The first time I ever heard about feminism was when I overheard a conversation between my father and one of his co-workers.
Dad and his colleague were strolling behind our townhouse in Virginia on a beautiful sun-washed day in 1971 or 1972. I’m not sure if it was spring or summer or fall – we were transplants from Pittsburgh by way of Cleveland and the seasons were strange. I do remember the green and golden light of sunbeams filtered by branches suffusing the common area, and how soft the air was in a way that we rarely had experienced in the Midwest.
I only eleven and I’m not sure the men even knew I was there. I’m inclined to doubt it since I doubt they would have spoken so openly if they’d seen me a few feet behind them, killing time as we waited for Mum to call us in for dinner. I may have been walking the dog. As I said, I was only eleven and don’t remember all the details.
What I do remember is my father’s voice suddenly becoming far more intense than usual, with a serious note that I rarely saw. And I remember what he said.
“If it happened to Martha, I’d demand it! She almost died the first time!”
His friend’s reply was lost in the soft rustle of the wind through the trees, but I never forgot how passionate Dad was. And it was only years later, after he was gone and I’d become an adult, that I realized that he’d been defending my mother’s right to have an abortion should she become pregnant with a second child.
My parents weren’t radicals by any standards. Dad was a teacher and college administrator, and Mum was a teacher. They were solidly middle class, voted Republican but still mourned the unfinished work of Jack Kennedy, and did their best to instill their beliefs in me. And whether they meant it or not, those included feminism.
Mum was always a feminist, even if she never said so until I brought it up during the fight to pass the ERA. She always believed that women could and should do anything men could do, and never once tried to steer me away from my childhood dream of becoming a paleontologist in favor of being a housewife or a nurse. Dad agreed, and he treated Mum as his equal in every way. They were true partners, and if she did the cooking while he mowed the lawn, it was as much because we’d have starved to death if Dad had tried anything more complicated than peanut butter and jelly on Nabisco Saltines as because of any belief cookery was “women’s work.”
I’m not sure why Dad and his colleague were discussing abortion, or what the other man replied, but I learned years later that Mum had had a rough pregnancy and delivery, and then had hemorrhaged badly enough a week after my birth that Dad had taken on a large share of baby care for my first few months while she recovered her strength. He was adamant that Mum’s life was just as precious to him as mine, and when her doctor told her “you have a healthy child, don’t push your luck,” he never pressed her to try for a second child.
That was why he was firmly in support of abortion rights. He’d married late and nearly lost his wife to childbirth complications, and if the comment I overheard that sweet Virginia day is any guide, he would not have taken kindly to the idea that a woman’s life should be subordinate to her fetus if something went wrong, even if the woman was married and the child both planned and wanted. He died before I could really talk to him about feminism, but I never sensed anything but love and support from him for all my dreams, no matter how outlandish.
And so when Ms. appeared in 1973, I read it at the library. I read as many books on feminism and famous women and women’s rights as I could, and by the time I was a junior in high school I had a reputation as the class feminism. This wasn’t popular – the rest of my class was a bunch of a nascent little Republicans – but I had the last laugh; the essay question on the Advance Placement exam my senior year was on women’s education in the Renaissance, and I was the only one from my school to get a 5 because I was the only one who’d taken the subject seriously.
Feminism shaped my life in many other ways; it’s why I chose a women’s college over coed schools, why I kept my birth name on marriage, why reproductive rights are my political line in the sand. If I’m passionate about any progressive cause or issue, it’s because I’ve been a feminist for most of my life, and if I find some of the more radical forms of contemporary feminism inexplicable, well, blame my age.
My feminism is also why I’ve been keeping an eye on the Radical Right since the mid-70s, especially the Religious Right. I’ve never quite grasped why some men (and women) are so threatened by something as simple as legal and social equality, but I’ve seen all too many politicians and writers who would force me and every woman in America into a nightmare of happy housewifery if they had their way. And so, as repugnant as the books and articles and speeches these reactionaries produce may be, I force myself to read them so that when the enemy appears at my door, I’ll be ready.
Some of the books anti-feminists churn out are actually interesting, even if I can’t agree with their conclusions. Most are boring and repetitive. Some, like the works of Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe, somehow become identified as “feminist” despite being nearly misogynist enough to be used as textbooks at the Don Draper Academy of Gender Relations. And a few, a precious few, are so howlingly awful that they reach the rarified status of Misogyny So Bad It’s Good.
