Rating: 
Summary: superbly qulified? ha!
Review: "superbly qualified to analyze the varied roles of women in society?" the woman doesn't even have enough brains to understand that if it were not for feminism we would never hear from ms. graglia in the first place. she attacks the movement that got her into law school and allowed her to make a CHOICE regarding her life. (well, given the outcome of ms. graglia's education, perhaps it would've made more sense to give her place in college to a man, while graglia baked cookies and served tea.)graglia wonders where the real men are. i can tell her: there are many in serbia, there are some even more manly in afghanistan. ever consider taking a trip there? i, for one, am walking proof that feminism has made someone happy. and it's not just me but the men in my life as well. i resent graglia writing all this nonsense on my behalf. so do the men in my life. what a pathetic book!
Rating:
Summary: More Turn Back the Clock Nonsense
Review: All over the country, women lawyers are raising kids, and raising them well. You can indeed combine work with motherhood. After all, Carolyn Graglia wrote this book! This is just another big slice of rightwing tripe. Women work because the need to earn a living, because like men they want to be part of the world -- the world beyond the playground and the carpool. Carolyn Graglia would never say that being a househusband was the best way for ALL men to live -- its only women that are supposed to be content with the lives that drove women nuts in the l950s.
Rating: 
Summary: you can't have an infant in day care and be a good mom
Review: all the reviewers who try to be cute and say graglia worked and had kids miss the essential point that this woman designed her life in a way that those babies who depended on her didn't suffer. do you really imagine a woman who went to law school in the fifties still had babies while she wrote this book? all you parents lying to yourselves and others about how your babies are fine in day care ought to learn something about child development. an infant suffers terribly apart from its mom. and, research shows mom is less sensitive to the needs of her babies if she institutionalizes them. get some facts on the harm of day care.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer drivel--a waste of trees
Review: As a happy feminist and stay-at-home-mom, I found this book to be utter nonsense. Rather than exposing the evils of feminism, it succeeds in exposing the prejudices and faulty understanding of its author. This is simply the same sort of wrongheaded misinformation that has been leveled against women for ages. Once upon a time critics predicted the family would go to heck in a handbasket if women resisted arranged marriages! Just exactly how far back in time does Graglia expect us to go? What naive folly to believe in some golden age, when women were content to have no power over their lives! Go talk to the women of Afghanistan. Their suicide rates are exploding. Even a quick investigation into social and political exposes how weak and trite Graglia's arguments are. Furthermore, Graglia attacks a phantom feminism that doesn't really exist, except in the minds of fanatical anti-feminists such as herself. Therefore, its not likely to change any one's mind, just galvanize the already misled. And, hey reader from Washington! Jane Austen would not have approved of this book! She was an ardent foe of irrationalism.
Rating:
Summary: Started out good, then disappointed
Review: As a novice homemaker who struggled mightily with feminist expectations, I really wanted to like this book, which I read in the course of my transition from career to home. And at first, I did like it. Graglia's exposition of the inherent misogyny of doctrinaire feminism was right on. But about halfway through the book it became apparent that a woman who stays home isn't, in Graglia's view, moving into a different area of achievement which brings balance to the family unit, but rather renouncing all achievement so that the man can shine in solitary glory. And this is supposed to give her some sort of hero-worshipping sexual high. Yep, that's the worst part. I've read enough books on both sides of this issue to know that when an author starts slighting people whose sexuality isn't like her own, it's a sure sign she's run out of real arguments. In fact, it was kind of embarrassing to read, because so obviously a projection of the author's private tastes: a woman should be "constantly available for sex", and prefer vaginal penetration to clitoral orgasm; when she does have an orgasm, it should be part of the "prelude" to intercourse; she ought to feel "controlled" by the man, who in turn ought to make liberal use of "the lover's pinch"; but sado-masochism is going too far because she should experience his power directly rather than through instruments. And so on. If she wanted to express herself that way, she should have sent away for the Harlequin Romance writer's guide. Dressed up as philosophy, it's blatantly arbitrary and self-serving: how very convenient that what she likes should also happen to be the recipe for perfect femininity! Oops, I almost forgot to mention the several pages she spends rhapsodizing about how lucky African mutilation victims are because the absence of a clitoris allows them to focus completely on their husbands. She waxed quite poetic when describing how they cry and scream for mercy as they're cut open on their wedding nights and raped for days to keep the wound from healing. I hate to bring that awful topic up, but I swear it's in the book and she really does write approvingly of it. Despicable.
Rating: 
Summary: Domesticity is Tranquil
Review: Before you start to write a review, consider some facts.More than seventeen and a half married couples with children both work. There are five million latchkey children nation-wide. Six out of seven Daycare Centers have been rated from mediocre to poor. Nine out of ten which care for pre-school children and babies fall short of good care. Women can't even cite the basic ingredients to a basic cake mixture. The majority don't own a sewing box. Carolyn Graglia, a wife and mother, is an endangered species, just like me. She most probably wrote her book between school hours or when her children were asleep. She definitely didn't watch the Soaps. She lost alot of sleep. MRS. Graglia believed in what she was writing, and she wrote it well. Probably TOO WELL for most women to digest. I agree whole heartedly with every statement she made. It's time that women let their DNA do its job all the time, and not merely unleash it when it's advantageous to them. It's also time women stay home and care for the most precious conception they'll ever have in their entire lives. Women can't have the world all their own way. By the way, men didn't alter their position in society because they knew who had the better deal.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I've read this decade.
