Booknotes

Ms. F. CAROLYN GRAGLIA (Author, "Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism"): Actually, my editor and publisher got the idea for the title. I had originally called it "Awakened Femininity," and they were told by various people that men wouldn't buy a book called "Awakened Femininity." And I thought "Domestic Tranquility" was a--a great choice.

Ms. GRAGLIA: What i--it applies on several different levels, because in my book, I discuss the harm that I believe feminism has caused to society. I'm talking about how to restore tranquility within the polity. You could think of it as referring to the Constitution of the United States to restore domestic tranquility. But I'm obviously also talking about the tranquility of the family and I'm talking about the tranquility of the woman because I find that the feminist ideas have hurt women so much. And so it's tranquility on three levels.

Ms. GRAGLIA: It's my husband's name and it's northern Italian. It's right up in the Piedmont. And actually, there's a town there called Graglia and there's a trucking company there because we had friends who were traveling there and took a picture of a truck that said `Graglia.'

Ms. GRAGLIA: Pennington.

Ms. GRAGLIA: We met when we were in law school. We both went to Columbia University Law School. We met--actually, it's a great story--the very first year. Our first assignment was to work with one other student on a writing project, and Lino and I were assigned to work together. And he always tells the story that he came up to me and he said, `Miss Pennington, you don't have to worry about this. I'll take care of it.' And I said to him, `Mr. Graglia, you don't have to worry about it. I'll take care of it.' And so we didn't really cooperate very much on that project. But then the second year, we both were on the law review and we started dating right away.

Ms. GRAGLIA: We married right upon graduation from law school. That would've been in 1954.

Ms. GRAGLIA: We went to Washington. I--I tell the story in my book that I--and--and I discussed this in relation to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's claim that women--she couldn't get an offer. She said not a single law firm in the city of Yew--New York bid for her employment as a lawyer. Well, I went out and I received an offer from a major Wall Street law firm, but my husband didn't. And for the reason that I say in my book, I'm quite sure, because Jews and other ethnics had a hard time getting jobs on Wall Street back in 1954. And many of the men in my class who were Jewish, as well as the women, didn't get offers on Wall Street. They could get jobs as lawyers. I got an offer on Wall Street because I don't believe that WASPs were discriminated against back then, and I was still Pennington.

But because he didn't get an offer, we decided to take jobs in Washington. So we took jobs with the Department of Justice, and I worked there and I worked for Warren Burger, who was then assistant attorney general in charge of the civil division. And when he was appointed by Eisenhower to the Court of Appeals, he asked me to come to be his first law clerk. And then--that was in 1956.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Now I have three.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, they're all in their 30s now. I worked in--in Washington until just before our first daughter was born and then I stopped working, and...

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, for a long time. Now when I say `work,' I mean work for money. I think you're always working. You're always doing something. I dropped out of the labor market i--where--just a month before my first daughter was born, and I never worked i--in the labor market for years and years. When our youngest daughter started college, I started doing some consulting work with Lino because he would be asked to do a lot of cases in both constitutional law and antitrust law, and for a while, I worked with him on those cases. But I wanted to write this book, and I was always trying to do it at the same time. And I said to him one day, `I'm never gonna write this book if I don't stop this.' And he said, `OK. That's fine.' So only for those few brief years did I do the consulting work, and then I started working on the book full-time.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No, except--except on the book.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No. No, I--I do not.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Actually, I started thinking about the book way back in 1965. I decided to write that book when our youngest daughter was only a few months old. And I was home one night--I remember the night that I thought, `Someday, I'm gonna write a book.' I was home waiting for her to wake up. She was an infant. It was nighttime. Lino--by then, he was working on Wall Street and we were living in the New Jersey suburbs. And I was waiting for my daughter--my youngest daughter, the baby, to wake up to be nursed. And Lino wouldn't get home until late on the 11:00 train. And I was reading the "Feminine Mystique," which had been recommended by a friend. And when I read the things that Betty Friedan said about the housewife, about me, a mother waiting for her baby to wake up to be nursed, I couldn't believe what I was reading. As I say in my book, she said that we were parasites, we were dependent children, we had no real function, we were less than fully human. And I thought to myself, `Someday, I'm going to answer this book.' And from then on, everything I read I evaluated in terms of its relevance to defending the homemaker and domesticity.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No, I have not.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, I think she must've been an extremely unhappy woman. She--she clearly was an extremely unhappy woman. She hated everything about her life in the suburbs, about being a wife and mother at home. She said her marriage was one of dependent hatred and she ended her marriage. And I loved everything about my life. I loved living in the suburbs, I loved being a mother at home. I have been happy practicing law. And if I had never had children, I would've thought I had a good life. But staying home and raising my children was incomparably more satisfying to me. I couldn't imagine that I could be so happy.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey.