One of the books I’ve chosen for tonight first came to my attention back in college, when I found it in the stacks at Neilson Library and spent several minutes trying to wade through its impenetrable prose. The other, a beautiful example of mid-century Freudian illogic, was enormously influential in its day, to the point that it figured prominently in one of the great Second Wave feminist manifestoes. I recently forced myself to reread them, and it’s a tribute to how seriously I take these diaries that I didn’t go to an antiques mall, find a soapbox, haul it to Smith, and stand in the middle of Seelye Lawn waving these books at the students and screaming warnings until someone called the paramedics to take me away for a nice dose of Thorazine:
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, MD. One of the best sections of The Feminist Mystique was a chapter devoted to what Betty Friedan called “functionalists.” These were social psychologists who believed that individuals, regardless of talent, training, or inclination, should adapt to societal norms rather than societal norms stretching to accommodate the individual. During the 1940s and 1950s certain functionalists became extremely influential, especially in regards to higher education for women. Their basic belief, according to Friedan, was that since even the most talented or intelligent woman would inevitably end up as a housewife and mother, it would be best for women and for the family if women were educated for their ultimate function in life.
Friedan had first noticed this during a reunion visit to her alma mater, Smith, where she found students knitting in class, majoring in easy subjects because their boyfriends were threatened by the idea of female scientists, and regarding themselves as failures if they didn’t graduate with an engagement ring firmly ensconced on their left hands. Bull sessions had been replaced by wedding showers, and even the best students were refusing to continue their training because it would somehow make them unlovable.
Smith was far from the only women’s college that retreated from actually educating women; Friedan’s research found that one school had tried to institute a purely functionalist curriculum until the howls of rage from alumnae and parents forced them to reinstitute the old liberal arts courses. One of the educators she cited was so hellbent on reconciling women to their “true role” in life that he’d proposed replacing chemistry courses with cooking where women would learn “the simple sophistication of fresh artichokes with milk.” That this could be learned in a high school home economics class instead of at a four year degree-granting college didn’t quite seem to register.
Friedan did an excellent job of describing this nonsense, and the damage it inflicted on a generation of bright, eager women who were steered away from careers into the home. What I didn’t quite grasp until much later was why this happened. The educators and social psychologists she quoted surely didn’t represent the mainstream, did they? And did even the most functionalist theorist really think that feminism was, “at its core, a deep illness,” as one of Friedan’s sources would have it?
The answer to that question, unfortunately, is yes. Worse, the book with that priceless quote was co-written by a woman.
The book in question, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, was published in 1947, just as the post-war backlash against working women was starting to gain real strength. Written by Ferdinand Lundberg, a Columbia graduate best known as a financial writer and economist, and Marynia Farnham, MD, a Freudian psychiatrist who should have known better, Modern Woman argued that social problems like alcoholism, “juvenile delinquency,” divorce, and homosexuality were caused by feminism. Specifically, Lundberg and Farnham believed that since the female role in sex required passivity, vaginal orgasms, and (ultimately) impregnation for a woman’s “femininity to be available both for her own satisfaction and for the satisfaction of her children and her husband,” she had to be a loving, willing, happy, dependent housewife. Any sign of independence, like strong outside interests or (horrors!) an actual career, led to
masculinization…and enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children…and to the ability of the woman, as well as her husband to obtain sexual gratification.
In other words, a woman who had a mind of her own not only would raise a pack of nasty little hooligans, neither she nor her husband would ever have a decent orgasm.
There’s more. This astonishing book sees every single political, social, economic, or individual gain made by women in the previous two centuries as a sign of neurosis. Mary Wollstonecraft, early feminist and mother of author Mary Godwin, was dismissed as hopelessly damaged because she (rightly) pointed out that legally speaking, women were at a huge disadvantage in Georgian society. Ditto Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joscelyn Gage, and all the great suffragists. No matter how plausible their arguments on the surface, they sprang from deep-seated penis envy, not anger over married women having no rights to their own children or property, while the campaign for female suffrage was nothing more than psychologically unstable women wishing to assume a role that nature simply had not intended. And education, that great liberator, was nothing more than a trap that would induce yet more penis envy and keep a woman from experiencing the deep satisfaction that came with a vaginal orgasm, produced by her husband’s penis, and ending with pregnancy and childbirth through (of course) the vagina.
