The Femine Mistake

...The most repulsive of the poets is the one who recently came out with a bit of prose on motherhood: Adrienne Rich, the intelligent, educated, talented, successful, and prosperous author of Of Woman Born...

...This book, put together by Carol Koneck and Dorothy Walters, also includes such expressions of female sensibility as these lines by Mary Gordon: "Mite, maggot, ovum, sperm, what are you...

...From there it was a short step to the attacks on "Mom"—works using psychoanalytic jargon to prove all social ills and personal problems were women's fault for raising their sons wrong...

...Or any genuinely self-realizing woman...

...Erica Jong, Manhattan Jewish poet, who writes a sexy novel about Isadora Wing, Manhattan Jewish poet, who writes a sexy novel about Candida Wong, Manhattan...Anyway, each of these beings is married to a Chinese psychiatrist, gets famous, discovers feminism, gets divorced, and so on to the young boyfriend who, for at least Erica and Isadora, spells happy ending...

...They wanted to forget K rations and Spam by giving little dinner parties where a splash of vermouth could turn canned mushroom soup into a French sauce...

...People of both sexes wanted furniture and candlesticks and washing machines and cars...

...Carter has shown an alarmingly visceral streak when under pressure.' " Like Lindsay, Carter has turned out to be more vulnerable to interest-group pressure than politicians who recognize from the start that they must negotiate with the interests if they are to maintain an effective coalition...

...Now that women have been delivered from marriage and the rest, there they are alone in the singles bar...

...Anne Crutcher The Feminine Mistake A. hundred years ago, feminism was wanting to vote, to go to college, to earn a living at a profession other than the oldest...

...In even the most prosperous Victorian households, nobody thought of investing in higher education for Arthur's sisters...

...However, the sad truth is that the American feminism of the last five years has taken more from its crazies than from her...

...This is what Adrienne Rich resents most...

...He had little education...

...My neat trick, my sweet genesis...

...It seems the one-night stands of the uncommitted have that aftertaste because capitalism has "commoditized" sex...

...It commits blasphemies against the real potentialities of feminine nature...

...Engineering, no...

...The pity is that all too many people think the only alternative to this sort of thing is Marabel Morgan and Total Woman...

...Erica-Isadora-Candida is a pathologically scared person—afraid not only of flying but of being like her family, of not being like her family, of failing, of succeeding, of having a baby, and of being alone in a hotel room for half an hour...

...The violated confidence, the cruel portrait of a friend, a lover, a parent, a home town...

...So does the image of the inviolate room of one's own...

...you have to take the bitter with the better, as Jane Ace used to say...

...Superb insights all...

...If it wasn't opening a second front, it was banning the bomb...

...The way it gloats over victimization would have Dr...

...Sexual pleasure is, after all, the ultimate reassurance, the ultimate sense of well-being...

...It was wanting to own property and to decide whom to marry without asking Papa...

...Nobody who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis, or seen a man with a bald spot comb his hair, should fall for that one...

...In "Three Guineas," she took on the Victorian proposition that women don't need to earn money because they share so fully in the resources of the men in their lives...

...Carter is now seen by many as a man prone to retreat too quickly...

...By the time she started NOW in 1966, the sexual revolution was in sufficiently full swing to take a new women's movement indirections that would have dismayed Susan B. Anthony...

...Virginia Woolf faced t.11 the embarrassing questions...

...All women think they're ugly," she says with an air of discovery, "even the prettiest ones"—the feminist cliche about "body loathing" as something unique to women...

...Its hedonism is the short-fuse kind, very quick to take out after individuals, "the system," or God any time the fun isn't fun anymore...

...There was always the honing of mind on mind within a self-confident elite...

...The pity was that everybody forgot them for 25 years...

...A place to be alone, and somebody else doing the housework...

...Coolly, she pointed out the obvious: that when sharing is a matter of largesse, it doesn't assume very large proportions...

...With someone you don't know and will never see again, there are none of the distracting, emotion-sapping emotions of a relationship where resentments, fears, and dependency can impede the flow of feeling...

...Yes indeed, but she finds she still needs the husband to hold on to...

