" Woman is an imperfect creature," a character in Cervantes's Don Quixote declares, "and you must not put stumbling-blocks in her path, so that she may trip and fall, but rather clear her road of every obstacle, so that she may run free and unburdened to gain the perfection she lacks, which consists in a good life."
It was during the 1960s that feminists preached, with astounding success, that a good life for women can't be found in the home. The traditional female roles of bearing and rearing children, society was taught, are inferior to the male role of working in the public marketplace. And whether they consider themselves feminists or not, women in enormous numbers today lead the life scripted for them by the feminists.
It is, as Cervantes put it, a life strewn with stumbling blocks. The fact that many women have tripped and fallen, never to recover -- and the fact that few women have actually found a good life following the feminists' script -- is ably demonstrated by Danielle Crittenden in her new work, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us. This wonderful, breezy book reads as easily as all the women's magazines its author uses for her evidence. But it bravely faces what those magzines, steeped in feminist ideology, steadfastly avoid.
The first stumbling blocks strewn in women's path were the sexual revolution and the feminists' demand that women mimic male promiscuity. Crittenden remembers her own sexual indoctrination as a girl, listening with her classmates to sex-education courses delivering the message that girls should just "do it," in the same way they do math and English. This message -- relentlessly reinforced by television, the recording industry, and movies -- gave us a society in which well-educated, middle-class girls created a market of free sex to replace prostitutes. And the inevitable result was that men became increasingly unwilling to marry or stay married.
Crittenden is the editor of the Women's Quarterly, the polished and witty journal published by the Independent Women's Forum in Washington, D. C. In her book, she admonishes women to recognize the differences between male and female sexuality, advising them that they will regain sexual power over man only "if women as a group cease to be readily available -- if they begin to demand commitment (and real commitment, as in marriage) in exchange for sex." As Crittenden aptly notes, if women today cannot find a Mr. Knightly -- the paradigmatic committed male in Jane Austen's Emma -- it is because women have ceased to be Emma Woodhouse. The title of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us is a little mistaken: Many mothers did tell their daughters this. But Crittenden's observation that even the most conservative women she knows "would never disavow their right to sleep with whomsoever they please" indicates how far today's women are from being Emma.
And yet, the return to Emma may happen, for the evidence is increasingly available to women that their sexual behavior affects their own and other women's ability to find husbands. Women also know that the sexual revolution's legacy in America has been the Western world's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases and abortion. And then, as Crittenden so well describes, there are the gloomy prospects of the women who gave up everything for careers.
Crittenden zealously dissects her generation's egalitarian marriages, showing how indistinguishable husbands and wives -- both seeking independence and careers -- have converted marriages into pseudo-homosexual partnerships lacking the sexual differentiation and mutual dependency that hold marriages together. The woman who gives birth in such a partnership is at serious risk: The husband has no thought of being the sole breadwinner, no-fault divorce makes desertion easy for him, and yet she may now want only to stay home with her baby. Hasn't the time come, asks Crittenden, to admit that even the 1950s had it better, when the stay-at-home mother was still accorded status and security, rather than being seen as the freakish parasite that feminists convinced society she was?
What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us manifests the great joy that some women find in sustained contact with their children. And it gives voice to the wrenchingly ambivalent feelings of those women who long to be at home -- despite the feminist teaching that they will have no identity without a job.
Here, however, Crittenden falters somewhat. Just as she accepts feminist myths about the past -- that fathers, for example, were aloof from their children and that women were forced into domesticity and denied careers -- she seems, like the feminists, to believe that all women are the same. A working mother, says Crittenden, can never stop thinking about her child and suffers from "the guilty tension that is felt by every working mother at nearly every moment of her working day."
But one has only to read, for example, Susan Chira's A Mother's Place, to realize this isn't true: It's being with her children that causes Chira tension. She cut short her maternity leaves, citing the depression she felt caring for her babies. Chira says she is happy with a motherhood that involves only a brief time with children in the morning and evening, and I believe her. In the same way, one has only to read Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's comments on child-rearing to believe that she never suffered from maternal yearnings to be with her children more than her career permitted.
No one compels us to have babies, Crittenden argues, and if we do, we have an obligation to care for them. That's true enough, but some women are content to hire others to do the bulk of the caring. Crittenden cannot assume these mothers want their children any less than she and I want our own.
Similarly, I don't think Crittenden's criticisms of older mothers are justified. An older mother, says Crittenden, "will certainly be further away from having natural empathy with her child from that vivid sense of what it is like to be young." She then criticizes the older mother who will not leave a baby with a sitter or whose nine-month-old still wakes up at night "because the mother had decided that it would be traumatizing to let the child cry itself back to sleep." These women, she believes, are working too hard at motherhood "the way they once would have worked on their most important accounts.
And yet, it may be that older women, despite their greater distance from childhood, have more, not less, natural empathy. I had my first child at about the same age Crittenden had hers, but my child-rearing was that of these older mothers. I rarely left my babies with sitters, and they never cried for longer than it took me to reach them. This did not seem difficult, although I had no household help. One of our daughters was always an uneasy sleeper, and she would wake me when she needed to talk. She is now a pediatrician. I do not believe she faults my decision not to let her cry in her crib, and she has told me that she has happy memories -- as I do -- of our late night talks.
There are good reasons for not postponing childbearing, but poor mothering by older women is not one of them. Crittenden would like all mothers to stay home with their children for a few years and believes this is more likely to happen if women bear children when young. In Crittenden's scenario, the young mother can "enter the workforce or go to graduate school" when "her second child is toddling off to nursery school." But for Susan Chira this is already too much mothering, and for me it would have been too little. My children toddled off to nursery school for two and one-half hours on two or three mornings of the week, only enough time for me to keep a doctor's appointment, shop, or read peacefully. Who will tend this toddler during the rest of the day and the older child after school? Who will care for them when they are sick? How much time will this mother have for them when she returns at night?
Any serious attempt to go back to school or pursue a career recreates the problems that Crittenden so cogently analyzes of the overworked mother in the unstable egalitarian marriage. When women seek to achieve in the workplace at the same level as men -- as some women have always wanted and done -- their children will be raised largely be surrogates. If these mothers are content with this, it is fruitless to try to convince them otherwise.
But for those mothers who want to remain a large part of their children's lives -- to be there long after they toddle off to nursery school -- the stumbling blocks that feminism has placed in their way must be removed. Crittenden correctly states that no-fault divorce has "robbed women of a choice that belonged to every previous generation of women -- the choice to care for their children and expect support from their husbands for doing so." She concludes, however, that "the legislative efforts to shore up marriage are probably doomed." But if these efforts are doomed, then the goal of stable marriages is also doomed. Divorce reform is crucial.
Nor can we avoid facing the abortion issue. While Crittenden laments women's lack of attention to their children, she ignores abortion. The high rate at which women eliminate their unborn children is one reason they have been so susceptible to the feminist message about the waste of time spent with their born children. All of Crittenden's excellent arguments will avail little unless we also use them to dismantle the legal regime that has places so many stumbling blocks in the way of women seeking, as Cervantes said, the perfection they lack: a good life.
Danielle Crittenden
What Our Mothers Did't Tell Us
Why Happiness
Eludes the Modern Woman
Simon & Schuster, 224 pp., $ 23
F. Carolyn Graglia is author of Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism.