Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by David Gelernter

Come the Revolution

Domestic Tranquility: A Brief against Feminism, by F. Carolyn Graglia (Spence, 480 pp., $29.95)

CAROLYN Graglia's Domestic Tranquility is a powerful, noble, tragic book. It presents modern feminism for what it is: institutionalized hatred of motherhood and homemaking, at least as they have been understood over the last few millennia. The book has been attacked for extremism. There is nothing extreme about it. Mrs. Graglia's accusations are meticulously documented and footnoted. The book is honest, passionate, furious, and not for the faint-hearted, because modern reality is not for the faint-hearted. But to be anything but furious, a woman in Carolyn Graglia's position would have to be inhuman or insane.

Here is the story: in 1963 Betty Friedan, founding mother of modern American feminism, announced in The Feminine Mystique that "all professions are finally open to women in America." Fine. Women who want careers are henceforth free to have them. So what's Mrs. Friedan's problem? Her aim was to attack the institution of homemaking. Homemakers, she said, are "parasites." The housewife's goal is "to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security."

It is hard to conceive of a more disgusting attack or a bigger lie. But intolerance was the point of feminism. Mrs. Graglia practiced law until her first child was born. "My own career pursuits," she writes, "elicited a vastly more tolerant reaction four decades ago than a decision to devote oneself to being a full-time mother and housewife" does today. "Those under the age of 35," she notes quietly, "have rarely heard the housewife depicted in any but demeaning terms."

Surely Mrs. Friedan's charges weren't allowed to stand? But of course they were. Betty Friedan inspired a revolution that turned American life upside down.

Women are notorious for wanting to please people, including in some cases their families. "Workplace discrimination in fact played no part," Mrs. Graglia explains, "in the decisions many of us made to cease working outside the home." She was moved instead by the "strong emotional pull" of home and children. But the Friedan crowd set out to convince such mothers to suppress their loving urges: women could enter a thousand deep and spiritually rewarding professions -- they could be bank clerks, car salesmen, even insurance agents -- and put aside the drudgery of childrearing.

The goal was to destroy the American family, and Domestic Tranquility documents the family's "startling deterioration" since feminism first got a claw hold: the surge in illegitimacy, divorce, female-headed households. By 1986, a quarter of all American children under 18 lived in single-parent households (versus 9 per cent in 1960); 60 per cent of children born in 1986 were likely to spend part of their childhood in a single-parent home. You can't measure unhappiness, but you can catch glimpses of it in the data Mrs. Graglia marshals: in a 1986 poll, three-quarters of adults say that a child today faces worse problems than the adults themselves did when young. That children in this richest, fanciest, flushest society in history are "basically happy" is a proposition subscribed to by less than half of American adults.

How could we allow such a catastrophe to take place? The feminist revolution was powered by male greed -- for sex, money, and irresponsibility. "The women's movement," Mrs. Graglia writes, "could have been orchestrated by Playboy: readily available sex without marriage; if married, a working wife to unburden the male from responsibility for supporting the household; readily available abortion to eliminate unwanted children . . ." Women are advised nowadays (by sober, good-hearted feminists) that, given the no-fault divorce laws that make it so easy to chuck an old wife and get a spiffy new one, they had better be prepared to earn their own living. "No-fault divorce laws did not, however, result from an edict of the gods or from some force of nature, but from sustained political efforts, particularly by the feminist movement." Statistics show that in the first year after divorce the average woman and her minor children experience a severe decline in living standards.

Mrs. Graglia never beats around the bush or plays it safe. Her discussion of Jewish feminists and their key role is one of the few unconvincing parts of her argument. Disdain for housework might have been typical of German Jewish women in America but not of Jew-ish women generally -- and I doubt whether you could distinguish, on this score, between German Jews and gentiles of comparable class. Notwithstanding, Mrs. Graglia has done everyone a favor by confronting this topic instead of cowering under a table like the typical social theorist.

And in personal terms, Mrs. Graglia leaves the impression of fearlessness above all. How many authors of either sex would publish a claim like this? Simone de Beauvoir's "excitement at being bested by this superior man" -- her common-law husband, Jean-Paul Sartre --"is familiar to women (it was not entirely with regret that I realized my future husband might beat me in an argument). This excitement can serve a woman well."