unbearable lightness of Catharine MacKinnon: Be happy--or be feminist, The

Be Happy Or Be Feminist

What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us

By Danielle Crittenden Simon & Schuster, 1999 202 pages, cloth, $23.00 ISBN 0-684-83219-4

Danielle Crittenden's new book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, is misnamed. It would more appropriately be titled What Our Mothers Did Tell Us, and Why It Is Making Us Miserable. The book is essentially a critique of the feminist legacy, which, according to Crittenden, is to blame for much of the discontent, anxiety, emptiness and confusion of the modern woman.

Crittenden analyzes the realms of sex, love, marriage, motherhood, aging and politics and concludes that our mothers were wrong, but our grandmothers were right. Take premarital sex. Crittenden explains that women of her generation-the children of the first wave of feminists-had no problem with casual sex unless they were "particularly religious."

This so-called freedom is promoted as a gift resulting from our mother's hard-fought battles to become sexually liberated and free from male control. But sooner or later,, buyer's remorse sets in for women who engage in casual sex, and they begin to feel used, bitter, empty. They resent the lack of commitment that typifies the modem male, and become increasingly desperate for a partner as they age and their biological clocks tick ever more loudly.

So, Crittenden concludes, grandmother was right when she warned against premarital sex, with the old adage, "Why buy the cow when the milk is free?" She argues that the harsh biological facts of life are that a woman loses the power to demand commitment from a man when she says "yes" to sex. "If men feel that they can flit from woman to woman, they will. They will enjoy our ready availability and exploit it to their advantage. But if women as a group cease to be readily availabl-if they begin to demand commitment (and real commitment, as in marriage) in exchange for sex-market conditions will shift in favor of women."

Though the "free milk" problem may be the fallout of feminism, Crittenden cheapens the value of chastity and commitment by turning courtship into a power game. Sex is a God-given gift, not a biological bargaining chip. You can't barter your way into a healthy relationship.

Most would agree that "beauty and sexual power" are not the only glues that holds mature, healthy couples together, even in a post-feminist world The reality is that real love based on commitment should be impervious to "market conditions" and able to withstand the loss of "beauty and sexual power" on the part of either partner.

Crittenden is right on target in terms of the damage done by the glamorization and therefore trivialization of sex. Little did the feminists realize that women would suffer the most from the fallout

The Lewinsky/Clinton episode is a prime example of the feminist formula for sexual liberation gone bad. Mix sexual autonomy with a relativistic worldview, and you get a sexually unconstrained woman with absolutely no moral center. Her judgment revolves solely around how she feels. Is it any surprise that Monica was drawn to Clinton, the ultimate postmodern man, a man who can say anything and "believe" it?

Crittenden critiques influential feminists Carol Gilligan and Catharine MacKinnon, who argue that women simply "do not accept a strict, objective understanding of right and wrong or of guilt and innocence" and that their actions should be "judged contextually ideally from the point of view of the woman herself, and not by the light of an abstract ethical principle." But what does that mean? Should we exempt all women from our justice system?

That is not only absurd, but it's sad. Crittenden rightly points out that human beings cannot live happily if they are unethical. She argues that one root problem is that we've "abandoned the customs that used to protect and civilize both sexes, that constrained men and women but also obliged them to live up to their best natures." At some levels that may be true, but it's not following customs and establishing rules of behavior that make for good human relationships and a healthy societyit's freely making moral choices based on a worldview that is true to reality. It's showing respect for human beings as having intrinsic value because they are made in the image of the Creator. By itself, reinstating customs may only bring back a superficial level of civility and control that our mothers found so stifling.

The feminists were and are wrong. Neither empowerment for women, sexual liberation, nor especially freedom "from an objective understanding of right and wrong," will bring happiness.

Crittenden has a message for her daughter: to see herself as different from men rather than in competition with them, and to have the choice of finding fulfillment in her work and/or as a wife and mother. "I want her to understand that the roles she takes on in life, in her work or family, may differ from those of men, but that they do not diminish her equality before the law or make her any less powerful in the world."

Miss Williams is director of public affairs at the Cato Institute.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Apr 16, 1999
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