Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality
by Cathy Young
Free Press. 400 pp. $25.00

What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
by Danielle Crittenden
Simon & Schuster. 224 pp. $23.00

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
by Wendy Shalit
Free Press. 304 pp. $24.00

That sexual differences do make a difference was the first human truth denied by contemporary feminists. The second was that even the most ordinary transactions of life between men and women possess a vast capacity for havoc. Women’s entry in large numbers into the workplace was supposed to be a purely bureaucratic affair, an adjustment of numbers in the interest of equity. But, coinciding as it did with the liberation of women from the demands of reproduction through birth control and then legalized abortion, a movement ostensibly designed to make women equal competitors with men ended up changing radically the nature of their sexual relationships.

What once gave starch to those relationships was the prospect of pregnancy. Chastity was to a romance as fourteen lines are to a sonnet, a net and baseline to a tennis match. If you strayed beyond those parameters, you lost; but if you stayed within them, you developed musculature. You learned how to say no; failing that, you were forced to take responsibility for the mistakes you made, and sometimes you even learned from them.

For 30 years, the net has been removed, the baseline has disappeared, and all hell has broken loose. When women stopped saying “no” to men in sexual matters, it was only a matter of time before they would have to turn over to the courts, of all institutions, the adjudication and even the definition of their personal relationships. The resulting legacy of bad faith, hurt feelings, and blasted hopes is something even some feminists have reluctantly come to acknowledge. Still, as their conspicuous silence in the face of the revelations about our priapic President suggests, if there is to be any reassessment of feminist first principles, it will not come from within, or from the older generation that formulated those principles in the first place.

Fortuitously, three new books, all by younger writers, subject to sharp analysis the repercussions of the legal enshrinement of “equality,” and thereby add significantly to our understanding not only of how feminism established its grip on the culture but of the toll it has taken.

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From the surface of things, the journalist Cathy Young, who has the distinction of having been born and raised in the Soviet Union, might be expected to have some especially trenchant observations on our own topsy-turvy state of affairs. As she writes in Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, when she left the USSR in 1980 at the age of seventeen she was already a feminist, if of an old-fashioned kind. Her mother was a professor of music, and she herself “passionately believed that, as Nora said in A Doll’s House, ‘Before I am a woman I am a human being’: what I was and what I did was not defined by my sex.”

Then, as a newly minted American college student, Young came to witness the increasingly irrational behavior of those professing to be feminists: “young women . . . acting as a volunteer thought police.” One of Young’s intentions in this book is to unmask the false claims of these “thought police,” especially as they concern the supposed continued inequality of women in the United States.

In fact, as she shows:

Girls are not silenced or ignored in the classroom. Medicine has not neglected women’s health. Abuse by men is not the leading cause of injury to American women; the courts do not treat violence toward women more leniently than violence toward men. Gender disparities in pay and job status are not merely a consequence of sex discrimination. The 80’s were not a “backlash decade” but a time of steady progress for women and, generally, of strong support for women’s advancement.

Young has done her legal homework, scrutinizing court cases involving gender violence and sex crimes, child abuse and domestic violence, child custody and school curricula: excrescences of a cultural agenda that has been put in place to support spurious feminist claims and provide employment for enforcers. Yet even as she demonstrates the havoc wrought by this agenda in the lives of ordinary people, Young insists that she does not wish to abandon feminism. Her purpose, rather, is one of restoration. What we need, she writes, is something like the old-fashioned feminism of her mother and her own seventeen-year-old self:

[A] philosophy that is not pro-woman (or pro-man) but pro-fairness; that stresses flexibility and more options for all; that encourages us to treat people, regardless of sex, as human beings.

Alas, boilerplate prose aside, the society of human equality Young advocates is but a newer version of the utopian—and surreptitiously class-ridden—proposals Gloria Steinem used to expound in her day for our future social order, and is subject to the same criticism. Sexual differentiation, and the arrangements that have historically arisen from it, produce messy compromises that cannot be brought under the discipline of efficiency experts, any more than children can be raised with a Filofax. Certain high-powered female college graduates of the 1960’s and 1970’s may have earned enough money to keep their personal and professional lives in separate columns of the ledger; and for those who managed to marry and have children, general affluence and all that it could buy may have made up for any losses on the family side of things. But most married couples are less fortunate economically, and feminism, as Young herself shows, has only made their lives messier.

