Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism [Hardcover]

A major thesis of this volume is that while feminism may appear to be anti-men, it is even more so anti-women, at least women of a certain stripe. Wives and homemakers are the real target of radical feminists, insists Graglia, and she spends a good part of this hefty tome (450 pages) in documenting this claim.

The author, who is a lawyer by profession, but a homemaker by choice, has the intellectual firepower needed to take on the heavyweights of the feminists movement. The thoughts and writings of Friedan, Steinem, Greer, Millet, de Beauvoir, and all the other major movers and shakers in the feminist movement are here carefully evaluated, and their antipathy to wives and families are carefully assessed.

Solid chapters explore the rise of modern feminism, the feminist agenda, the totalitarian impulse in feminism, the push for androgyny, and the attack on the institutions of marriage and the traditional family, among other things.

The author is especially adept at showing how women cannot have it all, at least not at the same time. The push for climbing the corporate ladder invariably takes a toll on child rearing and family, and many women have suffered as a result of buying the feminist line on this issue.

She tackles a number of other myths, such as the idea that gender is simply a social construct, and the idea that motherhood and homemaking are somehow second class lifestyles. She shows how women have been the big losers in the feminist-promoted sexual revolution. She documents how women have suffered under no-fault divorce. And she demonstrates how the push for a purely androgynous society results in all parties losing out.

While acknowledging that women have the right to pursue the feminist script if they so choose, Graglia firmly believes that feminism is really anti-women. Feminism remains a destructive and destablising social force. In the end, feminism has damaged women, harmed families, and put children at risk. Strong words, but after reading her arguments one has to agree that not everything has been sweetness and light in this major social revolution. Indeed, like most revolutions, the results are often worse than the original problem.

While many will violently disagree with the major propositions of this volume, the author's arguments deserve a fair hearing. Spence Publishing deserves credit for running with such a volume, at a time when many other publishers wouldn't dream of offering such a daring title.

There are several parts of this book with which I take exception. They are, but not limited to, the following:

1) She blames women whose husbands molest their daughters because the wives should be sexually satisfying their husbands. This does not address the issue of pedophilia and the perverseness of a man who would sexually abuse his own daughter. In no way should the woman be blamed when her husband obviously has more serious problems than an unsatisfactory sex life. If the mother is ever to blame, it is in those instances in which she knew it was going on and allowed it to continue.

2) She presents what I view as flawed statistics. Graglia states that 90% of all births to black mothers aged 15-19 are illegitimate. This obviously makes perfect sense, since the average age of marriage is currently 24 for women and 26 for men. A married eighteen- or nineteen-year-old is rare and surely most women younger than this are not married. Graglia also discusses rape and sexual abuse statistics which show a veritable explosion in occurrence of these crimes over the past forty years. However, rape and sexual abuse are not as taboo or ignored by the police as they once were; this explains why these statistics have risen so alarmingly, despite the fact that both are still widely underreported.

3) Graglia acts as though a declining birth rate is a huge problem, although Earth is projected to reach her carrying capacity--the maximum amount of people Earth's natural resources can support--in the not too distant future. Overpopulation, not underpopulation, is a bigger concern for scientists, unless my Geology professor had no idea what he was talking about.

Lastly, Graglia uses the one reason that disgusts me the most as to why women should stay home--that women who dare work in the marketplace are taking away jobs that men who are the solitary breadwinners need. Propaganda, anyone? This argument was used to get women to give up whatever employment they held during the Depression...and then, during WWII, free child care was made available in the workplace so Rosie the Riveter could do her patriotic duty. Naturally, Graglia is against this child care. I do not have a problem with the fact that she does not support child care that one-income families must pay for, but it frustrates me to no end that our government has manipulated women in this way, and Graglia has bought into the brainwashing.

I like to read both sides of the issue, but I found this book absolutely infuriating. The writing does not flow well and I found it difficult to concentrate and, when I did, what I read just made me mad. According to other reviews, it looks as though other people really liked it. If you are homemakers, that's great, but I, for one, want to have a profession and a family, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. So if we can just learn to live and let live, that would be perfectly wonderful. I support your choice to stay at home, and all I would ask is that you support my choice to work outside the home without thinking I must be a terrible mother.