Ms. GRAGLIA: My family was--well, my parents were divorced. My--they were separated when I was two. They were divorced when I was seven. I never saw my father from the time I was seven, although we lived in the same city. But I never saw him again. And we were poor. I mean, we--I grew up in the Depression. My mother was a stenographer, and eventually, she became a secretary. And as I say in my book, I lived on the edge of poverty. And I had memories of going to the grocery store and saying, `Charge it,' and if they didn't charge it, we wouldn't have eaten. And so that concentrates your mind. And so I ve--very early on decided that men were unreliable--in my lifetime, so far, they had been. And I thought, `I better have a career.'

And when I was in junior high school, in seventh grade, we were asked to--to decide whether we wanted a--an academic curriculum or a vocational curriculum. And I remember I said to my mother, `I want the academic because I wanna be a lawyer.' And we were really worried that they would say, `Oh, well, you can't possibly afford to go to college.' And I was never worried they'd say, `A woman can't be a lawyer.' It never occurred to me that they would say that. And no one ever did. And when I told the teacher what I wanted to do, I remember my seventh-grade teacher said, `Well, you're going to have to study very hard because your mother can't help you and you'll have to get scholarships.' And I was always encouraged throughout my whole life, my academic life. I never could've succeeded if I hadn't been encouraged and helped by counselors. My counselors in high school were just wonderful, counselors in college were just wonderful.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, I think it has an incredible impact. I don't think you ever recover from that experience that--I mean, I'm sure it can be handled differently than it was, but never to see a parent, although you know that parent is alive, it is a rejection that you never recover from, and you just have to live with it.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No, she died--it--it was last November.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Not really. No, I wouldn't talk about it because that, in a way, would be a reproaching of her. No, I--I never talked about being unhappy or feeling rejected by my father. That would only hurt her more. No.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No. I was an only child.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Austin, Texas. My husband teaches at the University of Texas Law School.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, we've been there about--a little over th--we moved there in 1966, so it'll be 32 years.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: The publisher in Dallas, just started up recently. This is one of the first books that they've published, and it is--Tom Spence is a small publisher. He had worked in publishing. He's a lawyer, decided he wanted to publish conservative books. Their--their catalog calls them `books for the culture wars.' And they, I think, have done a very good job. I--I love what they did to the book.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, the feminism that I a--am writing a brief against is the feminism that I call `contemporary feminism.' It's the feminism that was revived in the 1960s. The beginning of the revival was Betty Friedan's the "Feminine Mystique." And the point of contemporary feminism was--the major point was to attack the homemaker, to convince homemakers that they were worthless in the domestic role and to drive them into the workplace. The women who revived contemporary feminism, except for Betty Friedan, were unmarried, they didn't have children and they thought that it was necessary that women be independent from men. That is the crucial point to be made about contemporary feminism. They believe that women should not be dependent upon men, that women should play the same roles in the workplace that men play, that women should strive for complete political and economic power with men. That's their goal. The only way you can achieve that goal is to always remain in the workplace, never to stay home, as I did, for all those years and raise your children at home.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, what I start out with i--is an overview which says, essentially, what I just said. Then I discuss the forces operating in our society that made women accept this feminist message because this is a very, really, counterfeminine message that you should be completely independent of men and that you should abandon the child-rearing role. And so I discuss all those forces that were operating in my chapter called Women's Divine Discontent.

Then I have a chapter called Status Degradation Achieved, which is a discussion of the feminist writings that were really--the feminist writings were crucial. I mean, feminism changed the way people lived in this country to an incredible degree. And I analyze those writings. The point of those writings were--as Betty Friedan made very clear in the "Feminine Mystique," the point of them was to convince women that the domestic role was worthless, that raising children was an activity that should be done mainly by the government in the form of day care and to convince women that they had no status unless they were full-time market producers, and a lot of women accepted that. They accepted it, though, for lots of different reasons, not just because they believed it. But they--so many women felt so put-upon by their society that they were not respected unless they had jobs, so that a lot of them were really shamed, I think, into the workplace.

