Women are 'victims' again

Karen DeCrow is the former president of the National Organization for Women.

Not wanting to intrude, or appear unsisterly, I have nonetheless begun to worry about this younger generation of feminists: The new puritanism is terrifying.

A quarter-century ago, what we feminists had in mind included sexual liberation - the recognition that physical pleasure was for us, too. What our well-meaning mothers and grandmothers were telling us, in the only way they knew, was that because women were excluded from equality in the marketplace, we were required to trade sex for food. What the women's liberation movement had in mind 25 years ago was ending the double standard. If women craved and adored sex also, we could hardly use it for barter.

Now, a feminist in her 20s has courageously taken the movement to task. Katie Roiphe, author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, describes and laments the new puritanism:

"Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims - women offended by a professor's dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across.

"This portrait of the delicate female bears a striking resemblance to that '50s ideal my mother and other women of her generation fought so hard to leave behind. They didn't like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence."

For those under age 55 (my age and that of Katie Roiphe's mother), some American social history is in order, albeit the tale limited to females in the middle class.

What were male-female relations like in the 1950s? What was it like at those beach parties, in the back seats of those two-toned Chevy Bel Aires?

The aim of the dating game for the girls, innocents abroad in our own land, innocent broads, was not to have fun, or even a pleasant evening. The goal was to catch a husband. Getting married was not a goal; it was the only goal.

We were instructed to find the husband sooner, rather than later. As described in the classic novel, Marjorie Morningstar, beauty was alleged to fade rapidly. Why would a boy want someone of 21 when he could find someone of 18? Thus, engaged at 18, married at 18 1/2 was considered safest. Career plans for women were not relegated to second place - they had no place.

Sexual innocence played a major role. Girls had to acquiesce to the myth that sensual delight was for men only. Translated, this meant that we could not pay our own bills, and if we wanted men to marry us and do so, we had to provide something precious in return. This myth was no favor to the men, either; they were required to quickly locate occupations which could support one adult female and the children.

So, along with cooking, laundry service, escort service to routine professional and family dinners, and child care, we could provide sexual service. The cult of female virginity and purity was part of the second-class citizenship of women. Demeaning and oppressive, it was a "dumbing down," a companion to the "dumbing down" we were taught to exhibit in the classroom, and while on dates, and indeed in every situation where females could smilingly glance at males and mumble, "I am an innocent. Teach me."

Acting dumb in the classroom was often unconvincing, as the girls, not diverted by sports (off limits to us in those days), were usually the best students. But scholarly girls could get around this by dating boys from other high schools.

I did that one summer. My boyfriend was a great dancer, had use of the family car, and all was savory. One afternoon, as we lounged on the beach (that was before the beach was a cancer risk), sophisticatedly smoking cigarettes like French film stars (that was before smoking was deemed poison), he said he had heard something about me from his cousin. What terrible thing? Was this summer idyll to come to an abrupt end?

He had heard that I was "a brain"! My modest academic record had spread all over the city of Chicago. Not me, murmured I. It must have been someone else.

In sexual matters, innocence was also the requirement. Abortion was illegal, although available (sometimes safe, sometimes not) in distant towns and in the Caribbean, for a great deal of cash. There was no birth control pill. In order to get a diaphragm, you had to convince a physician you were married, then pray he wouldn't meet your parents at a concert. Condoms broke with regularity.

Katie Roiphe writes that her grandmother carefully instructed Katie's mother to drink sloe gin fizzes on dates so she wouldn't drink too much and get too drunk and "go too far." The implication was that only the boy wanted to go too far. No one except a husband, and only after the ceremony was over and your father had paid the orchestra, was supposed to "go below the waist."

Compared to my mother, her grandma was a libertine. My mother's guidance lectures suggested drinking chocolate milk (that was before we knew that chocolate milk was poison).

A young woman's instruction was to keep your mouth shut - for two reasons: don't be funnier than the date, and no french kissing.

Girls had to be shorter than boys. (This was before Ann Kelsey and Stuart Markowitz.) My sister, eight years my junior and a competent aide, had the job of checking the chart I had made on the front door (the kind now used to identify the height of supermarket thieves) in order to tell me whether to wear low- or spiked-heel shoes.

Obviously, every civilized person - female and male - abjures rape and sexual harassment. But the oppression of young female students is not being whistled at, or even slurped at. It was the chilling recognition in the bad old days that one could never be mayor, governor, senator, attorney general or a justice of the Supreme Court.

What was stultifying about the 1950s was not that boys would routinely snap one's bra strap, but that we were judged by our sexual behavior: Virgins or sluts were the two categories.

Perhaps this is a good time for a midcourse correction to avoid the danger of, as Katie Roiphe says, "remaking love in its old image." What we had in mind 25 years ago was not a new puritanism but freeing women from being eternal children.

As grown-ups, we have won the right to say "no" and to be believed and taken seriously. As grown-ups, we also have the right to repeat, after Molly Bloom, "yes I said yes I will Yes."