’ demeanor, "that comes from inauthenticity, from giving away too much." "I was losing my real self," says one beneficiary of such liberation. Another reported, "I feel that some of my experiences thinned my soul" (italics added). By pretending that women were exactly like men — able to "have sex" and "make love" with equal facility — feminist doctrine not only hurt some women personally, but something much larger had started to happen: as license tended to make sexual relations less serious, it made men less serious, too. A crude social system in which women exchanged sex for love and commitment became one in which women exchanged sex for nothing, as men now lacked reasons to court or protect them. A flood of stories from young women reveals the new dilemma: they can refuse to sleep with young men who ignore them; or they can sleep with young men who move on. If they complain, young women are scolded for being too emotional and insufficiently in touch with their sexual nature. But in fact, female reservations exist for a reason: to protect young women from male exploitation and to force responsibility on men. Shalit cites a 1997 cover of Cosmopolitan featuring dueling headlines: "Are Your Hang-Ups Sabotaging Your Love Life?" and "Make Him Commit." "These two problems have emerged together for a reason," she writes. A culture that frowns upon "hang-ups" cannot foster commitment.
Even when a man commits, problems still may exist; this may not be the marriage that your parents had. As Crittenden writes: "The same impulse that leads men to sleep with women and not call them again, or date a woman for months, and then vanish at the first inquiry of seriousness affects those men . . . who take the step of getting married, but then blanch at any escalation of responsibility" such as having a child or buying a house. The unreliable man meets his perfect match in the autonomous woman, who has been told by feminists that merging her life with a man is emotional suicide. Coupled with the transgender sense of boomer entitlement that no one should be forced to suffer a moment of tedium, the altered dynamics have tended to make marriage more fragile; matrimony becomes less a lifetime commitment than a living arrangement for the immediate future until it all palls, until somebody meets someone else more attractive, or until someone gets tired or bored. Marriages, which used to last unless wracked by a truly grand passion, now can break up on a whim. Mothers who would like to rear their very young children themselves — but are afraid to interrupt their job résumés for any reason lest they one day be left on their own — suffer from this pathology most of all. Few might want to leave professional work entirely, but most mothers might prefer to work part time, work from a home office, or leave the workforce for some years to return after the children are reared. Even this compromise becomes an impossibility or a frightening sacrifice in view of the fragility of modern domestic arrangements, putting added burdens both on parents and the state. "If a woman could be sure that her husband would stay with her, the cost of leaving the workforce might well be bearable," Crittenden says. "But because no woman today can be sure, she must make her choices defensively. . . . Combine the women who must work because they are single mothers, and the women who feel they should work . . . lest they become single mothers, and you realize that what looks like a child care crisis is really a symptom of America’s larger marriage crisis," which is one of instability, rooted in selfishness. The under-used housewife of Betty Friedan’s generation, therefore, has become today’s stressed-out working mother: over-taxed, guilt-ridden, and forced to see her children raised by other people. Feminism, which claimed to expand choices for women, has, ironically, taken from most women the choices that they really want.
The diverse perspectives of the authors strengthen their joint indictment of feminism. Graglia, the most senior of the three, writes looking back on a full life that was graced by her leaving a promising legal career to be a full-time homemaker caring for her husband and three children. Shalit represents the reverse angle, just two years out of Williams College and single. In her mid-thirties, Crittenden — who writes under her maiden name — stands somewhere in the middle, seeking to juggle a writing career while raising two children. The indictment also represents three faith traditions: Crittenden, a convert to Judaism, was reared Protestant; Graglia is a Catholic; and Shalit is Jewish.
Crittenden’s book is the best of the three, larger in scope and shorter in volume, with a coherent larger argument to make. Graglia and Shalit tend to say less in more pages, repeating the same things to diminishing impact. Shalit’s book in particular should have been a short, brilliant essay, instead of the uneven, sometimes rambling, book it is. Crittenden’s one flaw is in being too formulaic: suggesting that the solution she offers — that all women try to wed and breed early, even if the men and the choices seem none too attractive — will tend to make most, if not all, women happy; she makes the prospects for women more than thirty years of age appear much more dire than they really are. Marrying the wrong man — without love — at any age would not seem too promising; the formula did not work too well for Princess Grace, Princess Diana, or Joan Kennedy, whose princes (two real, one from American political royalty) proved in the end none too charming. Given the vagaries of life and death, fortune, illness, accident, not to mention sheer human cussedness, no system will ever make everyone happy or even most people happy most of the time.
Given these realities, everything these books have been screaming — that the feminist system of license, "choice," androgyny resentment, and endless autonomy has been making more people less happy than anyone ever forced on free men—seems fair indeed. The intelligent women for whom the feminists once thought they spoke are among the aggrieved. The Faludis of the world may not have expected this ironic turn of events, but then, they have not had a very good year. Their feminist president is a probable rapist, their feminist first lady is a certified doormat, and abortion is losing favor among women and young people while bright young women are saying loud and clear that discretion, commitment, and even patriarchy might be a good thing. Strong fathers, Shalit observes, help women grow up. "What is so terrible about ‘belonging’ to someone who loves you?" Shalit asks. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Miss Emery, a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, has written biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. She is currently working on a book exploring the families of American political dynasties from the Adams to the Bushes.
Those fringe harridans just can't accept the fact that there a women who actually like having men in their lives.
Feminism is a form of Socialism; and like all forms of Socialism, is based upon a fundamentally flawed concept--a big lie. (See The Feminist Absurdity.)
The Socialist lie than implies human interchangeability is at the root of most of the evil that has been associated with the Twentieth Century. I, for one, would like to see that lie laid to rest in the Twenty-First.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site a
If you know somebody who views compassion as a disease, there is only one thing to do.
Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But....along with the progeny which they provide us with...they are still the best thing going.
"A little bitter about the woman who (lucky for her) got away?"
Go easy on Darheel, probably had multiple crushes on Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, Donna Shalayla, Madeline Albright, and Helen Thomas.
The only power feminists should have is from a pack of Duracells.
LOL. You're probably correct. In my selfishness, I failed to consider the trauma he may have endured in his lifetime and its impact on his outlook. Instead, I just jumped to a conclusion based upon what he actually said.
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