Without a doubt Domestic Tranquility [i]is the best book I’ve read on feminism. It’s subtitled “A Brief Against Feminism” because she was a lawyer by training. She was about the same age as Ruth Bader Ginsberg the feminist icon, heroine, and example. She pooh-poohs the idea that opportunities were limited for the women of her generation, and she faults feminism for breaking the woman-code and ridiculing women who could be happy with a loving supportive husband and raising their children.
The back jacket says this: “F. CAROLYN GRAGLIA is a lawyer by training and a housewife by choice. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her law degree from Columbia University, where she was an editor of the law review. After working in the Justice Department, she clerked for the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Mrs. Graglia later left a promising career in a prominent Washington law firm to care for her husband and three children. Now a writer and lecture, she lives in Austin with her husband, Leo Graglia, a law professor at the University of Texas.”
This is what Google has under her book listing: “Mrs. Graglia traces the origins of modern feminism to the post-war exaltation of marketplace achievement, which bred dissatisfaction with women’s domestic roles. In a masterly analysis of seminal feminist texts, she reveals a conscious campaign of ostracism of the housewife as a childish ‘parasite’. Turning to the feminist understanding of sexuality, now pervasive in our culture, she shows how it has distorted and impoverished sex by stripping it of its true significance. Finally, after exposing feminism’s totalitarian impulse and its contribution to the ‘tangle of pathologies’ that have left marriage and family life in tatters, she argues for a renewed appreciation of the transforming experience of motherhood and the value of the domestic vocation. The Wall Street Journal extols Domestic Tranquility as ‘a thinking woman’s argument for putting family first.’ William Kristol calls the book ‘a stunningly bold and deep assault on the most powerful movement of our time-feminism. A genuinely thought-provoking book.’ Danielle Crittenden of The Women’s Quarterly praises it as ‘a stunning indictment of the women’s movement and its radical vision of female equality. Carolyn Graglia is a courageous thinker.’”
She passed away in April of 2024 at age 95. I found out too late that she lived here. I would have tried to contact here. She exposes the lies of feminism, and how they have successfully made many a wife “a spiritual virgin.” This is a feminist concept which they trumpet and Mrs. Graglia shows how destructive it is to the marriage bed. She take feminist’s views on male and female sexuality, orgasm, childbirth, and more and says they are right but in a wrong way.
Graglia sums up her position on feminism on the last pages. “Delighted and contented women will certainly do less harm – and probably more good – to society than frenzied and despairing ones. This is not to suggest that society should interfere with a woman’s decision to follow the feminist script and adopt any form of spiritual virginity that suits her. But neither should society continue to validate destruction of the women’s pact by the contemporary feminists who sought to make us all follow their script” (Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, 371-2).
Now let’s hear from her. I warn you some of her comments are extremely frank. If you have ever encountered a feminist who tried to “blush” you into a corner by her salty or brazen way of talking about sex and sexuality, this is reminiscent of that. But I think this frankness is needed in addressing a whole generation of women who’ve been swept away by the lies of feminism. These are the women who trumpet on social media that they are a Trad Wife, a real traditional wife would not waste her time on such silliness. The trumpters seem to be the women who think they can/do have it all inside the home, outside the home, in the bedroom and in the boardroom.
Now let’s here from Mrs. Graglia herself. I was going to publish this as a link, but I have decided to include it. Be forewarned that some will find this enlightening, enlivening, and helpful. Others will be shocked. Some will think it befitting for the week of Valentine’s; others will find it discomfiting. Proceed when, if ready.
Feminism first had to make women discontent
“If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made to through education. …Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give a women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions other than those of child-bearing” (31).
To continue the lie of feminism they sell young mothers that others could raise their children better than they could.
“In a national survey of high school seniors in 1977, seven out of ten rated as not acceptable the situation in which both parents of preschool children work full time, over one-half of the remainder gave this situation the second lowest rating, and four out of five gave the two highest ratings to the traditional arrangement in which the husband works full time and the wife does not work” (68-69).
Feminists got the lesson of telling a big lie repeatedly. Even women opposed to feminism bought the lie that no or limited existed for women and that’s why the movement was needed.
Already in 1963 Betty Friedan can say that “’all professions are finally open to women in America,’” and that there had been a “’removal of all the legal, political, economic, and educational barriers that once kept woman from being man’s equal.’” So why have to have feminism? Friedan goes on to show us: “Why, she asks, ‘despite the opportunities open to all women now,’ do ‘so few have any purpose in life other than to be wife and mother’” (115)?
Working women still do the lion’s share of housework decades into feminism. I observed in my book that men are the ones with ‘caves’ and ‘toys’ and the net effect of a working wife is more stuff for the husband.
1976 study showed working women spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on household work; their husband 1.6 hours. The 1.6 was the same amount even if their wives didn’t work outside the home. A 1987 studied of households in Soviet and American cities showed women spent about 25 hours a week and men 11 hours. This was true even though 55% of American women were in labor force while 81% of the Russians were (39).
Feminism is caused by men. Strong women were seldom a problem for me in the ministry. Weak men always were.
“Not women’s oppression, he [Herb Goldberg] notes, but ‘the decay and demise of the male’ inspired the feminist movement” (155).
In matters of sexuality, historically women were thought to gain more than men.
“A fragment of a Greek epic poem from the sixth century B.C. says about the pleasures of the sex act: ‘Of ten shares the man enjoys one, the woman by enjoying ten satisfies her mind.’ The consequence of the sexual revolution was to confine women to a male’s one share of sexual pleasure” (159). [PRH – This is reminiscent of this ancient quote: Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque; often it’s only quoted as “after sex every animal is sad, but this is the full quote which ends with “except the woman and the cock (= rooster)”.
Sexuality here’s another example where Graglia speaks a sexual truth that most shy away from.
Repeatedly, an approvingly, she makes reference to the “groined archway” that women have. It’s a gateway, an opening to wonderful things. It’s a portal and women have the charge of it. By abandoning the bargaining power of the groined archway by adopting male sexual manners feminists have convinced women to take the giant step toward convincing women and society that sexual differences are unimportant (156).
Women as sex objects is not a bad thing. You won’t read that virtually anywhere else, but read on to find out why not.
“Most heterosexual men, I believe, think that one of the most important functions a women serves is as sex object. This is good quality in men that well serves traditional women, for it is what give us power over men and enable us to demand that we become a great deal to them before we will allow them to use us in sex. There is nothing wrong with being a sex object; it can be very gratifying. The moments when I became the objective of my husband’s sexual attentions are the most enjoyable of my life; they surpass by a wide margin those spent as an intellectual object discussing the First Amendment. Except for nursing my babies, I have experienced no pleasure remotely comparable to that of being the sex object of a dependable and loving man who fathered my children and always provided for me and those children. What is wrong is to be sex object and nothing more, which is precisely what is involved in the sexual encounters that feminists have promoted” (160-1). [PRH – I have asked for many years why you don’t hear feminists speaking out against pornography, strip clubs, and prostitution? Answer: That is their kind of sex.]
Sexuality how men and women differ. This is important to note and noted by few, but ought to be pointed out.
“The woman can experience profound psychic effects from an event which the man defines by physical sensation” (174).
Feminism does not fair well in literature or among the ancients.
Heroic women are portrayed in terms of selfless devotion to a man and children. Women who define themselves by acquiring power (Lady Macbeth, Lear’s Regan and Goneril) or by adulterous sexual trysts (Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary) are the most unrelenting evil or most woefully pathetic women in literature. Feminist Mary Lefkowitz wrote in her 1986 Women in Greek Myth that: “’The only women who are seen to express different notions about their primary role in life, or are seen to complain of it… are the evil women of epic and tragedy, who bring destruction on their families and on themselves, like Clytemnestra, Deianeira and Medea’” (180).
Feminism has succeeded in hardening the hearts of women in general making day care (Graglia calls it surrogate parenting) and abortion seem normal.
Economist Jennifer Roback Morse married, had an abortion, divorced her first husband, but then returned to Catholicism. She said, “’When we harden our hearts to place a six week old baby into the care of strangers, who will moderate us?’” Graglia says that she would have felt like the wire monkey in Harlow’s famous Rhesus monkey experiment “…if I had to pump out breast milk at my office for another to feed to my baby.” Then she asks, “What can possibly moderate a society that encourages its mothers so to harden their hearts and denigrates those who refuse to do so? The ‘grief’, the listlessness, the obvious and heart-rending despair’ of the infant monkey’s deprived of maternal care in Harlow’s experiment evoked this reaction [from experimenters]: ‘Thank God we only have to do it once to prove the point.’ The success of contemporary feminism in hardening women’s hearts, however, indicates that the monkeys suffered in vain” (185). [PRH – Please remember, and be fittingly appalled, that there are confessional Lutheran pastors and congregations who see nothing wrong with aiding and abetting, usually well to do women, with abandoning their children at 6 weeks. Worse than monkeys these.]
