A Hard Look at Flabby Thought

...Yet in fact she is writing not about the typical women's-lib fanatic, if there is such a creature, but about the prototypical product of a modern urban liberal upper-middle-class upbringing, probably Jewish and in Manhattan, bounded by Spock, Freud, the Dalton School, and Sarah Lawrence (or Bennington or Reed...

...What this necessarily minimizes—and in the case of women's lib it is unfortunate—is psychological individuality, the quirky instinct that turns one female in the direction of liberation and another, of almost identical background, in the direction of the kitchen, or a career, or in no direction at all...

...Strangelove, women's liberation, growing up in St...

...Reading this in the wake of Midge Decter's The Liberated Woman and Other Americans (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 256 pp., $6.95), I was bemused by the Thoreauvian austerity of such antimaterialistic pronouncements and the way those who issue them—in all sincerity—actually live...

...i.e., to make distinctions about ideas, instead of becoming a pack...

...Unfortunately, Miss Decter does not make a convincing progression of cause and effect—except for some unhappy moments in beds and offices—from this abstract upbringing to women's liberation: The prototype is excellently denned in all its detail, but "she" could just as easily, and inexplicably, end up in suburbia as in league with Misses Millett and Greer...

...Their acquisition obligates a man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life...

...In the best of the essays, "Anti-Americanism in America," Miss Decter traces the development of this self-abusive idee fixe from the giddy optimism of the Kennedy Administration through the growing horror over Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war...

...Independence, irony, quality, and integrity ended up on the cutting-room floor in their fervid theoretical devotion to youth, violence and revolutionary invective...

...Having for years believed in her emancipated eagerness to speak freely of sex when the moment came, as her own parents had not, she discovers herself unexpectedly being a good deal less than candid, and realizes that "This whole problem is in the end really not my daughters', but mine...

...In the introduction to this fearless book, she remarks that her "main preoccupation as a writer [is] to account for the difference between what is, or must be, the experience of something and the way that experience has come to be talked about, in political life no less than private...

...The trouble lies, I think, in the very abstractness of such portraiture...

...Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studied contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action...

...Miss Decter is urging us to understand this, and we ignore her at our peril...

...Because Miss Decter turns her tough intelligence to this and other contradictions of our contemporary politics and culture, her book will make some of its readers uncomfortable and others apoplectically indignant...

...MISS DECTER is much more satisfying in her irreverent piece on the Kennedys...

...At the core of The Liberated Woman and Other Americans is the deadly serious belief that the life of the mind plays a crucial, indispensable role in the life of a nation...

...Paul, Norman Mailer, anti-Americanism in America, and the political phenomenon she calls Kennedyism...

...When the author does come to grips with the new liberated woman, in her most ambitious and disappointing essay, she does not really accomplish what she sets out to do, either: explain the intricate mystery of the women's-lib convert whose parents, teachers, friends, and lovers spared no effort to bestow upon her the most blessed of lives, only to have her denounce their generosity and devotion, in the end, as a seditious scheme for enslavement...

...The Gay Divorcee," for example, is quite conventional now, or perhaps merely unimportant, though it seemed ironically detached and precise when it came out in 1962...

...Very much a woman of her time, albeit an uncommonly intelligent one, she explores her reluctance to discuss the undiscussable with her daughters—despite the "friendship" that enlightened parents work so hard to form with their children...

...Miss Decter has brought together the essays and reviews she has written over a period of 12 years on different yet related subjects, including sex, divorced women, Dr...

...he was almost their equal at seductive, manipulative illusions about American reality...

...The Kennedys, in other words, represented a New Frontier not of democracy but of elitism, an idea that is supposedly abhorrent to Americans...

...What will be for them their experience and their life will be for me always the record of my inability as a parent to stand behind that person whose face I had so long ago chosen to show to the world...

...In the long run, however, the intellectuals of a country are more significant to its well-being than any dynasty of politicians...

...He believes that their worship brings unhappiness and social discord...

...what it sought to do, was to impose an image of itself on American society and American history: an image of itself as the rightful, by virtue of intrinsic superiority, American ruling class...

...Liberal intellectuals, increasingly frustrated about the war, the blacks and poverty, devised an extremist morality—America is evil—to still their humiliating sense of futility, and in the process jettisoned much that they once held dear...

...John Kennedy was not the intellectuals' darling for nothing, Miss Decter reminds us...

...since then the list has grown enormously, from Charles Reich and Richard Poirier on down to Jason Epstein, Jack New-field, ad nauseum et absurdum...

...Why so much education—of precisely this wondrously expectant kind?often brings forth so little intellectual independence is an interesting conundrum whose solution might provide telling lessons about the values and obligations of parents and teachers...

...I have read nothing else about the Kennedys that makes so convincing a case both against them as political leaders and against those who still insist on their right to be praised...

...All the energy, hope, promise, purpose, and unbelievable amounts of money that have shaped this woman culminate in disappointment, boredom and mediocrity...

...Given what has happened to the entire subject of women, regardless of their civil state, in the last few years, Miss Decter's once-burned-twice-cautious divorcee has not aged well...

...People in general, and with-it intellectuals in particular, do not like to be reminded of the gulf between what they say and how they behave...

...Oddly, Miss Decter is not at her best in a more straightforward kind of essay—one that makes its exposition through a representative portrait (what the sociologists call an "ideal type"), rather than through the juxtaposition and interplay of argument, fact, idea, and judgment...

...What bothers me about "The Liberated Woman" has little to do with the typhoon of outrage that inundated the letters column of Commentary after it was published, for I agree with Miss Decter that this latter-day Snow White is demanding "a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty...

...What the Kennedy Administration wanted...

...Probing beneath the trendentious gloss that liberal—some would now say radical—intellectuals smear over reality, she presents a free-standing, tightly reasoned, though not dispassionate indictment of their failure to be intellectuals...

...On a more personal level, in "Sex, My Daughters and Me," Miss Decter does not absolve herself of wanting to march, in rather bewildered obedience, to another kind of liberal drumbeat...

...She is not content, as lesser writers on this overexposed subject have been, to prove that these once and future kings have feet of clay...

...They . . . impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable...

...Her approach does more real damage to the Kennedy myth than any muckraking expose, for she is dealing with a more elusive and dangerous phenomenon, the irresponsibility of politics-by-illusion...

...Miss Decter cites a few who had soured on America—Staughton Lynd, Susan Sontag, Andrew Kopkind, Robert Brustein —by 1968, when she wrote this essay...

...And it has hardly seemed to matter that all that glittering promise gave so little return on such a large investment of hope and power...

...Miss Decter knows better than most that the embattled sisters are concerned less with daycare centers than with an ideology of discontent...

...Writers & Writing A HARD LOOK AT FLABBY THOUGHT BY PEARL K. BELL SCARCELY A DAY GOES BY in the press without some banal reprise of the self-congratulatory mea culpa: The middle-class American "has begun to grow weary," one columnist recently wrote, "of his society's emphasis on things, on possessions...

...Even domestic privacy reveals a gap between dictum and practice...

...As Miss Decter ruefully points out, "At precisely a time when the values for which this community believes itself to stand—the enlargement of intellectual possibility and the devotion to standards of excellence—are being most threatened from the outside, it has responded only in kind, by threatening them further from the inside...