REVIEWS
Graff, Gerald & Greene, Robert W. & Coser, Rose Laub
THE NEW CHASTITY AND OTHER ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN'S LIBERATION, by Midge Decter. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 188 pp. $5.95. THE AMERICAN WOMAN, HER CHANGING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND...
...Most citizens preferred to retain traditional definitions of masculine and feminine spheres in practice...
...A commitment to Freud's "classic tragic realism," as Trilling once called it, has served him before as a point of moral reference for measuring some of the more self-indulgent tendencies of the age...
...Just as in Chafe's words, some "contemporary feminists often [show] an appalling ignorance of history" when they claim that "the `feminine mystique' is a new postWorldWar-II phenomenon," so Decter betrays a lack of historical sense when she notes that the feminists complain about women being pressured into becoming housewives at precisely the time they have more choices than ever before...
...But what brought about these changes...
...Trilling's important new book returns to this topic in the course of a critical assessment of the history and fate of the concept of authenticity in modern culture...
...Ethnocentrism in America, for example, has traditionally been more marked among Eastern Orthodox groups such as Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians, than it has been among Irish, Italians, or Poles, the three largest Roman Catholic groups in America...
...I shall return to this crucial point later...
...Even more than the Moscow trials of the 'thirties, the infamous event known to history as the Slansky trial, staged in 1952, marks a turning point in the story of revolution...
...Elsewhere, women ran lathes, cut dies, read blueprints, and serviced airplanes...
...What I object to in this final section is its visionary, almost utopian tone and substance...
...But just let me do a few talk bits...
...They are no longer useful or pragmatic, They are no longer true...
...Of course the Irish have too often been condescending and even abusive in their behavior toward other Catholic groups in America, and naturally this behavior has been resented...
...And of course the Irish have monopolized leadership positions not only in the Church, but also in politics, unions, and police and fire departments, frequently at the expense of other Catholics...
...Who needs to pay for servants or buy his wife a washing machine when he has a cock...
...Are the two sentences contradictory...
...Even if Decter were BOOKS 227 right that "the two determinants of pleasure" for a woman "cannot be understood by an analogy in the experience of man," does this mean, as she seems to tell us, that the woman's "pursuit of orgasm is an entirely irrelevant undertaking...
...These developments have lessened the artist's "adversary relation to the dominant culture," with a corresponding lessening of intellectual individuality...
...But this is precisely what she does not want to face...
...The pace of female employment quickened in the '50s, so that in 1960 twice as many women were at work as in 1940...
...Mr...
...Though Trilling does not mention this one specifically, fads like the put-on might be adduced as evidence of his contention that the once-subversive tradition of authenticity has been domesticated and trivialized by its recent popularity...
...8.95—at bookstores or from HORIZON PRESS 156 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 BOOKS plished, the kidder lets the victim know he's been taken for a ride...
...The bourgeois "establishment," cut off from its 19th-century traditions, has ceased to hold firm religious, moral, and intellectual convictions...
...multiple identity is real, right and good...
...This rigidification, Trilling suggests, is an aspect of "developments in the ecology of art" such as "the unprecedented proliferation of art, the ease with which formerly esoteric or repellent art forms are accepted, the fascinating conjunction of popular and commercial art with what used to be called advanced art...
...One of Novak's principal theses is that the nonnativist American does violence to his psyche and his sense of himself when he struggles to blend with the majority culture or the "superculture," to use Novak's preferred term...
...Women responded to the manpower crisis," writes Chafe, "with an unprecedented display of skill and ingenuity...
...CHAFE shows that women are not being kept out of the world of work as long as the rewards they earn and the commitments they make do not interfere with their dependent position in the household and their basic duties in the family...
...In only one other place in her book does Decter refer to inequalities of opportunities— though again without discussing them...
...However, Novak's decision to focus his study on the ethnic groups represented by Monsignor Baroni's catchy acronym, if in some respects justifiable, in the end has saddled his book with an orientation that seems to foreshorten its potential reach...
...Heda Kovaly tells the firsthand story of the holocaust which prefaced the ground for the revolution, of its day-by-day ferment, and its triumph...
...A complex, rapidly changing society, says the author, renders the traditional, unified self obsolete...
...The beautician who overnight became a switchwoman for 600 L.I...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...q * The May 1972 issue of Psychology Today features an article by Kenneth J. Gergen entitled "Multiple Identity...
...Brackman writes] is always manifest: to pass off untruth as truth just for the fun of it...
...By comparison, the new introduction to Nathan Glazer's and Daniel P. Moynihan's revised edition of Beyond the Melting Pot (M.I.T...
...Irrelevant for whom...
...Although the book aims to be suggestive rather than definitive, this failure to treat the causes of the tendencies it attacks is its most serious limitation...
...These concern the rewards a woman can expect from the work she does for her family, which are sharply at odds with rewards for other types of work...
...Trilling's effective restatement of this line of criticism demonstrates that it is far from obso lete...
...She does recognize that a woman depends on her husband for status, but only in the context of the advantages a woman derives from marriage, implying that this advantage (of "staking her very self on marriage") demands of her obligations in return...
...to be) a fluid and unconditioned fiction that is free to improvise infinite avatars of itself and its mythoplastic "reality," and both the self and reality are no more than a kind of undifferentiated oatmeal that can be kneaded and manipulated into the shape desired at each transitory moment...
...I concur in Novak's wishes, but wishing won't make it so, and the Democratic Convention in Miami last July provided little evidence that the McGovern wing (which for other reasons I personally supported) cared much about the plight and sensitivities of white ethnics...
...Indeed, it is because women today do have more choices and opportunities than extreme feminists are willing to admit that there is widespread discontent...
...There is great cultural variety in our midst, which we manage to tolerate but which we don't treasure...
...One's impression is that it is quite large"—leaves an unhappy, familiar ring...
...The melting-pot ideal, while more and more questioned these days, especially by minorities, is yet to be dislodged from its preeminent position in the minds of most Americans...
...With him career is the only and ultimate medium of self-definition...
...The woman not only cares for the family, she is given status by the man...
...Dreams of recapturing the supportive intimacy of the old ethnic ways, while cozy to linger in, will never inspire the actions required to transform them into realities...
...As bourgeois opposition has softened, the BOOKS 233 pressure of the adversary culture's resistance to co-optation has simultaneously lowered...