But that is not all. In elevating the work that most women do outside the home to the status of career (the “two-career couple,” she writes, “has become the norm”), Young inevitably denigrates what they do inside the home, and thus misses something essential about the desires of ordinary women. Most women want to have and raise their own children. Although Young nods respectfully in the direction of traditional choices, for her as for feminists generally it is only through “significant” work and economic freedom that women really become human. The last part of her book is thus devoted to a critique of conservative opponents of feminism like George Gilder and F. Carolyn Graglia, advocates of traditional sexual prerogatives.

That critique does not succeed. One may agree with Young that women do not have to bear children to be “human persons.” But it is within those larger social webs, including families, which inculcate and perpetuate human virtues, that most people still find their greatest fulfillment. Indeed, whether the achievements on which our prosperity is based can exist without these structures and the virtues they transmit is a question that should give pause to any self-declared feminist, especially to an anti-feminist feminist like Young.

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If Cathy Young is engaged in a rescue mission, trying to salvage something from the wreckage of a movement gone desperately awry, no such motive impels Danielle Crittenden in What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. The massive social upheaval that has occurred in the name of sexual equality—not to mention the massive amounts spent by government in engineering the desired result—has not, she writes, “been able to banish fundamental female desires.” Most women still “want to marry husbands who will love and respect us; we want to have children; we want to be good mothers to those children.”

Crittenden, a leading light of the Independent Women’s Forum and the editor of its feisty publication, the Women’s Quarterly, knows well how hard it is to invest such simple facts with the cultural authority they once enjoyed. So thoroughly have feminist categories of thought seeped into women’s consciousness, she writes, “like intravenous saline into the arm of an unconscious patient,” that many women are “feminists without knowing it.” That is, they are so much “in the habit of approaching [their] problems as those arising from inequality and sexism that [they] cannot imagine any other way to think about them.” Her book is therefore constructed as a systematic rebuttal of myths that, for most young women, conservative and liberal alike, still count as gospel truth: that sexual liberty is essential to women’s equality; that dependency is dangerous; that, in a good marriage, each partner remains a separate and distinct individual; that women should have children when convenient, but in no case should they permit their children to define them or their lives.

Crittenden’s demolition of these propositions is thorough, and thoroughly satisfying. In adopting, under the aegis of feminism, the libertarian sexual agenda of men, women trade away what they most want—lasting love and all that goes with it—for an illusion of sexual power. When they then wake up to the fact that they do want marriage and a family, they find (unlike older men) that they have less sexual power with which to attain them. As for marriage, it is not about the promotion of rights but about their surrender, by both men and women—especially when there are children involved. And as any mother knows, those children will dominate a woman’s mind to a degree she could scarcely imagine possible beforehand.

There are few rhetorical flourishes in this book, but the cumulative effect is weighty. Crittenden’s “essentialist” view of the differences between men and women is balanced by a realistic assessment of the many hitherto undreamed-of possibilities modern life offers to those in the middle class. Women today are likely to live 80 years and even be healthy in old age. This, for Crittenden, constitutes an argument not for postponing marriage and children but, to the contrary, for early marriage and child-bearing, followed by reentry into the workforce after the (comparatively few) years devoted to caring for one’s young children. After all, as she writes, despite today’s long life spans,

the length of time it takes for a human being to transform from a demanding infant into a smiling baby into a crawling terror into a walking child into a teenager and finally into a grown man or woman is profoundly short.

Only in the upside-down world of feminist ideology would such a deeply reasonable observation seem counterintuitive—or downright blasphemous.

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A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, the Chinese say. If so, by the time it comes to an end the journey itself will have consumed a countless number of steps, each one taking us only imperceptibly far from the one before. One day, however, a member of the caravan may look up and note that somehow the climate has changed, the local flora and fauna are different: where once the wind was warm, it is now chilly, and where once we walked on grass, we now tread on ice. Just such an indispensable service is performed by the twenty-three-year-old Wendy Shalit in A Return to Modesty, a powerful and witty book that registers the changes in our social landscape in all their starkness while also illuminating many of the steps that brought us to where we are.

