"She argued that the real revolution that allowed women to have careers was not the women’s movement but the availability of modern forms of birth control. To Ms. Decter, women had a biological destiny to be wives and mothers, and those who tried to escape it evinced self-hatred. In her 1972 book, 'The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation,' she wrote that women’s 'true grievance' is not that they are 'mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are — women.' She offered a solution: Single women should remain chaste, because women are naturally monogamous. And withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men...."
I remember reading about Midge Decter for the first time back in 1972 when "The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation" came out. I wish I could find that article now, not just to be able to revisit the reaction to the book, but to see the illustration, which I remember as a sequence of drawings of a woman reading the book calmly, then reading the book with an expression of developing anger, then kicking the book in the air. It neatly conveyed the message: Don't read this book. Midge Decter is toxic.
I did find the contemporaneous review in the NYT, "The argument of Women's Liberation, Midge Decter says, is with liberation" (October 15, 1972). The reviewer, George Stade, an English professor, writes:
Women's Liberation, she says, expresses not a demand for equal rights or a yearning for freedom, but an inability to manage the rights and freedoms women already have. Women are now free to marry or not, to do housework or not, to get a job or not, and to make of their marriages, housework or job what they will....
Housework, Midge Decter argues, has become not a task imposed, but a profession chosen. With choice comes the possibility of making the wrong one, the anxious knowledge of that possibility beforehand, and a personal responsibility for how it turns out.
Similarly, middle — class women, unlike their husbands, take jobs by choice, not necessity. For men a career is the only medium of self‐definition. For women a career is a possibility embraced among others that beckon.
Liberationists, then, are those women who cannot bear the risk of failure or the responsibilities of success, who cannot come to terms with their own ambition, who see themselves as too delicate for the hurly‐burly of competition or for exposure to judgment—those who want never to grow up.
These are hard words, but of a kind with Midge Decter's stern replies to the arguments of Women's Liberation on the subject of sex, marriage and motherhood. The movement's response to the sexual revolution has been counterrevolutionary, she argues, a retreat to a nunnery of the mind, a longing for the old chastity and the bargaining power it gave women over men, a flinching avoidance of the dangers and difficulties of sexual equality.
What the Women's Liberationist cannot abide is the terms of the contract [of marriage]—terms which include the requirement that she respond to her husband's maleness with a reciprocal femininity, that she enter into the conflicts and concessions of a dialogue with the sexual and social other.
Midge Decter also has a reply to the movement's claim that motherhood is a swindle, an ideological fortress erected by men to confine women to a life of drudgery, a stockade built on the narrow ground of a biological property that science will soon remove to the lab. Her reply is that birth control and the easier availability of abortion have “transposed motherhood from a descriptive category to a normative one.” ...
[T]his new opportunity for decision and choice, like the others, has been felt by Women's Liberation as only a new burden, a dreadful freedom, a sickness unto death from the moment of her first child's birth. The movement, then, is not an expression of women's surge toward new possibilities and new freedoms, but “an expression of their terror in the face of the harshness and burdens of a new and as yet not fully claimed freedom.” That terror is the force behind the movement's “true underlying intention. And that is to create a world, or a culture, in which either literally or to all intents and purposes there would be no men and no women.”
The world they want to re‐create is that of prepubescent androgeny, a world shrunk to “a household culture in which maleness and femaleness would be indistinguishable.”...
No doubt Midge Decter goes too far, but in doing so she clarifies the issue... Women's Liberation says women are victims; Midge Decter says they are free to choose among alternatives...
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53 comments:
Gosh, that seems sensible!.
I've often thought that (some) feminists actually wish that women are men. Why? I don't know.
Surprising, really!
So, if you own a dairy; and you're giving the milk away.. Interest in cow purchases plummets?
"withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men."
Ain't it the truth?
tolkein said...
I've often thought that (some) feminists actually wish that women are men.
Now, look at gender dysphoria
"She argued that the real revolution that allowed women to have careers was not the women’s movement but the availability of modern forms of birth control."
The real revolution that allowed women to have careers was WWII and every man between 18 and 35 being actively engaged in military service, and despite even that, having such a manpower crunch that in late 1944 USA leadership was actively considering drafting women for non-combat roles as the considered the tremendous manpower needs (and losses) had operation downfall been necessary.
Seriously, look it up. People still do not appreciate the magnitude of that war. Yes, they were actively considering drafting women. Rosie The Riveter almost became Rosie the frontline combat aircraft mechanic draftee.
