Dear Steve:
I’m reading the newest issue of the Women’s Quarterly, put out by the Independent Women’s Forum. You know that I love IWF–full of my pals. But oh dear, looking at some of the articles, I’m feeling old or young–can’t quite figure out which.
For instance, lovely, wonderful, brilliant Danielle Crittenden, who writes like a dream, has an editorial describing the long-gone “sisterhood” that “used to be based on the mutual protection of women in marriage.” Once upon a (good) time, Danielle says, women “closed ranks” against the marriage-wreckers, the “other women”–the likes of Monica and Gennifer and Dolly and…
It’s been a downhill slide ever since, Danielle says. Today, women are seen as “individuals, connected by mutual political interests, not by marital status.” The women’s groups have lost sight of the simplest point: we sisters have an enduring interest in being united in support of wedlock. Want to end up with a mess of kids and no bank account? Pretty dumb for women “to align themselves with the adulterer and his mistress against the wife and daughter.”
I’m lost. In the first place, I thought the sensible women among us wanted to be treated as individuals, and not members of any genetically-determined group. Don’t like white solidarity, black solidarity, male solidarity–you name it. I’m not a sister; I’m me.
And who’s aligning themselves with unappealing, discarded, no-job, no-man, butt-of-bad-jokes Monica against Hillary and Chelsea? Seems to me the problem is quite the opposite: women going ga-ga over Hillary as wife, which means Bill and Hillary as couple. (Perhaps against Chelsea; one doesn’t know.) These oh-so-modern women are saying marriage first, personal dignity second. Keep the man; keep the bank account; keep the digs and the servants and the parties and the rest of the First Lady shebang. So, he treats you like scum. So?
And on the subject of Hillary, I note in this week’s Newsweek that Hillary (according to an “ally”) objects to a fine imposed on Bill as part of a censure deal. “Why should she have to pay for her husband’s misdeeds?” And has that “ally” asked why her husband should pay for the house, the clothes, the jewelry, the trips, the meals?
I get it. The modern woman (read “Hillary”) shares the pleasure, not the pain. Now there’s the real generational divide.
Abby
