Books: Unraised Consciousness

THE NEW CHASTITY AND OTHER ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN'S LIBERATION

by MIDGE DECTER 188 pages. Coward, McCann &

Geoghegan. $5.95.

There's no thrill quite like signing up with an idea whose time has come —except, of course, the thrill of opposing it if you happen to be a loner. For her present foolhardiness, roughly comparable to throwing herself in front of a juggernaut with a Molotov cocktail, Midge Decter deserves to be named 1972's Daughter of the Anti-Zeitgeist.

Miss Decter, a Harper's editor under Willie Morris, and in private life the wife of Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, has chosen this perilous moment to announce, among other unspeakable things, that "every woman wants to marry." Worse—dare one even repeat it?—that woman's problem is not too little freedom but too much. For her pains, Midge Decter has already been called "neurotic," described as plumbing "new depths in the art of petty arrogance," and summarily notified she is "full of s—" in the letters column of the Atlantic, where an excerpt from her case against Women's Liberation appeared.

What outrageous things does The New Chastity say to produce these outraged responses? True, Miss Decter calls Betty (The Feminine Mystique) Friedan a "would-be intellectual" and grades Kate (Sexual Politics) Millett's celebrated textual analyses as "vulgarity almost not to be credited." But for the most part, she soberly reasons with her adversaries. For instance: Is society, as charged, "a vast cultural conspiracy" against women, who are "tricked or, let us say, massively guided into opting for housewifery"? Quite the contrary, Miss Decter decides. To assume so is to assume that women are either incredibly stupid or weak. The fact is, she argues, woman is the architect rather than the victim of her fate. Marriage is not only woman's choice but woman's arrangement, to which man is left to acquiesce.

But what about that modern Holy Grail the career, which woman either sacrifices for marriage or is condemned to pursue as a second-class competitor? Miss Decter believes she knows a dirty little secret. Women don't really want work-as-necessity, work as it is for a man. "Discovering for themselves how very difficult—how fraught with stress and anxiety—is the activity of making one's way in the world of work," most women, in their hearts, cherish smaller ambitions than they may militantly pretend.

As for the alleged curse of motherhood, Miss Decter, the mother of four, judges "Women's Liberation's diatribes against the impositions of motherhood" to be "an expression of self-hatred." Here she senses the movement's "true grievance": "Not that women are mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are ...women." Kicking against "the womb itself," Women's Liberation perversely drifts, like a bad update of Lysistrata, toward "female chastity," and a world of boycotted relationships.