Midge Decter

Quotes:

"The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian -- although it of course offers warm house to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood -- to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it."

"Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable."

"Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women."

"The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children."

"It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given."

Midge Decter (born July 25, 1927, in St. Paul, Minnesota) is an American neoconservative journalist and author of various books. With Donald Rumsfeld, Decter is the former co-chair of the Committee for the Free World and one of the original drivers of the neoconservative movement with her spouse, Norman Podhoretz. She is also a founder of the Independent Women's Forum, and was founding treasurer for the Northcote Parkinson Fund, founded and chaired by John Train.

Ms. Decter started her career in journalism as the secretary to the then-editor of Commentary, Robert Warshow. She resigned during her first pregnancy.

Among other positions, she was the executive editor of Harper's under Willie Morris, leaving the magazine in 1971. Her first job in publishing came as an editor at Basic Books. She is also a member of the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C.-based public policy research institute.^[1]

She is one of the signatories to Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century.^[2]

She is the mother of the conservative syndicated columnist John Podhoretz, the youngest of her four children, and the second by Norman Podhoretz. She is also the mother of Rachel Decter who married Elliott Abrams in 1980.^[3]

Publications

• Losing the First Battle, Winning the War
• The Liberated Woman and Other Americans
• Liberal Parents, Radical Children
• The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation
• Always Right: Selected Writings of Midge Decter
• Rumsfeld : A Personal Portrait ISBN 0-06-056091-6

References

1. ^ Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees, heritage.org
2. ^ New American Century Statement of Principles
3. ^ washingtonpost.com: Back in Political Forefront

Persondata
NAME	Decter, Midge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Neoconservative writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	July 25, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	St. Paul, Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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