BOOKS

...For example, she writes that she feared that her campaign for NOW's presidency would be derailed by the fact that she has both a husband— the wisdom-toothless James Humble—and a female companion...

...Almost immediately, sexism appeared ubiquitous...

...It's the fashion within today's left," Tomasky says, "to scorn democracy and reason and progress as 'big, shaggy ideas," in the phrase of writer Katha Pollitt, that have run their course and been exposed for the hoaxes they are...

...Although Ireland never tells readers why she found the ERA more compelling than other forms of feminist activism—for example, consciousness-raising groups, organizing to keep abortion legal, or the self-help movement—What Women Want offers a detailed summary of NOW's pro-ERA effort and her own work, post-law school, as NOW's pro-bono legal counsel...

...Take Tomasky's handling of feminism...

...As he quotes me (approvingly) from an essay on the limits of multi-culturalism, "the left isn't multi-anything...

...Single-payer advocates I know, myself included, pitched their appeals to the underinsured and the spottily insured as well as to those completely left out...

...Are we not feminists, or are these not "class" issues, too...

...We opposed the Gulf War, and most of us opposed it no less when the polls shot from 50 to 90 percent approval of the war...

...But Ireland's life did not follow its anticipated course...

...And consciousness is the predecessor of transformation...

...But Tomasky doesn't get the distinction, and proceeds to lump all movements based on gender or ethnicity into the pernicious "identity" camp...

...Unfortunately, What Women Want is a largely superficial look at Ireland's rise from "ordinary middle-class girl" to national leader...

...Second, higher benefits are a "solution"—if, that is, the problem you are trying to solve is poverty...

...In fact, they kept voting for guys like Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, who were cheerfully redistributing the wealth to the wealthy...

...Oddly, though, anti-choice activists are just about the only non-NOW folks mentioned in What Women Want...

...Indeed, the book's powerful personal anecdotes are its strong point, and offset shallow political points and lackluster notions about women's oppression that dominate her pages...

...Instead, he goes after a straw man stuffed with bits and pieces of postmodernism, black nationalism, and militant identity politics...

...The craving for salacious gossip aside, what are we to make of this...

...A short-lived marriage when she was seventeen left her divorced and "aimless in attitude...

...This insularity ended, however, when her second husband, James Humble, got word that his wisdom teeth had to be extracted...

...But if my definition is overly selective, so, in the opposite way, is Tomasky's...

...Many women, myself included, viewed sexual harassment as the price of admission into the workplace...

...Worse, he makes it sound, a few pages later, as if Willis were endorsing what she was in fact critiquing...

...Subsequent contact with the Labor Department led to victory: Pan Am's coverage was extended to James...

...The experience that followed was profoundly radicalizing...

...to give an example closer to Tomasky's heart: Leftists have been advocating the kind of populist economic politics that he espouses for nearly twenty years, and for many of those years, the American majority did not seem to agree with us at all...

...Not that Left for Dead is utterly without merit...

...Where did I go wrong...

...Like many young women, Ireland dreamed of a June wedding, a small, . well-furnished home, and genteel church . socials...

...and that's what's wrong with them...

...He quotes her definition of identity politics: "that membership in an oppressed group...

...Of course not, she said...

...The left is doomed—quixotically, from Tomasky's perspective—to take up one-unpopular issue after another...

...During the ERA campaign some of the men we had supported for election because they were pro-ERA were otherwise so uninspiring in their political views that we had to keep them away from the NOW offices so our volunteers wouldn't see the kinds of politicians they were really working for," she writes...

...In fact, I think we ought to try it...

...Ireland was resigned to the conditions of airline employment, content to earn money and explore the places she flew to...

...to show how I gained the . power to control my own life and to make positive changes for myself and for other women...

...I was probably naive, but I certainly didn't expect problems...

...That's what they are...

...She was trying to make a distinction between "identity politics" and identity-based political movements like feminism...

...Nonetheless, some of her confessions are a bit bizarre...

...Now there are a couple of problems with this...

...Is she implying that NOW should not have given these men its support...

...I would like to read a serious analytical account of how it was that postmodernism came to be mistaken for leftism on so many campuses, and of how, in all too many cases, a sour identity politics replaced a self-confident feminism and black pride...

...And even if that weren't so, isn't 37 million a pretty big number anyway...

...They are not "not working," as Tomasky asserts, they are raising children, and doing so under the most difficult conditions imaginable— as single parents, living in poverty and in what are often dangerous neighborhoods...

...Unfortunately, this vision excludes many feminists and would-be feminists and leaves those of us with a broader conception of social change feeling bereft, bitter, and even a little bored...

