A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.

• Author: Goldberg, Jonah
• Position: Review

by Wendy Shalit, New York: The Free Press, 304 pages, $24.00

It's been a very strange decade for the women's movement. It began with feminists lionizing the fictional Murphy Brown for having a baby without a husband. Now the equally fictional Ally McBeal has inspired Time to ask "Is Feminism Dead?" because she likes men, thinks sex is both fun and a big deal, and really wants to be married before she's a mother. When the '90s were young, Katie Roiphe made it big pointing out that radical feminists had largely concocted the date rape crisis. More recently, she wrote that sleeping with the boss is a winning strategy for can-do women. Naomi Wolfe has championed promiscuity but retreated somewhat on abortion; Camille Paglia has made a cottage industry out of celebrating kinky sex, pornography, and, most of all, herself.

And then, of course, there is the president's contribution. 1991 seems like an alien planet now, with feminists flaying an unmarried Clarence Thomas for asking an employee for a date. Eight years later, it's no big deal for the married commander-in-chief to have sex with an intern. Indeed, according to some feminist writers such as Jane Smiley writing in The New Yorker, Clinton's behavior simply reflected a human "desire to make a connection with another person." On Meet the Press, then-Sen. Carol Mosely Braun (D-Ill.), a woman swept into office by the backlash against Clarence Thomas, defended the president's behavior by observing, "Thirty years ago women weren't even allowed to be White House interns."

The only conclusion one can draw from all this is that the market for feminist commentary is as open as the definition of feminism itself.

Enter Wendy Shalit, author of A Return To Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. Shalit has a lot in common with the decade's other feminist and anti-feminist newcomers. She's young. She's smart. And she believes in perhaps the only axiom to be passed down intact from the previous generation: "The personal is political."

Therein lies the twist. Rather than claim, like some of her peers, that her catalog of one-night stands, unrequited lust, dysfunctional relationships, and sexual misadventures gives her the authority to dictate morality to others, Shalit asserts the opposite. Her moral stature derives from the fact that she doesn't put out.

A very recent graduate of Williams College, Shalit made her breakthrough with an article in Commentary about her horror at her dorm's introduction of coed...