George Gilder is as close as the conservative movement comes to fitting the stereotype of the absent-minded genius. Legend has it that he has left a string of overcoats at friends' houses up and down the East Coast, forgotten after visits. Once, he drove to Philadelphia from Boston, then took a plane back, and wandered for hours around the parking lots of the Boston airport before remembering where he had left his car.
He is tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and magnetic eyes that bespeak a man to whom ideas are the most real thing in the world. It is not surprising that it should be thus: he springs from a long line of word- and idea-smiths. His father was editor of the Harvard Crimson; his grandfather was head of Century magazine. One of his mother's aunts was Mary O'Hara, the author of the Flicka trilogy, whose sisters were equally literary.
Gilder is a man who fulfills, not breaks, tradition. He lives today with his wife and four children in a 185-year-old house that has been in the family almost continuously since his great-grandfather bought it early in this century. The ideas he espouses, in Men and Marriage, so unfashionable that no major New York publishing house was willing to issue the book, are actually the restatements of the oldest ideas, the most traditional wisdom of our race.
Fathers are important, mothers are important; work is what makes the world go round, women enjoy taking care of their families; being a mother is a greater challenge than punching a keyboard; people don't produce if they can't keep some of the profit for their own families; men won't work for themselves as much as they will for their families. So sensible when you hear them, or read them, only in our confused age do these views provoke violent emotional reaction.
Gilder first challenged the current orthodoxy governing relations between the sexes in his 1973 book, Sexual Suicide, which was excoriated by reviewers and denounced by feminists. Presumably censorship doesn't take place in America, but is hard to find a copy of Sexual Suicide in a library today, even a major university library.
It was ironic that Gilder was courting his wife at the same time in his career as he was earning money by arguing with feminists. "I had to debate all over the country, and it was a miserable experience," he said of his promotional tour after Sexual Suicide was published. "Men don't like arguing with women. I certainly know nobody else does, because nobody else would do it. Even Bill Buckley, when he has to debate feminists, just turns to mush. Very few [feminists] have ever done any research or say anything interesting. And they don't know anything besides their feminist issues."
It is ironic, then, that having rewritten that book, he is about to undertake the same painful scenario again on behalf of Men and Marriage. It will be easier for him to endure this time, because now he is joined by his wife Nini. "I had to pray to get Nini," he recalled warmly, "and I had to follow her to Britain even." They were wed in 1976, and four children have come along since. "Marriage was better than I expected. I don't know how I knew all this before, but somehow I did." And somebody has to tell the world the truths it needs to hear, and bear the
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