A salient title in bookstores this season is Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. A 23-year-old graduate of Williams College, Shalit radically champions old-fashioned ideas of female sexuality. She places much of the blame for sexual-harassment, eating-disorders, and date-rape on feminism's doorstep, claiming such problems are by-products of the movement's encouraging of promiscuity. The plight of American women, she says, can only be remedied by a revival of sexual restraint, good manners, and romantic idealism.
Shalit's is not the only new book to hark back to traditional notions of femininity. Danielle Crittenden, a 35-year-old wife and mother, has written What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. And F. Carolyn Graglia, who was a lawyer and is now a homemaker, came out in October with Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism. These books strike at the very heart of feminist ideology, contending that women are, by nature, more suited to raising children and steering the life of the home than to pursuing careers. Childrearing and homemaking aren't burdens but noble, fulfilling pursuits which deserve our respect.
What are we young women at Harvard to make of such reactionary claims? We could, of course, ignore them and hope that their popularity doesn't stick with the plebeians. We should, however, in the rational, open-minded spirit of inquiry which so permeates this institution of ours, consider their validity.
The role of women is one of many issues to which our generation gives little thought. We believe, for the most part, that the feminist movement was a deserved success. Complete social, political, and economic equality for men and women is an unquestioned ideal. Very few of us were raised by stay-at-home moms, and virtually all of us see careers as the overarching concern of our futures. As far as sex goes, many see women as being no different than men except in the narrowest biological sense. We expect a woman to be aggressive, to be free with herself, and not to place too much hope and trust in a man. In many circles marriage is not valued, nor is the desire to have and raise children. For working women, motherhood is reduced to little more than a coffee break.
Having arrived after the sexual and feminist revolutions, our generation has next to no knowledge or appreciation of traditional feminine virtues. Modesty is one of these. As Wendy Shalit points out, modest, chaste women are regarded as socially-retarded "prudes." Gentleness is another of these virtues. The ideal woman of the '90s is power-hungry and career-minded. She can be gruff when she wants, use the same foul language once used only in men's locker rooms, and even play hockey and enlist in the military with hopes that one day she might become "G.I. Jane." Motherly devotion is a third. Many women have children, of course, but they are encouraged, often against their better instincts, to have as few as possible and to resume their careers soon after giving birth.
Our culture has spoon-fed us a specific set of values concerning the role of women. To question these values is considered not merely heresy but madness. If a Harvard graduate, for example, turned down a great job so that she could marry young, have a bunch of kids, and spend the rest of her life dedicated full-time to her home and family, she'd be regarded by the great number of her peers as a misguided fool. She'd be an unfortunate abberration -- a squanderer of her talents, of her education, and of her life. To more extreme elements she'd be a traitor to her sex, or at best a sacrificial lamb of the patriarchy. On a personal level she would be tolerated, but in the minds of many and in the eyes of society she would be a wasted commodity.
It's amazing that such prejudice prevails among people who profess so loudly the creed of choice and tolerance. The fact is that our society is quite rigid and demanding when it comes to what women should and shouldn't do. It has carved out a very narrow niche for our sex, a niche which is often contrary to the feminine nature. Ironically, the boundaries the sexual revolutionaries have erected undermine their own creed of women's "liberation."
It's time for young women -- including those who go to Harvard -- to question this society. Just as our great-grandmothers questioned the validity of a system which denied them their rights as citizens of a free country, we must question the validity of a culture which denies us our most basic rights as females. We have a right to our modesty. It's a natural, healthy impulse to refrain from certain activities and behaviors, yet our society has conditioned whole generations of young girls to reject that impulse. The result is nothing more than free and easy sex for men and heartache for women. We have a right to become full-time wives and mothers and in fact we should be encouraged to do so. Motherhood is the most natural calling of our sex -- we are biologically and emotionally made for it, and as many will attest, homemaking can be tremendously fulfilling, perhaps much more so in the end than a lifetime spent in an office climbing up the economic ladder. Yet society marginalizes stay-at-home moms and denies the very real dignity of their vocation.
The feminists pushed for complete equality. They defined it as attaining the same degree of social, political, and economic power men had, even going so far as to demand equality of experience as well as opportunity. They missed the mark, and our generation is paying for it. The feminist movement denied that women have a unique nature which, when nutured and respected as it ought to be, brings forth life experiences different than -- but just as important and worthwhile as -- men's. We do not have to be the same to be equal. True equality is the equality of dignity, and a woman who is modest and who loves her husband and invests her whole life in her home and family has as much dignity as any powerful corporate executive -- male or female.