An Old Wife’s Tale
by Midge Decter
Regan Books. 234 pp. $26.00
Midge Decter is someone you want to read no matter what topic she is writing about. An Old Wife’s Tale—the story of her life, her politics, and American society—is a book you would have to read no matter who wrote it. She has the unique trick of writing about deeply depressing topics in a way that leaves you encouraged instead of crushed. The book reads like a casual, anecdotal ramble through the woods that opens out regularly onto huge vistas and big truths, expressed with breathtakingly simple clarity.
She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and seems to have been planning to leave more or less from the moment she arrived. The Depression, FDR, and World War II colored her childhood and adolescence. About that adolescence, in the oddly sane, strangely wholesome world of the pre-1960’s, she sets today’s popular misconceptions straight as casually as if she were straightening crooked pictures on her living-room wall:
Not to be a virgin was a scandal, but to remain chaste was a far from simple proposition. For sex was our main source of power over the boys, who otherwise exerted an untoward degree of power over us. . . . Call it nature’s way of evening the score.
It seems hard to imagine today: the world in balance.
Eventually, she dropped out of college (the University of Minnesota) and set off for New York, ostensibly to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “My heart lifted so high as I boarded that train that some years would pass before it came back down again.” But she hated school, and the war was over, and she married a veteran who was finishing his education; so, without “even the pretense of a proper marketable skill,” she got a job as a clerk and a few years later was secretary to the managing editor of COMMENTARY. Then she had a child and quit work, and moved with her family to a garden apartment in the suburbs.
Garden apartments and suburbia, quitting work to rear children, the whole 1950’s—all unpopular with today’s cultural mainstream, so naturally Midge Decter defends them. She was not crazy about the suburbs, or the garden apartment, or the husband, either. But they had their points, recollected in evocative vignettes of afternoons on stoops where mothers gathered to entertain one another as the children romped:
Many of the toddlers we were chasing after on those long-ago afternoons would, of course, one day grow up and accuse us all of being bourgeois, conformist, and materialistic. And each time as I would sigh with weariness or grow angry at the sheer ingratitude of it all, I would have to laugh as well, thinking of those days.
The husbands worked hard and commuted hard. The mothers worked hard, too, in their bare-bones little apartments. No one had much money. No one had been liberated from anything. But life—not bourgeois, nor conformist, nor materialistic—was all right. In a few years the family (there were now two children) returned to the city. The author got divorced, went back to work at COMMENTARY, and before too long was being courted by the man she would marry “for all time,” Norman Podhoretz.
They had two more children, meaning another pause before she returned to work. In time she became executive editor of Harper’s, which under the editorship of Willie Morris “had virtually overnight been turned into a writers’ magazine and was in the process of becoming what is called in the trade a ‘hot book.’ ” Roughly a third of the way through this narrative, we have hit the late 60’s; henceforth, An Old Wife’s Tale is an idea-book as much as a memoir.
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At Harper’s, Midge Decter was a leading literary figure. With the eruption of feminism into the body politic like a new and fatal form of acne, she turned herself into a leading public intellectual.
A few years earlier she had read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and dismissed it—“intellectually and stylistically very crude,” and “unbelievably insulting to ordinary housewives.” Now she was starting to encounter other feminists all over the New York literary scene. They seemed angry and confused and made no sense. But people were taking this stuff seriously. Friedan had founded the National Organization for Women; it never attracted even 300,000 members (the Zionist women’s organization Hadassah, she points out, had 350,000), yet somehow it was anointed “the women’s movement.”
Feminists wanted to pass as oppressed persons, just like Southern blacks—a transparent con that no one seemed to see through. It was the era of the Vietnam war, and oppression was on a roll. “There was something very unpleasant,” she writes, in the idea that “one should be asked to extend some special sympathy to [a class of] women who were hands down among the luckiest, healthiest, and freest people on earth.” As feminism flared up, Midge Decter flared up to meet it, like the RAF scrambling to intercept.