But--and I analyze this in several places in the book--one of the most important tools that the feminist movement used to drive women into the workplace was the institution of no-fault divorce. No-fault divorce was instituted in all 50 states very, very quickly.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, no-fault divorce was a change from the prior divorce regime, which was based on fault. Under a fault divorce regime, if a wife behaves herself so that her husband could not divorce her, she would be protected. It would be harder for him to get a divorce. I mean, you had to have grounds for a divorce. And if you didn't commit adultery, your husband probably wouldn't have grounds for a divorce, so that women could resist their husbands' demand for divorce. And if he was able to get a divorce, you were usually protected financially. That is, you were going to be given not only child support but alimony, if his financial condition allowed that.

So that a woman like me, for example, under a fault regime, my husband was practicing law when I was--we were making the same amount of money. I stopped working and he continued. I--I took care of everything so that he was able to advance in his career, and he had a very good income by the time he was 45. Now if at the time he was 45, under a fault regime, he decided, `Well, I've had it with you. I want,' what we now called trophy wives, he would have to--I would have been able to have long-term alimony that would provide some financial recompense for all those years that I had stayed home and taken care of the home.

Now with no-fault divorce it's easy, and you can get a divorce with no grounds at all, and women are very rarely given long-term alimony. So as--I--I quote many of the commentators who say that no-fault divorce is a message from our society to women that, `You should be in the workplace because our society will not protect you if your husband chooses to divorce you. You can't resist. There is no way you can resist his petition for a divorce. And you will get only what they call rehabilitative alimony,' which even the word i--is--is a way of saying to women, `You were a homemaker all those years. You're like a juvenile delinquent. You have to be rehabilitated from that.' So that the message of no-fault divorce--and this is the message that all of our--all 50 states are giving women today--`You will stay home and raise your children in the marital home at your peril, at your economic peril.' So that it's a message--and judges will say this to women. They'll say, `If you choose not to be in the workplace, that's your choice, but our--we're not going to protect you.' I'm not...

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, one is a lawyer, one is a doctor and one is a teacher.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yeah, they all work. Only--only one of them is married.

Ms. GRAGLIA: One of them--I know the one who's the teacher has read the book. I don't know about the other two.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, you see, in a sense, you can't--I think you can't disagree with me because I never say that women who want to work shouldn't work. I never say that. All I say is that our society is now set up to discourage women from staying home. And so really, there's no way they could disagree with that. I don't say to any woman that she should stay home. I simply say that we should respect those who do stay home. We should reform our no-fault divorce laws to protect those who do stay home.

I talk in my book about what I call `the women's pact,' and that was the way I described the attitude before the revival of contemporary feminism. And I analyze women's situation there in this way: I say there have always been women who don't wanna marry and don't wanna have children. And they have usually pursued careers or they may have joined religious orders. There are other women who have always wanted to pursue a career, even though they had children, and they always have done so. A certain number of women always did. And then you have the third group of women who were the most common before the revival of contemporary feminism, and they were the women who only wanted to work until they had children and then they wanted to be homemakers. And I said that before the revival of contemporary feminism, these women maintained a pact with each other that they did not criticize each other's life choices. They let each other go their own way without criticizing them. And I think that was true. When I was in the workplace, it never would've occurred to me, back in the 1950s, to have said that homemakers were parasites. I wouldn't have dreamed of saying anything like that.

Betty Friedan and contemporary feminists broke the women's pact because they were a group of women who didn't like the homemaking role and they undertook to attack and to disadvantage those women who did like the homemaking role. And I say we need to restore the women's pact. And I would say I maintain a women's pact with my daughters. I mean, how they want to live their life is their concern, and in that sense, I don't see how they could disagree with me.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yeah.

Ms. GRAGLIA: OK.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, she is a paradigmatic feminist. In fact, she has the paradigmatic feminist marriage.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, by that, she has done everything feminists say a woman should do. She pursued a career, she never left her career when she had one child--and, you know, the early feminists really didn't think women should have children at all and they certainly believed they shouldn't have very many children, and whatever children they had should be raised by surrogates. They should not sacrifice their career for child-rearing, and they always talk about it as sacrificing your career. Well, Hillary Rodham Clinton always continued to work. I mean, she stayed home only briefly. She was, in fact, the primary breadwinner in her family. The governor of Arkansas did not make much money, and so she always made more money until--then when he became president, of course, she stopped working. But she was everything feminists think women should be.

