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BOOK REVIEW

AN OLD WIFE'S TALE -
My Seven Decades in Love and War

by Midge Decter
$36.50 Canadian
Regan Books/Harper Collins

This is a personal story of life, marriage, career and political activism during the tumultuous years when feminism changed the lives of many men and women in America. As a young mother, Midge Decter lived in the same general social environment as Betty Friedan, yet she never succumbed to the bitter feminist reaction to home and motherhood exposed in Betty's book, The Feminine Mystique. Whereas Midge was instrumental in founding the anti-Communist Committee for the Free World, Betty Friedan was described by biographer Daniel Horowitz as very active in the Communist left.

Even in the 1950's Decter recognized the general attack on middle class America, on "men who were working to support their wives and families", and saw "a more general assault on the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live in the post-war world."

Outspoken about Feminism

Decter's comments on feminism are piercing. She writes that the movement is "implicitly anti-motherhood" and a "conspiracy against men." To feminist support of studies which purportedly show that children in day care do better than those at home with their mother, she retorts: "Can anyone but an unthinking, or resentful ideologue... even pretend to believe that?"

Feminist pressure to have women work in the tight quarters of military submarines along with men, she claims, "is an act of brutality toward the men that only a deeply hostile culture could have made possible."

Concerning attacks on male valour: "The last thing an American boy is nowadays apt either to hear or to read is that girls, being the weaker and more delicate sex, need to be protected. Anyone who tried to tell them such a thing would, of course, instantly be set upon by a gender posse."

She links anorexia with the women's movement, which she claims attempts to liberate girls from womanhood. "Perhaps... anorexia is the affliction of young girls who wish to stave off the arrival of menstruation, and with it, of womanhood and ultimately motherhood." She also links body piercing and tattooing to the "self-destructive self-hatred of young girls."

New York Publisher

Her experience in book publishing and editing periodicals is extensive. She was assistant editor of the Zionist magazine Mainstream, was executive editor of Harper's magazine and a contributor to the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine. Her second husband Norman Podhoretz, was editor of Commentary for 35 years. She has been published in The Atlantic, The American Spectator, The National Review and The New Republic. She was on the Board of Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, and is now on the editorial board of the outstanding magazine, First Things. She and her family eventually left powerful liberal literary social circles in New York City to adopt a neo-conservative world-view.

Movement-speak

Midge Decter claims that the feminist movement "moved into the book publishing industry in a big way." She observed that feminists "took control of the English language ...issued guidelines of acceptable usage of language which made their way into every copy department and thus positively barbarized the language of a large number of books..." Male and female editors proceeded to "murder" manuscripts with "movement speak" as she describes it. She often stood alone against the tide of what she called "feminist corruption." The radical feminist organization NOW (National Organization for Women), named her the "Aunt Tom" of the year in 1972.

Having read feminist literature extensively, she characterizes much of it as vulgar and crude: "foul mouthed, written by various self-identified lesbians for whom Women's Liberation has, naturally, been a walk in the park. ...lesbian or 'straight', the undeniable import of the movement's literary outpouring was that men, all men - husbands, fathers, lovers, bosses - were oppressive louts, if not worse. (Some of the mothers in the movement even decided that they had to emasculate their little sons by bringing them up gender-free.)"

Hate for the Sexual

Decter observed that "sexual liberation" left young women "looking like weary older women." She knew that "women genuinely hated the sexual revolution, for it is in women's nature to be monogamous." It forced people to pretend that men and women were alike sexually, it was "a struggle with no rules in which everyone loses." In a rather unique interpretation, she sees the feminist movement as a rebellion against this sexual revolution, by "launching an all-out attack on men, their natures, their social behaviour, and their sexual needs."

She calls sex education a "sin" and claims American children are being "deprived of their God-given entitlement to the comforting innocence of childhood." She also claims the homosexual rights movement has "come to wield an enormous influence over the country's sex-education curricula...."

She calls the "cultural embrace of AIDS" by artists and "sentimentalizers" the "frivolous but nevertheless dangerous embrace of death." Of homosexuals' "dangerous habits - as if in defiance of life itself" she states "perhaps... in some deeply psychological sense they play with death because society is putting up so little resistance to their demands."

Shortcomings of the Book

Even though Decter occasionally succumbs to the coarse language of the left in describing relationships, she more than makes up for this with her astute observations of the world around her.

It is surprising, however, that she fails to make the well-documented link between Marxism, Communism and feminism. Knowing full well that the ravages of feminism are still active in society, it would have been natural for her to continue her work with the "Anti-Communist Committee for a Free World" working at the level of social revolution. Instead, the Committee for a Free World was shut down immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Also, Decter's many profound insights are amazingly disconnected from a major feminist concern: abortion. The book totally shies away from this act of destruction which has cut short the fulfilment of millions of women as mothers.

Conclusion

Midge Decter honestly notes the contradictions in her position as a strong supporter of marriage and motherhood while making the decision to divorce as a mother of two young children and by being "the approving mother of the divorces of each of my children."

As a mother of four grown children and grandmother of ten, she has great concern for future generations. She is sad when she witnesses the cultural devastation on women, men and their relationships and she wonders how this will impact on her beloved grandchildren.

Midge Decter is also the author of The New Chastity, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans, and Liberal Parents,Radical Children.

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