First Things RSS Feed - Midge Decter

Farewell to the Woman Question

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A prescient look at the coming postfeminist backlash by Midge Decter , the author of Liberal Parents, Radical Children and The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. From the June/July 1991 edition .

For many years, I was interested—in both senses of the term—in women’s problems. It seemed to me that somewhere in the course of the twentieth century the lives of middle-class American women had been radically altered and we understood neither what had happened nor how to respond properly to it.

Continue Reading »

Comrades in Arms

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

When I first came to spend my days in the office of the Institute on Religion and Public Life—this was sometime in early 1990—Richard Neuhaus had been a friend of mine for roughly twenty years. During that time, the two of us had been traveling, politically and culturally speaking, pretty much along the same path and had met often on the way.

For convenience one might characterize that journey, as most people who have remained hostile to it are wont to do, as having followed a straightforward political trajectory from left to right. In truth, however, our travels had been more complicated than that, more full of corners and curves, which is to say, more involved with what had become of the country’s culture than with its politics—though with its politics, too, of course, because the political life of this nation is always ultimately indentured to its cultural life. The point is that on most of the issues that mattered most to us we had found ourselves to be comrades in arms (and in those days especially, military metaphors tended to come to mind).

“Why don’t you come and hang out with us?” had been Richard’s all-too-blithe invitation to me—the us being the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the organization he had only a few years earlier undertaken to create—and just as blithely I accepted. Whereupon there began, all unsuspected on my part, what would turn out to be one of the most deeply engaging cultural adventures of my life.

I cannot say my joining his crew was anything like the same—or indeed any adventure at all—for Richard, who was himself just then off on a journey far more consequential than I believe he knew at the time: a journey from Lutheranism into the Catholic Church. (“But Richard,” my husband had asked him on first being told of his decision to convert to Catholicism, as a token of the almost careless tone in which that decision had been imparted, “what about Bach?”)

In any case, it was quite in the relaxed spirit of Richard’s invitation that I, oh-so-jauntily, arrived at his office one Monday morning, somewhat startled to see him in an ordinary shirt and necktie—no longer the properly collared Lutheran pastor I had known for all those years. (He would before the year was out, however, be ordained a priest, and I would be comforted to see him in a collar once again.) Neither of us, I think, was quite certain just what contribution I might be making to the enterprise, but I was a reasonably educated and reasonably pious—though hardly properly observant—Jew who had worked for many years as an editor, and since Religion and Public Life had recently begun publishing First Things , I suppose it was thought that I was qualified to add some, albeit hardly scholarly, expertise to the enterprise. In any case, I quickly found a place for myself in Richard’s domain.

Did I say quickly? On the magazine, yes, for editing is editing, but First Things was not just a magazine, and Religion and Public Life was far from just an organization. It was, both figuratively and literally, a conversation, a special kind of conversation both stimulated and presided over by someone who might just in his way have become one of the country’s most gifted conversationalists. This exchange was carried on in numerous meetings, large and small, formally sponsored by Religion and Public Life as well as over informal lunches and dinners and drinks—a conversation among socially and politically and religiously passionate scholars and clergymen and even, sometimes, among the staff during the meetings at which we decided on the contents of the next issue of the magazine.

Whatever the subject—from creation to the politics of abortion, from the agreements and disagreements among scientists and theologians to the prevailing attitudes toward war, this conversation was always passionate and frequently brilliant. And whatever the nature of the occasion, Richard would always preside, pretending merely to host but always directing and moving the discussion along.

Now, by that time in my life I had myself taken part in discussion groups, panels, and seminars too numerous to count. But with each of Richard’s I would undergo the, to me, shocking revelation that though I almost always had strong responses to what was being said, I had only the weakest of vocabularies for articulating them. Perhaps this pointed to some shortcoming in my education or personal formation, or perhaps it was that for a politically passionate Jew in the late twentieth century the problems presented to man on earth by the nature of God in heaven seemed to require expression in somewhat different terms than those natural to Richard and company. In any case, here I was, a woman of considerable years and experience, grandmother of ten and still counting, and a schoolgirl once again. If Richard recognized this, as surely he did, he never by so much as a blink of the eye let on.

Be that as it may, not too long after I arrived on the scene Richard was ordained a priest of the Catholic Church. His collar, to my comfort and no doubt to his, reappeared. And there began a process that he may not have been aware of, at least at first, but that became ever more visible to me. In an interview recently published in the National Review , Robert P. George remarked that, as a Catholic, Richard retained something of the character of the Lutheran pastor he once had been, but I do not think that that was so. For as the months and years rolled on, something in him seemed to me to have been quite deeply altered. He was of course the same person, serious and laughing and ebullient and passionate and certain and at the same time remarkably tender of the feelings of his interlocutors, but his personality had taken on a new quality. Call it a deepening serenity. Beneath the tireless energy for reading and writing and arguing and joking he was slowly but perceptibly acquiring a new kind and degree of inner peace. With apologies for what must seem a tired cliché, it was as if, after a good deal of journeying, he had now come home.