Whether a woman who was unfortunate enough to need a c-section was actually suffering from penis envy was not discussed.
As ludicrous as this sounds today, Lundberg and Farnham were very influential in their day, and surprisingly popular. And though their book is deservedly forgotten, there are echoes of it in websites maintained by advocates of so-called “Christian patriarchy,” manly men like Vision Forum’s Geoff Botkin and Doug Phillips who have mapped out a master plan to use their sons’ “full quivers” of children to outbreed us evil liberals and lead to a theocratic paradise where women stay at home under their fathers’ loving care until they are given to their husbands, after which they will be good helpmeets, wombs waxing and waning like the moon, as they in turn produce the next generation of full quivers.
Whether the Christian patriarchs have ever heard of Lundberg and Farnham, or whether they would approve of Farnham’s frank talk about the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms, or the Freudianism that drips from every page of Modern Woman, is unknown. However, they certainly would approve of its message of female passivity and dependency, perhaps over a glass of fresh milk and a nice bowl of artichokes.
The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation, by Midge Decter. Nora Ephron, now best known as the scriptwriter for When Harry Met Sally, Heartburn, and other light entertainment, was not always a purveyor of romantic comedies or bittersweet films about divorce. Her earliest book, Crazy Salad, was a collection of columns she’d produced for Esquire and New York Magazine. Funny, perceptive, and elegantly written, Ephron’s essays were imbued with Second Wave feminism. “A Few Words About Breasts” and “About The, Um, Problem” are still far too accurate for comfort, especially the latter’s look at how women had been brainwashed into using “personal deodorants” to keep clean despite the harm caused by spraying hexachlorophene directly onto their genitalia.
Ephron didn’t tackle all aspects of women’s lives, of course; I don’t recall anything about reproduction in Crazy Salad (understandable, since Ephron had no children) or about domestic violence, or sexual harassment. However, she was still a feminist, writing for a largely male audience, and it’s a tribute to Esquire that the editors not only employed her, but let her write about subjects that the average upscale man never would have considered.
That’s why it’s interesting that one of the authors Ephron, an unabashed liberal, mentioned was Midge Decter.
It was only in passing, to note that Decter had written a “long, unreadable screed…that had been justifiably creamed by the critics,” but I always wondered who Midge Decter was, and just how bad her “unreadable screed” could be. The only person with the same name I could find was a writer for Commentary, a political magazine my high school library subscribed to as part of its mission to expose the youth of West Jefferson Hills to higher culture and good writing, and if her work didn’t particularly appeal to me, it was scarcely “unreadable.”
Then I got to college, and I found this book deep in the bowels of Neilson Library.
Wow.
Not only was Nora Ephron not kidding, she was letting Decter off light. The New Chastity is one of those books that, as Dorothy Parker put it, “should be flung, preferably with great force.” Worse, it’s dishonest in a way that is so deep and so fundamental that it’s almost certain that Decter had no idea that it was dishonest.
I’ve since learned that Decter, wife to legendary right-wing pundit Norman Podhoretz and mother to John (current editor of Commentary) and Rachel (wife in turn to Elliot Abrams), was part of a cadre of left-leaning Jewish intellectuals who took a hard right turn in the 1950s and 1960s and never looked back. She’s responsible for some of the intellectual framework of the so-called New American Century Project that lead America into involvement in Iraq in the early 21st century, and is still one of America’s leading neoconservatives despite advanced age and declining health.
She also hates feminism with the fiery heat of a thousand burning suns.
You think I exaggerate? How else can one interpret a passage like this?
“From its very inception, Women’s Liberation has intoned a seemingly endless and various litany of women’s incapacities. The housewives who declare their sickly enslavement, the secretaries who lovingly dwell on the progressive dulling of their minds, students who triumphantly bear witness to their fear in the face of rigorous academic discipline, professional women who detail their many obeisances before the terror of male authority – all together make up a kind of grand chorus whose unified melodic theme is that women, for whatever reason, are simply in no condition to take their rightful place in the world of men.”