Review: Carolyn Graglia was a lawyer before she had children, so she knows how to argue her case against feminism. She shows how its aim is to destroy the traditional woman who gets her satisfaction from taking care of her home and family. And she documents the devastation to children and society that has resulted. In a very moving way, Mrs. Graglia uses her own experiences and feelings to show how feminism violates women's nature. Women are different from men, as anyone knows who isn't blinded by ideology. But feminists have succeeded in changing society's view of women so that instead of nurturing and yielding, women are now expected to be just like men. She describes women's sexuality at length, taking issue with feminism's view that women should be casual and aggressive about sex. She shows how feminism is totalitarian at heart, because feminists cannot simply live their own lives the way they wish, but must impose their world view on everyone. Thus they hold up traditional women to contempt, and rearrange society's institutions to drive women out of the home. I was fascinated to read Mrs. Graglia's skewering of some feminist myths, such as the idea that women were not sexual beings until the last few decades. Her history of female sexuality alone would make the book worth reading. I am also fascinated by the little notice this book has received, as far as I am aware. It is so powerful that, were its subject anything but feminism, it would certainly be the subject of constant publicity, in the way that, say "The Bell Curve" was.
Rating: 
Summary: A Most Riveting Expose' Against Feminism
Review: For years I grew up believing that the feminist movement was simply a backlash against male society's degradation of women. Yet, in a most profound and poignant fashion, the author reveals that much of the feminist group's beliefs, rhetoric, and actions are equally to blame for such debasement of their own gender, particularly women of traditional values. Many times, while reading a particular paragraph, I found myself saying audibly and emphatically, 'that is so true.' There is one criticism. While I certainly can appreciate her position on abortion and how well it ties in with feminist beliefs, it is quite conspicuous that she does not address the perplexities, extenuating circumstances, and even tragedies that a few abortions truly mitigate. A parenthetical statement would have sufficed. Overall, an affirmation and confirmation of my mother's choice to stay home and raise us. This book is a must-read for any man, woman, or couple.
Rating:
Summary: A reductionist, polarizing diatribe
Review: Graglia follows, with absolute consistency, one formula in this book: consider only the most extreme feminist positions, assert that all women who wish to work in addition to having a family are dupes of a monolithic feminism in thrall to those extreme positions, and ignore inconvenient facts. To begin with the inconvenient facts, nowhere does Graglia acknowledge that the ideal of domesticity she extols has a history, one that dates only to the 18th century (though her ham-fisted emphasis on the Romantic trope of "the awakened Brunnhilde" is something of a tipoff). In particular, she does not consider that 1) for generations, there was no sharp distinction between the home and "the marketplace," since most women were doing farm work, helping run the family business, etc; and 2) even when the housewife ideal was enjoying its acscendency in mid-century America, it was an ideal available only to women of a certain social class (and, as a consequence, largely to white women). If you begin by neglecting historical context and continue by constructing a straw man with whom to do battle, victory (of a kind) is virtually assured. It's a shame to see Graglia settle for this, since she does have some valid criticisms to make of feminist extremism, and is clearly capable of doing better. Especially dismaying is the way in which she presents women's choice between a life of domesticity and existence as a souless, defemininized harpy. She can present such a stark view of home life and work life in part because she does not mention the ways in which women -- and men -- have found creative ways to accomodate both. Here the reader will find no mention of part-time work, flex-time schedules, or working at home. Nor (and this is a more serious criticism) does Graglia even begin to acknowledge that work might, even for some wives and mothers, be about more than money and power. While she describes the role of housewife in glowing terms, only by emptying the desire to work of any concrete content and presenting it abstractly as a pure, Nietzschean will to power can she claim that all women find their "true selves" through vaginal orgasms and domesticity. Of a woman whose work is an extension of her "true self," who is working because she loves what she does, Graglia has nothing to say. Of the possibility that a man might love a woman at least in part because of her direct engagement with the larger world (an engagement, I would argue, that is available to stay-at-home wives and mothers as well), and would regard as a loss the "emptying out" of the woman that Graglia dwells upon so lovingly as a consequence of full-blooded heterosexual intercourse, she cannot conceive. By far the best (and the briefest!)outline of a moderate, reasonable feminism is Dorothy Sayers' "Are Women Human?" Its argument, though a few decades old now, is eminently sensible and virtually unanswerable. Sayers' short book makes crystal clear that feminism need not be about male-bashing, and it has the added virtue of exposing the denials of female human nature to which anti-feminists are forced to resort. If you're looking for an anti-feminist book, I'd recommend "Modern Woman: The Lost Sex," which (though showing its age a bit) covers much the same ground that Graglia's tome does, makes explicit its allegiance to an unnuanced biological determinism, and is better-written to boot.
Rating:
Summary: Obscene, unladylike, verbose
Review: Graglia stole a man's slot in law school, and takes her show on the road with this poorly written, vitriolic diatribe against feminism. She conveniently forgets that women were illiterate and unpublished prior to the early roots of the movement. So-called 'domestic tranquility' is often a fantasy, exposed in spousal abuse statistics; she disregards this. The author seeks to mold complex societal and personal issues into simplistic "black and white thinking," and understandably fails. Graglia ignores that most women don't enjoy the privileged, elitist lifestyle that she does, married or not. If we carry Graglia's argument to logical conclusion, we may well wonder how a woman could profer such a weighty tome while purporting to care for children. Graglia has a career as a writer, yet denounces other women who seek one. The book is so explicit and presumptuous about female sexual experience, it's obscene. Graglia is no demure, ladylike antifeminist. This is the treatise of a fanatical oddball.
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