Around this time the Catholic Church in America had become embroiled in the nastiest of scandals, one that would among other things spend years on prominent display in the country’s press, and Richard and his company of fellow Catholics had to have been deeply distressed by it. (As who, indeed, was not? Only the community of hard-bitten anti-Catholics, whose schadenfreude at the Church’s discomfiture was quickly made only too evident). The Richard I had once known might have been stirred to publishing public statements, even to marching in the streets outside the newspaper offices or perhaps even outside the meetings of the bishops called to discuss what should be done about it. But he had other things, more permanent things—shall we call them first things ?—on his mind.

For a most deeply significant instance, there was John Paul II, who had by the time of Richard’s ordination been pope for more than ten years. His papacy had become, and would remain, the kind of happy, hopeful, and uplifting phenomenon that kept focusing the eye, and the mind, on things higher and more essential—even for me, a Jew with a rather different set of worries and angers of my own about the state of the world to contend with.

This new serenity would indeed see him through the first life-threatening onset of cancer, which turned out to be a crisis that sent those of us around him into a watchful state of anxiety but that would by his account leave him with a newfound feeling of peace and acceptance in the presence of death. He would soon write about this experience and in so doing leave us at first comforted and then, in the face of his refreshed vitality, all too blithely forgetful.

That he would write about his brush with death was to be expected, for he wrote about everything: in books and magazine articles—not to mention his collection of observations and arguments published in the back of this magazine each month. Indeed, or so it seems to me, it was in this feature called “The Public Square” where he most copiously displayed his very special literary gift. For over the years until just before his death he managed unflaggingly to keep up this always fresh and pointed running commentary on what he had been reading: books, magazines, memoranda, speeches, even church bulletins—nothing seemed to escape his watchful eye and oh-so-wittily pouncing pen. It never felt repetitive and never, month after month, year after year, got to be the least bit mechanical. (Anyone who has ever attempted to set words on paper is bound to know—and though it is a deadly sin, I myself would say to envy—how extraordinary a literary feat this was.)

When he grew ill this last and final time, for a while only those closest to him knew how really ill he was. Fortunately (I know that in some sense I sin when I say this) his final journey didn’t take too long. Did he remember his vision from that earlier brush with death, when he had been told by angel voices that all had been prepared and was awaiting him? I do hope so. In any case, the angels may have been prepared, and Richard may have been prepared, but those of us he left behind—friends, disciples, and a large public—were most definitely not. He will be missed for a long, long time, and for many more reasons than he himself could ever have imagined, among them that conversation that will never quite be the same.

Midge Decter, a member of the editorial board of First Things , was an editor at First Things from 1990 to 1995.

Continue Reading »

Liberating Germaine Greer

Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400

I never met Germaine Greer, but I did see her once in live performance—and a most diverting performance it was. The year, as I remember it, was 1970. Norman Mailer had recently published a very long article on the then newly declared women’s revolution and had succeeded, as was his wont, in scandalizing both the revolutionaries and their conservative ill-wishers. Some enterprising showman (showlady, actually) arranged for Mailer to defend himself in public debate with three women: the literary critic Diana Trilling, who read a formal and somewhat inconclusive paper on Mailer’s vision of the thing between men and women; Jill Johnston, a lesbian activist and columnist for the Village Voice, who failed rather embarrassingly in her attempt to shock the audience; and last, and mainly, Germaine Greer.

Miss Greer had recently become famous as the author of a highly celebrated liberationist tract called The Female Eunuch , whose declared purpose was to open women’s eyes to how much men actually hated them and how successfully men had conspired to teach them to hate themselves. What was notable about her book—amid all the frenzied declarations and totally off-the-wall analyses of women’s lot that constituted the first wave of liberationist literature—was that it was highly literate, which no doubt contributed to the fact that it had become an overnight “classic.”

Miss Greer, who was (and judging from the photograph on the jacket of her new book, still is) a very beautiful woman, was the last of the lady panelists to speak. As she rose from her chair to walk to the lectern, those of us in the audience who were seated at some distance from the stage could see for the first time that she had, for reasons that would soon become apparent, gotten herself up for the occasion in a long and slinky black gown, while flung across her shoulder and dragged behind her on the floor was a long fur boa. She then proceeded to read a highfalutin little statement about art, the gravamen of which was that we should again seek for the glory days of the Gothic cathedrals, whose greatest works had been built by a community of anonymous artisans. The reason I remember what she said after lo these nearly thirty years is that in my surprise (which soon gave way to something else) I wrote down a mean-spirited little summary of it: “Germaine Greer says that if she can’t be a great writer, let all great works of literature be anonymous.”