...He's right that the left doesn't have, as far as I know, a clear stand on immigration, and we certainly haven't done all we could to answer the hypocritical "color-blind" arguments against affirmative action...

...320 pages...

...my family would have been protected...

...We had no large appliances to pawn for quick cash when his teeth began to really hurt him, so I breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of Pan Am's medical coverage...

...You can't make it into something it isn't (monolithically, self-righteously...

...But is this true...

...Nowhere is this clearer than in her discussion of abortion...

...And what harassment there was...

...First, "the left" was never exactly eager to embrace welfare as a legitimate economic-justice issue...

...And we have, in too many instances, mistaken politically correct language purifications for genuine political change...

...As if she were vacuum-sealed, her account presents a woman eager and able to ignore the political and social turmoil of late-1960s America...

...as feminists may have been, one basic belief united them: that the old, class-based politics wasn't relevant anymore...

...Left for Dead doesn't even wave to Todd Gitlin, with his book-long critique of identity politics, or Ralph Nader, who rejects as distracting "gonadal politics," those gay and feminist issues that get in the way of his economic agenda, or Michael Lerner, who is forever trying to get the left to take up the kind of "family values" that presumably appeal to the white working class...

...In telling her story Ireland may inspire a few, but she has no monopoly on the dreams of many...

...They are women with small children...

...At least I think "like me...

...and in the worst sense PC), and then go after it for not being what you wish it would be...

...Tomasky offers no evidence of this single-minded concern with the "37 million" (the number is now over 40 million) uninsured...

...Because I was a woman, my family was not...

...The woman is never named, nor do we learn how Ireland juggles both relationships...

...Although she acknowledges irritation at the strictures of life in the friendly skies...

...Nowhere in his discussion of welfare does Tomasky show signs of noticing that adult welfare recipients are not just any old grifters and scammers...

...What lessons did she learn...

...You find yourself becoming conscious of more and more...

...Jobs, first as a can-can dancer, then as a waitress and stewardess, gave her a toehold on independence...

...Imagine my surprise upon being told that Pan Am's insurance didn't cover my husband, even though it covered my fellow employees' wives...

...Her devotion to NOW is palpable...

...It] has to be an attempt to find, in the rich diversity of the human world, some point of moral unity that brings us all together...

...So was the iron maiden of women's wear: the girdle...

...Why not acknowledge, straight out, that Willis was ahead of him on this one, and that the critique of the crasser manifestations of identity politics was well advanced—by a feminist—before he ever got to it...

...Another book contained this chestnut: "Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband...

...Has NOW changed its policies towards endorsements, or does it still support pro-choice, pro-ERA, and pro-child-care candidates regardless of their stands on welfare, militarism, foreign policy, or budget cuts...

...Eleanor J. Bader is a writer and teacher j$f Brooklyn, New York...

...Tomasky seems to have swallowed the conservative critique of welfare—that it engenders "miserable dependence in those stuck in its maw...

...On the health-care issue, you'd think the left might win a moment of grudging admiration from Tomasky...

...A Leader for NOW What Women Want - by Patricia Ireland E.P...

...Now anyone who has read Pollitt knows that she is one of the nation's most fearless promoters of democracy, reason, progress, rights, and secular anti-authoritarianism, so upon hitting this paragraph I called her up and asked in what context she had ever referred to democracy, etc., as "big, shaggy ideas...

...Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book of essays is "The Snarling Citizen...

...The book then moved on to safer topics...

...The left's embrace of welfare is a screw-up, according to Tomasky, because: 1) it puts us on the wrong side of the American majority...

...and 2) we have "no solutions"— just "dewy-eyed" demands for higher benefits...

...Ireland offers other, equally muddled confessions as well...

...But we were pro-choice before the majority was: Was that a screw-up...

...at other times it is a didactic lecture...

...There is no glory, of course, in taking stands just epater le bourgeoisie, or in refusing ever to compromise...

...So OK, hit me again...

...Or do we need a full 51 percent of the population before an issue merits attention...

...Consciousness is a funny thing," Ireland writes...

...A book about the failings of the left should, one would think, go after the feminist left, but Tomasly blows off the possibility that such a flit' could even exist, observing that "&tjg...

...Tomasky's description of the left and all that is wrong with it has the virtue of consistency, but it is the dreary consistency of a tautology: The left is a bunch of losers...

...Of course, Tomasky is hardly alone in any of his criticisms of the left, but the last thing he seems to want is company...

...Law school seemed a logical step and in 1972 she enrolled...

...While Ireland rarely goes beneath the surface in discussing NOW's work—a serious shortcoming if this book is meant for the politically active—she also fails to place NOW into the larger, more diverse women's movement...

