Friedan

Graglia criticizes the founders of modern feminism such as Simone de Beauvoir. About Betty Friedan she writes, "she was unhappy with her marriage and life in the suburban home, which she compared to a 'comfortable concentration camp' in which the housewife performs 'endless, monotonous, unrewarding' work that 'does not require adult capabilities' and causes 'a slow death of mind and spirit.' She felt 'like a freak, absolutely alone' and afraid to face her 'real feelings about her husband and and children you were presumably living for.'

"Denying that contemporary women could live 'through their bodies' and derive satisfaction from child-bearing as the 'pinnacle of human achievement' that it was on Margaret Mead's South Sea Islands, Friedan recommended the path of women who remained in the workplace by 'juggling their pregnancies' and relying on nurses and housekeepers. Characterizing her marriage as one based not 'on love but on dependent hate,' Friedan concluded that she could no longer continue 'leading other women out of the wilderness while holding on to a marriage that destroyed my self-respect.' And so the self-proclaimed Moses from New York suburbs obtained her divorce."

Piggyback

"Feminism's ability to piggyback upon the black civil rights movement has greatly facilitated women acquisition of educational, job, and other market preferences. Yet, the principal weapon feminists have employed to devalue the housewife's status has been an attack based on stereotypical analysis, arrant bigotry, and undisguised contempt."

Graglia not discriminated against

She writes that feminists say that there has been tremendous discrimination against women who wanted to work, but "My own experience differs sharply from the tales feminists tell. I was a practicing lawyer in the 1950s. From the time in junior high school when I decided to become a lawyer until I ceased working in order to raise a family, I always received unstinting encouragement and support." She goes on give details of all the support she received in pursuing her career. "At the same time, those of my female friends in the 1950s who were traditional housewives little resembled the stereotype, so effectively popularized by Betty Friedan, of intellectually shallow, bored, underachieving child-wives. Nor do I believe the stereotype accurately applied to me when I, too, became a homemaker."

Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- Feminist Mythology

"Attending law school and practicing law during a period when feminists would have us believe women were systematically discriminated against, I was treated as well as, I sometimes thought even better than, the men with I was competing. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, upon her nomination to the United States Supreme Court, reiterated the feminist mythology. Paying homage to her mother, Justice Ginsburg expressed the hope that she herself would be all her mother 'would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve.' Reflected in these words are the feminist assumptions that women can 'achieve' only through market production and that failure to achieve within the workplace cannot have been a willing choice. Cannot Justice Ginsburg conceive that her mother may not have wanted to sacrifice the time at home with her child that would have been required to gain what that child achieved?

Feminism's Victory

"Feminism's ideological victory has been a significant factor in producing the conditions cited by public school administrators when recommending full-day public school education for very young children because government institutions must take responsibility for children at ever younger ages. One administrator, for example, stated at a public hearing that children are no longer being reared by their families since the family 'as we knew it, has been destroyed.' The family, he said, 'is gone' and so 'we are going to have to something else': 'You can forget the family part.' But not all those mothers whose employment has contributed to creating this situation celebrate it as the social advance it is to feminists. Some of these mothers, instead, acknowledge a strong yearning to be at home with their children and guilt because of the choices they have made.

"If this maternal yearning is ever to influence behavior, it must be powerful enough to overcome the feminist triumph that has entrenched within our society views of the elite opinion-makers like those expressed by Justice Ginsburg and Karen DeCrow. The traditional family that the women's movement targeted as its enemy is on its way to extinction. While not yet dead and gone, as the school administrator claimed, it will be unless those who believe in the value of this family structure attempt to reverse feminism's victory. Such an attempt will not succeed until society begins again to respect and support -- rather than disfavor, patronize, and demean -- the woman who undertakes a traditional role and the man who makes it possible for her to do so."

Attack George Gilder

She says the feminists call any man who disagrees with them a misogynist such as "George Gilder, one of the most valiant and loyal defenders of femininity." Feminism is now the ruling ideology of the West: "The assault on the worth of a traditional female role has succeeded in degrading it to the most inferior status it has ever had in our society."

Little Things

"The Victorian home, as Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it, became 'a haven not only from the pressures of the marketplace but from the temptations of sin and corruption.' The attitude that market activity within the public arena is not the ultimate good reflected what Brigitte and Peter Berger have identified as a fundamental bourgeois belief that the 'little things' in life, the ordinary and seemingly unimportant details of everyday events, matter as much as the 'great things' (The War Over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground).

Austen and Tolstoy

"It is the crucial significance of these simple, commonplace events comprising our daily routines that Jane Austen celebrates in her writings of delicate precision and Leo Tolstoy portrays in his monumental novels. In War and Peace, Tolstoy captures in Natasha the essence of the woman who finds satisfaction in attending to the particularities of her family's daily activities by preserving routines and discharging the obligations they impose. Indeed, it was at the figure of Natasha that Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 fired the first salvo of feminism's current war against the housewife, when she ridiculed the 'supreme self-abasement' of Natasha's 'passionate and tyrannical devotion to her family.'

"Women who cherish the ideal Tolstoy's portrayal of the domestic bliss that Natasha finally achieved -- perceiving that bliss as self-fulfilling, not abasing -- stand athwart the course of feminism's advance. Society can choose to honor this ideal, to grant significance to the ordinary details of everyday life, and to respect, rather than disdain, a woman's devotion to her family's daily routine. If it does, then this woman can easily derive more satisfaction from baking a loaf of bread with her child than from writing the legal briefs that feminism would celebrate as the only genuine achievements. Such a woman might well describe the purpose of her daily life in the way Mark Helprin described the paintings of Edward Schmidt: this artist's purpose, said Helprin, is not 'to reinvent the universe, but rather, like Raphael, and Caravaggio, and Sargent, and a thousand others before, to attend to it.'

SMALL UNIVERSE

"Contemporary feminism would have women devote themselves to reinventing the universe -- as Hillary Rodham Clinton urges them to 'remold society.' But devotion to grandiose schemes within the public arena necessarily requires relinquishing to others the cultivation of one's own garden. The essence of the traditional woman is her preference for attending to the welfare of her small universe, hoping to create therein a simple canvas of quotidian beauty. If T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock thinks his life diminished because it is measured out with coffee spoons, the traditional woman cherishes the daily ceremonies in which she arranges these spoons. Henry James speaks for her when he begins The Portrait of a Lady by observing that 'there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.'"

The Victorians put their children first; now Americans put work first: "Whatever the arrangements for surrogate care, the relationship which exists between the mother who is at home all day and her child no longer exists when that mother enters the workplace."

Graglia spends time in her book on painting a picture of how she and her husband would talk about the children and their relationship when he came home from work. He is a lawyer also, but he was right in not wanting to talk shop, even with a wife who was very skilled in his profession. Men should not bring their work home. True balance is not women studying men's profession, but women being respected for their work in the home. Graglia's title is not one that would interest many men. We wish she would have picked a title that would appeal to men as well. Men should read her book because she is one of the rare, wise voices that teach men to honor women's sphere of the home.

Patriarchy means that men are the leaders of their home. They work all day and may be tired when they come home. But the woman does not stop working in the home. Men must stretch and work in their home along side with their wife. When they play, they should play together as much as possible. Men should give attention to their wife and kids. They should praise them for all they do. This means he must know what they are doing. The home is so devalued that it is only a place for men to watch ball games on TV now. Women cook and put the kids to bed at night while he watches junk on TV. Men should be family men. They should be involved in their kids education -- teaching them values and knowledge. We are at war with feminists who work day and night for their agenda to disparage homemakers. Men have been boiled in water like the frog who didn't see it coming.

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