For men a woman is the promise of release, an easing of his specific tension, and this is useful to women. Many a new wife can’t understand this.
“The ‘driving force’ of this tension is ‘physiological,’ but for its relief he can ‘be persuaded to do almost anything – including love.’” A late 18th century French philosopher Germaine de Stael said, “’Love is the whole history of a women’ life, it is but an episode in a man’s.’” That’s like what Lord Byron said in Don Juan, “’Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘tis woman’s whole existence’” (202).
Having sex is different (duh!) for men and women. This is forgotten to the peril of both.
“Women – for whom sex is one of the least demanding activities – are equally entitled, feminists have argued, to designate the time of sexual performance for men – for whom it is one of the most demanding activities” ( 207).
This will be stunning to some, insulting to others because it is so beyond the well of feminism that we all drink from daily.
“It not only will do no violence to her nature but will contribute to her enjoyment if she tries to think of herself as being always available for sex. For a woman to believe she must decide each time whether not she really feels like participating in a sexual encounter is akin to deciding at 2:00 a.m. whether or not one really want to get up and begin a long hike. One is much more likely to join the hike in good spirits if one has already committed oneself to it and packed a lunch the night before” (212).
Another prevailing myth told by feminism is that women didn’t enjoy sex till feminism.
“Queen Victoria herself acknowledged the delights of sex. After giving birth her ninth baby at the age of thirty-eight, the Queen ‘longed for another child.’ Her physician warned against further pregnancies, however, ‘which led her to ask him with a sinking heart: ‘Can I have no more fun in bed’” (214). [PRH – Read Genesis 18 this is Sara’s response to God promising her and Abraham a child in late life.]
Feminism believes women had no choices before feminism. They lie.
“And in nineteenth-century England, more novels were published by women – writing under their own names-than by men” ( 225).
Graglia was not a frigid woman.
“Although many qualities in a husband my evoke a wife’s love and respect, adoration and worship such as Anna expressed for Dostoyevsky usually derive from the satisfaction of being ‘a well-laid woman’ (a phrase I have never found offensive but accurately descriptive of an enviable state)” ( 215).
More lies about historical facts.
“Contrary to feminist mythology, women were not so ignorant and victimized at the end of the 1900s that they required the enlightenment of feminist sexual revolutionaries. Rather it was the feminist sexual teaching encouraging female pursuit of casual sex that themselves became the source of women’s victimization” (225).
Who hasn’t been told how “uptight” the Victorian age was about sex? Dig this:
“Manuals written at the beginning of the nineteenth century considers normal sexual relations for a married couple to be four or five times a week and recommended that the wife experience an orgasm.” While a 1980s book by feminists concluded that the “’most significant “innovation” to enter the sexual mainstream in the seventies was oral sex,’ but as Charles Winick notes surveys in the 1940s had shown participation in oragenitality by three-fifths of those surveyed” (226, 258).
Feminism war on patriarchy is accepted by most. Even among those who believe the distinction between male and female is God-given, I find many still think patriarchy is a man-made evil. Dollars will get you doughnuts that this is being taught at LCMS colleges. Well, what’s left of them anyways.
“De Riencourt [mid-20th century historian] has described how, from the Spartan dictatorship through Leninist Russia to the National Socialism of Hitler’s Germany, the patriarchal autonomous family was attacked as a dangerous barrier protecting individuals against an all-powerful government. …[T]totalitarian regimes depend on the ‘decay of patriarchal authority’” ( 256).
The shock of marriage for women is real. Elizabeth Elliot said this too.
“Child-bearing, said [Queen] Victoria, ‘was not only dangerous and agonizing, but a complete violence to all one’s feelings of propriety (which God knows receive a shock enough in marriage alone)’” (339).
Happiness of the marriage bed is linked to correctly valuing the Order of Creation.
“The woman who believes that differences between herself and her husband enliven the sexual experience would concur in Roger Scranton’s statement, cited earlier, that the ‘energy released when man and woman come together is proportional to the distance which divides them when they are apart’” (349).
What feminism has really and always been about.