Women worked and had careers before the pill, but generally not before WWII. WWII created the concept of the 'working woman', not birth control.
That was a reminder that "neo-conservatives" once had some interesting things to say. Today of course the term refers to the compulsive warmongers embedded in the Deep State, who are on board with whatever the current thing is.
The left can be defined as dogmatic. They see or read something that threatens their loyalty and devotion.. & they scream "Don't let it in!.." "Do not read it!" Do not dare to challenge the dogma of the left.
When you're right, you're right.
That was interesting. Those ideas offer me a fresh perspective and give me something to think about. I'd like to know Ann's response, both then and now.
The women’s movement has been the greatest con job ever perpetuated on women by men who want an endless stream of sexual partners available to them and an endless stream of worker bees trying to find meaning in serving their corporate masters. The old fool’s gold play. The only woman I have ever known to be comfortable in their own skin have come to grips with their femininity as well their others gifts.
I can't stand the word "liberalism"
I consider myself a classical liberal.
Liberals barely exist on the left these days. Today's modern left consists of mostly Maddow believing/ Kimmel/Colbert adhering/ hardcore progressive extreme leftists.
What foresight she had. And now if one’s feminism holds that women are unique and valuable for their feminine characteristics you get TERFed out of the club for insufficient wokeness. No male or female Indeed.
My mom saw Midge on TV after Liberal Parents, Radical Children and liked her. I don't know what she would have made of this earlier, other Midge.
What she wrote rings pretty true. Women seem to have a fair amount of angst that stems from having to choose between finding fulfillment as a wife and mom, on the one hand, and enjoying the kinds of freedom that go along with being a man, on the other. I don't think men are similarly conflicted.
She offered a solution: Single women should remain chaste, because women are naturally monogamous. And withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men...."
Women are not naturally monogamous. Quite the opposite.
. . . the movement's "true underlying intention . . . is to create a world, or a culture, in which either literally or to all intents and purposes there would be no men and no women."
Thus, some fifty years on, the moral panic over "trans" and "nonbinary" gender identities.
withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men
Only the one you're married to, and only if he decides to honor his vows regardless.
[Decter] wrote that women’s 'true grievance' is not that they are 'mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are — women.'
This is definitely true of feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, who thought that women would never achieve equality as long as they alone had the biological job of birthing babies. Firestone wanted the technology of artificial wombs to take over the job birthin' those babies.
Neoconservative of 1972 = Woke left "sex withholding if Roe repealed" of 2022.
Universities are now majority female...and becoming something of religious convents? Isle of Lesbos in ancient Greece...females being female and unmated alone?
Moving away from libertarianism (right of center) and Bohemianism (left of center) by necessity becomes more conservative/rigid.
I'm a little confused by the part you(?) bolded. Is Decter criticizing those who (subconsciously?) seek pre-marital chastity or not?
Did the Women's Movement attract man-hating Lesbians or make them?
Why would the Times quote so extensively from Decter's occasional rival Gore Vidal while giving her esteemed acolyte, Bestsey Fox-Genovese, a mere comment in passing? Betsey's own Humanities Medal scholarship and the work of thousands of other accomplished conservative women and others were deeply influenced by Decter. If she is not well remembered today, it is simply because her truly challenging ideas have been disappeared from a dumbed-down and propagandist academia. And if the Times quoted Vidal every time an enemy of his died, they would have to double the size of their paper.
She was also far more a conservative than a neocon. They couldn't find someone minimally better informed to write this?
Amusingly, the Times expends more space in her obituary on people other than her, poaching the focus from her own books and ideas. Pretty sexist of them, but it amusingly illustrates what Decter herself predicted women would become under the feminist movement: self-limiting and obsequious to sex and to men.
She saw far
Also the mother of John Podhoretz.
"Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...."
Wise and prescient. But it seems to apply more to what's going on now. In the Sixties and Seventies liberalism/progressivism may have looked like or been an assault on the way Americans were living, but we've adapted to the changes and assimilated them. The changes happening now will be harder to take in and manage.
Like other radical activists, they can't see compromise or moderation. Some liberation activists felt the only way to fix the problem was to burn down the system. Same with trans, same with pro-aborts. Their fight is with themselves, but they blame the normies. Your freedom does not mean you should destroy the freedom of others.
I enjoyed her biography of Donald Rumsfeld which came shortly after his retirement from the W. Bush administration.
Midge used to write a lot for National Review in the 1970s. She and her Husband were big friends of WFB until about 2005, when Buckley began to have doubts about the Iraq War. OTOH, Gore Vidal hated her.
