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and other non-public institutions, as Plato, Marxists, and now cer–
tain feminists have proposed, Elshtain advocates only that women
become full citizens and that men become more involved in the life
of the family - a point of view to which no middle-aged person, male
or female, is likely to take exception, since most of us are by now
either too busy or too tired to want to change, rather than to work
within, the existing structures of society. And, as Elshtain shows, it is
questionable whether the most radical theories would come up with
anything that would actually improve women's status, unless, like
the Amazons, women simply ceased to be female. But, as Elshtain
reminds us, most women seem to want to keep the female identity
defined for them by clothes designers and fashion magazines .
Acquaintance with previous theory gives Elshtain a perspective
other feminist writers generally lack, preferring instead to base their
arguments on zeal or outrage. She points out where feminist theor–
ists have oversimplified the issues or simply failed to do their
homework. She derides the "liberal" notion that women politicans
once in power will behave differently from men - a judgment con–
firmed daily by the behavior of Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs . Gandhi.
She reminds feminist psychologists that doing away with the family
and traditional sex roles seems to result in lack of creativity; ap–
parently, one cannot have both complete egalitarianism
and
in–
dividuality.
This leaves us (women) almost back where we were before
Betty Friedan, et aI, gave voice to our suppressed resentments, or at
least to our supposed resentments, because
I
am not sure that
I
at
least resented Saks Fifth Avenue so much as unequal pay for equal
work. What will happen to women's role in the eighties? What Elsh–
tain projects,
I
fear, is academic discussion: "contemporary fem–
inism is alive with competing ways of seeing and contrasting images
of public and private realities." Perhaps Elshtain's book has helped to
frame the main lines of this new and, one hopes, not too tedious
dialogue. But
I
can't help wondering if she (or the anthropologists
from whom she borrowed it) hasn't exaggerated the importance of
the dichotomy between public and private in political thought, and
hasn't traced it back to a remote past where it has only limited rele–
vance.
Elshtain locates the origin of the public-private split in Greek
political philosophy of the fourth century
B.C.
She criticizes Plato for
denying to women guardians in the utopian society of his
Republic