...I happen to disagree with these guys in fundamental ways, but they are as much "the left" as I am or Tomasky is...

...If I'd been a man...

...Why is she telling us this...

...At least for a while there, we were on the majority side, the side of a single-payer system (if the polls taken in the early 1990s are to be believed...

...Besides, middle-class people themselves move in and out of coverage—as they lose jobs, or spouses, or decide to go freelance...

...By playing to both crowds it is sure to satisfy neither...

...And if piAHe opinion should revert to the anti-wooift ism of the Christian right, would Tomay have us abandon our pro-choice position...

...You will not find, in Left for Dead, such groups as Citizens for Tax Justice, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Wider Opportunities for Women, the New Party, Acorn, Democratic Socialists of America, or a host of other organizations focused, for the most part, on the kind of issues that Tomasky approves of...

...Hair was strictly regulated: not one strand could drop below the jawline, and the style had to 'look good in the rain.' Pan Am even interested itself in our underwear...

...She explained the context, which involved the degradation of these ideals into manipulative rhetoric during the immediate postwar years...

...Her fury prompted her to call a local NOW chapter, where she was given the information she needed to fight the company...

...Surely Tomasky doesn't think we should have abandoned our populist economics in, say, 1984, in order to ingratiate ourselves with the majority du jour...

...But these experiences awakened her to the male world...

...determines my legitimacy as a political person, the validity of my political ideas, and indeed, my moral right to express them...

...A talk on legal ethics rankled: "Don't steal your client's money," the instructor warned...

...Otherwise, why mention these choices...

...It is as if NOW is the be-all and end-all, fighting the Gender War all by its lonesome...

...It takes a certain level of malice to construct a target that so neatly fits the missiles pitched at it...

...And to establish this, he ticks off a number of issues on which, he says, the left finds itself on the losing side: immigration, welfare, affirmative action, and health care...

...At some points the book reads like a chatty confession...

...The left, as always, fairly seethes with self-criticism, factionalism, and inwardly directed rage...

...We stewardesses had to wear red lipstick and fingernail polish—no other color was acceptable," she writes...

...Tomasky notes approvingly that the left's pro-choice stance is shared by a majority of the public...

...Any wonder that low-income and working-class women and girls see NOW as a bastion of the white middle class...

...Welfare benefits, like the minimum wage, set a kind of maximum misery level against which all wages can be judged...

...This is a "left," previously unknown to me, that made a "cause" out of defending Ben Chavis from sexual-harassment charges, that militantly opposes transracial adoptions, and to which "quality of life" is a "dirty phrase...

...At the same time as these insights were tolling, NOW organizers were launching a campaign in support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA...

...Yes, leftists have pandered at times to black nationalists (Jesse Jackson and Cornel West's participation in the Million Man March being a regrettable example, as Tomasky says...

...Sometimes it takes duplicity to make the target fit the attack...

...Donna Bray, leader of the anti-abortion Defenders for Life, is described as having "a mouth made to crack gum...

...While mired in the study of real property, taxation, torts, and constitutional law, Ireland began to understand the sexist foundations on which our government had long rested...

...The book opens with Ireland's evocation of small-town Indiana in the 1950s and offers an amazing slice of white Americana, a place full of wide-eyed girls, remote, money-earning fathers and husbands, and doting, recipe-chasing mothers and wives...

...On the ground, our black heels had to measure at least three inches...

...Now, to excoriate the left for not being on the winning side, as determined by Harris and Gallup, is to seriously misapprehend what a "left" can be...

...Democrats and Republicans base their platforms on the latest poll and, by so doing, they do indeed win elections...

...After all, his biggest beef with the left is not that we take the wrong positions, but that we too often end up with a minority position—advocating against welfare "reform," for example, when huge majorities seem to favor it...

...Left welfare advocates Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have led a long, uphill, and not entirely successful struggle to get welfare a place on the progressive agenda...

...These are failings that call for fearless self-criticism and analysis...

...Not that those of us fighting welfare reform from the left have ever slighted other elements of a "solution"— like child care and higher wages...

...I . would stay at home to raise them and live . happily ever after...

...This, mind you, was from an essay in which Willis was highly critical of identity politics...

...From my point of view, the type of person who, for example, disrupts a progressive conference because of some microscopic slight to women, or gay people, or people of color—and I have seen this happen all too often—is not "left": maybe a potential constituent for the left, if that hyper-refined sensitivity to injustice could be directed toward an actual real-world problem, but, for now, a PC brat...