...Of photographs of herself unzipping flies, she says only "Wouldn't you rather sell six million copies than be tasteful and not read...

...She understood the connections between successful functioning, power, and self-respect...

...The "zipless f--k...

...If she ran away to London to go on the stage as he did, either rape or passion Anne Crutcher is an editorial writer for the Washington Star...

...Psychoanalytic types used to say that all writers were either voyeurs or exhibitionists...

...If it wasn't doing away with the poll tax, it was lowering the price of hamburger...

...Women's real desires were more mixed than the most self-aware quite knew...

...Modern Women, The Lost Sex was a popular book in the 1940s...

...Or how about Virginia Gilbert's "I hope you realize I need your terrible goodbyes...

...The real Erica Jong, past 35, became pregnant only recently...

...Sure, she didn't have to have children...

...government faces the same dilemma...

...But that too can be explained...

...And she was Marxist enough to pin it on capitalism, which, if you recall your mythology, invented patriarchy and destroyed the sexual egalitarianism of the primal horde...

...That's how careful she is never to get pregnant...

...There was the building of the old-boy network so the elite could take care of its own and keep the outsiders out...

...She had three children and they made her miserable as well as happy...

...Ironically, the very growth of government makes them appear weak and ineffective...

...David Broder has emphasized that Carter's experience "tells you a great deal, not only about the inability of this President to achieve his goals, but about the inherent frustrations of a governmental process so big and complex as to overwhelm almost anyone...

...There will be another golden age, though, when motherhood as we know it has receded into anthropology...

...We know where Erica Jong fits...

...As Steven Roberts has written in the New York Times: "Citizens say they want Government off their backs, but they welcome Federal benefits....These demands on the Federal Government have been compounded by the enormous growth of special interest groups, which often concentrate on one issue: equality or theenvironment, birth control or gun control, prayer in schools or money in campaigns, saving the whales or saving the family...

...But she might have missed something...

...The conclusion had to be that the woman's share was her pearls and dresses...

...She would have been home learning to bake and brew while he was out talking to soldiers, travellers, tavern trulls, and courtiers...

...Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love," mourns Denise Levertov...

...So much for robust sensuality...

...The real avatar of this sort of feminism, however, is Erica Jong, poet, novelist, and career sensualist...

...many a male writer regrets not being able to go home again...

...As every parent knows, children are annoying, time-consuming, anxiety-provoking, and disappointing as well as infinitely beautiful, lovable, and fulfilling...

...On a larger scale, the U.S...

...It's all men's fault for inventing the forceps and being rapists and gynecologists and husbands who expect their socks to be washed...

...The examples are everywhere...

...Furthermore, she was as aware as any affirmative-action purist that Oxbridge and its American equivalents give their customers more than book-learning...

...10 The American Spectator June/ July 1978 At the same time, Virginia Woolf differed from most latter-day feminists in understanding equally well the positive side of women's deprivations...

...For every woman who thinks her breasts are too small, there's a man who thinks he's too small somewhere else...

...He noted that the "new" urban program made public on March 25, 1978, the product of an interdepartmental task force assigned the job a year earlier of getting rid of programs which did not work, "proved mainly to be a device for protecting every program of every agency represented....None of the 160 recommendations call for eliminating any single existing federal program—despite the almost universal acknowledgment that some of them are real losers...

...But she has always retained a certain heterosexual wholesomeness and clearly knows more about the joys of sexuality than any number of Gloria Steinems and Jill Johnsons...

...Writing in the Washington Post...

...If they're still not happy, it's because "Those in power can turn women's goals against them...

...A. nd then Betty Friedan discovered that it was a capitalist plot to sell diamond engagement rings and detergents that were bad for the environment...

...Women's handicaps were subtler and more pervasive than the most militant had supposed...

...Her book is a supreme example of contemporary feminism as childish rebellion against the fact that every known human situation, let alone relationship, is charged with tension and ambivalence...

...This is the feminist appropriation of a problem that hits writers regardless of gender...

...It has always been easy to make fun of her as a divorced middle-aged woman who would have trouble winning a beauty contest even against Bella Abzug...

...History had collaborated with Freud to set women up for this...

...There's an answerto that question: to have it with none of the responsibilities of a relationship...