...Now one simply dismisses him as dead—a gesture that requires lesseffort, is unanswerable, and tends to suggest thatone is oneself vibrantly and excitingly alive...
...AS VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING I have said thus far indicates, it is my opinion that Novak's book constitutes a powerful and convincing brief on behalf of ethnic Americans and their legitimate grievances...
...In an essay entitled "New Heaven and Earth," Joyce Carol Oates writes: We have come to the end of, we are satiated with, the "objective," valueless philosophies that have always worked to preserve a status quo, however archaic...
...It is not so much, as Decter admits, that housework fails to be satisfying because it is a job one can never carry through and be finished with...
...As a second-generation Irish American, I wonder whether a nativist American can really appreciate how beautifully these two seemingly contradictory sentences sum up the very mixed feelings an ethnic American can have regarding his lot, especially an ethnic American who has "made it" in terms of upper-middle-class standards of success...
...q Gerald Graff On Culture and Society SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY, by Lionel Trilling...
...As Chafe notes, "If women had been as oppressed as the feminists claimed, no amount of rhetoric could have aroused them from their captivity...
...At a Fort Wayne, Indiana, General Electric Plant, where "many of the jobs required comparable skill and training...
...Its thesis is that "the healthy, happy human being wears many masks...
...As a result, Decter cannot deal with any issue that would lead to a contradiction with her main thesis, except through evasiveness...
...There are no pressures like the pressures to conform to the norm of lower-class expectations, expectations that are usually pegged pretty low as regards both occupational and personal aspirations...
...Women, it seems, do not know how good they have it, do not know that they are getting something for nothing...
...William Chafe's book cannot be done justice in this review...
...BOOKS elusively or primarily to the family...
...Why should women liberationists complain about the dulling aspects of housework...
...Michael Novak's book, whatever its shortcomings, demonstrates and embodies this basic truth in unforgettable fashion...
...His second sentence tells another story or, more precisely, shows the other side of the coin...
...Certain passages in the writings of Laing and Cooper go so far as to endow schizophrenia and madness with the authority of visionary revelation...
...THE AMERICAN WOMAN, HER CHANGING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ROLES, 1920-1970, by William H. Chafe...
...Along with Andrew Greeley in Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...It is here especially that Novak's deeply felt need to respond to Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority comes to the fore...
...One of the authors, Heda Kovaly, a survivor of Auschwitz, was the wife of Rudolf Margolius, a dedicated young Communist whom the Czechoslovak Communist Party placed in a high government position only to execute him as a conspirator, and finally a decade later to declare him innocent...
...What she will not entertain is the idea that one might question the whole societal arrangement that makes a woman dependent on marriage and family in a way a man is not...
...Moreover, she has chosen what sort of house 2 Cynthia Epstein's work, especially her excellent and probing book Woman's Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), is not quoted once...
...Trilling suggests that the awareness of the protean nature of consciousness, entertained with ambivalence by the earlier modernist writers, has today reached an extreme phase, expressing itself in an unqualified negation of all "limiting conditions" on the self...
...And these same professors often deny financial support to a woman because she is a "bad risk," thus strengthening in her the notion that the choice between family commitment and career is a zero-sum game...
...Origins are after all people and places and things and customs and words and habits and values, not all of which he really wants to discard or forget about...
...Kohak's description of the events from 1938 to the present are masterly as history, clarifying as interpretation...
...At first, the victim believes the false to be true, whereas the kidder knows the truth...
...Appropriately, it is the nephew's character upon which Hegel draws in the Phenomenology of Mind in order to illustrate his notion of the "disintegrated consciousness...
...Marcuse defines revolutionary consciousness in terms of the polymorphous self...
...As an approach to such a diagnosis, I would suggest the following...
...If one wishes really to understand a social movement, one must analyze its dynamics, the conditions that give rise to it, clear up the confusions between ideology and reality, and distinguish the rhetoric (the usefulness of which should not be underestimated) from what is socially and historically relevant, if I may be permitted that much abused word...
...But then he feels guilty about hating his origins because it is disloyal and ungrateful to do so...
...7.95...
...the leadership of Dubcek...
...On the one side there is the stress on family commitment...
...In that sense his book is a perfect illustration of the unexamined interethnic tensions within Catholic America he only alludes to briefly...
...Greeks outside Greece, Syrians outside Syria, and Armenians outside Armenia tend to see themselves as dwelling in a kind of diaspora, as still connected somehow to the Old Country, while Polish America, Irish America, and Italian America exhibit a significant degree of autonomy, exist as social entities no longer directly dependent upon the Old Country, though to be sure not yet totally merged with the New...
...This imperative anchors and affirms "the authenticity of him to whom the fate is assigned...
...1, 1967, pp...
...Like Paul Goodman, Trilling has fought a continuous battle against the assumption of liberal, technological society that, as Goodman phrased it, "the essence of `human nature' is to be pretty infinitely malleable" and thus subject to unlimited manipulation and control...
...There has taken place in the present century a cultural transformation of the bourgeoisie itself, which has deprived the adversary culture of the resistance that once stimulated its creative self-definition...
...He builds up the evidence to demonstrate the contradiction between economic practices and social ideals...
...Of the half-dozen studies of white ethnicity in America that have appeared during the past couple of years, Michael Novak's The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics is probably the most valuable—and the most abrasive...
...The main point, however, is not whether housework is boring or diversified, whether it is grubwork or self-expressive, but that in a society in which achievement is measured by the amount of knowledge, training, and talent it requires, no person, whether man or woman, is likely to get much satisfaction from a type of work that anyone can do...
...Trilling's distinction between authentic and sincere character models might be further illuminated by aligning it with Jacob Brackman's distinction, in his book, The Put-On, between the "put-on" and the old-fashioned practice of "kidding...
...By 1970, the labor force contained 60 percent of all wives from homes with an annual income of more than $10,000...
...Although she devotes a whole chapter to housework, Decter does not deal with the basic factors underlying the problem (neither did the women liberationists whom she attacks...
...But Decter uses their rhetorical claims of oppression mostly to score polemical points, as when she says that the complaints of women liberationists "make up a kind of grand chorus whose unified melodic theme is that women...
...Press, 1970) offers far more useful suggestions for constructing our future as a richly pluralistic instead of a distressingly fragmented society...
...The family has changed before, and, as it survives, can change again...
...This psychological experimentalism, which the adversary culture had initiated as a form of discipline, becomes mediated and trivialized by the machinery of consumerism and publicity...
