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Book Review |
The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter
March/April, 1999, Vol. 6, Number 2.
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us:
Reviewed by Donna Laframboise |
I n recent decades, no category of humanity has attracted as much attention as has womankind. Entire bookstores are devoted to her status and well-being, hundreds of women's studies departments focus their energies on her, and numerous popular magazines promulgate theories about her.
But those searching for a coherent new view of modern women won't find it in a pair of recent books: Wendy Shalit's Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, and Danielle Crittenden's What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.
As conservatives, these authors might have been expected to cut through much of the muddle-headed leftist dogma that permeates so many discussions of gender. But in their eagerness to declare the women's movement and the sexual revolution unmitigated disasters, Shalit and Crittenden replicate some of feminism's worst errors. Both rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and exaggeration, and both have a tendency to promulgate anti-male bigotry.
On a few occasions, 23-year-old Shalit acknowledges that one "shouldn't extrapolate" from personal experience or "from trifles." But these momentary lapses aside, her book is little more than a collection of anecdotes extrapolated to absurd degrees.
For Shalit, the anorexic clinical population treated by psychologist Mary Pipher (Reviving Ophelia, 1994), tell us something important about the lives of all young women. So do on-the-street interviews with five people, a single politically correct remark by Hollywood actress Alicia Silverstone, and the narrow mindedness of Shalit's peers in a college philosophy class.
In her view, a few lines in an American Girl magazine advice column constitute proof that embarrassment is "natural" for young girls. She suggests that a quote from a book written by a rabbi, together with two anecdotes culled from women's magazines, establishes that sexual dysfunction among the young is "typical." Elsewhere, she presents the personal opinion of a 26-year-old surgery resident as good reason to believe that the "number of dates you have before sex may predict the longevity of a relationship." If "you're still unconvinced" that young people are positively expected to engage in pre-marital sex these days, she says, looking to hard data or the informed observations of an expert is unnecessary. Rather, the words of Mademoiselle's "male advice columnist" are evidence enough.
In Shalit's view, because the world isn't perfect yet, we should repudiate the last 40 years and scurry back to the past. She has no patience for striking pragmatic, workable compromises between the old and the new, but believes solutions to profound human problems come in neat, sharply delineated packages. Thus, she romanticizes an era in which there were rules, damn it, and people were expected to follow them.
Among Shalit's examples of this supposedly golden age is a world in which it was illegal to supply non-married women with birth control, in which women could be jailed 50 days for dancing the turkey trot, in which only the wives and daughters of bar owners were permitted to tend bar, and in which young ladies were not only tyrannized by pointless rules concerning whether rings and bracelets should be worn under or over their gloves, but were told the "main object, when travelling" was not to be enriched by the experience but to "remain inconspicuous at all times."
Even Shalit's more robust arguments are undermined by her propensity for exaggeration. To hear her tell it, she has not merely been exposed to safe sex campaigns, but has had adults dangling condoms and dental dams "in my face everywhere I turned." According to her, the average nine-year-old girl has to worry about being sodomized by boys at school, and contemporary young women have grown up hearing a constant barrage of crudeness as soon as they step on the street. Self-mutilation on the part of young women is "disturbingly common" she says, and "[e]veryone acts as though this is perfectly normal."
The world is in such turmoil, in her view, that "nowadays it's the faithful couples who are looked upon as oddly childish" and it is the "modestly dressed woman [who] is the exception." She describes a shocking report of 58 sixth grade girls being subjected to genital exams by moronic Pennsylvania school authorities searching out venereal disease as "a drearily typical story." Moreover, she maintains that the ill-advised teaching of "an explicit sex poem" to 15-year-old high school students is "more or less the same thing" as sexual assault.
In light of such rhetorical excess, it's no surprise that Shalit claims widespread pre-marital sex on the part of women has led to nearly every social ill imaginable: "miserable romances, sexual violence of all sorts, sexual harassment, divorce, suicide, 13-year-olds who find it easier to have sex with a series of people rather than say 'no,' and anorexics who weigh 52 pounds.
Shalit doesn't argue calmly and reasonably that we should attempt to persuade young adolescents to wait until they're older to have sexual intercourse, or that it might be a good thing if everyone took sex more seriously. She never focuses squarely on the obvious yearning many of her generation have for more hands-on, active parenting. Nor does she recognize that the lack of a backbone is the real issue when young people capitulate to peer pressure to have sex. (Kids with starch in their spines resist peer pressure with respect to shoplifting, cheating on exams and alcohol abuse -- not just sex.) Instead, in a manner reminiscent of feminist extremists, Shalit insists the sky has fallen.
Echoing Pipher, Shalit declares that girls "today are much more oppressed" than 30 years ago. Elsewhere, she insists that "hatred of women is more in evidence" than it used to be, that there is an "associative link" between sex education and sexual brutality, and that the "dangers besetting girls have grown steadily more extreme." We live, says Shalit, in a "truly misogynist culture" that "affords [females] precious little respect or protection."
