To the Editor:

In “Feminism, Stage Three” [August], Michael Levin maintains that I support only “parental leave and day care.” His own view of the matter is this: “One would think that the goal of anyone who takes seriously the problems of the mother who must work would be to make her working unnecessary, and one way to help do so would be to increase the dependent deduction for minors on the federal income tax.”

The fact of the matter is that I support parental leave and day care, as Mr. Levin says. But I also support some form of high cash payment, just as he does, if not necessarily for the same reasons. In fact, I wrote a column about it, “Help Families, Not Yuppies.”

Ben Wattenberg
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Michael Levin dismisses all the recent commotion about “family policy” with a simple prescription: mothers should stay out of the labor force and tend to their children.

Listen, you 70 percent of all mothers with school-age children who work outside the home as well as in it—your problem has been solved. Quit work, stay at home. Get serious, Mr. Levin. The fact is there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the entry of women into the labor force is temporary or reversible. Women are joining the labor force across the globe for a variety of reasons—for example, greater education—which have little to do with Mr. Levin’s morality tale of family-hating feminists. A policy prescription which assumes the reversal of this trend is simply not relevant to today’s realities, or tomorrow’s.

Mr. Levin is also quite careless with his facts. For example, he declares that family-policy advocates have “passed over in silence” the idea of raising the child exemption in the federal tax code. Perhaps Mr. Levin is not familiar with the often-cited proposals on this topic from family-policy advocates like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Children’s Defense Fund, or even my own organization. Similarly, Mr. Levin’s notion that real wages and family income are of no interest to family-policy supporters will come as quite a shock to nearly everyone I know in the field. Mr. Levin proposes “a rise in real wages” as part of his pro-family program—does he really think that anyone finds this idea too hot to handle?

By erecting such straw men, Mr. Levin seeks to hold family-policy advocates responsible for women’s entering the labor force. In fact, the opposite is true: it is because women are working that new policies are being proposed to help today’s parents bridge the gap between work and family.

The stage is now set for an important national debate on the family. Some voices, including Mr. Levin’s, will insist that the only way forward is to repeal the last thirty years of new opportunities for women. Surely there are better ideas around than that one.

David Blankenhorn
Co-Director, Institute for American Values
New York City

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To the Editor:

In “Feminism, Stage Three,” Michael Levin correctly perceives that Western society has put too little emphasis (in the form of praise) on full-time motherhood. However, he is the first to put it down, as he tosses off motherhood as something “which virtually all women can succeed at.” Similarly, he takes for granted the traditional male role of breadwinner. . . . Mr. Levin seems to think that all women are genetically programmed to be Mother of the Year and all men are genetically programmed to be Lee Iacocca. More’s the pity, since it is evident that most are not.

In addition, it is not true that “it has yet to be grasped that [maternal] impulses weaken the drive for extra-familial achievement.” Women across the nation are grasping all too well the family-career dilemma, whereby society will penalize them economically for accepting the responsibilities and joys of motherhood, and emotionally for accepting the rewards of a career at the expense of time with the family. One might as well say that the innate drive in men to earn big bucks weakens their drive for familial achievement, a position which could easily be substantiated by statistics on runaway fathers. But in this age, debating our presumed biological imperatives does not help; we are not bound by them as other animals seem to be.

What has yet to be grasped is that there is no reason, genetic or societal, to divide the world so sharply into breadwinners and breeders. This arrangement has obviously proved uncomfortable or untenable for both genders, and has been attacked, subverted, and put aside for decades. What is needed is an arrangement which will allow each role to be respected within each person, man or woman. . . .

Jenny-Anne Martz
Brooklyn, New York

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To the Editor:

Michael Levin has written a factual and well-reasoned analysis of the current status of women and the feminist movement. His observations on the effects of increasing divorce and abandonment on a large proportion of the nation’s women, pushing them below the poverty level while forcing them into the marketplace and into inadequate child-care arrangements, are, if anything, understated. However, upon finishing the article I was dismayed. Mr. Levin does what the extremists of the women’s-liberation movement also do—he looks at women as an undifferentiated mass with uniform needs, aptitudes, and aspirations.

The finest achievement of the women’s-liberation movement has been to win wide public acceptance for women’s right to a multiplicity of choices. . . . Different women will make different choices reflecting their varying interests and capacities. All of this Mr. Levin ignores, treating women as if all were alike, with identical drives, emotional patterns, and reactions to motherhood and family.

Mr. Levin states that families supported solely by the husband’s wage experience far lower rates of divorce, poverty, “and other forms of social pathology. In short, women do best when they raise children with a hard-working man.” All women? Counselors at battered-women’s shelters know better. They know that the greatest obstacle to helping a battered woman is the woman’s fear of being unable to support herself and her children without the battering husband. . . .

Later, Mr. Levin uses an interesting statistic in an interesting way. He says that 56 percent of all women who work do so for the money. If so, it follows that 44 percent work for some reason other than money. . . . Why are these 44 percent in the working world? For the feeling that they are using their talents, for the challenge of daily events in the marketplace, for a meaning they are not finding at home.

In speaking of motherhood, Mr. Levin opines: A mother “will normally wish to spend at least three years with her child before sending him off somewhere.” The fatal word is “normally.” If a woman wants to go back to work long before then and finds adequate—to her—child-care arrangements, . . . is she then abnormal? Women, portrayed by Mr. Levin as having strong needs to be with their children, are the greatest child abusers. Fewer men abuse children. Why? Because they are not home with them all day when loving maternal impulses can fade very rapidly. . . .

The difficulty with Mr. Levin’s article is the broad stereotyping of both men and women. Many women have strong maternal drives; others . . . have little or none. Some men have strong paternal drives which may lessen their interest in extra-familial achievement. Some women work well in the home and are happy there; they should be encouraged. Other women have different talents and interests and prefer working outside the home. They, too, should be encouraged. Some women do best under a system that permits them part of each arrangement, and they, too, have a place. Women and men are both exceedingly various and complex in their needs, dispositions, and talents. To stereotype either sex as having uniform needs, physical, emotional, or social, is to fall into the serious error that detracts from Mr. Levin’s otherwise excellent article.

Jane Zahn Edises
Carefree, Arizona

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To the Editor:

At last, an honest look at the issues involved in child-rearing when both parents work.

Mr. Levin says that “Almost nothing is heard about ‘traditional’ American women—still the majority, if barely—who raise children within a family supported by the husband’s wage.” Since I am one of these “traditional” American women, I would like to speak out. . . .

Mr. Levin makes a convincing argument that it should be the mother who stays at home, but on this one point I differ with him. I feel that men and women are equal, so that either one could provide children with good care. Of course this is a decision that each family must work out for itself. . . .

The current cost of living also has to be considered. I agree with Mr. Levin that the dependent deduction for minors on the federal income tax should be substantially increased. We should be moving in the direction of making it easier for one parent to stay home instead of getting both parents out of the home into paying jobs.

I am a member of the privileged “baby-boom” generation raised in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The vast majority of us benefited greatly from having a mother who cared for us full-time. It is unfortunate that more of us don’t want to emulate our mothers and give the same care to our own children.

Karen J. Tidholm
Houston, Texas

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To the Editor:

Michael Levin’s article raises the interesting question, rarely addressed by feminists except to be shunted aside, of the innateness of sex differences and its ramifications. I confess ignorance as to the extent of the emotional differences between boys and girls—differences that exist prior to nurture and socialization. Further research needs to be done in this area, preferably research that is ideology-free. . . . Why, for instance, do girls in general seem to have more difficulty with mathematics than boys, and is this solely due to differences in socialization? Mr. Levin says that a woman’s maternal impulses may impair her earning ability. I would add that perhaps a woman’s ability to raise a child from infancy is innately greater than that of a man. I have noticed, for example, that mothers respond to their infant children with a perspicacity that a father can learn only with great difficulty. . . .

If it can be discovered, through more research, that there are innate differences between males and females, . . . then the joy, value, and validity of motherhood can be revived.

Joseph R. Aziz
Flushing, New York

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To the Editor:

Two cheers for Michael Levin for pointing out that the Ruth Sidels and Sylvia Hewletts are not all that different in the short run from the card-carrying feminists they criticize. Essentially, these so-called more moderate writers agree with doctrinaire feminists on most issues and especially on the supreme importance of a woman’s having a career or full-time job and not being a housewife and full-time mother. In fact, their books, which Mr. Levin notes are perceived as marking a “historic turn [for the women’s movement] toward a new appreciation of motherhood and children,” . . . are in some ways more pernicious than doctrinaire feminist tracts, for they argue for such policies as affirmative action, comparable worth, and national day care With practical and meliorist rather than utopian and ideological rhetoric. . . .

During the last decade and a half, women in the workforce have benefited from goverment-imposed favoritism. The number of women in male-dominated, high-paying, prestigious, and symbolically masculine professions has risen dramatically—roughly 25 million of over 35 million new jobs have gone to women—while in the same period the “feminization of poverty” has grown increasingly worse. This proves that the so-called “feminization of poverty”—a propagandistic and tendentious way of saying that most of the people defined as living below the poverty line are children in single-parent, female-headed families receiving welfare benefits—has little or nothing to do with “discrimination against women.” This phenomenon is largely explained by divorce, desertion, and illegitimacy, and by a welfare system and culture which foster these maladies and subvert the male role as essential family provider; by the massive influx of middle- and upper-middle-class women into the workforce, . . . most of them with no true and urgent need to work . . . ; and by male poverty and joblessness, and the dwindling percentage of young males with jobs that pay adequately to support a family. . . .

