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WHAT OUR MOTHERS DIDN'T TELL US: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman

WHAT OUR MOTHERS DIDN'T TELL US: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman

List Price: $13.00
Your Price: $9.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Uncomfortably TRUE for the "modern" American Woman.
Review: I found this book so true and to the point. have been in USA so I observe a lot of subtle points. I think a lot of American women are defiantly feminist ...rather than positively feminist. a big mistake.

They are misled by the media.. are unrealistically harsh to themselves on their looks ,needlessly touchy about "equality", easily offended and stressed out beyond a point. In my experience women can be a whole lot more successful if they are mentally relaxed and have a happy family life. IT IS THE BASE FOR HAPPINESS. feminism or no feminism.

Thank You

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Average fare jolts feminists
Review: Let me agree with the charges of several reviewers of Miss Crittenden's hypocrisy regarding her keeping of her maiden name. She is married to David Frum, probably the most brilliant young neo-conservative around, and heir to a multi-million dollar fortune in Canada. Though Miss Crittenden calls herself conservative, there is nothing conservative about a woman disrespecting her husband so much that she would keep her father's surname rather than take her husband's. Miss Crittenden and the many negative female reviewers of this book are presumptuous in that they really believe the average American woman spends much time analyzing what Betty Friedan and the feminist movement means to them. Your average American female has little time for feminist intellectual games and I would guess that less than ten percent of American women even know who Betty Friedan is. Only a small elite with time on their hands (and with a maid, Miss Crittenden has time) have the freedom to muse over the impact of feminism on their lives. The majority of young women her age with kids, daughters of Iowa meat packers, Kentucky tobacco farmers, Michigan auto workers, Washington airplane rivetters and the like, are driven out into the labor force to toil at jobs most don't really enjoy (so much more fun, Danielle, to work at a keyboard speading one's ideas than, say, putting together plastic tool chests in a Lima, Ohio plastics plant). And why? The current economic system dictates the two wage earner household due to the severe taxes forced upon the common wage earner in order to subsidize the greedy elderly masses of our country. Miss Crittenden lives in a dream world-she can afford to stay home with her kids. Millions of other young women with children would gladly join her as a homemaker but there are taxes and bills to pay. However, a book that presents an ideal and also makes so many feminists seethe with hatred can't be all bad.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Methinks [the critics of this book] dost protest too much
Review: This book is on the money. I'm a 33 year old mother of 3, a professional working out the home and struggling against the quaint prejudices of feminists and those in the mainstream who are trying to tell me I am provincial, unhappy and even a betrayer of my gender by staying at home and prioritizing the quality raising of my children. This book reinforces the idea of man, not as enemy, not as co-dependent, but as teammate, as helpmate, and exposes the lies sown in schools about men and how we should react to them sexually and professionally in the '80s and '90s. An intelligent voice in the wilderness, most welcome in my library.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fantastic! Domesticity vindicated!
Review: Finally, a well documented, cerebral explanation for the blatant failure of 70s feminisim. After absorbing the 70s feminist message during my twenties, I proceeded to "have it all" and be a "free spirit." Fortunately, I learned quickly how empty that hedonistic lifestyle becomes. I then began to break all the feminist rules; feeling at times like a traitor to the cause, but knowing I was somehow right. Now, in my mid forties, I have 4 children, two grown and two in high school. I have a career, two degrees, and I continue to to to school. Best of all, I am young enough to enjoy adult kids on a new level and enjoy the second half of my life with a husband who has shared all the ups and downs. Danielle has done us all a huge favor by getting the message out to the younger generation: family first and the rest will follow.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Superficial but Entertaining -- Like a Magazine Article!
Review: As soon as I read that Crittenden was basing her book's thesis (that modern women are unhappy) on a "scholarly" review of popular magazines ... I knew not to expect much empirical support for her arguments.

Some of her opinions are completely unsupported and thus downright absurd. For example, she argues that our grandmothers never fretted about their roles in life. To believe that, I first must have proof that my grandmother was thrilled about raising seven children during the Depression! Also, upon getting engaged, my friend Jim asked his grandmother why marriages of her generation tended to endure. He fully expected to hear some encouraging response ("We knew what love was in my day ..." "We said our vows at the altar and we lived up to them ...") that would bolster him in hard times with his future wife. His grandmother's shocking response? "Women couldn't leave; they had no way to support themselves."

