To the Editor:

I read Elizabeth Powers’s “A Farewell to Feminism” [January] hoping the author would help me to understand my own increasing sense of separation from the modern women’s movement However, many of her criticisms are familiar and easily discredited: that feminism is against marriage and child-rearing, a supposition without any more substantiation here than elsewhere; that anger is a defining and discrediting attribute of most writing by avowed feminists, here supported by a single example, a book published a quarter of a century ago (Ingrid Bengis’s Combat in the Erogenous Zone); and that women who choose to work are somehow denatured through their “abandonment of the female realm,” without attempting to define what that realm might be and how it may have changed, or revealing the author’s own choices in the matter.

It is too easy for Elizabeth Powers to label nameless women as caring little or nothing about marriage and children, to imagine that “most of these women have probably not dwelt on the consequence of the Faustian bargain they have struck” while avoiding mention of her own surely Faustian bargain as an intelligent woman of some ambition who seeks to write and publish as well as (I assume) to have some sort of personal life.

Defenses of or attacks on feminism seem to cloud the minds of those who write them; this is, and always has been, a hot emotional topic. However, whether we are attackers or defenders of feminism, I do not believe we should continue to excuse our lack of rigor because (as the women’s movement may have persuaded us) we put faith in our subjective reaction to the topic, then shored it up with dubious research. For example, to state, as Elizabeth Powers does, that “Young males . . . will only be protective and caring of females when something is at stake,” without providing attribution for such a sweeping statement, is to use a quasi-scientific tone to support something that is, patently, unproved. Are we talking about young gorillas?

Because the issues raised here are important, I was disappointed to find the attack so threadbare. Feminism deserves more potent criticism.

Sallie Bingham
Santa Fe, New Mexico

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To the Editor:

I read Elizabeth Powers’s “A Farewell to Feminism” with great interest. Her essential point—that in embracing sexual freedom, women of the movement did not intend, or even expect, men to embrace it to the point where they would lose a sense of responsibility to the children they fathered—is well taken. I believe current feminist thinking agrees with her assessment of the early feminist movement as somewhat elitist. But her fear of state-controlled child care is itself somewhat elitist if one considers how expensive, and therefore out of reach to poorer families, high-quality private child care is. Does she have the same fear about the state pouring money into building new prisons? Look at the prison population, examine its socioeconomic origins, and ask whether we all might have benefited had the state put more money into attending to the early-childhood needs of that population.

Elizabeth Powers went to college ten years before I did, and by the time I went, we young women had already internalized many of the issues of the women’s movement. We viewed equality as our right, not as a novelty, not as something we had to burn our bras over. We even thought that the feminists she talks about were somewhat shrill. Our attitude was: “We get it. Now let’s get to work.” Meaning: let’s get jobs just like the ones men have. We had not yet confronted the realities of glass ceilings and mommy tracks and unequal pay and the pull of motherhood.

Perhaps for Elizabeth Powers the disjunction came about because of the feminist “belief in the inevitable progress of humanity.” When one’s involvement in a movement is based on a fallacy like that, one is bound to be disappointed. I think much of her piece is about feeling betrayed by people she respected and looked up to who did not help her find a clear path through life.

Anne Rittenberg
Brooklyn, New York

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To the Editor:

Elizabeth Powers invokes Aristotle’s position that we have a goal toward which we strive, but Aristotle never suggested that marriage was the necessary relationship in that quest; rather, for Aristotle, it was friendship.

As Henry James saw quite clearly, modern romantics make a mistake when they burden marriage with a romanticization of the spiritual fulfillment it can offer to the exclusion of other kinds of spiritual fulfillment. Elizabeth Powers might have cut out the long, somewhat pointless autobiographical parts of her essay and instead offered a more pertinent reflection on the different ways human beings can strive toward Aristotle’s goal. She might have remembered that James, whom she seems to admire, made the opening line of The Ambassadors, “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend.”

Anne D. Hall
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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To the Editor:

As Elizabeth Powers observes so astutely, the feminist mandate that led women to insist upon sexual and economic autonomy was a Faustian bargain. While it enabled many women coming of age in the 70’s to obtain professional degrees and corner offices, it also left many of those women unmarried and panicked about their biological clocks. Sadly enough, as the author implies, this was a generational tragedy born of 60’s idealism, a response to the 50’s housewives by daughters who sought to avoid what they saw as their mothers’ plight by sacrificing their own feminine needs on the altar of autonomy.

Still, there was another group of women just coming of age in the late 60’s and early 70’s who trusted in traditional heterosexual love and the implicit protections it afforded females. For these sophisticated and largely urban or suburban women, devotion to their husbands and children, to the creation of a home and its comforts, remained their first priority. Once the children were grown, in college, or out on their own, these women anticipated entering the labor force. In contrast to their single and childless feminist sisters, they believed they were ultimately fulfilled—until the specter of divorce arrived in midlife, and left them shaken, financially, economically, and spiritually.