The big bad wolf responsible for this state of affairs is, of course, male. As if attempting to outdo the most virulent feminist, Shalit believes women should be spared the least inconvenience (they shouldn't have to deal with peer pressure to dress like a "slut" in order to be popular in high school) while males deserve no sympathy.
Even though young males commit suicide six times more frequently than females, and even though the only first-hand account of self-mutilation she provides involves a male student, Shalit has nothing but hostility for boys. In her view, the only thing worth mentioning about this half of the population is that they stalk, rape, sexually harass and batter. Expecting "to be able to treat all women like prostitutes," they "behave worse than ever" and spend their time "trying to escape from their obligations." Research showing that men, too, are the victims of sexual harassment and coercion, not to mention domestic violence is utterly ignored by Shalit.
Intellectually Shalit is still a kid who longs for a paint-by-number set. She's naively certain that if people would only do things in a particular order (first get married, then have sex), life would be perfect and we'd all live happily ever after. But while she can be forgiven for still believing in magic formulas, it's more difficult to excuse similar ideas when they turn up in books written by chronologically older writers.
Crittenden's polemic is a case in point. Once again, anecdotal evidence plays a central role in this critique of feminism. Crittenden's conclusion that women today are "even more miserable and insecure, more thwarted and obsessed with men, than the most depressed, Lithium-popping, suburban" women of the fifties is based not on hard data or years of careful, documented research conducted by academics - but on her own perusal of women's magazines.
Crittenden tells us she "pulled thirty years' worth of back issues of Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vogue, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and McCalls from the stacks of the Library of Congress" and, on this basis, arrived at her conclusions. This sounds impressive until, six pages later, she refers to "those women's magazines I waded through THAT DAY in the library" (italics added). While superficial impressions may be valid in some arenas, it's surely not unreasonable to expect the fundamental premise of an entire book to be rooted in firmer soil than a single day's research.
What's more, even if Crittenden had spent months studying these magazines, making rigorous tallies and conducting careful calculations, a serious discussion of the limitations of such a yardstick, as well as a good-faith exploration of alternative hypotheses, is surely also in order.
Is it sensible to conclude that women's magazines accurately reflect real women's lives? Is it not possible that these magazines, catering to what sells, have paid inordinate attention to some issues while neglecting others? Could it be that women's magazines have merely become more willing to talk openly about women's insecurities in recent years? Crittenden addresses none of these questions.
She, too, is fond of exaggeration. Not content to merely criticize the inept sex education she received in school, she declares: "if you weren't having sex by fourteen, you almost expected to fail gym." Funny, I was born in the same year as Crittenden but that's not how I remember it. Contemporary society, she continues, has now "made it almost impossible for teenagers to avoid having sex before the age of eighteen." (Later, however. she declares that modern women are now free to "have sex or abstain--all without any social stigma.")
In another vein, Crittenden observes not that mothers sometimes struggle with guilt when they work outside the home, but that "guilty tension is felt by every working mother at nearly every moment of her working day." Graphically, Crittenden refers to this as the "internal bleeding of the working mother's existence."
While Crittenden's views on men are more balanced than Shalit's, she also frequently contradicts herself. In contrast to Shalit, she says that "men have not suddenly become more beastly," condemns feminists for fanning "female mistrust and hostility toward men," and admits that males, too, have historically been punished by society for "their sexual misdemeanors."
Elsewhere, however, Crittenden declares that men "are getting away with appalling behavior toward women," that they "behave more badly than they used to," that "so many men don't understand that it's wrong to walk out on their children and wives" and that nearly half the men in America are "shirking the duties of fatherhood."
Women who wait until later in life to get married will, Crittenden warns, eventually discover that the available men her age are all losers. They are, she says. "misfits and crazy men, immature, elusive Peter Pans who won't commit themselves to a second cup of coffee--sexual predators who hit on every woman they meet, newly divorced men taking pleasure wherever they can, [and] embittered, scorned men who still feel vengeful toward their last girlfriend."
Even more insulting toward men in general, however, is her contention that men will only marry and settle down if they are unable to procure sex any other way. Moreover, her belief that sex is -- and should be -- a lever by which women manipulate men into supporting them financially is hardly conducive to genuinely sympathetic and respectful relations between the sexes.
As the work of a growing number of dissident feminists have demonstrated, there are numerous legitimate grounds on which the women's movement deserves to be criticized. Responsible advocates of the sexual revolution are also beginning to admit that the movement has engendered its own casualties --most notably the children who continue to be born to inner city single mothers.
It's a pity such large portions of these books reinforce -- rather than challenge -- some of feminism's worst stereotypes about women and men. While Shalit and Crittenden are legitimately concerned about loyalty and permanence in male-female relationships, work-family tensions, and the troubled sexual landscape, their analysis is so tainted, their evidence so shallow, and their approach so hyperbolic that neither work significantly advances the debate.
Donna Laframboise is a reporter for The National post (Canada) and the author of The Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality.