Recalling Arianna Huffington's The Female Woman

Reading Arianna Huffington's most recent book, "On Becoming Fearless," a book specifically oriented toward helping we women overcome our fears, led me to write a column about fears specific to men. It has also led me to recall the first volume the prolific Huffington ever penned, "The Female Woman." She was Arianna Stassinopoulos then, a Greek expatriate living in London who had become the first woman to serve as president of the Cambridge Union debating society.

"The Female Woman's" title was a pointed rejoinder to Germaine Greer's famous "The Female Eunuch." In concise, logical, hard-hitting and often spicily phrased arguments, Huffington (I'll call her by her present name) effectively demolished both Greer's book and Kate Millett's best-selling "Sexual Politics" as well as other excesses of what was then known as "Women's Lib."

"The Female Woman" completely supported efforts to expand work opportunities and roles for women and win equal treatment of females in the workplace. It strongly opposed what Huffington saw as attempts to pit men and women against each other as "bitter enemies," to "introduce the language of politics into intimate relationships," to deny the reality of biologically based psychic differences between the sexes, and to denigrate motherhood and homemaking.

"The Female Woman" is full of astute observations as when Huffington notes that, "the basic difference between men's and women's sexuality is that men have greater drive and women have greater capacity." Men's greater drive explains why they are the ones generally seeking and often paying for partners. Women's greater capacity explains why we are able to masturbate for much longer periods and enjoy both more intense and more frequent orgasms.

Huffington did a very good job in showing how those she called "women's libbers" (she never called them "feminists") were wrong-headed in glorifying paid work and downgrading work in the home. Germaine Greer wrote that housework cannot be satisfying since "it just has to be done over again." Huffington pointed out that virtually all work requires repetition. Factory jobs are perhaps the most repetitive jobs of all and are done by men as well as women. As for Greer's contention that raising children is not fulfilling since "children come up anyway," Huffington rightly retorted that a child brought up in a healthy, loving, attentive environment will grow up far differently than a neglected or persecuted child.

One of the primary points of The Female Woman is that "man's fate is more extreme" than woman's. Yes, she acknowledged, in some areas there is favoritism for men but in others they are at a disadvantage. She wrote, "While there may be a limit to how far society will let a woman rise, there is also a limit to how far it will let her sink" and went on to point out that the denizens of skid row are overwhelmingly male. She also noted that, "A man who tries to force upon a woman her primary biological function of reproduction risks prosecution for rape while the law is very hard on draft dodgers." She correctly continued that the majority of men are not artists and high-powered professionals but work in jobs that they may find distasteful, boring, and that are even dangerous. Perhaps her most important observation was that the fact that women in most countries enjoy greater longevity than men indicates (unless it is biologically based) that in at least some major respects our lives are easier.

Some of those reading this column may have read The Female Woman many moons ago. Others may be reading about this work for the first time. In either case, those who are conservatives may find her defection to liberalism puzzling. They may even feel a sense of betrayal and think she has gone back on the principles of "The Female Woman."

I do not. One of the reasons Huffington's first book opposed "Women's Lib" was that she felt "altruism was quickly dispensed with" by it. She quoted Germaine Greer as saying that "perhaps the best public service a woman can do for her community is to be happy" and added sarcastically that "we are back to Adam Smith and his butcher."

"The Female Woman" led Huffington into conservatism. But there she found the same anti-altruism that she had seen as a flaw in "Women's Lib." While she flirted with "compassionate conservatism," she later decided that the aid of the government was necessary if the worst off of our citizens are to be helped. The importance of altruism is a continuing and unifying thread in the work of this most interesting and provocative thinker.