As anyone knows who has experienced divorce after a long marriage, the backlash against the women’s movement often enables the divorce courts to consider former wives in their middle years as capable of climbing up the corporate or professional career ladder as nimbly as women in their late twenties do today. But few women who bought that idealistic dream of traditional love and marriage in the 60’s or 70’s are that sprightly.

And what about the “spiritual wholeness” that Elizabeth Powers praises as part of the traditional women’s contributions to the home? Few women reject or deny its ability to soothe and cheer family members at each stage in the life-cycle. But spiritual serenity, for all its importance and incandescence, has no cash value. Nor can it be used as collateral, even for a phone deposit for a suddenly single woman’s new apartment.

To protect their sanity, the women who have lavished love and devotion upon their husbands and children and put their own career potential on the back burner often come to understand that their efforts were born out of their most profound needs. As such, the spiritual serenity that they imparted to others must simultaneously be respected and regarded in a clear-eyed way as part of the perilous risk every woman takes in loving another.

Nancy Rubin
Larchmont, New York

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Elizabeth Powers writes:

It is frustrating to be admonished for what one did not set out to do. Since the motto of the women’s movement is “the personal is the political,” should I not be cut some slack for having written a personal memoir rather than a critique of feminism per se? In any event, in my thinking on this subject I have come to see the emancipation of women as an aspect of a vast process of secularization; to write a critique of that process would be an even vaster undertaking. What concerned me instead in my essay were the personal effects on a generation of unmarried women of the ideology that came into being in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: “feminism.”

I would be curious to know more about Sallie Bingham’s “increasing sense of separation from the modern women’s movement.” I suspect there is much dissatisfaction out there, but the response to my essay on the part of friends from my early days in the movement, some of whom have become highly visible figures, has been one of total silence. To me this suggests something doctrinaire in those who lead the movement, and something threatening in the prospect of deviating from its orthodoxy. I hope Sallie Bingham finds herself brave enough to write about her disaffection.

As for my assertion that men will not care for women unless there is something at stake: we are all to a great extent “gorillas,” by which I mean our tendency to form social groups centered around a paternal male, a mother, and their biological offspring. It seems to me that this secure base (for women) and settled realm of sexual relations (for men) are what allowed the larger pursuits of civilization, from which women were generally excluded because of child-bearing and child-raising. Obviously modern birth control and abortion had a profound effect on this state of affairs, and the marketplace has done the rest. A glance around, however, would surely inform Sallie Bingham that, the old sexual consensus having been breached, a growing number of males are—let us say it straight out—unsocialized (and uncivilized), unwilling to accept the onerous duties and limitations of parenthood. We are in fact becoming less than gorillas.

I was intrigued by Anne Rittenberg’s lament about the lack of high-quality child care, especially since she immediately follows it by talking about prisons (adult care of the criminal class?). Where is her evidence that criminality results from lack of state-sponsored child care? In fact, there seems to be some evidence that “child care” (as part of the service sector) correlates with a wide range of contemporary pathologies. This is not to say that criminals are bred in child-care facilities, but that such facilities substitute poorly for the authority and example of parents.

I appreciate Anne D. Hall’s reminder of Aristotle’s reflections on friendship, though I am puzzled as to the thrust of her comments. Does she mean to suggest that feminism has introduced women to new possibilities of friendship, including with men? If so, I would have liked her to spell out how.

Friendship, for Aristotle, was the crown of private relations, occurring among equals; most relations being unequal, he did not envisage friendship between men and women or within marriage (though he did not totally discount it, either). Still, the family, though a site of unequal relations, was also, for Aristotle, the basis of the associations one would enter into in the polls. I remain doubtful that a society which does not accord respect to parents (who, as Aristotle says, have bestowed on us the greatest of blessings, life and sustenance) will be able to graduate to friendship.

Nancy Rubin’s letter I found very moving. It reminds me how exceedingly fortunate we were in the U.S. in the 1950’s to have reached a stage of prosperity that enabled middle-class wives and mothers to lavish on their loved ones a level of care that in earlier periods was hardly within reach of the highest classes. I would never deny that, for some devotedly married women, the society-wide freedoms introduced in the 60’s and 70’s entailed harsh costs of their own. What I was pointing to, rather, was the astonishing fact that the enterprise of caring for one’s nearest and dearest should have become so anathematized by a movement purporting to speak in the name of women.

The ideology that bolstered this process of anathematization couched its arguments in the language of human autonomy, of “choice.” Such language may be suitable to consumer decisions; but when human attachments, and even marriage and child-bearing, come to be regarded in this light, we see how far removed we have become from the guiding influence of tradition, and down what cheerless path we have been led by our “enlightened” rejection of what most people still regard as the most basic truths of human nature.

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