Our Gal - An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War - Review

National Review, Nov 5, 2001 by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War, by Midge Decter (HarperCollins, 234 pp., $24)

Forthright to a fault-or a virtue-Midge Decter enjoys a well-deserved reputation for speaking her mind. In this new book, she lays her formidable polemical skills aside, adopting instead a rather irenic and bemused tone, perhaps on the assumption that polemics ill become a review of one's life, perhaps because she truly views her personal experience as personal rather than political. Decter's title appropriately evokes the mellow temper that informs her pages, although her subtitle, which presents her life as unfolding amidst love and war, hints at the presence of excitement; and even in this spirit of comfortable recollection, she cannot resist plunging the odd stiletto into a former foe or exposing the silliness of this or that feminist mantra. Overall, however, this book exudes the attractively restful sense of a woman who, in taking stock of her life, feels herself to have been more blessed than abused.

Those in quest of scandal, confession, or expose will be disappointed, for this is emphatically not a confessional book in the accepted sense. Explicitly crafted as a memoir rather than an autobiography, it combines a judiciously edited account of Decter's life with a judiciously selective picture of her times and the most significant people she has known. Some might find it tempting to see Decter as emblematic of an entire generation-the one that cut its teeth on the left-wing politics of the 1930s and 1940s, settled into a more or less comfortable anti-Communist liberalism during the 1950s and early 1960s, and was subsequently jolted by the turbulence of the student and women's movements into a new form of conservatism.

Decter-along with her husband Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a handful of others-ranks among the founding elite of what has become known as neoconservatism; in the 1980s, what Decter calls the "unbelievably happy" circumstance of her association with the conservative Washington think tank, the Heritage Foundation, would persuade her to drop the "neo." An Old Wife's Tale does not pretend to offer a chronicle of, or even a justification for, the movement, which Decter primarily treats-often in a charmingly wry tone-as a matter of common sense. Thus, recollecting a confrontation that she witnessed in the late 1960s between Barnard girls and New York City cops, she perceptively emphasizes the importance of the class dimension of the clash: "The great revolution of the sixties and seventies, in other words, turned out to be little more than a class war in which the affluent had the better weapons: the indulgence of parents and teachers along with virtually the whole of the press and the clergy."

Similarly, in her passing jabs at the women's movement, she displays more homey wisdom and common sense than vituperation. A staunch opponent of affirmative action, Decter failed to understand "why any woman would fight for years to become a member of a club whose majority were opposed to allowing women to join." How could affirmative action under such conditions result in anything but "massive seizures of self- doubt"-as she believes it has for "some blacks in elite colleges and women learning to be fighter pilots"? Comments and reflections like these, which she drops throughout the book, remind the reader that she is also the author of The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation-and of countless other directly political interventions that more acerbically dissect what she views as the failures and outright dishonesty of the last three decades of affirmative action and identity politics.

Like some of the other accomplished women of her generation (one thinks of Himmelfarb and Carolyn Graglia), Decter minimizes the difficulties that she, as a woman, encountered during the course of her career. Indeed, she places little emphasis on her feelings in general. The spare account of her private life leaves no doubt that she must have been a young woman of singular determination. The youngest of three daughters of a Jewish shopkeeper in St. Paul, Minn., Decter early developed a secret longing to live in New York; and after dropping out of the University of Minnesota, she moved there. Decter says nothing about having been discouraged in her pursuit of education. (To the contrary, her parents expected her to finish college, leave home, and embrace a career.) She says only that, even though she knew a college degree could prove useful, she hated school. So, armed only with her self-confidence and minimal typing skills, she left for New York to perfect her Hebrew "at the College of Jewish Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and otherwise, as the cliche of the time would have it, [to] 'find myself.'"

Within a year, she was married to her first husband and had met the man who, ten years later, would become her second husband. While her husband (she never gives us his name) completed his education on the GI Bill, she found a job as secretary to the managing editor of Commentary; she loved the job but soon left because of her pregnancy with her first child. There ensued a brief period in the suburbs, which permits Decter to expose, in passing, the fallacies of feminist complaints about a woman's lot during the 1950s. A second daughter followed the first, as did a return to New York; then came divorce- which, Decter writes, "begins in that moment in which one looks in the mirror and says 'Is this all there is going to be forever?'" Following the divorce, which she evokes as a matter of settling child support and visitation rights and the vow to remain "civilized," she returned to work at Commentary in order to support herself and the girls. Then Norman Podhoretz, whom Decter had met and befriended at the time of her first marriage, returned from his army service in Germany and joined Commentary. Decter offers a brief sketch of their courtship and marriage, concluding, "and thereby hangs the tale of the rest of my life as a woman."