I can remember reading "Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975)" in the college library, probably because it was the only conservative book in a big shelf of liberal sociology books. Didn't make much of an impact.
Thought she died a while ago, but she was 95.
Crazy, looney-left, pink-haired, pierced every-which-way, inked-up shrews withhold sex from men in protest.
All 3 billion men on earth breathe huge sigh of relief.
It’s a well known joke—the photo of the desiccated old bitties collected under a sign, “lips that have touched alcohol will not touch these.” The joke, of course, is that nobody wants to kiss those women anyway, so who cares if they are going on a sex strike?
The power is not in withholding sex, precisely, but in wielding sex. Whether granting or withholding, it’s the same power, and to really matter, the woman must be sexually desirable. Who cares if somebody nobody wants to sleep with announces she won’t sleep with anybody? Sexually desirable women, on the other hand, generally aren’t interested in withholding sex for personal advantage because they can also grant it for personal advantage. Which is more fun. And the more power they wield, the more advantages they already get anyway, so there’s less need.
This reminded me of descriptions from 'Only Yesterday An Informal History Of The Nineteen Twenties', Frederick Lewis Allen, (1931). In the book he discusses the revolution of the youth, specifically the freedom of young women as part of his survey. Interesting to see that a century ago, 50 years ago, and really today are only differing by degree. Allen does point out that the emancipation was very much "middle class" women, as poor women were already working, supporting themselves, etc. The same with birth control and abortion, the "respectable" girls could now engage in activities with less risk of scandal or being ostracized from their station.
Here is the passage on women loosening their norms
"The housewife was learning to telephone her shopping orders, to get her clothes ready-made and spare herself the rigors of dress-making, to buy a vacuum cleaner and emulate the lovely carefree girls in the magazine advertisements who banished dust with such delicate fingers. Women were slowly becoming emancipated from routine to “live their own lives.”
"And what were these “own lives” of theirs to be like? Well, for one thing, they could take jobs. Up to this time girls of the middle classes who had wanted to “do something” had been largely restricted to school-teaching, social-service work, nursing, stenography, and clerical work in business houses. But now they poured out of the schools and colleges into all manner of new occupations. They besieged the offices of publishers and advertisers; they went into tearoom management until there threatened to be more purveyors than consumers of chicken patties and cinnamon toast; they sold antiques, sold real estate, opened smart little shops, and finally invaded the department stores. In 1920 the department store was in the mind of the average college girl a rather bourgeois institution which employed “poor shop girls”; by the end of the decade college girls were standing in line for openings in the misses’ sports-wear department and even selling behind the counter in the hope that some day fortune might smile upon them and make them buyers or stylists. Small-town girls who once would have been contented to stay in Sauk Center all their days were now borrowing from father to go to New York or Chicago to seek their fortunes— in Best’s or Macy’s or Marshall Field’s. Married women who were encumbered with children and could not seek jobs consoled themselves with the thought that home-making and child-rearing were really “professions,” after all. No topic was so furiously discussed at luncheon tables from one end of the country to the other as the question whether the married woman should take a job, and whether the mother had a right to. And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended.
"With the job— or at least the sense that the job was a possibility— came a feeling of comparative economic independence. With the feeling of economic independence came a slackening of husbandly and parental authority. Maiden aunts and unmarried daughters were leaving the shelter of the family roof to install themselves in kitchenette apartments of their own. For city-dwellers the home was steadily becoming less of a shrine, more of a dormitory— a place of casual shelter where one stopped overnight on the way from the restaurant and the movie theater to the office. Yet even the job did not provide the American woman with that complete satisfaction which the management of a mechanized home no longer furnished. She still had energies and emotions to burn; she was ready for the revolution. "
The birth control pill had a huge effect on women, not all positive. There was even a very funny movie about it called "Prudence and the Pill."
"Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...."
This could have been expected, since the ideology was originating in Moscow and East Berlin.
@Whipple Women are not naturally monogamous.
That also caught my eye. The rate of false paternity varies all over the place, depending on country and who was tested, but seems to be somewhere between 1% and 5%. Men were also involved in all those false paternities, of course, but perhaps women are more equal than expected :) ISTR that the lines of male descent from Richard III were found to be broken by two events when it was traced in an attempt to verify that the remains in the newly discovered burial were his.