From the get-go Betty Friedan make clear in 1963 that the concern of feminism was never to give women the opportunity to fulfill their potential in the marketplace. Friedan pointed out in 1963 was this: “The problem that concerned her was how to convince women that domesticity they believed fulfilled their potential, did not in fact do so” (355).
This historical fact feminism must rebel against and substitute with a lie.
The feminist goal of male-female fungibility. Remember Graglia is a lawyer by training (361). William Henry said in 1994 book In Defense of Elitism a statement that feminists find shocking: “’The unvarnished truth is this: You could eliminate every woman writer, painter, and composer from the caveman era to the present moment and not significantly deform the course of Western culture.’” Graglia didn’t think this applied to her because “My belief, which makes Henry’s statement irrelevant to my life, is that although I did a workmanlike job in the marketplace, many others could have done that job equally well. But no one could have performed my mother’s role for me” (365). [PRH – Also see the 2007 McCullough book on Cleopatra, he says in the preface that apart from Caesar and Antony she wouldn’t even be a footnote in history.
Here is an uncomfortable truth even for us defenders of the Order of Creation. The weaker vessel does not get the credit she has earned, deserved, and God indeed gives.
Dorothea Tanning’s unpublished 2-5-1912 poem titled “Stain” on the effect marriage can have on the careers of men and women being so different.
“’Many years ago today
I took a husband tenderly
This simple human gentle act
Seen as a hard decisive fact
By all who dote on category
Did stain my work indelibly
I don’t know why that is
For it has not stained his’” (366).
I include this thought on the sexuality of women living in her body verses living in her mind. I don’t really get it but others might find it useful.
Author says her experience was “that when a woman lives too much in her mind, she finds it increasingly difficult to live through her body. …Dr. James C. Neely spoke the truth in Gender: The Myth of Equality: ‘With too much emphasis on intellect, a woman becomes “too into her heard” to function in a sexual, motherly way, destroying by the process of thought the process of feeling sexuality’” (270-1).
Her thoughts on spiritual virginity. It’s not a good thing.
Reoccurring theme here is “spiritual virginity”. Author believes this is what feminism has done to women. It has pushed them away from the sexual satisfaction of the woman in her role.. Graglia coined the term (26). It’s what feminism produces: women who are never penetrated by the joy, satisfaction, and security of being distinctly female. Author believes this is what feminism has done to women. Pushing them away from the sexual satisfaction of the woman in her role, if they can’t have sex like men, they don’t really have it all (365).
I never have read this view of frigidity anywhere.
Seymour Fisher’s1973 book Understanding the Female Orgasm studies of women’s sexual responsiveness show that a woman’s orgasm potential is correlated with two factors: first, a dependable childhood relationship with a father who was seen as ‘strict controlling’ rather than ‘casual permissive’; second, assurance that her husband is ‘a dependable love object (that he can be counted upon to remain with her)’ and ‘to be loyal and to maintain steadfast interest in her.’” A husband can do something about the latter, but nothing about the former (260).
Her take on sexuality beyond the pale or spot on? I hesitate to include this one since it is saying what by social standards is not said. The positive thing you can take away is that as excretory functions are not always under our mind’s or body’s control so is our sexuality after the Fall. It is a compulsion in fallen men much the same as bowel movements.
Dworkin a feminist thinks women are degraded by the sexual act noting that Victorian pornography modeled women’s genitals as a toilet. Graglia, a non-feminist, doesn’t think the sex act is degraded through distasteful associations. She notes someone else noting that Yeats didn’t regret that “’love has pitched his mansion/In the house of excrement.’” (Yeats was not a homosexual.) She observes it is true that as the excretory functions overcome our intentions, so does our sexuality. “Our excretory transactions teach us that the body eventually triumphs over the will. This is the lesson we must learn before we fully understand the sex act which is, most essentially, an event our will can forestall but not actualize. The metaphor that teaches so crucial a lesson cannot be a bad or distasteful one” (100).
[i] Published in 1998, the year after my Why is Feminism So Hard to resist?, had I read this I might not have wrote that. Remember, I had told Evangelical Synod Member, Patsy Leppien author of What’s Going Among the Lutherans?, that she ought to write a book about feminism. She said she would if I would do the research. I said that would be hundreds of dollars in books to read. She provided the money, I think through Northwestern Publishing House, but when I had finished the research, she demurred to write. So, I did, having done all that research, but then Northwestern demurred to publish by a vote of 5-4, I think.
