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Farewell to the Woman Question

Midge Decter

A prescient look at the coming postfeminist backlash by Midge Decter , the author of Liberal Parents, Radical Children and The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation....

Comrades in Arms

Midge Decter

When I first came to spend my days in the office of the Institute on Religion and Public Life—this was sometime in early 1990—Richard Neuhaus had been a friend...

What to Give a First Things Reader

George Weigel Stephen M. Barr David Novak Wilfred M. McClay Midge Decter

Seeking ideas for presents this year, we asked several of our well-read friends and contributors for recommendations of a few wise, or fun, or disturbing books that every First...

Notes from Underground

Midge Decter

A word in your ear ¯A well-known physicist told me that a popular blogger told him that an unnamed source told her that a distinguished elderly lady told the...

Liberating Germaine Greer

Midge Decter

I never met Germaine Greer, but I did see her once in live performance—and a most diverting performance it was. The year, as I remember it, was 1970. Norman...

A Jew in Anti-Christian America

Midge Decter

To speak of something called “Christian America,” as both the advocates and the opponents of this idea are nowadays at high levels of passion wont to do, is by...

The Nine Lives of Population Control

Midge Decter

The idea of population control”perhaps even the idea of population itself”seems to have come into circulation somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Western world was in...

National Service as Duty and Perk

Midge Decter

I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife...

An Incredible Lightness of Being

Midge Decter

Intellectual Memoirs, 1936–1938 by mary mccarthy harcourt brace jovanovich, 114 pages, $15.95 The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, was up to the time of her...