This Week's Suggested Book
from the Ashbrook Center
(Monday, September 28, 1998)
 | | Domestic Tranquility:
A Brief Against Feminism
by F. Carolyn Graglia |
Spence Publishing Company
451 pages, January 1998
Hardcover, 29.95
ISBN: 0965320863
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the
Ashbrook Center.
The principal targets of feminist fire in the on-going "gender wars" are not men but traditional wives and mothers, says a lawyer-turned-housewife in a powerful critique of contemporary feminism. With a profound understanding of the quandary of modern women, Carolyn Graglia shows that the cultural assault on marriage, motherhood, and traditional sexuality, rooted in the pursuit of economic and political power, has robbed women of their surest source of fulfillment. Mrs. Graglia traces the origins of modern feminism to the post-war exaltation of marketplace achievement, which bred dissatisfaction with women's domestic roles. In a masterly analysis of seminal feminist texts, she reveals a conscious campaign of ostracism of the housewife as a childish "parasite". Turning to the feminist understanding of sexuality, now pervasive in our culture, she shows how it has distorted and impoverished sex by stripping it of its true significance. Finally, after exposing feminism's totalitaria
n impulse and its contribution to the "tangle of pathologies" that have left marriage and family life in tatters, she argues for a renewed appreciation of the transforming experience of motherhood and the value of the domestic vocation.
Table of Contents
- 1. Traditional Homemaking Devalued
- 2. Traditional Sexual Morality Traduced
- 3. Marriage as a Woman's Career Discredited
- 4. Ironies within Feminism
- 5. Feminism's Falsification of Reality
- 6. The Awakened Brunnhilde
- 7. Bourgeois Family Values vs. the Market
- 8. The Marketplace Culture
- 9. The Expert Culture
- 10. The Androgynous Culture
- 11. The Emasculated Culture
- 12. The Consumer Culture
- 13. The Media Culture
- 14. Destruction of the Women's Pact
- 15. The Housewife as Pariah
- 16. Triumph of the Feminist Perspective
- 17. Feminist Endorsement of Promiscuous Sex
- 18. Female Chastity and the Preciousness of Women
- 19. Woman Defeminized
- 20. Women's Dissatisfaction with Casual Sex
- 21. The Feminist Sexual Prescription
- 22. Valuing Female Sexuality
- 23. The Casualty of the Casual Orgasm
- 24. A Feminist Version of Chastity
- 25. Feminists as Remolders of Society
- 26. The Spontaneity of the Civilizing Process
- 27. Collectivist Child-Rearing
- 28. The Traditional Family's Contribution to Capitalism
- 29. Chinese Women and the "Return Home"
- 30. Divorce
- 31. Illegitimacy and Teenage Pregnancy
- 32. Poverty
- 33. Crime
- 34. Children and Adolescents
- 35. Working Mothers and Declining Birth Rates
- 36. The Diminished Male
- 37. The Sexual Experience that Overwhelms
- 38. Spiritual Virginity
- 39. Our Double-Bind Society
- 40. The Particularities of Daily Life
- Bibliography
- Index
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