...For all the brilliant effects of her self-education, this Victorian daughter always resented missing the university training her brothers got...

...In all social movements, every gain by the exploited has been manipulated and coopted by the rulers...

...It would make Mary Wollstonecraft blush...

...Men may not be expected to be "nice," but for them the same issues come up quite as often...

...But there's still Midge Decter...

...Betty Friedan's book summing up these perceptions, The Feminine Mystique, came out in 1963, when the pendulum was ready to swing...

...In infinitely sophisticated language, she goes through the whole catalogue of women's wrongs from the beginning when men spoiled the prehistoric golden age by inventing patriarchy...

...Fifty years ago, a few people were beginning to understand that it was a little more complicated than it looked...

...Carter has become increasingly subject to criticism which is strikingly similar to the kind that was directed at John Lindsay...

...Or you can skip them both...

...She saw how keeping women out of the professions and the more desirable economic activities denied them these elements of fulfilled humanity...

...Unbearable...

...Feminist writing in the recent past has taken new forms, making its case through poetry and the novel, history, biography, and literary criticism as well as straightforward tracts and pop-psych advice books...

...The weakness of the Carter presidency may be due largely to certain basic trends in democratic politics, specifically, the fact that welfare states are exposed to steadily increasing demands from growing numbers of well-organized interest groups, outside of and within the government...

...And then there's the one about women's need to be "nice...

...Her sexuality owes a good deal of its force and direction to her anxiety-proneness...

...No past, no tomorrow...

...She was humanist enough to feel that if she wasn't perfectly happy, something or somebody must be to blame...

...Those at the summit, mayors or presidents, are blamed for these failures and, not surprisingly, their popularity goes down...

...In spite of her surrender on the gay issue at the last women's conference, she is essentially a Fabian reformer rather than a kill-or-cure Jacobin...

...Now that she has been liberated from fear of self-exposure, sexploitation doesn't worry her any more than highbrow disdain for the TV hype...

...Some were lesbians, some castrating heterosexuals, a few even exponents of a sour chastity...

...Like Adrienne Rich, she is given to presenting as tragedies the inevitable disappointments of those who want contradictory things at the same time...

...It is an image that still conveys...

...Unborn...

...The capacity of politicians and governments to satisfy the often contradictory demands of these external constituencies and internal bureaucracies has declined...

...An Anne Sexton figure: the suicide whose self-destructiveness is somehow a matter of nobility and wisdom...

...By the time we reach middle life, we've all been The American Spectator June/ July 1978 11 deserted and robbed," says Carolyn Kizer in an anthology called I Hear My Sisters Saying...

...Betty Friedan's revolt against child-pampering, carpooling, house-proud suburbia roused a strain of radicalism that went beyond politics...

...And the Economist noted that the behavior of the White House has "made our conclusion of a year ago seem almost embarrassingly prophetic: `Mr...

...D 12 The American Spectator June/ July 1978...

...Linda Gordon's book, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, interlards fascinating history with Marxist-feminist rationalization...

...In idealizing the brute selfishness of a woman discarding a man she has used but doesn't need anymore, Erica Jong's heroine idealizes another exemplar of emotional parasitism...

...That was not what Betty Friedan had in mind...

...There was World War II, followed by the rush to the suburbs...

...A poem explains: "I fear the barnacle which might latch on and not let go...so I keep my womb empty and full of possibilities...

...Even where there is—and sometimes there is—education, scholarship, and literary skill, the final package is marred by paranoid psychology, a conspiratorial view of history, crassness, and a refusal to face the either/ or aspects of the human condition...

...Between them, these two essays sum up just about everything 20th-century women are up against in trying to express themselves as human beings with intellectual as well as emotional dimensions and with legitimate ambitions to have a hand in running their world...

...It was the hour of the Kate Millets and Germaine Greersangry, humorless women who put their considerable brains and education at the service of man-hating hysterias...

...Newsweek reported: "The complaint is commonplace in Washington that Carter, far from being the stiff-necked purist of Georgia legend, bends too easily under pressure...

...The author's problem is that women have won so much of what they asked for in the sexual sphere...

