Volume 19, Number 9 · November 30, 1972
The Anti-Feminist Woman
By Adrienne Rich
The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation
by Midge Decter
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 181 pp., $5.95
This book is harmless, predictable, and sad. Like much ad hoc journalism, it is shallow, because the writer has set out to label and destroy a developing phenomenon like the women's movement rather than to reflect on the needs and conflicts that generated it. Midge Decter's writing lacks any sense of the past and of the ways it continues to haunt, illuminate, and seduce us. She finds that the women's movement is the product of emotional and intellectual laziness masquerading as a 'passion for social justice' and that its effect, if it is allowed to pursue its course, will be that 'we shall all of us, men, women and babes in arms, live to reap the whirlwind.'
Review, 5424 words
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