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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (29870)	1/26/1999 12:49:00 AM
From: Big D	Respond to of 67261

Don't need to. What decency is you ain't. That's all the reference point I need!

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (29870)	1/26/1999 9:37:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 67261

Hi Michelle! Thought you might want to read these truths self-evident: January 26, 1999 Bookshelf Something's Missing By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA The "mothers" who figure in the title of Danielle Crittenden's book, "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" (Simon & Schuster, 202 pages, $23), are not all mothers but that subset who raised children after the onset of the feminist revolution. This generation taught their daughters (the "us") to think of themselves as fully equal to men, to aspire to work and autonomy before home and family, not to feel guilty about sex, to delay marriage and keep separate bank accounts once married, and to let children disrupt their working lives as little as possible. It is this generation of mothers who broke down barriers and created the opportunities their daughters now enjoy and who, like Hillary Clinton, dismissed their own mothers with the phrase, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies ..." According to Ms. Crittenden's perceptive critique, the thing these mothers didn't tell their daughters, which every previous generation had known instinctively, is that they have bodies and thus natures. These natures would cause them to crave, as they matured, not only autonomy but children, family, companionship and love. She argues incisively that disregarding this simple truth has made the daughters' generation less happy. The ideal of individualistic autonomy espoused by feminists is, in many ways, one ideally suited for carefree 20-year-olds. The problem is that nature has ordered the female life cycle differently from the male one. Physically, women peak early: In dating and marriage markets, they have their greatest power during their 20s, when they are healthiest and most sexually attractive and have access to partners many years older. Having spent this period building careers and living autonomously, however, women by their 30s find this advantage slipping away: Just as the window for having children starts to close, they find themselves bereft of suitable choices for mates. Even if they marry and have children, they still face problems because the men, in the meantime, have changed as well. That their wives can now support themselves releases the men from the obligation to turn at least half their lifetime earnings over to their families. Emotionally, feminism and the sexual revolution have eased the guilt that used to accompany infidelity, and as men grow older their sexual opportunities expand rather than contract (witness President Clinton on both counts). The young, autonomous woman in her 20s becomes the worst enemy of the woman in her 40s or 50s by stealing her husband or lover -- just at the point the older woman has come to prize stability, commitment and respect over freedom. By the time the 20-year-old reaches middle age, she faces the prospect of spending the last three or four decades of life husbandless, perhaps childless, and wondering who in the end will visit her in the nursing home. Ms. Crittenden has a number of suggestions for how to remedy this situation. The first is for society to value the work of mothers properly. A woman who today chooses to stay at home with her young children finds herself in the absurd situation of feeling guilty and socially shunned for not working. Her labor is valued in the national income accounts at zero, in contrast to that of the uneducated baby-sitter whom she could have paid to do a much worse job raising her children. Ms. Crittenden's second suggestion is for women to marry at an earlier age. Rather than establishing oneself in a career before thinking about family, younger women should exploit their natural advantages to secure husbands and families before the odds turn against them. This would mean women taking both work and family life seriously while they are still in their 20s. Ms. Crittenden points out that many accomplished women, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Sandra Day O'Connor, have done precisely this and have had happier and more balanced lives as a result. Only time will tell if Ms. Crittenden is right about the residual place of family in women's longings. I suspect she is and see anecdotal evidence that more and more women are choosing to take time off to be with their young children because they realize that this brief period will be as important and as satisfying as anything they can accomplish in the labor market. Whether men can be re-socialized to take responsibility for their families is a more difficult question. Like many of the feminists that she criticizes, Ms. Crittenden's perspective is somewhat skewed by her own class background. At one point she states: "It seems a poor trade-off for a society: valuing the work a woman does writing legal briefs more than the hours she might have devoted to helping her child feel her importance in the world." Would that all women could have careers as high-powered corporate lawyers! The fact is that the bulk of the labor-market gains made by women in the 1970s and '80s were in low-skill service sector positions like data-entry clerks or Wal-Mart checkers. These women are still there, working at close to minimum wage, only now many of them are raising children without the benefit of a husband. That this does not seem like a satisfying trade-off is perhaps one reason why a majority of women, taking for granted the gains of the feminist revolution, no longer identify themselves as feminists. Mr. Fukuyama is a professor of public policy at George Mason University. URL for this Article: interactive.wsj.com