Did Feminists Forget the Most Crucial Issues?

More often than she would like, as she sprints around the country promoting her new book, Anne Roiphe hears that phrase. A woman comes up to her, at a bookstore or a reading, and begins, “I’m not a feminist, but . . . .” And Roiphe smiles a tired smile.

Invariably, the person she sees is “a strong woman who’s economically independent, a decent sense of herself, nobody’s handmaiden--by my standards she’s a feminist,” she says. “What she’s trying to signal is, ‘I want to have children and I’m interested in my love life.’ ” That such concerns are thought somehow incompatible with enlisting in the women’s movement is a dominant theme of Roiphe’s latest book, “Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World” (Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

And Roiphe herself, is she a feminist?

“Absolutely,” she returns. “Whether they’d admit me as one is another matter.”

That’s because in “Fruitful,” as in past writings, she finds fault with feminism for emphasizing sexual violence, abuse and pornography--promoting “the view of the world as a giant evil patriarchal system,” she writes--instead of concentrating on everyday female concerns, particularly motherhood.

“The focus got shifted,” Roiphe says. “The so-called sex issues began to dominate. And the anger.” Whereas Roiphe writes in “Fruitful”--in which memories of her own child rearing entwine around her political propositions--”I hold my children more important to me than any work I might accomplish.”

At 60, trim and silver-haired, she can point to considerable accomplishments of both sorts. The author of seven novels (the best known, “Up the Sandbox,” became a Streisand movie) and three nonfiction books, Roiphe is also the mother of three daughters and stepmother of two more. Their framed photos top the end tables and windowsills of her sunny sitting room on the Upper West Side.

There’s her eldest daughter from her first marriage, a 35-year-old writer living in Minneapolis, and there are her husband’s daughters, one of whom has made Roiphe a step-grandmother. The infant in the black-and-white photo grew up to be Katie, whose 1993 book “The Morning After” lambasted campus preoccupation with acquaintance rape in a way that suggested an apple falling rather close to the tree. And the fifth and youngest child is getting a doctorate.

If Roiphe had had her way, there would have been more children.

A champion of feminist founding mother Betty Friedan, and a veteran early marcher and meeting-goer, Roiphe was already a mother when feminism caught fire in the ‘70s. On the other hand, “many of the original spokespeople were women who did not have children. They didn’t measure the connection between mother and child,” Roiphe says. All these years later, therefore, she is calling for feminist family values.

Her agenda includes greater participation by fathers in child-rearing and homemaking.

And securing nationwide day care, “the work that is yet to be done. That there isn’t money for quality day care across this country is a disgrace to our government.”

And “putting male sin in its realistic place. Which is to say it happens--there is truly incest, wife abuse, rape and harassment--and it’s disgusting. Unspeakable when it happens. But it’s not all that happens between men and women.”

If certain items on the list sound familiar that’s because, as Roiphe acknowledges, some were part of what feminists demanded from the beginning. They were also central to Friedan’s book “The Second Stage,” published 15 years ago. But family concerns--such as the push for affordable day care--got lost, or at least marginalized, and feminism wound up “turning a collective back on biology,” she writes.

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“Fruitful” won a National Book Award nomination (though not the award), but it will probably not generate widespread applause from feminists, some of whom think conservative politicians and organizations bear at least as much responsibility for lack of day care as they do.

“One of the raps against feminism has always been that [feminists] don’t care enough about mothers and children and families,” says essayist Wendy Kaminer. “Maybe Catherine MacKinnon [the law professor and anti-porn crusader] doesn’t pay attention to these issues. But mainstream feminists, whether they’re organized into self-consciously feminist groups or not, are paying attention. There’s always been a strong maternal streak in feminism.”

Roiphe “sets up something of a straw woman,” agrees Katha Pollitt, critic for the Nation. (There is some history here: Roiphe reproaches Pollitt in “Fruitful” for her response to the Baby M surrogate-mother case; Pollitt slammed Katie Roiphe’s book in the New Yorker.) “I’d say the feminist movement is quite concerned with the issues she says it isn’t concerned with--for instance, combining work and motherhood,” Pollitt says. “Sadly, it hasn’t had the policy effects you might hope for, but I don’t think that’s women’s fault or feminists’ fault.”

Even Roiphe agrees that in the present political climate, her call for “decent, small, nonbureaucratic day care” is unlikely to ignite governmental action. Yet her own history makes her an optimist.

“In my lifetime, we’ve made so much progress. The difference between what the world looked like to me at 20”--her mother refused to pay for her to go to graduate school but financed her brother’s medical education--”and how it looks to a 20-year-old today! It’s so enormous. That men would change their minds and take women into law school, medical school, was unimaginable.”

When it comes to further social change, she is convinced that “if we organized, if we pushed, if we made a big enough fuss, if it was crucial to women, it would happen.”

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In the meantime, as she travels, she sees the effects of the unfinished revolution.

“The guilt in this country is just enormous,” she sighs. Mothers who have jobs, mothers who stay home, “these women are bedeviled by doubts whatever they do. . . . They want to be reassured: Is my choice all right?”

Mindful of the bad old days when there wasn’t much choice, Roiphe tells at-home mothers that she “honors” their decision, but reminds them that the intensive years of child rearing consume only a small part of a woman’s long life. She assures mothers in the work force that studies show no damage to children who have quality child-care arrangements, yet she understands their unease.

“Children have flourished with nannies and with day care, when parents care, and they’ve been ruined by parents who are at home and are anxious, miserable or depressed,” she says. “There are no guarantees.”

Her own guilt and doubt and preoccupation with her children’s well-being waft through “Fruitful,” in recollections sometimes painful to read. Her family, including her psychiatrist husband, read the manuscript and agreed that, yes, it was OK for her to write about her once-tempestuous relationships with her stepdaughters, about sitting in a small nursery school chair day after day for weeks until one of her daughters would allow her to leave. She writes, too, about sending her eldest child to the Hazelden Foundation for alcoholism and heroin addiction, then learning that her daughter was HIV-positive.

She included such stories to demonstrate that “I’m not talking about something abstract; this is not social theory,” Roiphe says. “I have not, with all my children, succeeded in making them happy people. I know I’m not alone in that. I’m still trying to figure out the connection between the personal and the political.”