FAREWELL TO FEMINISM

...I have experienced the ego titilla-tion of having 3,000 soldiers, during the war, applaud me for a speech, but there is more real ego well-being, and almost as much noise, in the shouts of two adolescent boys when I bake a pecan pie...

...Ostensibly interested in an elucidation of his ideas, but really much more eager to expound my own, I delivered a feminist sermon...

...The Associated Press ran a story on my electrifying thesis that any woman who didn't get out of her home was automatically a parasite...

...If I had only had the sense to prevent them, I wouldn't have had any...

...The vital question to be asked by the modern woman today is, "Are marriage and a career desirable, for the family, for the woman herself...

...I believe that in my present ability to appreciate the elemental joys of family living, I am far more modern than I was at the height of my career...

...We can't go home again to the life of butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker...

...Against this power, that which I have experienced at the feet of the "bitch-goddess Success" cannot hold a candle...

...I do not care if my ten-year-old daughter ever looks at my feminist library, which, after hours of ferreting in dingy Boston bookstores, research at the Library of Congress, and swapping with the late Carrie Chapman Catt, is a rather complete one...

...that her visit with me to the obstetrician's office to feel the embryonic heartbeat of her future brother or sister is worth 20 trips to museums...

...It is with the emotional fervor of any convert that I share the insights psychiatric analysis has shown me about myself—and, I think, about the modern woman in general...

...Getting as far away from the home physically and psychologically as our great grandmothers were immersed in it, however praiseworthy the cause or career, has not made us happy...

...Dorothy Thompson sums up my present frame of mind in her Ladies' Home Journal article, "If I Had a Daughter": "I would tell her that she had to choose between marriage and a career . . . that marriage is also a career, and if she finds the right husband, it will absorb every bit of talent that she has got...

...I was an up-and-coming mother, a superior wife, a lecturer, an author, an executive...

...With only the rare exception that proves the rule, women are happy when they are happily and securely married, and when they have several healthy and loving children...

...I have been freed from the bondage of my past...

...Wylie, to my mind, was a "viper" not to see the light as I saw it...

...baby" keep out of her domestic rut...

...With my Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from my wrist to reenforce my emotional fervor, I asked, "Why must a woman choose...

...Obviously, the question, "Can a woman have a family and a career?," need no longer be asked...

...With no note of defeat or apology, but as one leaving a conflictful past happily behind, I say, with Philip ' Wylie, "I was a feminist...

...Amounting to something" meant crusading, if not with Carrie Nation's hatchet, with a grim and single-minded devotion...

...The parental indoctrination "took" with a vengeance...

...was her constant refrain...

...I have learned that individuals to be whole and at peace with themselves must be integrated, wholeheartedly, in their drives and energies...

...It is a far cry from the day when women let their home-made bread cool on the hearth to an era in which we take a half a loaf out of the freezing compartment...

...As a professional book reviewer, I was presenting the literary bombshell of the day, Generation of Vipers...

...Reading a note under the Christmas tree from his three older brothers and sisters, "To mother, good for three hours' baby-sitting," is far more heartwarming than reading my magazine fanmail in Japanese, Finnish, or Portuguese...

...Wylie's thoughts on women were far more interesting to me that day than the response of my audi-ence...

...my plaudits, however small-townish, partially assuaged his disappointment at my not being a son...

...IV I hope that my daughter is not a feminist, because I want her to be happy, and I feel that her chances for happiness are greater if she chooses her natural biological role instead of that of a career girl...

...Wylie on his widely publicized views on women...

...Hearing my new born babe's first yell in the delivery room is another and far more meaningful kind...

...My clergyman husband and I produced three children in five years and yet, with them and on an $1800 ministerial pittance, I proudly managed my life to appear as often on the lecture platform as at the laundry tubs...

...If I can furnish her, in these formative years, with a true "mother ideal," 1 will have done my part...

...Susan B. Anthony may be the instigator of a Constitutional amendment which has made history, but she is also the extreme prototype of today's competitive woman, the embodiment of "masculine protest," and one of society's problem children, as was English-born Mary Wollstone-craft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women started the ball rolling for the American feminist movement and cigar-smoking, panta-looned, French-born George Sand...

...The world was her home...

...Their primary individual and social function is to be wives and mothers...