...For Novak and other ethnics, America produces "lonely crowds," masses of rootless people ever on the move, competing mercilessly with one another and at the same time assiduously avoiding contact with one another...
...The method that Novak implicitly advocates for achieving an ethnic Democratic party amounts to a return to the old, small, densely textured ways of family and neighborhood, essentially to a bygone ethnicity, as the source of secure identities and all things good...
...A final, major difference between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Americans: in part, no doubt BOOKS because of the relatively few doctrinal differences separating Episcopalianism from Eastern Orthodoxy, a Greek in America may turn Protestant, thereby joining the religion of the majority culture, sooner than, say, a Pole...
...Spiro Agnew and Edmund Muskie illustrate this perfectly...
...And commitment is something women are supposed to owe ex bivalence," Social Science and Medicine, vol...
...She even uses the term culture as if it were a natural force, when she says that a woman has "been appointed by all of culture" to be "the server rather than the served" and that "as a creature of culture woman has been trained to accept the appointment...
...As a result of these developments we have a rapprochement today between avant-garde intellectuals and mass society that promises to reestablish in the cultural sphere a complacency comparable to what was witnessed in the American 'SOs...
...It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that marriage could be more important for a woman than for a man—a view Decter proclaims without qualifications and at great length...
...What Lenny Bruce caught in his unique idiom has become the object of increased analysis in 230 the last decade or so—the assimilation, or at least benign toleration, by a large segment of the middle class, of cultural attitudes originally designed to affront it...
...Though somber in its implications, Freud's view attributes to life a certain stability which lends scope to human operations...
...This despairing and apologetic self-dramatization makes a greater concession than seems neces sary to the naive apocalypticism which he at tacks...
...yet, the proportion of women in business and the professions has hardly changed at all...
...Despite the revolutionary aspirations that have accompanied the drive to free the self from all boundaries and limits, Trilling finds a kind of despair beneath it all, a feeling that life is not "susceptible of comprehension and management...
...because she has asked it of him and he has not dared to refuse," but he has to "produce living, visible, upright evidence of...
...These basic facts—the occupational structure of prestige-grading and the highly deBOOKS veloped industry for home consumption— make most of the housewife's work anachronis tic and obsolete...
...The new accommodation between high and mass culture is alleged to represent a cultural revolution of liberating proportions, "the end of alienation...
...There is no better way of conveying the flavor of Decter's book than to start out in her own manner: Last year, a woman named Midge Decter (or a Miss Midge Decter)—a journalist, housewife, and mother of four—published a book called The New Chastity.' The object of her book is to justify her aversion to the feminist movement...
...OUR NEED at this juncture, it seems to me, is to live through our present malaise and to build a more harmonious and worthwhile future by setting straight the record of our various, double-edged pasts...
...So deeply engrained is this cultural mandate in everybody's mind that even some of the most extreme feminists con firm it in their very protestations...
...And having by luck, persistence, or unarguably superior qualification secured the desired training, they were still likely to undergo great difficulty in establishing themselves as qualified practitioners...
...With the put-on the distinction between truth and untruth is obscured, and the "real" identity and intention of the perpetrator remain ambiguous, even to the perpetrator himself...
...Also, his fervor is balanced most of the time by intellectual rigor and erudition...
...4 CF., "The Dysfunctionality of the Husband Provider Role in Industrialized Societies," by Erik Gr¢nseth, paper delivered at the Seventh World Congress of Sociology, 1970...
...In 1945 as in 1940, women earned only 65 percent of what men received," and we know that the situation isn't better in 1970...
...Not only does Decter make him seem to be a victim of women's expectations because he will "marry...
...On the contrary, the abandonment of critical thinking to a politics of ecstatic consciousness clears the way for further acquiescence to existing forms of social control.* As Trilling says, a propos of certain contradictions in Marcuse's writing, the "political implications of reduced individuality" are far from promising...
...The earlier ideal of sincerity, which arose in the Renaissance as a result of an unprecedented awareness of the deviousness of public life, did not entail a repudiation of public and social experience as such...
...It prevents him from examining in depth a subject that obviously fascinates him: American Catholicism as a kind of uneasy alliance among certain white ethnic groups who, despite their differences, constitute a single subculture that is almost as distinct from Eastern Orthodox America as it is from nativist America...
...All the surveys show that in families where the wife works, the husband takes part to some extent in activities that traditionally were labeled the woman's realm, and the wife takes part in decisions that heretofore were considered the realm of the husband...
...Novak wants to see an ethnic Democratic party, not the ethnic Republican party of Phillips...
...At the same time, the recognition of the ubiquity of masks in human experience has generated a literature of "unmasking" which undertakes profound explorations into the "heart of darkness" concealed by moral and social convention...
...but no, there is none...
...Most strik ingly, economic activities were not limited to the poor or the single...
...Here the ideas of openendedness and authenticity have merged with the slogans of affluent-society optimism...
...Many ethnics, Novak among them, believe that their strong family feeling and tribal sense are infinitely healthier in the long run for both themselves and the larger society than is the nativist's "pursuit of loneliness...
...Decter's statement—"it is difficult to say just how large a contingent of lesbians has been exerting influence on and through Women's Liberation...
...on the other, a stress on the priority of intellectual achievement by professors who "put [women] in the way of rigorous intellectual work...
...New York: Dutton, 1971) , Novak sees the melting pot ideal as having fostered not self-determination but an atomization of people...
...We are tired of the old dichotomies: Sane/Insane, Normal/Sick, Black/White, Man/Nature, Victor/Vanquished, and—above all this Cartesian dualism I/It...
...The Road to Wigan Pier, 19371...
...only the women in the highest female grouping received as much as the men in the lowest male category...
...But as I have also suggested, it seems to me that Novak made a serious mistake when he took as the scope of his study the groups represented by Geno Baroni's acronym PIGS (Poles, Italians, Greeks, Slays...
...As Chafe reports, the main impetus for women to enter the labor force took place during World War II, when 6 million women took jobs—an increase in the female labor force of 50 percent, raising the female proportion of the labor force from 25 percent in 1940 to 35 percent of all workers in 1950...
...Indeed, the inner logic of the doctrine of authenticity seems to foreclose the possibility of actually arriving at an authentic state of being, since any state of arrival would be static and thus by definition inauthentic...
