Are you as annoyed as I am by the way in which blameless do-gooders of yore – who really did some good – are co-opted by feminists who do no good at all? I love the dedication in Peggy Noonan’s The Case Against Hillary Clinton: “To Eleanor Roosevelt.” Which I take to mean: Stop the wrongheaded invocation of a woman with set of late-Victorian tastes and values in an attempt to legitimize an ugly ‘70s ideology that insulted all normal women. (Remember when Betty Friedan – one of the three original founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League – referred to housewives, now called stay-at-home mothers, as “little household drudges”?)

The title of Elizabeth Powers’s review of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (“Liberalism’s Little Women,” National Review May 28, 2007) is charming, but I gasped at the last sentence in which she equates the mentality of Louisa May Alcott with that of Hillary Clinton. Miss Alcott’s approach brings to mind G.K. Chesterton’s aphorism that it is useless “to speak of reform without reference to form.” Louisa Alcott was shaped by a post-Puritan milieu that had “form” coming out its ears, whereas Mrs. Clinton, product of the 1960s and disciple of Saul Alinsky, is a stranger to the concept of duty that informed Miss Alcott.

Stephen W. Hines is one commentator who understands what Alcott was all about. He writes: “Louisa May Alcott would have found it strange indeed if anyone had suggested to her that there could be a general scheme for helping all in need regardless of an individual’s efforts and personal morality. … In all her writing, Louisa’s characters exhibit virtue and vice within a context of personal responsibility. … [Today] all too often we are told there is no limit to what we can do and what satisfaction we may achieve – if only hindrances to opportunity could be swept from our path, perhaps by the mercy of government itself, regardless of whether we are worthy of the opportunity or not. But for Louisa, moral character cannot be excluded as a factor in our own well-being and in what we make of ourselves and our opportunities. As we awaken morally to what is charitable, truthful, and good, we awaken our own souls to moral transformation. If we have been dealt a bad hand by life, the virtue of accepting what has been dealt to us strengthens us to our challenge. Others have overcome through worthy endeavors; so can we.” – The Quiet Little Woman, Tulsa, OK: Honor Books, 1999

If liberals are allowed to incorporate softhearted ladies from earlier eras in order to claim respectability for their schemes, then we conservatives should cite the pantheon of curmudgeons. Recently, I discovered an author I never thought I would like, but to my great surprise, she turned out to be something of an ally. If I can make a judgment based on The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Old New York, Edith Wharton is no Louisa May Alcott, but her heart is most definitely in the right place. In Brooke Allen’s review of Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (The Weekly Standard, June 25/July 2, 2007) Mrs. Wharton “was old-fashioned, and openly disliked – this is Lee’s list – lesbianism, feminism, bad manners, obscenity, socialism and ‘Bolshevism,’ exhibitionism, and experimental art.” Well, that’s darned near everything I openly dislike, so it looks as though I might be in talented company.