...An article in the New York Times commented: "Once perceived as being 'too stubborn,' Mr...

...She saw how privilege gets fat and goes slack even as it is being corrupted by the brutalities of competition within its own ranks...

...Naturally, she feels aggrieved because his hurt to' rance of her infidelity makes her feel guilty, which is uncomfortable...

...Freud nodding with satisfaction about how right he was when he said all women were masochists...

...It threatened to make Betty Friedan the Kerensky of feminism, bypassed by a new breed of women whose all-encompassing grievances made her complaints about housework and not being on the Supreme Court sound like polite murmurs...

...But 40 years ago, it was possible to see it all spelled out, complete with nuances, by a woman who knew how to transcend feminine disadvantage as well as how to identify it...

...In her two highly successful novels, Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, she is never more than an alias away from autobiography...

...Feminist self-justification reaches a peak in How to Save Your Own Life when the author moves from old-fashioned recriminations against the Chinese husband—not tender, won't talk to her—to trendy ones—he was a detour she would not have taken but for the conditioning society forces on females...

...It had the primordial force of birds flying south in the winter...

...By that time, Virginia Woolf had written both "A Room of One's Own" and "Three Guineas," the first in 1929 and the second in 1938...

...Virginia Woolf was very clear about the way intellectual achievement requires privilege...

...Spock's babies started letting their hair grow...

...And people might have called her childless...

...Women had enjoyed their wartime experience in factories and offices but they were as eager as the men who came home to them to start raising lawns and babies in split-levels of their own...

...Betty Friedan was your standard, mid-20th-century American liberal housewife, every gene programmed for protest...

...What then would there have been for her but to hang herself...

...The poets are all in a funk, those who haven't already killed themselves...

...Clear-cut, and rather humble, goals...

...Like Adrienne Rich, she is a talented writer...

...would have made her pregnant at 16...

...Today's feminist writing features the kind of sentimentality that dignifies severe neurosis and irresponsibility into social protest...

...It gives me something to look forward to...

...In her second book, Erica Jong becomes more explicitly feminist about blaming merely human problems on what "the system" lets men do to women...

...That was Flying...

...It was essentially a keep-them-barefoot-and-pregnant book, although it granted the possibility of careers in the "nurturing" professions such as medicine, education, and social work...

...Isolated, clean of memories and expectations...

...She is, Isadora says, the only one of her friends who never had an abortion...

...Scarcely any of it is any good...

...We may see women vindicated as full human beings yet...

...The leftist forces were gearing up for the civil-rights movement and the rediscovery of poverty but not yet ready to institutionalize Bohemia, as they were to do later when Dr...

...It loves to combine gross confessionalism with claims of being "a very private person...

...New York City broke down financially...

...If women were edgy, it was because they were violating their deepest natures by "rejecting the female role" in favor of competition with men...

...She compared figures on the money going into exclusively male causes and interests and the money going into projects women might share...

...This graceless term identifies Erica Jong's concept of the sexual encounter with a stranger...

...Those were the years when Freud was running things...

...As various publics have been educated to demand more from their governors, those in office find it impossible to deal with them...

...Meanwhile, there was the matter of "Arthur's Education Fund...

...She was bourgeois enough to marry and put a good deal of Jewish-mother intensity into polishing the kitchen floor and driving the children to their music lessons...

...What more could anybody ask...

...she would have had less...

...Sensible people think that's just the way it is...

...You know, the seemingly strong authority figure to be outgrown along with unnatural dependency needs...

...The hollowness of the sexuality behind such appeals to the porn crowd comes out in the extreme fear and distaste the Flying heroine has for babies...

...To answer the one about why so few female geniuses, she replied by introducing Shakespeare's sister...

...What would have happened...

...A hypothetical girl just like him in brains, energy, imagination—everything except sex...

...Or Virginia Woolf...

...Part of the impulse was a bottled-up longing for the consumer goods that hadn't been around during the war...

...As an example of self-pitying weakness glorified, this drama is the greatest thing since the last Victorian injustice-collector raised her neurasthenia to the status of a higher sensibility...

...And David Broder has stressed the inability of the Carter administration to stand up to the pressure exerted from inside government...