"Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life;" How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women.

How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Doubleday, $23.95, 275 pp.

Family values, now a motif in every politician's theme song, often carries an antifeminist refrain among the most conservative. Some liberals and feminists, in reaction, see the appeal to family values as an attack on women's rights. Defensive stands toward teenaged pregnancies, family breakdown, and sexual license often make the political Left seem willfully blind to the double bind that women, especially young and poor ones, face in a sexually liberated world. Conservatives want to end this chaos by cutting welfare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, the organized women's movement focuses on protecting what it thinks is the only bulwark against male domination--abortion rights. In this atmosphere, it is virtually impossible to stand apart and have an honest discussion about the issues that most deeply affect women's lives--men, sex, children, families, mothers, jobs, growing up female, femininity, and female stereotypes.

Though it is unlikely to convince the most ardent feminist or resolute conservative, "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life" opens a discussion that has been too long delayed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a self-identified member of the feminist elite (professor of history at Emory University and noted historian), brings an open mind to conversations with ordinary women who share her disquiet with the agendas of both feminism and feminism's harshest critics. Informal and anecdotal, consisting of interviews and conversations with African-Americans, Latinas, Southern belles, college students, career women, retirees, mothers, and blue-collar workers--Fox-Genovese's research does not carry the weight of representative samples and indepth interviews. It has something better--the ring of reality.

These conversations are critical of a feminist agenda that treats men and children as the enemy, that regards sexual liberation as a boon to women, and that sees interest in traditional domestic and womanly concerns as a throw-back to the fifties. The conservative, agenda, on the other hand, ignores the economic forces that make women necessary breadwinners even in intact families; tries to penalize single mothers by making it ever more difficult for them to work and care for children; and shows little appreciation of the dire odds that face even the most conscientious parents in raising children in America's inner cities. Both feminists and conservatives, she argues, are out of touch with American women and American families. Because no political or cultural middle ground has emerged, many women have written their own definitions and done their own bargaining about what it means to be liberated.'

"Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life" sums up this struggle: to do what women have always done as wives and mothers while trying to take advantage of new opportunities. For some, it is the chance for more education; for others better jobs; for still others, even those in traditional roles, there is a sense that dependence on a man is no longer necessary or appropriate. Maria Ramierez, studying for a high school equivalency degree and the happily married mother of three, when asked by Fox-Genovese what she wants for her daughters, "unhesitatingly answers: `Independence'.... Not having to count on a man."

Being able to break loose from an abusive or philandering husband because a woman can support herself and her children also figures in the independence equation. But so does putting a career on hold while staying home with small children. These examples are typical of the stories Fox-genovese hears. Most women want to take on new opportunities without neglecting or penalizing their children; they want to go to school, bring home the bacon, and have satisfying marriages and happy homes.

What makes the balance so difficult for so many women to strike? Answer: Sexual liberation.

Fox-Genovese argues that feminists have made sexual liberation and abortion the core of women's rights and the litmus test for a voice in the women's movement--in her view an up-scale, elite movement. Her class analysis of the sexual revolution-the delinking of sex and morality-may not appeal to everyone, but I think she has it right. In chapters on the "Sexual Revolution" and "Living with Sexual Liberation," she shows that educated, middle- and upperclass women have the resources to ameliorate the often unexpected social and economic consequences of sexual liberty because they have bargaining power with men, with parents, and with society. Most working-class and poor women do not, and they pay the price, aboveall in the struggle to raise and support children on their own.

This is a book that will please neither feminists nor proponents of "family values." But it is a brave book that raises all the right questions.