And as I discuss--I have two long chapters on sex in my book. The feminists were at the forefront of the sexual revolution. They were not big believers in premarital virginity or in marital chastity. And many of the magazines in--in those days, in the '70s, the end of the '60s, the early '80s, many of the magazines that were staffed by feminists encouraged extramarital relationships. I mean, they thought, `Why would you ever give up the opportunity to have a broader sexual experience?' So I would say that the--that--that--what--what we know of that marriage fit the feminist mold of a marriage.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yeah.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yes. Yes.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I have not met her, no, but she certainly, again, is a paradigmatic feminist. The--these women have done exactly what the contemporary feminist movement wanted them to do. They chose a career, they devoted themselves to their career. Justice Ginsburg, a--again, never stayed home with children. And she, actually--often, when she's interviewed, I have seen this in several interviews, she will bemoan the fact that if one of her children was sick, they would tend to call her rather than her husband. She said, to her, that was a sign of discrimination, that you might think the woman would be more likely to come to pick up a sick child than the man. I mean, she--there--I don't think there's any feminist idea that she doesn't support whole-heartedly.

Ms. GRAGLIA: She's the same thing. Gloria Steinem--again, she...

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, extremely effective. The--these are all very effective women.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, Gloria Steinem was a real media personality, but she is an unmarried woman, she never had children. Like many of the feminists, like Simone de Beauvoir, for example, she has signed an ad that said she had had an abortion. They all promote abortion as necessary to women's equality and what they consider equality, it certainly is. I--if equality is living the same life that men live, you have to be able to prevent yourself from ever being tied down by children.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Ri--`Ehrenreich et al' was a book that Barbara Ehrenreich wrote. When I say, `Et al,' that's simply to avoid having to say the two other authors. And that's a--it's used in legal writing a great deal when you just want to use the name of the first author. She wrote a book called "Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex," and she wrote it with two other women--I think Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs. And rather than saying, Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs each time, we said, `et al,' which is used...

Ms. GRAGLIA: I--I--now Barbara Ehrenreich, I think, is a very good analyst. I used two of her books. I rely on her a great deal. Feminists are very bright women. I'm not saying they're not bright. And Ehrenreich, unlike the others, I--I don't think has ever attacked the homemaker a--as much. But in her analysis, she--she does an excellent job. She wrote a book called "The Hearts of Men: American Dreams & the Flight from Commitment," and in that book she analyzes the changes that had occurred in men and the decline of the breadwinner ethic. And it was--that is one of the factors that I analyze in my chapter called Women's Divine Discontent: the decline of the breadwinner ethic, the playboy mentality, that men didn't want to support wives anymore.

And Ehrenreich does a wonderful job of analyzing the kind of men that feminists were responding to when they revived their own movement. My point is that you don't respond to those men by becoming sexual revolutionaries. If you want those men to buckle down and marry you and support you so you can raise your children at home, the last thing you do is indulge in promiscuous sex with them. So I say the feminist movement was completely--misdirected its response to the decline of the breadwinner ethic.

Ms. GRAGLIA: That's called The Head of a Woman and it's by Sebastiano Del Piombo. And it's actually at the Kimbell Museum, and--which is a museum in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I think to show a very tranquil, fulfilled woman. That's what it shows to me. And that's--a large part of what I'm writing about is that for some women, a life devoted to market production rather than to domesticity and the rearing of children is not a happy, fulfilling life. And I'm arguing for the women who find fulfillment in bearing and raising children i--in their marital relationship and women who want to devote most of their time to those activities. And I think she's--she seems like that kind of woman to me.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, the Swedish government, more than any other government, although certainly the Clintons would like to see our government do a lot more of this--it has taken the position that women should maintain economic independence from men. And they have conducted all of their governmental activities with respect to the family and with respect to children so as to convince women to enter the work force and put their children in day care. The--the goal of the Swedish government was to have women independent from mem, and that's the goal of our feminists. So that in Sweden you--today the m--it's one of the lowest marriage rates in the world. People don't marry. Woman are supposed to be in the work force for as long as men.

