Author, activist, editor, wife, mother, grandmother – Midge Decter in her latest book, “An Old Wife’s Tale,” (Regan Books/HarperCollins, $24.00) is taking a look at her seven decades in love and war. What stands out in this relatively brief (234 pages) book is not just how much her personal history meshes with the political and cultural trends of a half century of American life, but what a singular success she has made of her personal existence.
Think on the women’s movement, the hectic ’60s, the Vietnam drang und sturm, the recession, Watergate, the Cold War, the drug war, the fall of communism, AIDS. Think of all the young lives and families in this time span – who doesn’t know at least one family marked – often disastrously, if not tragically – by these events?
Consider then, with some astonishment, that Ms. Decter is mother to four successful and stable children, and grandmother to 10 who appear to be coming along admirably well. Her marriage to Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of Commentary, lasting well over 40 years, is for all practical purposes a model mating.
At this point I should say we saw quite a bit of the Podhoretz family during the ’80s and early ’90s, finding them congenial and compatible folk to work and socialize with. Very much to her credit, Ms. Decter, in examining her career – and quite a career it has been – does not go in for name-dropping, the sin of so many memoirs of this order.
She is more interested in ideas and social trends than in collecting any reflected glory from association with boldface personalities. She does make mention of having met Ronald Reagan when he was president three or four times. “And each time I met him, he always gave the impression of being cordially attentive. Naturally, he never recognized me – on every occasion I was introduced anew – and I doubt he recognized many of the rest of us either.”
What should make Ms. Decter’s book of particular interest to young working women and working mothers are her own experiences in this realm. As a young single mother herself (she and her first husband divorced shortly after the birth of their second daughter), she went to work as a secretary. She underwent all the angst of hiring illegal aliens (soon to become legal through her help) to look out for her daughters. With two more children added to her family after her second marriage, she alternated between working – moving up the ladder from editorial assistant to executive editor – and staying at home with the children. She favors the staying at home with the children mode until they’re at least in high school, believing a woman can nearly always get back to work once the crucial childhood years are past.
What truly irks her most today is the damage wrought by the so-called women’s liberation movement and the likes of Betty Friedan, NOW and Gloria Steinem over the last 20 years. She has sat on more than one panel with Ms. Steinem arguing those issues, and is struck by the hypocrisy, conscious or not, of Ms. Steinem standing there on a platform in “a crotch-high skirt and knee-length boots telling men that women were no longer willing to be men’s playthings.”
Ms. Decter sees the damage being done to men and young boys as a result of the women’s movement as being the most nefarious heritage. She comments on boys today, such as the ones who partake in random killings seen on the evening news. “I do know something about those boys, and others like them, and it isn’t that they watch television and don’t have enough contact with adults (some, in fact, may have all too much). It’s that the society in which they live, and in which we all live, will neither allow them on the one hand to grow up, nor on the other hand to be real children at only the beginning of their journey to some genuine kind of adulthood.” She goes on to observe on how American kids are infantilized in lots of ways, “preeminent among them their almost never having to pay any genuine price for bad behavior, either at school, at home, or in the world at large.”
This “Old Wife” has a wise and often witty tale to tell. She deserves a listening. We can all profit from it.
