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The Feminine Mistake
| Article
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10147 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
4,172 Words |
| Author
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Richard Cummings
Richard Cummings, the author of The Pied Piper: Allard K.
Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, has taught law and social
policy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and
ecology at Duke University. |
FEMINISM ON TRIAL
The Ginny Foat Case and the Future of the Women's Movement
Ellen Hawkes
New York: William Morrow & Company
420 pp., $18.95
A LESSER LIFE
The Myth of Women's Liberation In America
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
New York: William Morrow & Company
Illustrated, 461 pp., $17.95
WOMEN & CHILDREN LAST
The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America
Ruth Sidel
New York: Viking
236 pp., $16.95
A new women's literature of the 1980s is emerging that challenges the entrenched ideology of feminism and seeks to redirect explicitly and implicitly feminist energies along different lines than those that culminated in the disastrous candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro. Mistakes of style and substance, as well as the clichés of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, are being put under the microscope by writers such as Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ellen Hawkes. Hewlitt and Hawkes, who describe themselves as feminists, are suggesting that a lot of nonsense was being promoted, while others such as Ruth Sidel now call for a social democratic transformation of American society so women can work and be wives and mothers at the same time.
As read in the sequence offered here, these three powerful books reject the histrionics and hypocrisy of the politics of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and the cult of personality of the women's movement that projected the image of women as victims (Feminism on Trial), assess what the actual situation is for most women in America who need to work but want families (A Lesser Life); and, finally, expound a sweeping advocacy of a total national family policy (Women and Children Last).
"He Done Her Wrong"
In Feminism on Trial, Ellen Hawkes, a feminist activist and journalist, gives a definitive account of the sensational 1983 trial of Ginny Foat, the president of the California chapter of
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