...Rejecting her own femininity, it was inevitable that I reject mine...

...I agree with President White of Mills College, whose startling book on woman's education has received well-deserved comment, that "both on co-ed campuses and women's colleges, we have assumed for educational purposes a woman is a man in disguise" and that "at the present time a woman tends to be de-feminized in proportion as she is educated...

...But as Freud wrote of sex relations outside marriage, "Freedom to have them has nothing to do with the ability to enjoy them...

...All through adolescence I was told by both parents that I must "amount to something...

...From the viewpoint of my mother, if she were living, and in the eyes of the average dissatisfied, frustrated American housewife, I am "tied down" with five children, two of them babies, with no help...

...Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person...

...When my liberal-minded husband was "banned in Boston" for startling instead of soothing his ecclesiastical flock (a process in which I was an eager helpmate) and we moved to the South, I added book-reviewing to my repertoire...

...Between mouth fuls of country club creamed chicken and well-placed nods at "my public," I tackled Mr...

...I do not expect to blink an eye if, at 17, she decides to marry and start a family instead of going to college...

...I have, as an executive, enjoyed being" "in conference" at the office and the cocktail bar, but the intimate session with my newest son gives me far more of a glow, and his coos and gurgles make more sense than I did then...

...Ten years ago I would have disowned her as no daughter of mine...

...For years I was a "drivin' woman, manic in achieving a double goal, trying to serve the two masters of careerism and motherhood...

...A. A. Brill and Richard Hoffman, noted psychiatrists, are right when they maintain no woman can live happily if she is in a competitive profession...

...My present integration as a wife and mother of five is, I believe, stronger and more secure because of my feminist past...

...I was not a wonder, but one of many women "successfully" combining both...

...Luncheon partner Wylie, long familiar with the feminist line I now recognize to be as rigid and dogmatic as the Communist line, raised his Mephistophelian eyebrow...

...My mother, submerged at my arrival by the demands of five other children, was determined that her...

...Five years ago I asked myself that question, and my answer was emphatically, "No...

...All women who succumbed to the rigors of the dishmop, were, I proclaimed, privately and publicly, dopes...

...II On graduating from college in 1932, I, like many self-centered and self-assured capped and gowned females, contended there should be no marriage or career postulate...

...Despite my "quiet, disarming manner," as one feature writer described me, I was a ferocious female, allowing no compromise in myself or in others...

...that the migraine headaches and dizzy spells which periodically took her out of circulation with Emerson, Greeley, and the other 19th Century VIPs were signs of a maladjusted personality, a frustrated female whose power-mad father insisted she be a man...

...for non-discrimination against Jews...

...he repeated the stand he had taken 1 in Generation of Vipers and recently revived in Look's "Mom's to Blame...

...Hearing Walter Winchell tell his radio audience to read a recent Reader's Digest article of mine evokes one type of power satisfaction...

...Her home should not be her world...

...At the not too petrified age of 39, I feel I am in a unique position to evaluate the satisfactions of both...

...Calmly RAMONA BARTH has written and lectured widely on feminism and pioneers in the feminist movement Her articles have appeared in American Family, Parents, The Nation, Reader's Digest, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post...

...I crusaded for flush toilets for Negroes...

...At last she was living, if vicariously, through me...

...From my enlightened state, I am not tied down but tied to the most meaningful job in life for a woman...

...Her light, brightened by suffrage and higher education, should not be hidden under pails of diapers and pans ot dishes...

...For a period, I was a paid executive director in a national educational organization...

...Obviously, woman must "adjust" in the sharp transition from the colonial homestead to the urban apartment...

...Psychiatrist Helene Deutsch corroborates the educator when she concludes: "Only exceptionally talented girls can carry a surplus of intellect without injuring their effective lives, for women's intellect, her capacity for objectively understanding life, thrives at the expense of her subjective emotional qualities...

...I do not see how my daughter or anyone's daughter, under our present educational system, can be learned— and a woman...

...Her own needs were so great that it was impossible for her to furnish me with' a true mother ideal...

...I, personally, will take the role of wife and mother, and that alone...

...A woman in modern society, my monologue went, should be an individual, not an appendage to man...

...Barth received her Bachelor of Science degree from Tufts College, her Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Chicago, and pursued special studies at the University of Munich, the University of London, and Harvard...