...Tomasky recounts the tragic dissipation of this majority in the face of Harry-and-Louise ads and a pusillanimous White House, but then whips around and blames the left again—for putting "too much emphasis on the uninsured" rather than emphasizing "uninsured and underin-sured alike" (the latter group, of course, containing the great white middle class...

...Surely feminists can critique the retrograde politics of the anti-choice movement without denigrating the opposition as gum-chewing babes...

...Once you become conscious, you can't just regress...

...Maybe there's something salubrious, after all about being slapped around for 200 pages by a cranky fellow yelling "Screw-up...

...I was intrigued but ultimately disappointed that after mentioning her sexual unions, she went on to say that she refuses to be pigeonholed by words like bisexual...

...by Barbara Ehrenreich There are books that a reviewer feels condemned, rather than assigned, to read, books so intensely irritating that the reviewer has to wonder what she has done to earn the pitiless enmity of the editors who assigned it...

...Tomasky's left—the bad, screw-up left—will not be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever joined a union picket line, or sat at a sidewalk table to register voters, or campaigned against the local toxic waste dump...

...What Women Want gives us some insight into what Ireland wants: an equal shot at the opportunities afforded middle-class, educated men...

...If feminism's assertion that the personal is political is to have any resonance, we need to know what her personal relationships mean in light of her activism...

...While the American majority longed for someone to speak forthrightly about issues like falling wages and campaign reform, we were indulging ourselves in an orgy of identity-based self-righteousness and craven pandering to same...

...Raise the benefits and it gets easier for working people—starting with the single mothers among them—to press for higher wages, hence increasing the upward pressure on wages throughout the work force...

...Most disappointing of all is Ireland's deep-seated class bias, which gives the book a sour taint...

...But, ipso facto, they also engender the withering contempt for politics that corrodes the entire polity...

...by Eleanor J. Bader Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), says she wrote What Women Want "to organize for action, to better all of our lives...

...23.95...

...Dutton...

...White gloves and a pillbox hat were absolute necessities...

...A whirlwind of activity among the women at Pan Am followed, and Ireland found herself becoming passionately interested in legal theories and concepts...

...And the Enlightenment," I asked her, "did you ever say a mean thing about that...

...Each of these gets chapter-length treatment, including less-than-entirely-relevant historical overviews, but let me focus on the two I know most about—welfare and health care...

...Even the tone is confused...

...Now obviously the truth of this depends on how you define "the left," and I should admit right off to defining it in a way that automatically fends off much of Tomasky's criticism...

...Brassieres and slips were required at all times...

...Worse, it appears not to know who its audience is: long-time activists, or women who have never, ever, pondered feminism...

...His thesis is that, sometime in the last twenty years, "the left" abandoned the straightforward issues of economics and democratic rights that appeal to the white middle class in order to concentrate, perversely, on a sterile PC-ness that is offensive to white people generally and probably also to the black middle class...

...Now here's where a little "identity politics" might come in handy...

...What is different about a left, a genuine left, is we represent a politics driven by principle, not by polls...

...Furthermore, Piven and Cloward and their claque (in which I am proud to claim membership) have consistently framed their argument for higher benefits in the kind of class terms Tomasky ought to admire...

...Her stint at Pan Am Airlines was in many ways emblematic, as abuse from patrons, pilots, mechanics, and bureaucrats was part of the daily routine...

...Land, like a woman, is meant to be possessed," advised a property-law textbook...

...But standing on principle, including deeply unpopular principle, is the business of the left...

...If we have screwed up in any serious way, it is by failing to convey this lonely mission to people like Tomasky...

...Not to mention a thorough history of the class war initiated by the corporate elite in the 1970s, with its pro-capitalist propaganda juggernaut and lavish funding for the institutional infrastructure of the new right...

...is of course the question the book itself wants me to dwell on, because Michael Tomasky's thesis is that the left has willfully screwed up, and it has screwed up largely because of people like me...

...Just like my mother before me," she writes, the plan was to "get a job for a while, then marry and have children...

...In decrying the mistreatment of women workers, Ireland is forthright and fierce...

...Steal his wife instead...

...Criticisms like Pollitt's amount to an attack on the Enlightenment, the movement that advanced the notions of rights and reason and secular anti-authoritarianism...

...Tomasky also misrepresents the views of another left feminist, Ellen Willis...

...The American left, throughout history, has taken stands that seemed bizarre or extreme to large numbers of their fellow citizens: in favor of abolishing slavery, or giving women the right to vote, or keeping the United States out of various wars...

...But Tomasky is not likely to be the source of the criticisms we need to hear...

...So what about the host of feminists, myself included, who are always railing about issues like low wages, child care, health care, and welfare...