The “something else” my surprise gave way to was great amusement. For what Miss Greer was really up to on that occasion, what her dress, demeanor, and manner of speaking were clearly intended for, was not a discussion of the condition of women but, quite simply, the seduction of Norman Mailer.

In those days Norman Mailer was a friend, and I had by then with the same kind of amusement watched a fair number of women go after him in pretty much the same way. Something about him clearly invited female provocation, and, allowing, of course, for differences of personal style, usually just about as naked as this.

Now, whether Germaine Greer actually succeeded with Mailer I don’t know, but I suspect not—at least not that evening. But as for me, I was left on that occasion with a very important reminder: to wit, when you read feminist literature, always look for some barely hidden giveaway.

As with its author, so with The Female Eunuch itself, which I set about reading the next day. One of Germaine Greer’s declaratory purposes may have been to make women understand how much men really hate them, but the putative hatred of men for women can be as nothing compared with the sheer, relentless hatred of women expressed in and by that book. (Children were perhaps the only thing more hateful than women.) What I call the giveaway is perhaps best summed up in this passage:

Continue Reading »

A Jew in Anti-Christian America

Sun, 01 Oct 1995 00:00:00 -0400

To speak of something called “Christian America,” as both the advocates and the opponents of this idea are nowadays at high levels of passion wont to do, is by itself evidence of how un -Christian the country has become. Many Christian activists, especially the most innocent and high-minded among them, seem not to understand the true nature of their underlying predicament. We are, for instance, constantly being reminded by those who have an interest in declaring the robustness of Christianity in America today that such-and-such a high percentage of Americans are to be found in church each Sunday and that an even higher percentage profess to believe in God; and while such numbers surely do not mean nothing, the very fact that the Christian party so often needs to invoke them is evidence that the religious enterprise, for all its vaunted majority status, is in a deeply defensive mode.

Continue Reading »

