Feminism Killed Chivalry

For well over 20 years, Dr. Laura Schlessinger has been advising and infuriating a public that can't seem to get enough of her. Her fans have catapulted her to the status of revered guru, eagerly imbibing her brew of advice, chastisement, scolding, and also encouragement to change – which she dispenses daily on her hugely popular syndicated radio show and through numerous best-selling books and sold-out lectures.

However, her critics are equally impassioned, excoriating her "right wing" opinions and her devotion to what they consider retro notions of family, motherhood, marriage, and patriotism.

In her latest book, "The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage," the 50-year-old Brooklyn native continues to wag a figurative finger at couples, warning them that if they aspire to the ultimate goals of marital peace and happiness, they should not "repair your childhood struggles and dramas by dragging your spouse into a re-enactment of your upbringing."

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But the danger of reliving one's unresolved past is only one of the themes that permeates the book, which begins with a trouncing condemnation of feminism. Dr. Laura reminds readers that the feminist movement did not originally "focus on equal pay for equal work," but rather on "how marriage, husbands, men in general, and children in specific were the enemies and oppressors of true womanhood." The movement, she says, not only promoted man hatred but self-loathing in women "of nurturing breasts, life-producing wombs, and an emotionally sensitive, nurturing spirit."

The result, she says, has been abortion on demand, "shacking up," recreational sex, institutionalized day care, and "unwed mothers by choice or irresponsibility intentionally denying a father's love and guidance to children." Other societal failures, she adds, include mothers of young children working outside the home, permissive parenting, euthanasia, same-sex "marriages," and casual multiple divorces and remarriages.

"Chivalry is largely dead," she proclaims, "and feminism is the murderer."

Throughout the book, transcripts of calls from listeners to her show, as well as e-mails and letters, illustrate the most haunting and daunting problems of today's married couples. They range from irritating personal habits to nagging, jealousy to moodiness, fear of abandonment to lack of support, workaholism to uncommunicativeness, and of course those old standbys, sex and money.

Dr. Laura provides answers to these age-old dilemmas and also gleans insight from surveys she has posted on her Web site (www.drlaura.com) that ask such probing questions as: What do you most admire-least admire about women/men in general?; What do you fear most in a relationship?; What is your single most important expectation of a wife/husband?; What do you think is the single most important thing a modern man/woman doesn't get about being a man/woman?

What the surveys reveal are that men overwhelmingly want and need attention, love, compassion, sex, and moral support, and that women want and need strength, confidence, honesty and, yes, chivalry! "Women are no longer programmed to admire and respect what is masculine and manly," Dr. Laura writes, "[but] it is stunning how `retro' their answers are … because what is hard-wired into feminine and masculine DNA and hearts [is] a yearning for the completion of their beings; the interdependence of masculine and feminine."

One conclusion, among many, that Dr. Laura reaches is that, "women … behave proportionally more destructively and insensitively in relationships and marriages than have men, and men are less and less behaving like men." Such conclusions have led many of Dr. Laura's critics over the years to accuse her of being anti-woman!

No doubt she would disagree, although in her book she hedges her bets with statements like this: "I don't see men as perfect. If that were so, I wouldn't be having daily on-air arguments with some damsel about her ridiculous choice of a scummy, alcoholic, druggie, irresponsible, philandering, violent, self-centered momma's boy.

"But ... I think when the damsel picks your basic nice guy she is generally handicapped in realizing the power she has to turn him from a toad into a prince at a moment's notice with a kiss and a loving compliment. Most women … see and treat their men like an accessory in their marriage instead of God's contribution to their happiness."

In addition to her years of fielding phone calls, the surveys she has taken, her previously successful books (nine of advice and four for children), and her pre-fame role as a marriage and family therapist, Dr. Laura clearly uses her own life experience to formulate her conclusions. These include the controversies that have dogged her persistently and given rise to accusations of hypocrisy for her disapproval of situational ethics and moral relativism.

However, she has apparently followed her own advice, which her new book synopsizes in a chapter called "The Gift of the Magi." Her recommendations urge both spouses to be understanding and compassionate, have perspective, focus on each other, feel and express and show gratitude, own up to one's own failures and hurtful behaviors, acknowledge all that is positive, follow Vito Corleone's directive to make one's spouse "an offer they can't refuse," and most of all to "give, give, give."

She also has followed her own advice by becoming "one" with her longtime husband, as well as an understanding and loving mother to her 22-year-old son Deryk, who now serves in the U.S. Army.

Throughout her book, Dr. Laura combines concrete, no-nonsense advice with her trademark wit ("marriage is not advanced dating") to reinforce the three bedrock strategies for a loving marriage: personal accountability, willingness to change, and most of all, thinking "in we terms more often than me terms."

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