Or this?
“A husband’s kindnesses and attentions to his wife, along with his concern that she be well housed and well fed and sexually gratified, are, that is to say, only the plans from which he means to construct a towering edifice to his own vanity. The Liberationist does not, like the ordinary nagging wife, demand more of such attentions but wishes rather to asset that they are so inadequate as to mean nothing to her.”
Or this?
“However determinedly the [women’s] movement has evaded the issue by concentrating on the manipulations of men and society, the plain unvarnished fact is that every woman wants to marry…the true balance of the situation is that marriage is something asked by women and agreed to by men.”
Feminist theorists like Alix Kates Shulman and Shulamith Firestone are quoted out of context and misinterpreted so badly that it’s hard not to assume that Decter did it deliberately. Feminist demands for equality in marriage and the workplace are seen as whining by weak women who are too frightened to claim their rightful place. New Journalists who point out the myriad barriers that women face in every aspect of life are scorned as exaggerators, while women who want something more than marriage and children are accused of lying about their true motives.
On and on and on it goes, until the reader finally gives up in disgust at both the conclusions and the way that Decter twists the words of the Second Wave to fit some idealized notion of relations between the sexes that bears more resemblance to Leave It To Beaver than reality. That the Decter/Podhoretz household itself almost certainly did not fit the Ward and June model only makes it worse.
And this book, which can be positively painful to read, is scarcely Decter’s last word on feminism. Oh no. Nearly twenty years later, in 1992, Decter gave a speech as part of a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation where she called Hillary Clinton “the quintessential girl radical” whose “type...[had] been poisoning the wells of colleges and graduates and professional schools and foundations and municipal governments across this land.” She then claimed that abortion was “everyone’s issue,” that “the human obligation of a woman is to look after men and children,” and that acquaintance rape was nothing more than a nasty, evil girl abusing her boyfriend by saying no at the last minute. She ends by comparing personal ads in The New York Review of Books to old style matchmakers, and decries the lack of flirtation (?), “rules of engagement” (??) and “tributes that women pay to men and men are permitted to pay to women” (???????) to “the bogus notion of sexual equality that has produced the most terrible dislocation.”
That Decter seems blithely unaware that The New York Review of Books was legendary for its rarified personal ads before the advent of feminism, that not all women marry or stay married, and that – get this! – some women aren’t sexually attracted to men (and vice versa) goes without saying. It fits all too well into the all too frequent neoconservative rewriting of the facts to suit political philosophy.
But that this woman, who wrote and lectured and produced policy papers and appeared regularly in top political magazines had the unmitigated gall to complain about feminism when her own life follows the feminist model in almost every way - that, as they say, is what really shucks my corn.
I mean, come on. Does anyone really think that Midge Decter was a housewife? That she really spent her time looking after her husband and their kids without help? That she does her own cooking or cleaning, or did so when her glittering career as a right-wing pundit was getting off the ground? Is it even vaguely credible that she didn’t hire a cleaning lady to do the heavy housework, or that Norman never once took the kids for an afternoon (or two, or three) while she was on deadline?
Or is it simply the Midge Decter, one of the very few women in the neoconservative movement, is afraid that if she lets herself sympathize with other women for a few moments, even once, the boys will realize she is a woman and kick her out of the clubhouse?
Perhaps I’m being too cruel to Midge Decter. After all, I was raised during the Second Wave, by a woman who never thought of herself as a housewife and who was visibly happier after she returned to teaching. I went to a feminist hotbed that produced two of the chief architects of Women’s Liberation. Who am I to call Midge Decter a hypocrite just because she would deny other women the freedom to write and pontificate and theorize and shape public policy that she herself has enjoyed for so many years?
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So, my friends – have any of you forced yourselves to read books like these? Perhaps there’s a 19th century marriage manual in your grandparents’ house, or an old copy of George Gilder somewhere in the basement. Maybe your cousin subscribed to Commentary, or tried to give you a copy of The Morning After one memorable Christmas. Come add to the list on this chilly December night…..
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Sun Dec 04, 2011 at 6:06 AM PT: Irony of ironies: Midget Decter slammed The New York Review of Books...but never revealed that her husband had been offered the editorship and turned it down. Jealous much?