Our Gal.(An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War)(Review)

An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War, by Midge Decter (HarperCollins, 234 pp., $24)

Forthright to a fault-or a virtue-Midge Decter enjoys a well-deserved reputation for speaking her mind. In this new book, she lays her formidable polemical skills aside, adopting instead a rather irenic and bemused tone, perhaps on the assumption that polemics ill become a review of one's life, perhaps because she truly views her personal experience as personal rather than political. Decter's title appropriately evokes the mellow temper that informs her pages, although her subtitle, which presents her life as unfolding amidst love and war, hints at the presence of excitement; and even in this spirit of comfortable recollection, she cannot resist plunging the odd stiletto into a former foe or exposing the silliness of this or that feminist mantra. Overall, however, this book exudes the attractively restful sense of a woman who, in taking stock of her life, feels herself to have been more blessed than abused.

Those in quest of scandal, confession, or expose will be disappointed, for this is emphatically not a confessional book in the accepted sense. Explicitly crafted as a memoir rather than an autobiography, it combines a judiciously edited account of Decter's life with a judiciously selective picture of her times and the most significant people she has known. Some might find it tempting to see Decter as emblematic of an entire generation-the one that cut its teeth on the left-wing politics of the 1930s and 1940s, settled into a more or less comfortable anti-Communist liberalism during the 1950s and early 1960s, and was subsequently jolted by the turbulence of the student and women's movements into a new form of conservatism.

Decter-along with her husband Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a handful of others-ranks among the founding elite of what has become known as neoconservatism; in the 1980s, what Decter calls the "unbelievably happy" circumstance of her association with the conservative Washington think tank, the Heritage Foundation, would persuade her to drop the "neo." An Old Wife's Tale does not pretend to offer a chronicle of, or even a justification for, the movement, which Decter primarily treats-often in a charmingly wry tone-as a matter of common sense. Thus, recollecting a confrontation that she witnessed in the late 1960s between Barnard girls and New York City cops, she perceptively emphasizes the importance of the class dimension of the clash: "The great revolution of the sixties and seventies, in other words, turned out to be little more than a class war in which the affluent had the better weapons: the indulgence of parents and teachers along with virtually the whole of the press and the clergy."

Similarly, in her passing jabs at the women's movement, she displays more homey wisdom and common sense than vituperation. A staunch opponent of affirmative action, Decter failed to understand "why any woman would fight for years to become a member of a club whose majority were opposed to allowing women to join." How could affirmative action under such conditions result in anything but "massive seizures of self- doubt"-as she believes it has for "some blacks in elite colleges and women learning to be fighter pilots"? Comments and reflections like these, which she drops throughout the book, remind the reader that she is also the author of The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation-and of countless other directly political interventions that more acerbically dissect what she views as the failures and outright dishonesty of the last three decades of affirmative action and identity politics.

Like some of the other accomplished women of her generation (one thinks of Himmelfarb and Carolyn Graglia), Decter minimizes the difficulties that she, as a ...