Carolyn Graglia is right to take on feminism: It bred its share of extremists, and it must shoulder part of the blame for the demise of the family. She is also right to defend domesticity: American society has relegated it to second-class status, forgetting its true meaning and value. But there are glitches in her thinking, ones that mar her “brief against feminism” (a portion of which appeared in this magazine a little more than a year ago). Graglia is less keen to extol the joys of nesting than she is to malign the sexual revolution and the working woman’s world. And this is an imbalance that weakens her argument.
When she does address domesticity, Graglia gives us a garden of delight. An “awakened Brunnhilde” is her paradigmatic wife, roused to the wonders of a man’s love. Her own homey world, into which she offers brief glimpses, is a veritable “Eden.” She portrays the ideal home as a kind of metaphysical atelier, in which children are works of art every bit as precious as the most prized Titians or Van Goghs. She writes that leaving a child in a nanny’s care is like Van Gogh’s asking a bystander to paint Starry Night, imagining that it will come out the same.
The notion, as Graglia makes clear, is absurd — yet some parents are more willing to consign their children to surrogates than to relinquish the prejudice that caregivers are fungible and housewives dolts.
Graglia takes a further step in the right direction: Feminists deny in vain that, broadly speaking, biology is destiny. In order to make women equal in the workplace, feminists tried to sever the links that bind mother and child, denying that, because of her pregnancy, a mother is a better nurturer than her husband. Feminists were obliged to fudge clear differences between men and women — to pretend that a woman’s anatomy does not predispose her to caregiving, while a man’s disqualifies him.
The probable truth that, on average, a woman makes a better mother than an executive, and a man a better executive than a father, is a hard one for non- nurturing women to swallow. To them, it feels too much like appeasement: first, the determinism of wombs, then the tyranny of gender roles.
This is not an entirely unwarranted complaint, and Graglia is wrong to pooh- pooh it. Anatomy may be irrefutable, but it need not be the only arbiter.
So too is Graglia overly fond of extremes. As a result, her androgynous feminists collapse into straw men, and her stallion Siegfrieds (model males) too closely resemble “blond beasts.” Nietzsche and Wagner are not ordinarily a critic’s best allies, especially when, as Graglia does, she has already made Stalinists of her foes. Graglia’s associations tend to be dubious, her dilemmas false. She posits co-opted caricatures of fascism and communism — in her lingo, “spiritual virgins” (feminist harridans) and “Angels in the House” (Stepford wives).
Moreover, her tone is too harsh. She is too categorical to be heard by more than the converted, and at times she sees only what she wishes to see. Her evidence, therefore, is selective, the choicest bits plucked from their rightful place within the mix of good and bad. She blunders, for example, when she picks Stanley Kowalski as her Siegfried, pitting him against what she regards as the feminists’ emasculated male, the type of man whom Blanche DuBois describes as “gentle, nervous, beautiful, with a softness and tenderness which [is not] like a man’s.” Graglia reveres Kowalski’s brawn: ” We garnered fodder aplenty for our fantasies when Stella walked down the stairs, not into the arms of a gentle, nervous, beautiful boy of unmanly softness and tenderness, but into those of the traditionally masculine, animalistic, aggressive Kowalski in the torn undershirt.”
But in her reverie, Graglia fails to remind us that Stanley stands at the bottom of the stairs, cajoling his wife, the first time because he has just beaten her, and the second time because he raped her sister. Kowalski’s crimes blight the virtues of his masculinity and impair Graglia’s point.
No one doubts the allure of Brando’s torso, his raw power, and, yes, even his aggressiveness. No one would prefer, at least for dramatic purposes and pure sex appeal, Karl Malden at the bottom of those stairs, his bow tie askew.
But to keep this Adonis, Stella and Blanche must submit to abuse — hardly a fair trade. And this, more than Graglia cares to admit, is the argument that most feminists would make (including Graglia’s bete noire, Andrea Dworkin, herself a battered wife).
Likewise, when Graglia wants to exalt homemaking, she invokes the writings of Chinese women, who “validate . . . maternal longings” and endeavor to give “full rein” to a woman’s “role as wife and mother at home”: “Li Xiaojiang has learned what Leo Tolstoy knew — and Western feminists have yet to discover — about how critically important are the particularities of daily life and how affirmative of her femininity a woman’s attention to these particularities can be.”
As before, Graglia is right to remind us that daily chores and a mother’s million small nurturing gestures are inestimably good for the soul. She is also right to argue that many feminists have wrongly derided homemaking as parasitic, thankless drudgery.
But she leaves out a crucial detail: China is a gruesome place for women. Many Chinese females do not grow to womanhood, because, if not first aborted, they die from malnutrition and neglect in state orphanages.
Both Graglia and her adversaries deserve more credit than either will give the other. Indeed, we should not be so quick to estrange them. Domestic Tranquility deserves a thorough and fair hearing, and, much as its author may dislike the idea, it earns a place alongside the works of Dworkin, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem as a bold, critical statement — this time from the right. “Feminist” has always been a slippery term, but it should describe someone who stands for women’s equality — and Graglia does want to show that so-called women’s work is worth as much as men’s. Still, she insists, equal does not mean the same. In her view, women are unquestionably equal to, but also unquestionably different from, men — and no sensible person can disagree with that.
Norah Vincent is a staff writer at the New York Press and the author of The Instant Intellectual, forthcoming from Hyperion.