The author misses this point so completely that it astounds the reader. FEMINISM IS ABOUT ECONOMICS. If women have no money, they have no power. Having dependents and having insufficient money -- and worse, having NO HOPE of ever getting money -- makes life a miserable tunnel of stress. Stress that "shreds your insides" in a way no kids-and-work-juggling bank executive could ever imagine in her worst nightmares.

My mother didn't tell me anything about womanhood. She didn't have to. A stay-home mother with limited education, she was totally dependent on my father, who every so often would quit his low-paying jobs. We didn't use Welfare; we lived with sympathetic family members. My mother, who indeed found joy in her maternal love for us, was nonetheless perpetually worried about feeding us and deeply ashamed of her situation. A shame that convinced some of my siblings that they were destined to failure, and they are living up to this doom. I myself could see the immense vulnerability of her dependency and, by the time I was five years old, knew I would NEVER allow myself to be placed willingly in the same desperate situation.

To suggest that women start their careers at 30, after five or more years at home raising children, shows incredible ignorance on Crittenden's part. I graduated at the top of my college class. Three years into my career (which now, after TWELVE years of full-time work pays me handsomely) I was making $22,000 a year. If I'd been married and my husband had died, or if he'd left me because, as Crittenden implies, I was the typical selfish, cold feminist wife, how on earth would I have fed my kid(s)?

Perhaps a more sane approach would be to advise couples to THINK BEFORE THEY REPRODUCE. I know women who have banked their total paychecks beginning the day they married and, after several years of stockpiling cash, switched to part-time when the baby came. The bankroll comes in handy when money emergencies arise; they've already learned to "get by" on one income; and she maintains her skills. If this seems extreme, I argue that it's no more ridiculous than telling women to sit at home for five years and hope that hubby doesn't go to the track on payday! And if couples can't afford to save money like this ... well, perhaps they should recognize that children are very expensive, perhaps a (gasp!) luxury they can't afford?

Next time around, when she's blaming feminism for everything that's wrong with marriage and family, Crittenden needs to consider the role that consumerism has played in the destruction of the secure household. Because, when she argues that mothers work because husbands "don't want to support the family," Crittenden's wrong. Often, wives work because BOTH spouses spend far too much and save far too little ... all in the interest of their children.

All in all, Crittenden's book is an entertaining, sometimes irritating first draft that needs help from a very objective, VERY analytical editor.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fantastic
Review: Fantastic! Feminists will absolutely *hate* this book with a passion! It exposes their lies, the homocentrism, anti-family, anti-father agenda of the heterophobic feminist movement.

I gave a copy of this book to my grandaughters and had a long talk over drinks at the local pub to make sure they understood that if they wanted families - they should think properly.

I told them - look girls, "there's the way it is and the way it shoudl be" unfortunately, most men are not interested in settling down with 30 something women. "Why?", they asked? "Because they don't have to!", I replied. It may not be fair but that's what happens. Usually a successful man in his 30s will have his options thought out - and they involve 20 something women with whom he can enjoy some marriage time before kids. 30 something women mean kids right away with an added health risk.

This book spells it out - with choice comes responsiblity and *consequences* - something the feminist movement has *utterly failed* to realize.

Consequences and responsiblities - an alien concept to the feminist "Me, me, me " mind!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The most brilliant analysis of womens lives to date !
Review: I loved this book ! The far reaching effects of the feminist view , so widely accepted as gospel, were manifested in my own reaction..I was shocked ! I was shocked to see what I and so many of my friends have thought and whispered explained so brilliantly in print ! While the progress of the past thirty years has undeniably benefited women everywhere it has also taken away from us many precious and treasured roles and choices. It has forced us to apologize for and hide our natural desire for home and family. It has in many ways done the exact oposite of its original intent, by asking women to fulfil all roles at once and then punishing them when they cannot. I think every woman should read this book . It is perhaps time for us to realize that while we can certainly embrace our new found opportunities, perhaps casting aside the intrinsic longings of women, the joys that have satisfied the heart of woman for centuries is not altogether necessary. Perhaps we can have both .