And as I say in my book, once you are expected to work as long and as hard as men do, and you're expected by your society to put your children in day care, have them raised by surrogates, as I say--that's the expression I always use--once you're expected to do that, marriage doesn't have as much importance. And that's clear from the situation in Sweden. They're--they have one of the highest illegitimacy rates in the Western world.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: That probably--i--if I quoted it...

Ms. GRAGLIA: If I quoted it, it's accurate. Whatever I quote, I'm sure it says what I said. The--they're mainly to teen-agers is the problem.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I mean, that's a big problem. I think that was--read what the whole thing says.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, a lot of them are from that period because what I wanted to do was--and--and when I do that--you're quoting from that chapter called Tangle of Pathology. I wanted to take the period that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan analyzed. In 1965, he wrote his book, which got him in a lot of trouble, on the Negro family. And he said what's happening in the Negro family is terrible. And he said Negro family then because that's the--the word that was used. And he analyzed all the statistics of the high illegitimacy rates, the rates of crime, the rates of poverty. And he said the Negro family in the urban ghettos has become a tangle of pathology.

Well, then, 20 years later, which would be 1985, he analyzed the same situation in his lectures at Harvard called the Godkin lectures, and that was called Family and Nation. And he said that things have gotten much worse in the Negro family, which by then was called the black family--and now it's an Afri--African-American. He said they've gotten much worse, but the white family, which was so stable in 1965, has begun to deteriorate and is following the same patterns. That is a period that saw the most strident feminist activism, and that's the period that I wanted to concentrate on to show the deterioration in what we would consider all the indicia of stable family life.

Ms. GRAGLIA: And that's why I use those dates.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Mm-hmm.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right. That would be teen-agers. Yeah.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Mm-hmm.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: We're talking about under 20. Most of them--oh, there's no doubt about that. That--that figure--I'm sure if I cite it--the--the source I cite said it, but that's not surprising at all. Most births to teen-agers are illegitimate. And this is a--a point that Moynihan was making, and many of the black leaders have then also said that this is a terrible thing; that it used to be in the 1950s, many black women married when they were very young, but they married th--and they did have children when they were young, but they were married. And that--as Eleanor Holmes Norton says, and I quote her there, she said that marriage has become a forgotten institution among young black women. So I'm sure that figure is right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, yes. That's from me viewing it. Now other commentators have said the same thing. In fact, I think Robert Bork always thought "M*A*S*H" was one of the worst programs, and I know I've discussed that with him.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, at the time, this--this was a horrible problem for parents trying to raise children to believe in what I would consider the conservative values. During that period almost everything on television was preaching that premarital sex was a perfectly acceptable thing; that sexual intercourse was--is to be expected, just as a way a goodnight kiss once was on a date. Now this was a message that television was preaching at that time. That certainly was the message of "M*A*S*H." And I--but my kids would look at "M*A*S*H."

I was never one to say that we're gonna take the television out of the house. I feel that if you're gonna live in this society, you have to know what's going on in this society. I mean, I made it perfectly clear--we--we both did--to our children that this isn't our message. But "M*A*S*H" was a well-done program. It was very slickly done, and the actors were excellent. And it was part of our culture. And so I would never have said, `You can't look at the program.' And I used to look at it with them. And they certainly knew--I made perfectly clear I thought a lot of it was a mistake.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, it depends on who you talk to. I get letters from women all over the country and some from men. But it--it's the women that I'm so happy I'm reaching because they'll--they'll say the s--the same thing. They'll say, `I thought I was the only one who felt this way about staying home with my children.' They'll say, `We have gotten no support. This is the first support that I have ever gotten.' I'll get letters--I got a letter from one wonderful woman who said that she had--and she was a minister. She's a minister. She says, `I have a liberal feminist mother, I have a liberal feminist sister, I'm in a liberal feminist church and they all tell me I'm wasting my education. And I was so happy to get your book.' And I get letters like this all the time. It makes it all worthwhile. But I--I certainly have aroused hostility, too.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Oh, I debate. Yeah, I have. Since the book was written, no. Actually, I'm--they're going to do a panel on my book at the American Political Science Association, which has its meeting the beginning of September in Boston. And they're going to do--Claremont Institute is going to do a panel on my book and I think Daphne Patai and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Tom West and I are going to be discussing the book.

Ms. GRAGLIA: So that should be fun.