...Her husband, working by day and demanding the full range of her attentions by night, does not enjoy her costly luxuries of choice...
...Just as for some extremists among the feminists all men are exploiters and oppressors, so for Decter all women liberationists are immature and irresponsible...
...With respect to this question Trilling forces us to make what we can out of a few suggestive hints, hints that unfortunately are not developed into any general hypothesis...
...I can't take the bit out...
...An Austrian aristocrat and designer of perfume bottles took a job as a precision toolmaker...
...In one Eastern war plant, male trainees received a higher wage than the women training them...
...ments about all men or all of humankind that leave no room for exceptions or ambiguities, so Decter speaks of the movement of women's liberation as if it were all of one cloth, as if there were not many kinds of feminists, from those who would destroy "the establishment" to those who demand more equality within it...
...7.95...
...As Trilling observes, it is "significant of our circumstance that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency...
...From Hitler's unleashing of fury on the Czech people to the role of the Communists in the resistance...
...The abolition of distinctions between reality and myth, sanity and insanity, would appear to be coming at just the right moment for governments whose policies depend upon keeping citizens from making such distinctions...
...Economic practices and social ideals were at odds...
...It is women liberationists' rejection of such obligations that Decter calls "irresponsible...
...Along with Novak, the "successful" ethnic feels unworthy because he has come to accept the superculture's caste and class system and accompanying moral imperative: rise and as similate...
...No clearer illustration could be found of the compatibility of the "radical" psychology of protean man with the requirements of social "adjustment...
...Then, the gulling accomThe VICTORS and the VANQUISHED by Heda Kovaly and Erazim Kohak I his moving book is the result of the experience of dialogue in which foes discover their common humanity...
...He envisions ethnic groups that will be not just interest groups but cultural groups as well, bearers of unique and unprocessed traditions, alternative modes of living to the hyperrationalized lifestyle of the superculture...
...Enough of a de facto change has taken place in woman's role to weaken the traditional myth and to bring into awareness the contradiction between the reality of woman's economic role and the ideology of her place in the home...
...The condition in which large numbers of people are forced to relieve a diminishing sense of selfhood by experimenting with the psyche is not a matter to be derided...
...therefore, nothing much prevents it from co-opting "radical" cultural styles for the uses of the media and the marketplace (especially since such cultural permissiveness requires no redress of material and social inequalities...
...Decter repeats this 19th-century argument in regard to late20thcentury women...
...The comedian Lenny Bruce occasionally used to open nightclub performances by stating his intention to piss on the audience...
...Kohak's achievement is of transcendent value...
...Although she admits that women are "far from having attained a full parity of opportunity," she drops this issue after all of four and a half lines...
...Precisely by understanding the limits of man's ability to transform himself, this view delimits an area in which intelligent direction can be effective...
...Novak has about as much difficulty BOOKS not bringing up the Irish as he has talking about the Greeks...
...has chosen to be a housewife...
...In this, Hegel anticipated the strategy of numerous modernist writers (Wilde, Yeats, Gide, Sartre) of assuming successive "masks" in quest of an authenticity superior to that of the predefined and predetermined self-concepBOOKS tions of bourgeois society...
...321 pp...
...But he cannot help recognizing that such an unfocused self is likely to be more easily manipulated—the final irony of the revolt he encourages against "limiting conditions"— and "that moral intransigence and political activism are brought into being by renunciation and sublimation," i.e., that radicalism depends on the survival of critical intelligence...
...Her explanation betrays short-sightedness, for she assumes that the contradictory social expectations facing women allow them choices of equal weight...
...She merely trivializes the issue by selecting for quotation some poorly reasoned statement by an extremist opponent...
...And such dreaming tends to gloss over the paralyzing constrictions of the old ethnic ways...
...Novak also makes the important point that while white ethnics are essentially "network" people who are plugged into extended family and neighborhood relationships, the dominant culture prizes individuality and views each person as somehow detached from his immediate social setting...
...Such statements will appear retrograde to some intellectuals, who interpret a lack of sympathy with the outlook of the New Sensibility as a symptom of a "new cultural conservatism," which presumably carries over into politics...
...One consequence of this is seen in the crafts of fiction and historical writing, where the theory of the radical open-endedness of experience has diminished the prestige of narrative form and storytelling...
...The other author, Erazim Kohak, is the noted Czechoslovak social philosopher first exiled after the Communist Coup in 1948 and for the second time after the Soviet occupation in 1969...
...The book must be read not only for the information it presents, but as a model of how to combine ideological sophistication with objective writing...
...But the truly serious way of dealing with the issue would have been to select for discussion some women liberationists of stature, for example, Cynthia Epstein or Alice Rossi...
...Yet, women's participation in the labor force has become so massive that the ideology that insists the woman's place is in the home could not survive unscarred...
...Decter uses this as an illustration of the women liberationists' rejection of sexual submission, but she does not ask the obvious question: why should a woman who rebels against matrimony take it for granted that he is the one to buy his wife a washing machine when she is the one who earns the money...
...Novak foresees a coalition within the Democratic party of confident, assertive, and yet cooperating and mutually respectful ethnic groups...
...Of course the Irish have functioned as self-appointed spokesmen for Catholic America and have played the "house" Catholic to the "field" Catholic of Poles, Italians, etc., for the benefit of "massa" WASP...
...In Beyond Culture (1968), Trilling interprets Freud's "emphasis on biology" as a "liberating idea" because of its implication that 232 "there is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control...
...At a time when more than 70 percent of all women college graduates are in the work force, women are still thought of as a sex generically tied to the home...
...Rousseau's "honest soul," which was counterposed against the corruption and hypocrisy of established society, presupposed its own social ideal...
...Women defined their work as a contribution to the well-being of the family and as such it was accepted as an extension of woman's tradi tional commitment, without challenging the man's role as provider and the woman's role as carer for the family...
...They had difficulty battling their way into certain professional schools, such as medical schools and engineering schools...
...But where have we heard such an argument before...
...A married woman was not thought of as an equal in the labor force...
...The most striking feature of the 'S0s was the degree to which women continued to enter the job market and to expand their sphere...
...This being greeted usually by much laughter and applause, Bruce would then say: Always so much acceptance, you see that...
...And she does the same in regard to women's restricted opportunities in the professions...
...The put-on, by contrast, "is an open-end form...
...In other words, and this is crucial, they have never belonged as groups to the American working class, as the Irish, Italians, and Poles have...