Midge, Fire Island Pines, 1980:
"And its denizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike, were predominantly professionals and people in soft, marginal businesses — lawyers, advertising executives, psychotherapists, actors, editors, writers, publishers, gallery owners, designers, decorators, etc."
Some have mentioned WWII as the driver for the modern Working Woman, but I'd argue it was the typewriter, some 50-75 years earlier. Typing had became highly female-centric even by the turn of the last century and that was what got them into at least the office setting in force.
Don't forget WW1 and mobilization of women outside the home. Women getting the vote tied to that.
I'd like to share Midge's writing with my wife. I probably won't because she'd probably just get pissed.
But it does seem that the "feminist movement" gets upset any time that women aren't treated just like men, whereas actual women get pissed when they're treated just like men.
See, for example, the whole MeToo movement. A lot of the treatment the are complaining about would be utterly unexceptional if done by one gay male to another gay male, or be a straight female to a straight male.
"we want to be treated exactly like males when we want to be treated like males, and exactly like 50s females when that's what we want" is not, in fact, a winning platform for life
That also caught my eye. The rate of false paternity varies all over the place, depending on country and who was tested, but seems to be somewhere between 1% and 5%. Men were also involved in all those false paternities, of course, but perhaps women are more equal than expected :)
Men have to work to earn access to sex. For women, all they have to do is offer it. That means that a woman incurs a lower cost for a greater benefit: trading sexual access for something in return, whether material or social. I think women also tend therefore to be constantly evaluating for the "next thing."
Men, in contrast, will generally be loyal if they're needs are met. Fill his belly, empty his balls, and make him feel appreciated, and he'll be loyal and devoted.
This is a middle-class concern. Poor women always worked.
Liberalism is a philosophy and practice of progressive (i.e. monotonic) divergence.
Women are not naturally monogamous.
Much more so than men. The hormones are strong when they're young, but eventually most want to settle down with a man. Many may even want to bear and raise children.
Expressing that choice for a long time would get you othered, which is one reason why the birth rate is down and single women's dissatisfaction rises as they get older. Who advocates for family and childbearing these days?
I like her!
Smart, saavy, forthright…
Sad that I’ve never heard of her before. But, hey. Her words live on!
May perpetual light shine upon her.
Women always worked in the farm and tenement household, and prior to inventions such as the washing machine, such work was extremely laborious. Yeoman households had men and women performing farming tasks alongside each other. Frontier life, and farming well into the period between the wars saw women and men working not only as sharecroppers but also running large commercial farms together. Of course female slaves worked, and freed black women sharecropped and were domestics. Generations of immigrant women eventually took over paid domestic work, especially in the North, when it became distasteful to have black female "help."
As factories replaced farms, girls and women, married and unmarried, north and south, also worked in cotton mills and other sorts of factories. In many such jobs, the smaller the hands, the better. Teachers, nurses, and librarians were until recently careers mainly for women.
The Fifties were the exception, not the rule.
Freud's question remains unanswered.
The first time (I think) I saw Midge was on C-Span in the 1990's, when she was paired with Democratic water-carrier Ann Lewis. The two had a very polite hosted discussion. In face, it was the politest intellectual disemboweling of an over-her-head liberal that I've ever seen. Midge was thoughtful and she was sharp-tongued when the occasion or need arose.
“Down With Love” was a pretty good spoof of that idea, whether intentional or not.
I remember back in the 1960s when Midge used come on the TV and say, "Liberalism, you're soaking in it."
Or something like that.
"Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...."
I respect Althouse for highlighting this. Liberalism veered off the tracks then, and progs now assault big chunks of the culture that Althouse herself holds dear.
For the past half century nice liberal women have looked the other way. How much longer?
Bill Peschel said...
Women are not naturally monogamous.
Much more so than men. The hormones are strong when they're young, but eventually most want to settle down with a man. Many may even want to bear and raise children.
read a study that claimed that women prefer the faces of "soft" looking men when they're on their period / pregnant, but prefer the faces of "hard" looking men when they're ovulating
.
Which means, among other things, that the faces they like when they're on birth control are NOT the faces they like when it's time to get pregnant
Abstinence is a choice. Moderation and prevention, too. We're adults who can set priorities, accept personal responsibility, and life is not so short that we cannot reconcile.
Great post, Ann, and great, thoughtful comments. This kind of thing is what makes Althouse the best blog on the internet. (The lists of TikTok videos don’t hurt either.)
The liberation of women (to work that is) resulted from household appliances, fewer children, the car, male labor shortages after WWII. Birth control did not have much to do with it because the pill came later.
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