Though they would deny it for purely tactical reasons, feminists covertly desire inflation; higher taxes for families with children; male poverty, joblessness, and unemployment; a society in which fewer and fewer males have jobs that pay adequately to support a family; and growing rates of divorce and male desertion. The reason is that such trends induce more and more women to enter the workforce, create a society in which women are less able and inclined to marry and have children, and force men to stay home and take care of the children . . . while their wives and girlfriends work. . . .

Scott Kuell
Green Bay, Wisconsin

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Michael Levin writes:

I regret not having mentioned Ben Wattenberg’s and David Blankenhorn’s support for increased dependent deductions, but I would still be careful about endorsing many of the policies that parade under that flag. The deduction can too easily be turned into a tax credit or a “negative income tax,” both of which are schemes to get the middle class—usually understood to include families now managing to scrape by on one income—to pay more of a tax bill that is already grossly inflated by unnecessary government expenditures.

Incidentally, Mr. Wattenberg’s support for “parental” (as opposed to maternal) leave indirectly reveals the extent to which unisex ideology has permeated our society. Even those who imagine themselves pro-natalist cannot bring themselves to do any favors for women that would imply their special place in child-rearing. Fathers and mothers must be treated as fungible.

It is not I who said that mothers should stay at home when their children are home; child psychologists say it. As far as public policy is concerned, however, my own view is that the whole matter should be left to the individual, with the government taking sides neither with the mother who decides to stay home nor with the mother who decides to work. A policy, such as Mr. Blankenhorn supports, of making the lot of women who choose to work easier is not simply a response to “today’s realities”; it is a policy that induces more women to work.

I agree with Mr. Blankenhorn that education and other changes in modern life are responsible for the entry of women into the workforce. This situation is reversible in the sense that it lowers the birth rate and a sufficiently low birth rate means the end of modern society. I would not presume to criticize this eventuality, but it does show how harshly nature deals with infertility.

This brings me to the letters which raise, in one way or another, the issue of whether the entry of women into the workforce may be said to “go against natural impulses.” I would point out, first of all, that to say a woman’s natural impulses “impair” her earning ability does not mean opposing a woman to her impulses, as if they were external forces that get in her way. It is to say that she will typically not want to make the sacrifices necessary for this extra income; if she does, in many cases she will find herself with both an unsatisfactory professional life and a disastrous personal life.

I do not think that merely emphasizing the biological link between mothers and babies will be at all sufficient for a recrudescence of respect for motherhood; that will require that the thousands of formal and informal propaganda organs of Western society stop praising wholly atypical women (the female judges and other authority figures who seem to populate every TV police show, for instance) and stop implying that there is something wrong with a woman who “just” wants children.

I am sorry that Jenny-Anne Martz took me to be slighting motherhood by trivializing it. I meant, simply, that since motherhood is intrinsically fulfilling for women, it is a great pity that society has decided to undervalue this ready-made path to happiness.

I would also be less sanguine than Miss Martz is about our entanglement with biological passions. We evolved our present drives under circumstances in which a female preoccupation with children was adaptive—it used to take about a lifetime of preoccupation to rear a couple of offspring to maturity. Nowadays women do not have to be so preoccupied, and people seem naturally to assume that because they need not be, they do not want to be. Women themselves may assume this. Nonetheless, as I wrote, our genes have not heard that they have become maladaptive, and until they do we shall have to put up with their imperatives.

I should emphasize, in reply to Jane Zahn Edises, that all my remarks were meant to cover the great generality of men and women, not each and every one. I do not think the exceptions are “abnormal” in any moral sense, but rather that they will forever be defying universal expectations created by the great mass of the more typical. Incidentally, I noted that 44 percent of all women who work do so for reasons other than money; presumably the proportion is much smaller for mothers who work. Donna Shalala gives a figure of 20 percent, which I will stipulate as accurate.

I was troubled by Mr. Blankenhorn’s reflexive endorsement of the “new opportunities” that have emerged for women, and Scott Kuell’s letter articulates the trouble. The new opportunities have been created as a result of government-enforced policies making it harder for men to get decent jobs and symbolically emasculating them by denying them spheres which they can regard as manly. As George Gilder and others have tried patiently to explain, men deprived of pride in constructive activities will find a niche in destructive activities. It is astounding, furthermore, that the most productive society in human history should suddenly decide to make it increasingly difficult for its most productive members to get jobs, and set about replacing them with workers whose productivity, for reasons having nothing to do with ability per se, is at best about two-thirds of theirs.

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