The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation. [Hardcover]

Midge Decter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1974

Turning her formidable intellligence on the Women's Movement, Midge Decter contends that in all the major areas of their lives, women's real difficulties stem from the availability of too many choices. 5 cassettes.

--This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Perigee (January 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399503072
• ISBN-13: 978-0399503078
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,415,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS "EARLY" CRITIQUES OF FEMINISM BY A WOMAN, September 23, 2011

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Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The new chastity and other arguments against women's liberation (Hardcover)

Midge Rosenthal Decter (born 1927) is an American neoconservative journalist (married to Norman Podhoretz), as well as the former co-chair of the "Committee for the Free World," and a founder of the "Independent Women's Forum." She has also written other books such as Farewell to the woman question: a prescient look at the coming postfeminist backlash by Midge Decter, the author of liberal parents, radical children and ... Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life and The liberated woman and other Americans.

Many of Decter's arguments have not, shall we say, "aged well." But here are some quotations from this 1972 book:

"But how extraordinary, then, that women demanding equality should be at such great pains to proclaim themselves unfit for it. From its very inception, Women's Liberation has intoned a seemingly endless and various litany of women's incapacities." (Pg. 40)
"What the new sexual freedom of women has indisputably brought them, however is... new sexual freedom; the freedom of each and every individual woman to have a large hand in the determination of her own sexual conduct and destiny... This condition of freedom Women's Liberation has called enslavement; this state of controlling one's choices Women's Liberation has called being a sexual object." (Pg. 95)
"However determinedly the (women's) movement has evaded the issue by concentrating on the manipulations of men and society, the plain unvarnished fact is that every woman wants to marry... the true balance of the situation is that marriage is something asked by women and agreed to by men." (Pg. 124)
"So with motherhood, as one might expect, Women's Liberation comes to the crux of its true grievance. Not that women are mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are ... women." (Pg. 179)