...He senses that the very system which holds out the promise of affluence and belonging would have him utterly devalue his earliest formative experiences...
...But "conservatism" has become an almost meaningless term in the arts today when constant innovation for its own sake and total rejection of the past have become routinely expected norms of "advanced art," and when the mere belief that a work of art should have some meaning is sufficient in many quarters to convict one of being "conservative...
...AGAINST THE DIZZINESS of the new authenticity, Trilling counterposes a rival concept of authenticity, best exemplified for him by the Freud of Civilization and its Discontents...
...Prestige-seeking, however, is discouraged for women (who wants to be a "career woman...
...Trilling's endorsement of the Freudian view against the new vogue of the protean self thus parallels the strategy of his earlier critiques of liberalism: The fabric of contradictions that Freud conceives human existence to be is recalcitrant to preference, to will, to reason...
...At still an earlier time, the Calvinist view of man as so feeble a reed that he cannot claim to even know the design of the creator had the consequence not of making Calvinist believers sink into apathy, but of making them turn their energies to working and striving in this world, thereby contributing to the most rapid advance of an economic system that the world has ever known...
...But this does not take account of the crucial fact that there is a general concensus in society about a woman's cultural 226 mandate to fulfill her traditional role (a fact equally ignored by those feminists who make men personally responsible for conditions of inequality...
...234 BOOKS Robert W. Greene Unmeltable Ethnics THE RISE OF THE UNMELTABLE ETHNICS, by Michael Novak...
...This obsolescence of the housewife stands in sharp contrast to the hitherto unquestioned cultural mandate for the woman to be in charge of family and home...
...But should a woman not want to be married, this would be due to "unnatural fear or lust for punishment . . ." (emphases added...
...2 An examination of such writers would have seriously impaired her effort to demonstrate that women liberationists (all of them...
...Small wonder, then, that his discourse abruptly shifts down at times into bitter accusation (e.g., his chapter entitled "Confessions of a White Ethnic") and up at other times to the level of exalted prophecy, especially in his final two chapters called "The New Ethnic Politics...
...How else could she tell us that women choose freely to be housewives...
...This seemingly trivial example sums up the cultural mandate that caring for the family is the woman's task and equipping it that of the man...
...For Hegel, this multiple consciousness represents a progressive advance of Spirit in its evolution toward ever greater consciousness of itself...
...Last, the logic of perpetual transcendence tends to subvert the very concept of an adversary culture, requiring the liquidation of "reactionary" or "elitist" dualisms which oppose intellectuals to society...
...She describes it from within, as one of the victors who were soon to become the revolution's intimate victims, as well as her experience of the great rebirth which culminated in the brief Spring of Freedom in 1968 and the searing aftermath of Soviet occupation...
...It seems that at one time intellectuals tried to discredit an opponent by demonstrating he was wrong...
...Novak's study contains numerous intriguing comparisons of the Catholic versus the Protestant temper and mentality...
...In short, Die to one life so as to be born again to another...
...She should know that social movements never arise at the high point of misery and oppression, but rather at a time when enough advantages have been gained to illuminate the distance that remains to complete freedom and equality...
...And I think something in the spirit must indeed rebel at writing like the following, which comes conveniently to hand from the November issue of the Saturday Review of the Arts...
...Trilling believes that since the collapse of the traditional social order and its unified world view around the close of the 18th century, sincerity has progressively given way to authenticity as the dominant ideal of moral consciousness...
...distinctions between subject and object, reality and illusion, etc., have been abolished, the "self" is now (or is shortly * George Orwell's remarks on the "proletariancant" of the '30s are pertinent once more: "Everyone knows, or ought to know by thistime, how it runs: the bourgeoisie are 'dead' (afavorite word of abuse nowadays and very effective because meaningless), bourgeois culture is bankrupt, bourgeois `values' are despicable, andso on and so forth...
...This Decter does not deal with, nor can she deal with it as long as she uses as her main documentation the excesses of her opponents...
...Being raised in an unaffluent, poorly educated, and nonachievement-oriented household and neighborhood (still the rule rather than the exception for most working- and lower-middleclass ethnic Catholic youngsters) can completely stifle whatever potential for growth and development a child may have...
...Openendedness loses its radical, liberating force in a social context that not only is itself bewilderingly open-ended and without fixed referencepoints but which turns such metaphors into media cliches...
...trains represented but one example...
...At present, most female college graduates are employed...
...As to Midge Decter, her book provides an instructive example of how ideological rigidity can blind a brilliant writer so that she becomes incapable of dealing with facts that less capable minds would have no trouble recognizing...
...Just as some extremists among the liberationists relish categorical state 1 The first sentence of the book reads: "In 1963, a woman named Betty Friedan—a journalist, housewife, and mother of three—published a book called The Feminine Mystique...
...Furthermore, as capitalist, technological society becomes more meaningless and impersonal and outlets for social boredom become more necessary, there arises an increased taste for psychological experimentalism—e.g., "immediate experience," "exploration of inner space," encounter-group psychology, etc...
...199 pp...
...This thesis is of course not new, but Novak's version of it is especially compelling because it is couched not in jargon but in the heart-felt language of the diary or notebook...
...But equality of pay would establish the principle of woman's equality with man in the home as well, a notion subversive of the traditional concept of the man as provider...
...The popular magazines, which had contained laudatory articles on women's war contributions (one issue of Life featured a pigtailed pilot on its cover) now "were full of articles that revived shibboleths about women's inferiority and questioned the BOOKS ability of females to compete with men...
...potency," and for him "each incidence of potency in bed [provides] intestinal reassurance of his adequacy to deal with the world outside it...
...Such a olalec tical perspective is found in much of the social criticism of the 1950s expressing the reaction against "other-directedness" and conformity...
...He is no longer attached to the soil, is he...
...That is to say, it is rarely climaxed by having the `truth' set straight—when a truth, indeed, exists...
...In Decter's case, this ambivalence consists in the contradiction between her liberal values in regard to equality and her conservatism in regard to conjugal relationships...
...The object of kidding...
...This evasiveness contrasts sharply with the emphasis with which she vents her indignation at women liberationists...
...Rather, it is because the latter clarifies and explains the issues that the first angrily sweeps under the rug...
...7.95...
...But surely she must know that social movements proceed according to a logic of their own...
