In her 1991 book Feminism Without Illusions, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called herself “temperamentally and culturally conservative” but also “a proud feminist.” Now, the second half of that paradox has given way. In her new book, “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 275 pages, $ 23.95), she portrays feminists as radicals who see men as the enemy, heterosexuality as a conspiracy, and children as hindrances to be “fit into the nooks and crannies” of lives whose important satisfactions lie elsewhere. For a sometime leftist, it has been a wholesome evolution.
To be sure, this professor of history at Emory University still wanly associates herself with feminism here and there in these pages. And she takes pains to balance her indictments of feminists with parallel charges against ” conservatives,” those, in her telling, who believe that parents can meet their responsibilities in only one way: by the mother’s looking after the children full time. Against these two contrasting foils, Fox-Genovese sets out to describe the way “most women” (and she) think and live. At its best, her method is illuminating, though it fails to camouflage the book’s real drama: a sensible woman’s disenchantment with contemporary feminism.
The spark from which the book developed was a conversation she had with a young journalist in 1991. After a long telephone interview, the two started talking about children as a social priority. The younger woman confided that she had recently attended the convention of that feminist flagship, the National Organization for Women. “Out of hundreds of discussion sessions,” she said, “only one focused on children — and it was on lesbian mothers.” Herself near the end of a pregnancy, she realized that her momentous preoccupation was of no concern to NOW.
“Startled,” Fox-Genovese began to explore systematically the longnoted reluctance of average women-including educated working women like the young reporter — to call themselves feminists. For two years, she conducted formal interviews with women from many regions and different walks of life. She reflected, too, on her own experience as a happily married professional woman, enthusiastically domestic and family-oriented but “not blessed” with children ( her husband is the equally ideologically interesting historian Eugene Genovese) . She pondered conversations with friends and relatives, as well, and studied the polling data and relevant scholarship.
The bedrock truth she uncovered, obvious to all but feminists, is that love, marriage, and motherhood remain central to most women’s aspirations and to the lives they lead, regardless of whether they also work for pay by necessity or choice; that a predilection for these vital experiences, as for the more mundane manifestations of femininity, is not foisted on women by the patriarchy or any backlash against feminism but passed down from mother to daughter and through other supportive and enriching “webs of female connection” ; and that, while most women who work value their economic power, as well as other important gratifications derived from activity beyond the home, most of them, if forced to choose, would put family first. Such women naturally see feminism as irrelevant, or actually hostile, to their most cherished concerns.
If this were all the burden of Fox-Genovese’s book, it would hold scant interest outside the intellectual hothouse of college campuses, where feminist radicals still have sufficient sway to require refutation. But she goes on to explore more problematic areas, like women’s ambivalence about the sexual revolution and abortion. The most effective part of “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life” is its discussion of how public policy and employment practices could ameliorate the biggest source of conflict in women’s lives: not their relations with the opposite sex, but the clashing demands of children and work.
Here Fox-Genovese shows how far she has moved toward apostasy, not just from feminism but from liberalism. Here, too, she nearly abandons the safe stance of erapitical observer for bolder assertions about the nature of things.
The problem, she writes, is “our collective uncertainty about how to combine opportunity for women, economic stability for families, and the crying needs of children” in an economic and cultural climate that increasingly sends both pare nts, or the only parent, to work. Fox-Genovese’s policy prescriptions start fro m a premise few conservatives would quarrel with (indeed, Charles Murray formul ates it in nearly identical terms): that raising the next generation is the mos t important thing individuals and societies do. She posits that this essential work is best performed by intact families and that children require considerabl e parental attention. She notes that, even with the rise of m ore equal sharing of tasks within companionate marriages, the care of young children is and will remain for the foreseeable future more women’s responsibility than men’s — then she burns her feminist bridges by failing to decry this reality and instead affirming that most mothers wish to retain their special bond with children.
These assumptions lead Fox- Genovese to endorse policies that respect the ” needs and sensibilities” both of women who work outside the home and of those who don’t. Thus, institutional day care should never be favored over the home care of children, which most families prefer, whether parents, relatives, or neighbors provide the care. Her suggestions include a large increase in the income-tax deduction for children, tax breaks for at-home mothers equal to those for paid day care, and maternity lRAs.
Since there will always be mothers who must work and who do not have nearby friends and relatives, she favors tax breaks encouraging businesses to contribute to the support of neighborhood day care programs, including those run by churches. Such indirect subsidies, she says, have the advantage of ” encouraging people to work together within local communities to promote the values in which they believe.”
She calls for expanding Head Start, which especially appeals to black women, but would transfer the program to the states and encourage some local funding and community control. And for the children whose parents cannot cope, Fox- Genovese sees a place for boarding schools and even — yes, she utters the word — orphanages.
Above all, the increased availability of part-time and “Mommy-track” jobs with decent pay and benefits, she says, would be the best possible answer to women’s employment needs while their children are at home.
Whatever one thinks of the particulars of this agenda, it is an honorable contribution to a debate about matters of utmost importance to Americans, singly and collectively. Yet Fox-Genovese is undoubtedly right when she notes with sorrow, on her last page, that some young women on campuses like her own will see her views as “threatening or oppressive.” Taught to overvalue independence and to shrink from the primal connecting acts of life, these daughters of feminism have been swindled.
Fox-Genovese would lure them back into the family.
By Claudia Winkler
