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. From the June/July 1991 edition. For many years, I was interested—in both senses of the term—in . . . . Continue Reading »

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 of mine for roughly twenty years. During that time, the two of us had been traveling, politically and culturally speaking, . . . . Continue Reading »

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 Things reader should know”limited only by the request that the lists not include the Bible, Shakespeare, or volumes by . . . . Continue Reading »

In the February issue First Things published the Erasmus Lecture of 2000, “Papacy and Power,” by George Weigel. The monumental political influence of the pontificate of John Paul II, Weigel argued, is the result of a long and complicated history in which the papacy has successfully contended . . . . Continue Reading »

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 Mailer had recently published a very long article on the then newly declared women’s revolution and had succeeded, as was his wont, in . . . . Continue Reading »

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 itself evidence of how un-Christian the country has become. Many Christian activists, especially the most innocent and high-minded among . . . . Continue Reading »

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 what is called “demographic transition,” i.e., the ratio of people being born to . . . . Continue Reading »

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 and four small children. He lives in Jerusalem. His annual five-week tour of service in the Israel Defense Force is called in Hebrew by a term . . . . Continue Reading »

The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, was up to the time of her death working on a memoir of her life in the late 1930s, in effect a sequel to her two previous autobiographical works, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew. Perhaps she meant by the end . . . . Continue Reading »

Contrary to popular American opinion, New Yorkers are by and large a gentle and long-suffering lot. Imagine having to stand in a long line to see a movie, to purchase the token needed for entrance to the subway platform, to buy a postage stamp, to get a morning container of coffee for consumption at . . . . Continue Reading »