The Nine Lives of Population Control

Wed, 01 Dec 1993 00:00:00 -0500

The idea of population control”perhaps even the idea of population itself”seems to have come into circulation somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Western world was in what is called “demographic transition,” i.e., the ratio of people being born to those dying was growing larger each year. Actual numbers for the period are somewhat speculative, but it is said that between 1650 and 1850 the world’s population had more than doubled. The key element, according to Paul and Anna Ehrlich (in The Population Explosion , 1990), was a marked decline in the death rate: at the beginning of the period in agrarian societies without modern sanitation and medicine annual death rates of thirty-eight or more per thousand were characteristic, while by the nineteenth century in certain European countries and North America the death rate had gone down to thirty per thousand and below. The reason for this development is clear. The industrial revolution, wherever its sway extended, was providing more and more people with better housing and nutrition and, even more important, making possible new and effective systems of public sanitation. Curiously, however, there is no record, neither in the literature nor in the social comment of the period, of any celebration of this development. No doubt the relatively sudden shift to a predominantly urban existence had created a widespread sense of social dislocation. In Britain and Western Europe, for example, simple crowding must have become palpable for people whose population had doubled and was in the process even more rapidly of doubling again. In 1798 Thomas Malthus had famously put it about that while population was increasing exponentially, the earth’s food supply could at best be increased only arithmetically; thus should war and pestilence fail to contribute adequately to the limiting of population and thereby forestall universal famine, “moral restraint,” as he put it, would have to be applied. Moreover, especially in England, where it can be said that the industrial revolution was given birth, many people must have begun to shudder along with William Blake at the sight of their villages and towns giving way before the spread of all those “dark, satanic mills.” But something else was also dampening any possible stray gratitude for the benefits of better health and longer life. Industrialism was proving to be frighteningly promiscuous in its bestowal of benefits: just as mere millers and brewers and manufacturers were overtaking the landed gentry in wealth and power, the increase in the number of the poor made possible by improved rates of survival was lending ever greater significance”political as well as social”to their presence in society. So significant had this presence indeed become that by 1883 Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had grown gravely concerned about the genetic stock of the nation. In that year he published his Inquiries Into Human Faculty and its Development , and a movement to promote the science Galton named “eugenics” was born. The eminent economist Peter Bauer, whose area of special concern has for many years been the economics of development, has noted a demographic phenomenon that might at a very careless glance seem to be anomalous. For reasons that Bauer himself does not attempt to explain, in developing countries the accession of wealth leads individual families and sometimes whole clans to limit family size. We can only imagine why this happens: that prosperity must give people, particularly those who have known poverty, a very different attitude to both the present and the future than is normally found among the very poor”some new sense of power over their destiny and of the standards of possibility for their progeny. In any case, by the early nineteenth century, first in France and somewhat later elsewhere, fertility control of one kind or another came to be practiced by the middle class on a scale large enough to have at least some influence on the trend and distribution of the birthrate. (Not surprisingly, the United States, with an empty continent to settle, would for a time be an exception to this tendency among the industrializing nations.) In any case, as the wealthy grew fewer in proportion, Galton was concerned with how to undo the growing demographic imbalance that threatened to influence the genetic characteristics of future generations. He was worried by the consequences for the oncoming human stock of the fact that the prosperous classes were with such velocity and in such volume being outnumbered by the great unwashed. (We may hope that he was not including within the circle of his concern England’s landed Tory aristocracy, who with few exceptions had remained just about as contentedly ignorant”not to mention unmannerly”as possible. It is valuable to remember from time to time that while the “masses” in England were reading, or being read to, from the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, a goodly proportion of the “quality folk” spent their otherwise empty days riding to hounds.) In any case, by 1923 Galton’s worries had spread across the Atlantic. In that year, the American Eugenics Society was founded, and overnight became a highly fashionable cause. The American birthrate was”in keeping with Peter Bauer’s notion, predictably”going down, and at the same time immigration was being cut off; the question for the Americans had now shifted to one of how to “improve” the population that remained. Soon courses in eugenics were being taught in a number of colleges and universities, and the issue was being taken up by people across the political spectrum. The young Norman Thomas, for example”displaying a certain sense of social propriety that his socialism would never totally enable him to overcome”spoke with passion of “the alarming high birthrate of definitely inferior stock.” By the 1930s, however, any idea of encouraging the better people to produce more children while “encouraging” the less desirables to produce many fewer”or, ideally, none at all”hit an enormous stumbling block, the Great Depression. How suggest that recently affluent people now suffering a sudden decline in prospects should expand their families for the common good? And meanwhile the second aspect of the eugenics project, i.e., controlling the birthrate of the undesirables, while legislatively highly successful”between the years 1907 and 1937 thirty-two states were to adopt legislation regulating the practice of sterilization for eugenic purposes”seems to have come up against certain difficulties of its own. For while the idea of forcibly sterilizing the undesirables may have been greeted with enthusiasm, the record of the actual practice of coerced sterilization bespeaks a certain timidity, or perhaps lack of stomach, on the part of the authorities appointed to carry it out: by the end of 1965, after more than half a century of practice, the total number of involuntary sterilizations numbered only around 65,000. (From a different point of view, of course, 65,000 is not so negligible a number. Still, in this connection the comparison with voluntary sterilization is instructive: beginning in the late 1950s, about 65,000 women were voluntarily undergoing tubal ligation, and about 45,000 men, vasectomy, each year. )

Continue Reading »

National Service as Duty and Perk

Sat, 01 May 1993 00:00:00 -0400

I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife and four small children. He lives in Jerusalem. His annual five-week tour of service in the Israel Defense Force is called in Hebrew by a term that would be translated into English as “replacement” but is, not insignificantly, etymologically related to the word “fulfillment.” He will, like every man of sound mind and body in the country (except for the extremely religious), continue in this way to fulfill his obligation as a member of the reserve until he is fifty-four years old.

Continue Reading »

An Incredible Lightness of Being

Thu, 01 Oct 1992 00:00:00 -0400

Intellectual Memoirs, 1936–1938
by mary mccarthy
harcourt brace jovanovich, 114 pages, $15.95

Continue Reading »

Notes from Underground

Sun, 01 Mar 1992 00:00:00 -0500

Contrary to popular American opinion, New Yorkers are by and large a gentle and long-suffering lot. Imagine having to stand in a long line to see a movie, to purchase the token needed for entrance to the subway platform, to buy a postage stamp, to get a morning container of coffee for consumption at one’s desk, to make a bank deposit, to cross a bridge, to see an art exhibit, to get hold of a sandwich at lunch time. Imagine being crushed cheek-by-jowl in a bus or train each day, summer and winter, for, say, an hour’s ride after a full day’s work. Imagine being accosted on virtually every street corner by someone brandishing a paper cup rattling with coins and claiming to be hungry, or dying of AIDS (the latest and evidently most successful of beggars’ ploys), or in need of a bed or a ticket “home.” Or stopping in your car for a red light and being set upon by a strapping young man with sponge and bucket in hand, who all unbidden takes a soapy swipe at your windshield and then holds his hand out for a quarter.

Continue Reading »

Farewell to the Woman Question

Sat, 01 Jun 1991 00:00:00 -0400

For many years, I was interested—in both senses of the term—in women’s problems. It seemed to me that somewhere in the course of the twentieth century the lives of middle-class American women had been radically altered and we understood neither what had happened nor how to respond properly to it.

Continue Reading »