The Feminist Mistake: A Partisan View

Elizabeth Dobbs of Vista writes that after a recent trip to Paris she has changed her attitudes about femininity. Finding a revelation in Frenchwomen, she now believes that women should preserve and enhance their beauty, their “womanliness,” not only for men, but for themselves.

Her credentials as a feminist are impressive. Until one month before the birth of her first son, she was Mammoth Lake’s first female firefighter. Later, she served as an emergency medical technician, and was elected to the Fire Commission. In their first year of marriage she helped her husband build their house. Her two sons were both born at home. She later worked at various jobs, supplying Mono County stores with Kodak film (her own business), selling radio and newspaper advertising, selling real estate. She has tested as a “radical” feminist.

In 1986, she went to Paris with a woman friend whom she describes as “a youthful blonde, 35 years old, tall and thin.” (She describes herself as “34, brunette, more zaftig, and, I’ve been told, striking.” From her photograph, she is indeed that.)

Evidently these two young American women did not go unnoticed on the streets of Paris. At the Gare du Nord railroad station five men offered to help with their luggage. (Under feminist tenets, such attention would be disdained.) But Dobbs admits they loved it.

“The taxi driver asked me if he could father a child for me on the way to the hotel.” (It isn’t clear whether the taxi driver made his offer on the way to the hotel, or offered to carry it out on the way to the hotel. In either case, it would be an unacceptable approach by almost any standard.)

However, Boggs didn’t mind. “Just smiling at a student caused him to run across the street to talk with us. (The language barrier was too great; he left.) Everywhere we went, we felt the open appreciation of men.”

Boggs thinks this open appreciation of women by men is a result of the Frenchwoman’s own feminine mystique. “(In Paris) I saw women being valued for their specialness as women. Their sense of style, and the way they take care of themselves, is a high art form. I don’t think they do it to please men. I think they care for themselves in the same way an artist paints, or a writer writes. They are internally driven to excellence in their beauty.”

Boggs says she saw the results of this self-enhancement all over Paris. “The women respond and encourage this (male) adoration. Couples kiss and embrace passionately in ice cream parlors, in front of the many fountains, on bridges and on the benches in the park surrounding Notre Dame.”

Boggs said she missed her husband “dreadfully,” and vowed never to travel again without him. “I had a change of heart about men and women relating to each other as opposite sexes. It is more than OK, it is great --something to be realized instead of suppressed.”

I remember writing after our trip to Paris that Parisian women were smarter and more attractive than women elsewhere. This brought irate challenges from champions of women in other cities from Stockholm to Bangkok. Of course feminine beauty, like every other kind, is in the eye of the beholder.

I doubt, though, that Parisian women work any harder at being beautiful than American women do. Look at the tons of beauty magazines they subscribe to, and the grueling hours they spend at aerobics.

For the first time in her adult life, Boggs says, she is not working. She is going to college while her husband supports the family. “It takes a lot of self-esteem to allow myself to be supported. Women who decide to ‘keep a home’ are very underappreciated in today’s society. As women, we lose what is most special and lovely in ourselves when we try to be like men.”

I certainly wish Boggs the best; but I’m not sure her retreat from the marketplace is permanent. She admits there’s a streak of the maverick in her family: Her parents couldn’t stay married and her sister ran off with her mother’s boyfriend. She is still married to the boyfriend, lives in Santiago, Chile, with their four children. “Sister is the best belly dancer in Chile. Dances for Pinochet.”

That’s what I call a classic case of having it all.