Ms. GRAGLIA: People don't get furious with me, no. Now I h--I have debated Elizabeth Fox-Genovese several years ago. We were on the same panel--I refer to it in the book--at the University of Virginia. And she--well, I think she's come a little closer to my views recently. She gave me what I thought was a wonderful review, even though I criticized a--a lot of things that she said in her last book. I thought she gave me a marvelous review in Crisis magazine. But when I debate--and I have debated feminists and--no, they don't get mad. They never--I--I have never personally experienced any hostility. But, certainly, I got a very bad review in Reason magazine.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Libertarians. Libertarians were not at all happy with what I say. A lot of women, and this would certainly be libertarian women, object to my sexual analysis. They object very fiercely to it. But, personally, people have always treated me very well.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yes, there is.

Ms. GRAGLIA: There is. There's a lot about sex.

Ms. GRAGLIA: How did that get here? Well, because I see the feminist endorsement of the sexual revolution, and there's no doubt that they did. And that's why I devote so much attention to the book that Ehren wrote--Ehrenreich wrote with the other two women because they concede--they--they'll say, `Well, feminists are now deeply divided over sex, but the fact is we appropriated the sexual revolution and it helped our movement.' And they're absolutely right in that.

A lot of feminists today want to deny that because they see how much the sexual revolution hurt women. But the sexual revolution was very important to feminism because, as Betty Friedan said in the "Feminine Mystique," `Why is it that all these women are so content just being homemakers? Why is it? Why do they want to waste their lives this way?' And she objected to the fact that most women were pursuing what is called the matrimonial strategy, the idea that when you get out of college, you marry and you only work until you have your children and then you stay home. And she saw this as a terrible thing.

And the feminists who followed her realized that if you wanted to replace the matrimonial strategy, you had to replace it with something. And so they both attempted to degrade the status of the housewife's role, but by encouraging women to become as sexually promiscuous as men--as--as the ideal for women should be behaving like male tomcats, which is what all the feminists were preaching originally, what that does is it completely destroys the matrimonial strategy because if men are getting all the sex that they want in a market of free sex, they're less likely to marry. There's no doubt about that. I mean, all commentators admit that, and that's just what feminists wanted. They wanted women to devote themselves to careers and not be worried about finding a man who would support them.

Ms. GRAGLIA: The Groined Archway. That's from--I quote from Flaubert, which--I just love that quote. Now you say, `Where do I get these things?' That's--that's interesting. I told you that way back in 1965 I decided that someday I was gonna answer Betty Friedan, and everything I read from then on I'd take notes on. I'd remember.

So years ago I was reading a biography of George Sand, and in that biography--it was by Andre Moreau and it was written in 1953. Well, I hadn't started working on my book then, but I was working in a way because I was taking notes on everything I read and saving it. And so I read this wonderful statement by Flaubert and I thought, `That describes men exactly.'

Ms. GRAGLIA: Re--you read it. I have it sort of half memorized.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right. I think that's absolutely true. Now it's not true of all men, or as I say in my book even of Flaubert at all times because he pursued many homosexual relationships as well. But--and I quote Jean-Paul Sartre for that. It--it wasn't something that I had known until I read that book by Sartre. So--and--so I quote him. But I think that that is just a wonderful statement of the male attitude, and to me it's a fine attitude because...

Ms. GRAGLIA: The awakened Brunhilda--and, again, that is based on a--the Wagnerian series of operas, "The Ring of the Nibelung." Brunhilda was the warrior-maiden who disobeyed her father, who was the king of the gods, Wotan. And to punish her, he said that he was going to make her a mortal. She would no longer be a warrior-maiden riding her horse through the clouds rescuing heroes. Instead, she was going to be bound on a rock and have to stay there until she was awakened by a man, and then she would have to submit to the man. And as he says, `You will have to sit by the hearth and spin.'

And so he surrounded the rock with fire. And Siegfried, the greatest hero of all, came through the fire, awakened her with a kiss and convinced her that she should abandon all her dreams and everything that she was to be his bride. And she very happily agreed. And it has a sad ending, but I--I love that opera. I love the series of operas. And to me, that so clearly shows the way many women react to marriage and motherhood; that you think of yourself in the beginning as a striving warrior-maiden, you're out there in the workplace and that's just how I felt.

I thought, `Oh, I'm a lawyer. I'm this neat, wonderful lawyer and I do all these things.' And there weren't many women lawyers then, so I even got more attention. I mean, now 40 percent of the people in law school are women, so it's not nearly as exciting. But I was--back there, I was so exciting and I did, I felt like a Brunhilda riding through the sky doing all these great things in the marketplace. And then the longer I was married and, as I analyze it in my book i--in detail, the more feminine I became.