...Rather, arrangements within the family will change if and when women assume an equal place in the economic and professional marketplace...
...Novak is evidently aware, even if he scarcely emphasizes it in his book, that his very ability to articulate the pain and frustration of his fellow PIGS correlates highly with the distance that he has 236 traveled from his lower-class, Slovak, Catholic origins...
...This culture's inveterate suspicion of theory and programmatic principles—a corollary of the doctrine of authenticity—has been the source of its traditional immunity to exploitation by ideological interests...
...After all, if there are permanent human imperatives, as Trilling thinks, then something in the spirit must eventually rebel when these imperatives are repeatedly denied...
...After all, why should a woman be expected grate fully to receive her status from her husband in a society in which she has been brought up and educated to be able to obtain it for herself...
...Those who really have it in them and work hard through the night can make it—if only they want to...
...BOOKS wife to be...
...This is the new voice of authority: the Western purposive ego is dead...
...The sacramental overtones of the melting pot ideal, he ultimately discovers, are all-pervasive...
...Yet, Trilling speaks almost as if he considers himself the last survivor of this tradition, rarely missing an opportunity to describe his own views as "archaic" or "anachronistic...
...As soon as the war ended, women's contributions were forgotten...
...They worked as stevedores, blacksmiths, foundry helpers, and drill-press operators...
...As a rule, ethnics haven't been encouraged to let themselves reflect upon or to discuss with others how they feel about forsaking one class (working or lower-middle) for another (upper-middle...
...INSOFAR as the contemporary avant-garde has persisted in this kind of thinking, it has tended to lose its adversary thrust, a development that Trilling, as we have seen, ascribes to changes in "the ecology of art...
...Women workers sought jobs, not careers," and "every aspect of female employ ment seemed designed to mute the suggestion that traditional modes of female behavior were under attack...
...The history of such movements as Futurism suggests the area of latent agreement which has always existed between certain avant-gardes and technological society—e.g., the taste for perpetual innovation, the exaltation of technique over ends, the hostility to tradition—and such agreement enhances the likelihood of co-optation...
...Note here the implication that what "we are tired of" need not count as true or real, that the criterion of the truth of a proposition is now to be its capacity to interest or give pleasure...
...In contrast, a woman "has no further obligation but just to be there and to open herself to the exertion of others...
...In Gary, Indiana, women maneuvered giant overhead traveling cranes and cleaned out blast furnaces...
...As a result, her reasoning all too often gives out to make room for the use of the slippery argument from biological nature...
...203-218...
...Alice Rossi is quoted once, and this from a secondary source...
...In Beyond Culture, Lionel Trilling termed this phenomenon "the legitimization of the subversive," specifically referring to the postwar social and academic respectability of the literature of the avant-garde "adversary culture...
...Yet as soon as an ethnic does start thinking or talking honestly about these matters, he realizes that his private reaction to his public success, to his attaining suburban-professional-uppermiddleclass status, is an intense and confused mass of negative and positive feelings, succinctly conveyed in Novak's sentences...
...Piss on us first, then you'll do the rest of it...
...THE NEW CHASTITY AND OTHER ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN'S LIBERATION, by Midge Decter...
...are simply in no condition to take their rightful place in the world of men...
...Such issues, however, are hardly dealt with by Decter...
...The housewife who weeps with angry exhaustion...
...The problem, she tells us, "turns out to be about . . . the difficulties women are experiencing with the rights and freedoms they already enjoy...
...Recourse to such absolute notions as "nature" and "instinct" is not surprising, since the appeal to deterministic forces is part and parcel of the categorical mode of thinking mentioned earlier, in which the world is seen as white or black and in which variability and relativity are alien concepts...
...And again, "a Miss Madeline Belkin described the experienceof being secretary...
...Clearly, this young woman is protesting against the man not liv ing up to the traditional expectation that he provide her with household equipment...
...And he would surely be enlightening if he were to elaborate upon his single perceptive sentence (on p. 55) contrasting the French of Louisiana (Cajuns) with those of New England (French Canadians...
...The professors who seemingly offer an alternative choice by making demands on a woman's intellect often expect her not to select a career...
...But that's just Novak's first sentence resonating, just the rage hissing through clenched teeth...
...Nevertheless, women continued to receive less pay than men...
...That is to say, they are no longer authentic...
...Addressing a lay audience on the subject of sexual symbolism, he said: "Of course, ladies and gentlemen, I don't deny that the Zeppelin is also a means of transportation...
...In an essay first published in 1941 (and reprinted in The Liberal Imagination, 1950), Trilling asserts that "the Freudian man is, I venture to think, a creature of far more dignity and interest than the man which any other modern system has been able to conceive...
...ONE MAIN CHARACTERISTIC of the book is indeed that Decter does not let her thesis be confused by facts...
...It has also been a kind of liberation and delight...
...He hates his origins because they represent so many unsought burdens, so many stigmata of his lowly station at birth...
...The primary strength of Novak's book is that it brilliantly articulates the pain and frustration of those Americans who constitute perhaps our least visible minority, the descendants of nonJewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe: Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slays...
...This accounts for the discrepancy, which Chafe shows so well, between the high participation of women in the labor force and their low participation in the professions...
...It speaks of liberation and delight, not of assaults on anyone's sense of worthiness...
...A line of American critics, from the early Van Wyck Brooks to Richard Chase, John W. Aldridge, and Alfred Kazin, has shared Trilling's conviction that sharply individuated character type needs a dialectic within which to operate, that it tends to disappear in a fluid, BOOKS incoherent, and faceless society...
...Yet its very elasticity and resistance to static formulations makes the adversary culture not only highly unstable as a force of opposition but vulnerable to another type of exploitation—subservience to a dynamic but incoherent and superficial mass society...
...Evasiveness, as I have shown elsewhere, 3 3 "Evasiveness as a Response to Structural Am 228 is a way of dealing with ambivalence...
...Furthermore, the fact that man is incurably divided against himself and his culture provides a context of resistance which makes individual self-definition possible...
...We must get to know ourselves as wholly as possible in order to accept both the good and the bad in us, perhaps for the first time...
...At this point we might expect some comment...
...He speaks of the same events from the perspective of the vanquished, the idealistic democrats who sought not to seize power but to humanize it...
...But more...
...Like most social movements, he tells us, the new feminism has several constituencies and boasts much division and controversy, even though all its wings share some basic demands: to end discrimination in jobs and education, to repeal abortion laws, and to create child-care centers...
