Women on the Verge

Cathy Young from the April 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Above all, Rhode finds it most unfair that people should have to choose between career success and family time. To some extent, this is a childish complaint: It's also terribly unfair that people should have to choose between eating as much as they want and looking good in a swimsuit. Nevertheless, the work-family dilemma is real. The "second shift" of housework and child care does weigh more heavily on women (though men do much more than they are often credited with--and, as some other feminists recognize, the obstacles to shared parenting are posed not only by many fathers' reluctance to assume an equal role but by many mothers' reluctance to let them do so). And the work hours required in many prestigious, high- pressure fields do seem to be prohibitive for anyone trying to raise a family.

But as the two-income family becomes increasingly common, most women and men find ways to accommodate family and work responsibilities. They demand more flexibility from employers, switch to home-based work, and rely on extended family or friends for help with child care.

To be sure, the problem of gender inequality--or, more precisely, balancing work and home--has not been fully solved. Nor can it be, since any "solution" would require a world without trade-offs. But Rhode's call for a massive new commitment to feminist activism, including goals that many women do not support--from massive investment in government-run child care to laws that would prohibit the use of the alleged victim's sexual past in a rape trial even when it has a direct bearing on the innocence of the accused--remains not only unrealistic but unpersuasive. And, as her loose grasp of the facts suggests, the rationale for such a commitment turns out to be built mostly on quicksand.

If Speaking of Sex offers a bleak picture of the state of American women at the end
of the millennium, Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism, by F. Carolyn Graglia, paints that portrait in even darker hues. Graglia, who seems to be a rising star in the conservative movement--she has spoken at Federalist Society conferences and been published in The Women's Quarterly and The Weekly Standard--is also the wife of conservative University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia. (She was herself a lawyer in the 1950s before leaving her career to become a mother.) Graglia impatiently brushes aside recent dissident critiques of radical feminism. For her, they don't go far enough because they do not champion the cause of the "traditional" woman--whom, Grag-lia contends, feminists hate far more than they hate men.

Once, says Graglia, there was an idyll in which women enjoyed ample opportunities in the workplace as well as security and respect at home. This was achieved by an unspoken agreement between women (married or single) who pursued careers and those whose vocation was domesticity. The "women's pact" was to "let each other live peacefully without attacking one another's integrity": Housewives may have disapproved of career women and career women may have felt disdain for housewives, but they kept it to themselves. Then, in the 1960s, argues Graglia, a "revitalized feminist movement" shattered the pact, with Betty Friedan firing the first volley in The Feminine Mystique; women at home were left deprived of "female approbation," demoralized, and driven out into the work force.

The grain of truth in this is that many feminists did try to make the housewife a "pariah." (Recently, feminists have been quite sympathetic to homemakers' claims in divorce cases: Between aversion to traditional roles and solidarity with women against men, the latter usually wins.) But the notion of ample--let alone equal--job opportunity for women in the '50s is bunk. Indeed, most Americans at the time didn't think women should have equal opportunity, especially if they had a man to support them.

Graglia twists Friedan's words to suggest that all external barriers to women's careers had been removed; but Friedan was referring to formal barriers, such as company policies which explicitly prohibited the hiring of married women. Friedan also wrote that "[s]ubtle discrimination against women...is still an unwritten law today." Thus, the "unwritten law" at Time magazine was that a woman could be a researcher but could not rise to the rank of writer. As for the "women's pact," much of The Feminine Mystique is an account--unchallenged by Graglia--of the denigration of career women in the culture of the '50s, particularly in women's magazines.

There is also some truth in Graglia's description of the problems engendered by high divorce rates and the two-earner family. As a source of information, though, she is about as reliable as Rhode. Her account of the devastation easy divorce inflicts on women--based mostly on discredited feminist research, of all things--ignores the fact that two-thirds of the time, it's the wife who wants to end the marriage (and that in poll after poll, women are more likely to say that divorce is the best solution if a marriage isn't working out). Eager to insist that men are unfit to nurture children, Graglia vastly underestimates fathers' contributions to child care and asserts, contradicting every study I have seen, that "husbands of working mothers spend less time with their children than husbands of full-time housewives."

Unlike some conservatives, Graglia admits that most married women who work do so by choice. But like Rhode, she clearly believes that choices she dislikes are not authentic: These women have been seduced or bullied by feminists. Nor, despite her assurances to the contrary, is she quite willing to live and let live; if too many affluent, college-educated women pursue careers, she warns, it sends a bad message to the rest of society, and homemakers "suffer a tremendous loss of social prestige."

At its heart, Domestic Tranquility is not about social policy but about a grandiose vision of womanhood expressed in fittingly operatic terms: The suburban housewife becomes "the awakened Brünhilde," after the Wagnerian Valkyrie, who is roused from her magical sleep by Siegfried and yields to his passion, giving up her job as a warrior maiden. (Graglia never mentions that Siegfried then goes off to seek adventure and marries another woman, and that it all ends quite badly for everyone involved.)

Graglia's "awakened" woman, purged of "striving" and "aspirations of her own," is described as "luxuriating" in passive contentment. Except for a jab at feminists' disregard for the educational and civic activities of homemakers, such activities are conspicuously absent from Graglia's paeans to the "domestic vocation." Motherhood is presented primarily as a "biological role," reduced almost entirely to its physical aspects.

Indeed, it seems that Graglia's main objection to mothers' involvement in "market production" is not the time spent away from children but the unwomanly traits associated with it. Achievement in the workplace requires maintaining too much of a separate self and "keeps the woman's analytical mind racing"; and, "when a woman lives too much in her mind, she finds it increasingly difficult to live through her body."

This amazing portrait of true womanhood raises many questions. For one, it has little to do with historical reality: Most of our foremothers did not spend "long, tranquil hours of child care" but were very involved in economic production (sometimes in the house, sometimes outside of it). In fact, some scholars have made the interesting argument that feminism, in its classical sense of the movement for equality in endeavors outside the home, was the consequence of the removal of economically vital work from the home and the reduction of women's role to "personal relations with husband and children." Graglia also never quite explains feminism's ability to win women over, except for the suggestion that men had grown "effete" while women's maternal competence was undermined by an education which trained them to rely on thinking rather than intuition.

But the real paradox is that, while Graglia decries feminist calumnies against the housewife as passive, absorbed in tasks "unconnected with mental ability," and even "less than fully human," her "Brünhilde" evokes that very stereotype. Graglia even likens the maternal woman in her contentment to a bovine lying blissfully in a field of flowers, an image hardly less insulting than the comparison to brain-damaged patients for which Graglia indicts Friedan.

I am, of course, "responding with the constricted emotions of a spiritual virgin" (that is, a woman who keeps her "maiden self" intact) as well as showing my Western prejudices. In yet another irony, to defend her vision of traditional womanhood, the conservative Graglia has to denigrate the West, which overvalues "male mental creativity" and undervalues "physiological maternal creativity." Some segments of Western culture, apparently, are especially at fault: Graglia asserts that "Jewish men [are] more likely than others to disdain a woman's domestic endeavors and condition their respect upon her market accomplishments," which is why "Jewish women have been disproportionately represented in the women's libera-tion movement." (Beyond the question of whether this statement is anti-Semitic, it is certainly bizarre in view of the importance placed on the woman's role in the home in traditional Jewish culture.)

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