And then when I--I became pregnant, I was like an awakened Brunhilda. It--it just opened a whole new world to me; that there's a lot more than being a market producer. And so that's what I mean by the awakened Brunhilda. It's the realization that much as the workplace may be a fun place when you're single or when you don't have children, once you have children and the feminine, the female part of you takes over, you can become a very different person. And that's what I'd called awakened femininity.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Yes.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Because he--he is the foundation of it. If it hadn't been for him, I never would have had any of these feelings. It--it--it was because of this tremendously satisfying marital relationship that I ever was able, I think, to feel secure enough not to need the security of a job. It takes a lot of courage to give up a job when that's been your whole identity. And it's because he made me feel so good about myself just as a woman that I--I didn't need to have that job. And--and, of course, he's the foundation of it because he's the one who supported me all these years.

Ms. GRAGLIA: He teaches constitutional law and antitrust law.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, tha--that's a good question. A lot of that is sexual analysis, which I go into at length. I think that some women eventually react to their marital sexual experiences by feeling very contented, very happy as a female, that just--and that's how he always made me feel: that being a female is an absolutely wonderful thing. And when you read feminist writings, you definitely get the idea that being a female, it is a gross thing. Many feminists seem to feel this way. He has always just been wonderful to me. I mean, when we got married, I was gonna be a career woman, and that was OK with him. I mean, he has always accepted me in whatever incarnation I assumed.

And that's why I say he's the foundation of it. I--I don't--I mean, I don't know. I've never been married to anyone else, but I can't imagine that I could have ever become the woman who wrote that book without a wonderfully loving relationship.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Right. Right.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Thirty-two.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I--I worked in Washington for five and a half years.

Ms. GRAGLIA: No. No. I find it--oh, I could. I mean, in a way, I'm working. I mean, there's a lot of work that went into that book. You could call that work, except it--it's done--when you're writing a book, you don't have deadlines. I find--and I address this at great length in my book--I find that stressful work makes it--I think it's harder on women than on men. I think men react to stress in different ways from women. And I found that practicing law--although at the time, I thought it was fun and I enjoyed it. Once I realized that life could be so relaxing and so calm and so satisfying, I never wanted to go back to what I had remembered as a very stressful life.

Ms. GRAGLIA: I--in my book, I talk about derailing the feminist engine of reform. We have to change no-fault divorce laws. Every state has got to institute a r--divorce regime that will protect the long-term homemaker because if you don't do that, it's not safe for women to stay home with their children. We also have got to make changes, I believe, in all preferential treatment of women. We now have a regime in place that gives women preferences. I think all people should be judged on their merits. And preferential treatment of women, whether in education or in the workplace, not only disadvantages men, but it disadvantages the women who would depend on the men to be breadwinners for their family. So that's the second thing I would change.

The third thing that we should change is to stop discriminating against one-income families in order to provide subsidizations of two-income families. Any government money that is going to be devoted to help families should go directly to the families. All government money that goes to support day care is a discrimination against the one-income family which doesn't use the day care. There is no question that today there are lots of families with young children where they could use government help. That should be given to them in a way that doesn't subsidize the working mother at the expense of the mother who stays home with her children.

That can be easily done. You can do it through family allowances, directly to all families. We should not, in our tax laws, give a credit for day-care expenses because that credit is being subsidized by the one-income family which doesn't use day care. You can go through the tax laws and find lots of things. Provision four utflex where you put aside tax free the money you used to pay for day care. We should increase the dependent exemption. That would be a wonderful way to help families. All those people who say, `Oh, well, it's sad that women have to work, but economic necessity drives them to work,' the fact is there are more women working whose husbands earn above the median than women working whose husbands earn below the median.

It's the best-educated women who go back to work the soonest. It's the highest-paid women who do--well, they should not be getting an exemption or a credit in--in their tax for the cost of day care because that's being subsidized by the one-income family, which has chosen to sacrifice the extra money. So all--and there are lots of things that are--are discussed. All initiatives--e--every bit of money that the government wants to allocate for helping families should go in a non-discriminatory way so that we do not discriminate against the one-income family.

Ms. GRAGLIA: Well, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it.