...Decter completely ignores the allpervasive strength of a value system that dictates that a woman should be in charge of her family (a dictum she seems to agree with...
...4 To say this is not, as some extreme women liberationists seem to believe, to say that the family has to be destroyed...
...Instead of cooperation among rugged loners, the American reality has been something else altogether, as ethnics have always known and as Novak's chapter entitled "The Nordic Jungle: Inferiority in America" shows with chilling eloquence...
...Trilling here sees Freud as reinstating "the tragic element of Judaism and Christianity" in an age which has lost the objective moral authority which gave solidity to those systems...
...When she briefly and parenthetically admits the lack of parity in regard to opportunities for women, she simply drops the matter, as if it were trivial...
...I also have reservations about Novak's conservative stance, his prejudice in favor of the past, an aspect of his book that has been brilliantly analyzed by Robert Alter in the June 1972 Commentary...
...She describes what I am sure she would agree are plain facts: First of all, women were often discriminated against...
...The target of her hostility is the whole movement, but she selects as evidence for her case mostly statements by extremists whose fanaticism parallels her own...
...But none of that in any way diminishes the indisputable fact that in religion, in relationship to the Old Country, and in actual or residual class self-concept, most if not all ethnic Catholic groups in America, including the Irish, have more in common with one another than any of them has in common with most Eastern Orthodox groups...
...As for workers, have they been incited by troublemaking reds...
...He has a hard time of it...
...I was particularly disappointed by the book's concluding section entitled "The New Ethnic Politics...
...His imagination of thehuman condition preserves something—much—of the stratum of hardness that runs throughthe Jewish and Christian traditions as theyrespond to the hardness of human destiny...
...Another is found in the psychological and social theories of Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, and David Cooper, where the dissolution of the strongly individuated ego is often equated with personal and social liberation...
...What specifically strikes me as wrong-headed is that he almost excludes the Irish and includes the Greeks—and I don't think that I am merely reacting as a slighted Irish American when I say this...
...emphasis added...
...This has been a significant spur to the rise of the women's liberation movement...
...But what is being claimed as the end of alienation might more accurately be described as its democratization...
...moreover this sincerity harmonized with certain simple, unified moral norms acknowledged by the generality of mankind...
...In Detroit the female labor force soared from 182,000 to 387,000, while in San Francisco it grew from 138,000 to 275,000...
...This, after all, is also true for gratifying kinds of work: research, for example, where it often takes years to finish, or a physician's work with patients who won't get or stay better...
...Wouldn't the fact that, as Chafe tells us, the median income of working women with college degrees is only 51 percent of that earned by men with a comparable education be enough to arouse indignation...
...In eight of ten war-impacted cities surveyed by the Women's Bureau, the number of women workers doubled from 1940 to 1945...
...America is a pluralistic society in spite of itself...
...it comes from inside the experience rather than from outside the problem...
...the power of the Soviet thrust in 1968 "with a force greater than that which the Americans deployed in Vietnam," down to the present, the entire epoch comes clear to us in depth...
...Trilling cites Diderot's Rameau's nephew, of whom Diderot as a "sincere" moralist explicitly disapproves, as an early example of an authentic character type...
...There are a number of paradoxes here...
...A former cosmetics salesgirl . . . operated a 1,700-ton keel binder...
...This nonnativist perception of America, even if it borders on caricature, rings true enough to be profoundly disturbing...
...Up to this point Novak's approach is downtoearth and concrete, even if given to an occasional facile generalization...
...The dismissing manner in which Decter mentions the issue of parity reminds me of a lecture I heard by a famous psychoanalyst many years ago...
...Novak's exclusion of the Irish and his inclusion of the Greeks imposes harmful constraints upon his book...
...There is even in Decter an undertone that suggests the notion of the survival of the fittest...
...Furthermore, the alleged connection between conservatism in the arts and conservatism in politics is an unexamined assumption—as is the notion that the destruction of the reality principle and the spread of undifferentiated forms of consciousness represent steps in the direction of social equality and freedom...
...DECTER HAS more in common with some of the extreme feminists than a love for categorical statements...
...To this day the main imperative confronting the new arrival is that he must at once set about the task of assimilating to the majority culture...
...I f I choose to review Midge Decter's polemic together with William Henry Chafe's history, it is not because they have anything in common with regard to style or scholarship...
...His sporadic remarks about the Irish reveal both a fascination with them and ambivalent if mostly hostile feelings toward them...
...Revolutions," Chafe remarks, "begin in response to `rising expectations,' after a group has started on the road to improvement and become aware of its relative deprivation...
...As to the professions and high-status positions, these are associated with prestige in return for commitment...
...The pretense that mass alienation is liberation, like the pretense that schizophrenia is health, testifies to the depth of the longing in our day to construe the symptoms of cultural pathos as the signs of a cultural revolution...
...Chafe does this superbly...
...Eventually he comes to resent the society which presses him to cut all ties with his past...
...One should have to review how he deals with the ups and downs of the feminist movements over half a century, and with the ambiguities and contradictions within that movement, and how these relate to the changes in the status of women in the world of work...
...Rossi's writing, from the by now famous "An Immodest Proposal" (Daedalus, 1964) to the more recent "Women: Terms of Liberation" (DISSENT, November–December 1970) dealing with women in academia and in science, are readily available...
...They maintained road-beds, greased locomotives, and took the place of lumberjacks in toppling giant redwoods...
...What Decter apparently means is that a woman does not have to contribute actively to a man's sexual pleasure...
...And even though this class did not, in fact, liberate humanity, the linkage of the seemingly contradictory images of "chained" workers and "inevitable historical force" helped produce a social movement of considerable consequence...
...Certainly not to a white ethnic who has experienced the pleasure and the pain of leaving his milieu of origin...
...One wonders what makes her think she can engage in such grandiose generalizations, and where she obtained her evidence...
...351 pp...
...To do so, one should have to convey how he combines the rigorous scholarship of the historian with sociological sensitivity and superb writing...
...De-differentiation of roles in the family has developed to some extent for the last 20 years or so...
...are irresponsible, shying away from the choices and freedoms they already have, whether as housewives, sex partners, wives, or mothers...
...As such, it illuminates dilemmas that are going to have to be resolved if America is to survive the various polarizations that are currently threatening to tear it apart...