Wendy Shalit was born in 1975, the year the Vietnam war ended, one year after the resignation of Richard Nixon, two years after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade declaring abortion a constitutional right. Women of my generation, already grown up by 1975, had been in the forefront of the social changes whose effects were to be visited on the young girls of hers. The opening anecdote of her book shows one such woman, a nice lady named “Mrs. Nelson,” who appeared one day in Shalit’s fourth-grade Wisconsin classroom to initiate her young charges in the areas of “Human Growth and Development.” From the question box on her lap, Mrs. Nelson pulled out a slip of white paper, which she cheerily read aloud: “What is 69, class?”

Luckily for Shalit, her mother did not wish her to learn about such subjects at the age of nine, and so she sat out the classes in the school library. The perspective she thereby gained on the effects of sexual enlightenment on her age-mates, especially the little boys, brilliantly clarifies the process by which feminism, in Danielle Crittenden’s phrase, “seeped” into the minds of later generations. The leading agent of that osmotic process was sex education:

“Erica, do you masturbate?” one boy would say to one poor pig-tailed victim. . . . Then another boy would say, closing in on her from the other side, “It’s really natural, you know.”

Or:

“Why aren’t you developing, Erica?. . . It’s time for you to be developing, didn’t you hear?”

To which poor Erica, before bursting into tears, would reply:

“Mrs. Nelson says that if you tease us about what we learn in class, then you haven’t understood the principle of respect.”

By the time Shalit got to Williams College in the early 1990’s, coed bathrooms were the rule; but respect, along with lots of other things, had gone out the window. In their place had come a sexual regime ten times more oppressive than the “patriarchal” one from which feminism and associated ideas claimed to have liberated Shalit and her generation of young women. Her article on that regime, “A Ladies’ Room of One’s Own,” caused a sensation when it was published in COMMENTARY (August 1995), and led to the writing of this book.

In part an examination of the pathologies that have resulted from the relentless sexualization of the world of young people, A Return to Modesty seeks to reclaim what has been forgotten: that sex is significant. Girls, Shalit writes, have always known this, and once revealed it by their blushes and giggles. Intending to get rid of the blushes, feminists and sex educators have produced not only coed bathrooms and boorish boys but a generation of women in terror of date rape and prone to eating disorders and self-mutilation. Their romantic experience can be summed up, to paraphrase Shalit, by the two topics that seem to dominate the columns of today’s women’s magazines: “How to Have Great Sex with Men You Hardly Know” and “How To Get Over the Heartbreak of Having Had Sex with Men Who Don’t Care to Get to Know You.”

Against today’s licentiousness, Shalit places a consideration of the “lost virtue” of restraint: a virtue that, in her telling, permitted young women to be true to their natures and to value their own sexuality at something like its real worth, in the interest of one day finding lasting love, which, Shalit also affirms, is what most young women desire. Taking us through the experience of other times and places, she invokes an abundance of historical and philosophical sources in support of her notion that a “cartel of virtue” once ensured a separate realm for girls, allowing them to develop at their own pace and to explore areas of life apart from the sexual. This cartel is what she would, if she could, restore.

Though she offers what is perhaps too schematic an exit from today’s battlefields, there can be no doubt that, partly with the aid of expert testimony from earlier and more decorous ages, but mostly through her own preternaturally sharp eyes and mind, Shalit has seen deeply into female nature, and into the malaise of a generation. A Return to Modesty certainly caused me to view the college students I teach in a new light. Only a few years younger than Wendy Shalit, these students strike me most of all by their extreme mental passivity—another inheritance of the regime of political correctness to which they have been subjected all their lives, and of which feminism has long been the leading component.

After reading Shalit’s book, I began to have the feeling that, in reality, my students, and legions like them all across the country, are not so much passive as waiting, heads down, for the floodwaters to recede so that they can at last regain their lives. Indeed, I would like to believe that, in taking us back to basics, Danielle Crittenden and Wendy Shalit are harbingers of a movement that may yet succeed in reclaiming the battered traces of the civilized life that was once our common birthright. If so, we will all owe these young women a debt of gratitude.

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