Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
by Naomi Wolf
Doubleday. 326 pp. $24.95
Early in the presidential year 2000, the feminist writer Naomi Wolf (Promiscuities, The Beauty Myth) enjoyed a brief notoriety as the woman hired by Al Gore to advise him on his personal style, at a cool $15,000 a month. From her well-publicized lectures to the Vice President on the subject of the alpha male, there flowed Gore’s emergence in earth tones and, perhaps, events of still greater moment. How many voters said to themselves that a man who could do this should never be President? How many in Florida? 537? 930? Enough to make a difference?
But this is not entirely fair. There are, it seems, two Naomi Wolfs, two different sides of one coin. The first, capable of rigor and insight, is the one who in 1995 stunned her feminist sisters with the unwelcome news that abortion kills babies. The second, a prototypical liberal feminist boomer with the signature flaws of her generation, conflates personal taste with universal experience, cultivates a sense of just deserts that exceeds all rationality, shows an embarrassing weakness for New Age inanities, and thinks there is no human woe that cannot be cured by a government program and no human desire that cannot be satisfied by means of a large, noisy “movement.” Call them Naomi Wolf and her evil twin Skippy, or the Alpha and the Beta Wolf. Both are on full display in her new book, a treatise on motherhood in the personal and the public sense.
Alpha Wolf rules the first part of Misconceptions, which is often a pretty good book. Here we see a woman who was abstractly pro-choice confronting an actual pregnancy; a woman raised to be independent and assertive coming up against the pull of family ties and the hyper-femininity of her new condition; and a woman of self-advertised “conscience” facing a culture of designer babies and choices that her mother never had to make.
Under pressure, Alpha Wolf’s slightly hedged support for legal abortion did not break, but it was shaken:
Being a pro-choice woman, pregnant in a country in which almost a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion, represented a conundrum so uncomfortable I could barely stand to think about it. . . . [I]t was . . . “my body.” But did I own this baby the way I owned my possessions, my hair, and my fingernails? . . . My attitudes about abortion were shifting like magma under the ocean floor, caused by upheavals too strong to see.
Throughout, Wolf is appalled at today’s commodification of babies, the transmutation of life into goods. Eggs, sperm, wombs, embryos become consumer quantities, to be bought, sold, and rented out in pursuit of an ultimate “lifestyle” accessory: the perfect baby, under the right conditions, at just the right time of life. One couple she knows aborted three healthy children on the 50-50 chance they might start to lose their hearing in their teens. Upscale yuppies go to the ends of the earth (literally) to find white children while, blocks away, non-white children go begging. Wolf tells the story of a couple who stormed out of the hospital after the woman whose baby they had contracted for told them it had been fathered by a Hispanic man. The value of life itself, for itself, is lost in the search for ego fulfillment and the endless cry of “mine, mine, mine.”
As her pregnancy advanced, Wolf writes, many old certainties began to seem shaky, besieged by reality. She became more generically feminine: “The ways in which the hormones . . . affected me called into question my basic belief system in the ‘social construction of gender.’ ” Next out the window went the theory of total personal autonomy: “A baby’s need for its mother breaks down something in the personal ego that then gets reconstructed around service.” Before and after giving birth, she and her friends in similar situations became less feisty, more passive, more pliant, more dependent—physically and financially—on men. Previously understood equations changed shape: “With a baby, too much depends on stability.” Feminism itself, she observes,
was undergoing a form of triage: whatever was inessential got hauled overboard so as not to rock the fragile, all-important boat of the new family. . . . I was still a feminist. But I understood at this point in my life that it could be dangerous to be one. . . . My self-sufficiency and independence, two qualities that I admired most in others, shut down like a business that had lost its clientele.
_____________
This much is Alpha Wolf, the perceptive if ever-belated discoverer of some of life’s complex issues. But then her baby was born, and someone had to take care of it—and Beta Wolf reappears.
“When I was growing up,” Wolf tells us, “I knew exactly how I wanted my life to be ‘after the revolution.’ ” In this Utopia, men and women would share work and parenting, with the slack taken up by “additional, nurturing, community-based care” staffed by happy, well-paid, loving professionals; it would be cheap, universal, and, of course, always available. That no such perfect arrangement exists—may, in fact, be impossible—fills her with a sense of crying injustice. And a list of demands.
“What do we need?,” she asks. “The question should also be, what do we deserve?” And she proceeds to tell us: “We deserve: real flextime that lets us and the fathers . . . cycle in and out of the workplace”; “real family leave,” with six months at partial pay for both parents; “quality child care for a flat, non-means-tested low fee per day, provided by caregivers who are unionized and reasonably paid.” Oh, and we also need “to pressure politicians to boost the minimum wage, and offer health-care benefits, . . . on-site day care so that we can see our children, . . . [and] tax deductions and benefits to help underwrite the cost of transporting and housing relatives who are able to come and help.” And so forth and so on. This heaven on earth is to be set in place by a movement known as “Motherhood Feminism,” which will relentlessly pressure all levels of government and punish recalcitrant businesses through boycotts of their consumer goods.
Sound familiar? It should. A year ago, the professor and political pundit Susan Estrich, another working mother and liberal boomer, discovered how monstrously unjust it was that women were forced off the fast track by parenthood, thus resulting in (by her lights) a dearth of female chief executives in Fortune 500 companies. Estrich, too, proposed a new feminist movement, this one designed to slow down the fast track and make it mother-friendly, with flextime, time off, and long leaves; the movement would pressure the state and boycott producers until “enough” females were made law partners or corporate heads.
Wolf and Estrich are filled with ideas of what they think is due them and their cohort, what they “deserve” from society, what is “fair.” They think it fair that they be given time off for motherhood, without loss of money or status. But is this fair to people who work full-time, who work overtime, who are always on call? Or to the many women who would prefer to stay home and raise children but are pushed into the workforce by excessive tax burdens? Wolf, who admits that her plans are expensive, would certainly burden those women further: the wives of teachers and firemen, women who want to stay home, would be punished so that well-to-do women like Wolf and Estrich can have exactly the lives they want.
Other women, too, complain about the onus of child-rearing, about the social demotion of stay-at-home mothers, the lessening of income and work opportunities, the boredom, the isolation from other adults. But they seem better at understanding that you get nothing for nothing; that in life many trade-offs occur. You marry for love, and give up the big money; work for yourself, and give up security; have children, and give up the freedoms and opportunities of the single life.
You can, of course, have children and a working life, only not the same working life as if you were free and single. But this is what Wolf and Estrich refuse to admit. They want it all, when they want it, and if they cannot have it then someone must pay: the state, which must reinvent everything from scratch; the corporate world, which must play nurse and nanny; the taxpayer, who must pay through the nose so that they can maintain their fantasies intact.
Thus does the Naomi Wolf who is smart enough to see the Utopian folly of designer babies insist on her plan for the designer life. She, or her evil twin, insults her own intelligence.
_____________