...Only then can ethnics hope to show others what they have long suspected, that cultural differentiation in America is not a liability, not something to be fantasized away with imaginings of melting pots...
...I'm going to piss on you," he would announce...
...Already in a preface Novak elects to adopt Geno Baroni's acronym for this group, PIGS, and this initial choice sets the tone for the entire book, a tone that is on the whole elegantly polemical, while occasionally acerbic and even nasty...
...Still, women did not stay away from work after the war...
...Like innumerable contemporary artists, the adept of the put-on disclaims responsibility for or interest in the interpretation of his meaning...
...Thus, when she speaks of man's fear of getting married, since she cannot explain how she knows this, she says that "for men, this fear seems natural...
...Just like the women liberationists whom she so ferociously attacks, Decter deals only with the idea of intrinsic satisfactions or the lack of them...
...The utopian fantasy of transcending the reality principle betrays an inability to come to terms with any possible reality...
...She says that a girl "almost by instinct organizes her relations with members of the opposite sex around the principle of rehearsal for wifehood" (emphasis added...
...New York: Macmillan...
...And they just said, hooray, hooray, hooray...
...Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians have gravitated generally to entrepreneurial positions, moving into the managerial, professional, and owner classes more rapidly than have Poles, Italians, or even the Irish...
...I just started it as a gag once, you know...
...For while his PIGS perspective allows him to zero in on our most ignored and least "meltable" (i.e., least nordicProtestant) white ethnics, it also keeps him from addressing himself directly to something he clearly wanted very much to study: the American Catholic community as an enormously varied but ultimately cohesive subculture, and the relationship of that community to the majority culture...
...Chafe knows better...
...but it will scarcely be improved by pretending it is a sign of vitality...
...Surely she remembers the Marxian slogan that "workers have nothing to lose but their chains" and the Marxian view that "workers are deprived of the essence of humanity," which are hardly attributes, if we follow Decter's logic, that are conducive to make of the working class the "inevitable force of history" that Marx proclaimed would liberate humankind...
...The ethnic's deep roots in familial and local "turf" are thus threatened by the nativist's regard for highly mobile, interchangeable human units...
...We must really study, not half-invent, our separate and our shared histories, in the Old Country and in the New...
...THE TENSION between Novak's passion on the one hand and his sophistication on the other is mirrored in his ambivalent attitude toward being an ethnic American: "Growing up in America has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness...
...The new "authentic" social type, by contrast, is "characterized by its departure from singleness and simplicity, by the negation of self through role-playing, by commitment to an artistic culture and what this entails of alienation from the traditional ethos...
...We are made of soft plastic," he says, "and molded by social circumstances...
...After all, the modern woman enjoys freedom of choice...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...Paradoxically, this new complacency comes about through what profess to be radical auspices...
...It would be good to have his extended reflections on interethnic rivalry within American Catholicism...
...q...
...Paraphrasing some women liberationists, she goes on to state more undisputable facts: "The overwhelming majority of professional women entered professions that were known as `the women's professions.' They became, that is, nurses, teachers, social workers, child psychologists, and therapists of all sorts...
...For the lower-class ethnic Catholic, education is generally assumed to be vocational...
...In "the fabric of contradictions" that he saw as limiting the human fate Freud, according to Trilling, located a kind of substitute for this authority, an "authenticating imperative," that is, something to be authentic in relation to...
...Why else can they be heard to say, as some still do, to a woman applicant, "why should a pretty girl like you want to go to graduate school...
...It is just this resistance, "the hardness of human destiny," which is eroded—or concealed—by a bureaucratic, technological society that has become "affluent, permissive, and pleasure-oriented" and thus able to create the illusion that all the ancient obstacles to human happiness are about to be overcome...
...The concerted effort of a culture or of a segment of a culture to achieve authenticity," he writes, "generates its own conventions, its generalities, its commonplaces, its maxims, what Sartre, taking the word from Heidegger, calls the 'gabble.'" What began in an effort to subvert gabble has become gabble in its turn...
...she would have to confront the question whether true equality of opportunity, both as to earnings and access to positions of prestige, could actually occur without some change in the structure of the American family...
...However, she cannot examine this issue closely because it would conflict with her conservative view about family life...
...The modernist concern with authenticity is highly ambivalent, for the discovery of the fragility and "weightlessness" of the self is both liberating and terrifying...
...It has something to irritate if not offend almost every reader, but at the same time it contains a number of hard truths about monumental injustices and equally monumental resentments that are abroad in our land...
...Doesn't the worker have the right to change jobs...
...To escape such a milieu can thus be a delightful and liberating experience, and one liable to produce feelings of great joy, even gratitude to the system that permitted the escape...
...Not that the ideas and feelings Novak is expressing here would overtax the nativist imagination, but till now most Americans, including intellectuals, haven't been accustomed to thinking about upward mobility in purely subjective terms, or to measuring its worth against a personal set of values...
...Further, in a society in which achievement is rewarded by pay raises and promotions, it is hard to be satisfied with a type of work that does not yield them...
...As a professed liberal and a professional herself, Decter cannot come out against economic equality of women, and she does not do so anywhere in the book...
...He realizes that the price of rising and assimilating is high, that its basic command is, Deny your background and smooth out all the rough (read "ethnic," "lower-class," "nonProtestant") edges...
...For she would have to conclude that, under conditions of equality at work, the relations between man and woman in the family can no longer remain the way they are...
...Authenticity presents itself as prior to or "beyond" the fixed good and evil that underwrite the ethics of sincerity, viewing these norms as deceitful abstractions superimposed upon the contingency and open-endedness of experience...
...it is not to belightly manipulated...
...By excluding the Catholic Irish and including the non-Catholic Greeks, Novak limited in advance his special gift for BOOKS intelligent generalization about ethnic Catholic America...
...One of them, the former working wife of a graduate student whom Decter quotes to display the liberation ists' hatred of men, complains about her former husband: "[He thinks] a couple of screws and the slate is wiped clean...
...And, most important of all, in a society in which all the goods needed for family living—clothes and frozen foods and cans and pickles and cakes and jams—are produced by industry, there is little incentive for productivity inside the home, what with children preferring hamburgers and canned soups to fancy stews and soups cooked from scratch...
...The man provides notonly the economic means, but also status...
...This is because the man's cultural mandate to be the main provider of economic means and social status for his family rests on the assumption of inequality...
Vol. 20 • April 1973 • No. 2