She “duked it out” in conversation with feminist associates. She agreed to debate Gloria Steinem, played “the requisite bad guy on discussion panels,” and, having left Harper’s, turned to a thorough study of feminist literature. In 1972 she published The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. Naturally, the feminist Left hated her passionately. “Among my adventures,” she notes drily, “could be counted no awarding of medals.” (If Midge Decter cared about getting medals, she would long ago have abandoned conservative humanism for a different line of work.)
There is far more to this book than the truth about feminism (although if there were not, you would still be getting your money’s worth). But its most important theme, and the one to which she keeps returning, is man and woman—arguably the most important theme there is.
To boil things down, men want women; women want children. It used to be that a woman could sleep around if she felt like it; but if she did not, society stood behind her. (Most women, Decter notes, “genuinely hated the sexual revolution,” because “it is in a woman’s nature to be monogamous.” Period. A whole generation of silly ranting down the drain.) It used to be that a woman could work if she wanted or needed to; if she did not—if she wanted to make a home and rear children instead—society (“parents, schools, cultural authorities”) backed her up.
Under relentless feminist pressure, society caved in and canceled these understandings, and the tragic results are all around us. Unmarried males get all the girls they want without promising anything; society’s new and improved attitude is, help yourself. When a man agrees to marry, he is no longer obliged to support his wife: society’s progressive new approach is, can’t she get a job? And when a mother worries about her children, society’s response is—forget about it, sweetheart, they’re better off in day-care. “Can anyone but an unthinking, resentful ideologue (or a social scientist in the ideological swim) even pretend to believe that?”
The author’s bafflement at the male population’s passive acceptance of the feminist revolution is one of her book’s few unconvincing aspects. “Why men should have responded with so much timidity in the face of so violent an assault on them I could not understand,” she writes, but her book makes clear exactly why. In this brave new world where a woman’s role is no longer to be a wife and mother, her function instead is to be sexually available until she is married, and economically productive at all times. What feminists have achieved is not exactly the enslavement of women, but from a male point of view it is almost as good. (We may be lazy but we are not stupid; not that stupid.)
On the other hand, the author gives a powerful analysis of what made feminists do what they have done, and her analysis culminates in one of the few deep pronouncements that have ever been made about feminism: feminism is self-hatred. The “liberation” that feminists sought, Decter writes, was “liberation from the ultimately inescapable nature of womanhood itself.” They resented the world’s plans for them—that they should bear children and care for them. More horrible by far, they discovered that getting married and having children is just what they wanted to do. “Sooner or later . . . young women are bound to discover in themselves an ever more pressing wish to be married. That just happens to be the way young women—or at least most of them—are.” And: “How much foresight did it take to predict that some day, having put it off for too long, a lot of not-so-young women would grow panicked at the thought of being left childless?”
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Midge Decter has published other books—among them Liberal Parents, Radical Children—and during the 1980’s she invented and ran the Committee for the Free World. I pictured it at the time as a large, august institution with a marble lobby and attractive receptionist, exotic flowers on her desk; it turns out to have been a shoe-string operation, though its influence was enormous. It is typical of her to say that the committee’s campaign to support the Reagan administration in Central America was “small but noisy and joyous.” Given the Reagan policy’s opponents—strong, mean, Tyrannosaurus rexes of self-righteousness—I could understand the campaign’s being “tough” or “draining,” but “joyous”? That is the Decter touch.
There are times when this book seems slightly capricious in choosing what to tell. On page 75 the author’s first husband absconds in the middle of a parenthesis. Nosier readers (such as myself) will wish they had been told more of the inside story about Norman Podhoretz and the colossal Kulturkampf he waged as editor of COMMENTARY. Judaism and religion in general mean a great deal to the author, and it would have been interesting to know exactly why and how. In other words, it’s too bad the book isn’t longer. But that is the worst you can say about it.
Midge Decter invented the Committee for the Free World to fight Soviet Communism and Soviet Communism’s friends. In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed. Whereupon she did a jaw-dropping thing. The committee’s purpose having been achieved, she disbanded it. Disband a first-rate organization in good running order, merely because the job is finished? “To this day,” she writes, “I run into people who say, ‘Why don’t you start that committee thing up again?’ ” But shutting it down was pure Decter, Decter all over. Say and do exactly what is necessary and right with good cheer and no histrionics and then stop. She is one of a kind.
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