Farewell to the Woman Question: A Prescient Look at the Coming Postfeminist Backlash by Midge Decter, The Author of Liberal Parents, Radical Children and the New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation (June/July 1991‪)‬

For many years, I was interested- in both senses of the term-in women's problems. It seemed to me that somewhere in the course of the twentieth century the lives of middle-class American women had been radically altered and we understood neither what had happened nor how to respond properly to it. The serious Freudians, with their talk of penis envy and father fixation, certainly seemed far off the point; in any case, the women of my own acquaintance who had undergone classical psychoanalysis were more obtuse about the sources of their own conduct and feelings than any other women I knew. The "parlor" Freudians, those who chalked up every aspect of the human condition to the fulfillment, or lack of same, of all sexual encounters, were merely silly--although to be sure in some cases consequentially so.