...Even the conservative Boston ladies paid and paid well to find out to which category they were assigned...

...Amounting to something," according to the intellectually fertile but emotionally sterile New England tradition, meant giving one's all to "book laming...

...Think of what you put inside your head, not outside it," I was told each time I paused to "primp" at the dining room mirror...

...The feminists of yesterday and today do not interest me...

...But have we gone forward in our present way of life...

...As the waiters whisked our coffee cups away and the chairman of the occasion nudged me to start the review, Mr...

...Women are biological creatures as well as mental persons...

...According to my New England lecture manager, my chosen subject, "Woman—Paragon or Parasite?," had an unprecedented popularity...

...According to my ego ideal, I was everything a woman should be...

...Now I feel, with Alice, when she tried to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet: "It's no use to be two people...

...My harassed mother heaved sighs of relief...

...For a decade of marriage and family life, I had to prove that this was so...

...The girl announced this summer, after winning adulation for her homemade honey oatmeal bread, that maybe she could win boy friends by her baking, and I agreed with her wholeheartedly...

...With Marynia F. Farnham, I now believe that "Feminism is the unsuccessful attempt to the necessary readjustment of women in the machine age...

...Today I feel that I am freer than I have ever been in my life...

...Only now do I know what he meant...

...I am, at last, modern enough to know that the "new woman" must go home for her real, lasting satisfactions...

...III In my ideology and in my personal life, I have made a right-about-face in the place of woman...

...I must not get tied down as had she, with no money and a parcel of "young-uns...

...No, I'll give my daughter a Fanny Farmer cookbook instead of my rare edition, Life of Susan B. Anthony...

...I hope my daughter will not either, that she will, with one of the world's greatest career women, feel it is better to be a first-class wife and mother than a second or third rate novelist, poet, artist, or what have you...

...that Drs...

...Karl Menninger's statement, "The bearing and rearing of children is woman's greatest achievement and the climax of her erotic expression, not only her greatest joy, but the source of her greatest power...

...Only now am I sufficiently mature in my outlook to grasp fully the impact of Dr...

...Wylie (in a rather fatherly fashion, to show me that he, too, had gone through a benighted period) concluded, "You know, when I was in college I was a feminist...

...Of course, I wanted marriage, children, and a home, but a smart gal, I contended, could have them and a career too...

...The philosophy of feminism was not in accord with modern science's analysis of the sexes...

...As a student of the feminist movement, I think that Margaret Fuller was a regal genius—and a neurotic...

...As Fred Allen said on leaving radio, "It's wonderful, this freedom . . . you can live on the money you save on aspirin...

...My clergyman-father, disappointed at having a Ramona instead of a Richard at my birth, nevertheless found in me a willing pupil to be moulded into the "son" ideal he held...

...I hope that she will some day write "occupation, housewife" with pride and gusto instead of with the resignation and bitterness which mark so many "educated" women...

...Whether a woman, chooses the road of feminism or femininity is determined early...

...She is the author of "Fiery Angel: The Life of Florence Nightingale...

...Since a choice must be made, 1 hope she chooses to be a woman, not a bluestocking...

...I was unable to pursue the subject but Mr...

...Dissipating our time and energy at the bridge table or the cocktail party instead of braiding rugs is not the answer...

...When was he going to stop condemning the downtrodden sex and raise his influential voice in our behalf...

...In my case, it was inevitable that I embraced the former...

...My father beamed...

...Wylie and many like him who have given real thought and not blind emoting to the subject of woman's place, I say, "I was a feminist...

...Obviously, the woman who tries to put a fashion magazine to bed as well as a baby, the woman who has to prove she can be a wife, mother, clubwoman, artist and whatnot, is a divided self...

...For with Mr...

...The brainy, svelte, ambitious creature called The American Woman was a mess...

...I am modern enough to know that competition may be the life of trade but the death of marital love...

...Acclaimed a rare combination of brains and beauty, I brought home honor society badges and speaking contest trophies...

...I was a wonder...

...I am sure that the light she evokes in her father's eye as he munches her hot buttered, crusty bread is far more important for her development than the A's she brings home on her report card...

...Amounting to something" for me, in short, was in direct proportion to the brats I did not breed and the name I could make for myself—and father and mother...

...I no longer feel myself to be the exception that proves the rule...