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Damn It!
Review: I saw Ms Crittenden on television. She was gorgeous, funny, charming. I didn't know they still made women like this! I bought her book, and flipped to the acknowldgmts. She's married! Damn. I'm giving her book five stars anyway, coz it's smart and intrsting and lively and all tht. But I can't say my heart's really in it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Accurate Description of Modern Womanhood, but What Now?
Review: Though raised in a somewhat conservative small town, I became very enamored of the feminist ideals first expounded to me at college. I became a women's studies major, headed up the college feminist activist group, and debated issues from abortion to rape in public and private settings. Today I turned 30, and I have, since college, really had a change of heart. I would still consider myself a feminist, in the sense that I believe that we must remember that women are individuals in their own right with brains, bodies and dreams in equal measure to men's. However, as a single lawyer, I have found in Ms. Crittenden's book a straightforward and blunt (almost to the point of being painful) description of where I and many of my contemporaries find ourselves. My friends' marriages are foundering, or they remain single, and, like me, wondering "where all the men are." I have come to believe that the real problem, as Ms. Crittenden agrees, is not that there are no men, but that we have sought independence for our entire lives, to the exclusion of almost all else, and we deeply feared the radical change in our selves that marriage might bring. I wanted to be an autonomous woman, who did not have to take anyone else's desires into account. I'm not sure now how could I have thought that such a selfish attitude would lead to a fulfilling and peopled family and personal life. I believe that Ms. Crittenden's book is right on the money, at least for one segment of modern women (white, upper-middle-class). I can't speak for others. I would urge my contemporaries to read it and deeply think about what she has to say. One criticism is that I believe she is unnecessarily shrill in describing the women's movement. From being part of it so long, and indeed having met a lot of the players, I can attest that these women did not and do not intend to create more problems than they solve. They deeply believe in the rights of women, and they have good intentions. I think that Ms. Crittenden is right in that in many ways the feminist movement did not bring us what we really seek nor did it sufficiently account for what I have come to believe are truly biological differences between the sexes. However, for whatever reason, I think Ms. Crittenden treats the feminist movement with a bit too much disrespect (as opposed to constructive criticism), given that, at its most basic level, the women's movement was responsible for her being able to be a writer and speaker. One thing Ms. Crittenden does not provide is an exit. As I read, I keep thinking, "I agree. But what now?" She says that if I am lucky, at my old, crinkly-eyed age, I might be able to find a man who would be willing to forgo sex with 23-year-old libertines to marry me and then might even be willing to stay married to me rather than leave me (note that she is not without her generalized criticism of men), if we manage to work out the "old-fashioned" division of labor, which is truly what I'm looking for at this point. I hope she's right. But more importantly, I hope that I love him when I find him. (P.S. Where do I find Women's Quarterly magazine? How can I get in touch with Ms. Crittenden?)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I can't believe I loved this book...
Review: I went looking for it after I heard about it from a fellow childfreer, hoping to enjoy a little righteous anger. I had no intention of buying the book, but I found myself utterly engrossed with this author's message.

To say her message is controversial is an understatement. However, I believe that the readers who will hate this book will do so because they'd rather hate the book than hate themselves for the mistakes they *may* have made. I am amazed that I was able to read this book with an open mind - it would be very easy to get defensive while reading it.

Lastly, it will also be very easy to miscontrue and twist a lot of what the author is saying. Another reviewer of this book talks about Ms. Crittendon's advocation of taking your husband's name while accusing the author of missing the irony of writing with her maiden name. To the contrary! Ms. Crittendon highlights the difficulties of having chosen to retain her maiden name for writing purposes in order to illustrate her argument. Sort of a "learn from my mistakes", if you will.

I loved this book and everything she had to say. Her arguments are carefully constructed and virtually indestructible. Beware the reviews of this book that quote a passage - the potential to use the message of this book out of context is enormous. Read it with an open mind and see for yourself if you don't find yourself agreeing..


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