- Spirituality

`A Return To
Modesty'

Visiting author to
explore the
virtues of feminine modesty.

SUSAN TAWIL •
Special to the Jewish News

her national attention.
While majoring in philosophy
at Williams College in
Massachusetts, Shalit was inspired to
write A Return. to Modesty by her
professors' hostility to her opinion
that men and women are essentially
different.
"It was the end of the discus-

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DAVID BIERKAMP

V

irtue is now a pathology.
People think you're crazy,"
says Wendy Shalit, author
of A Return to Modesty

(Free Press, 1999, 304 pp., $24)
This hot new book, already
in its fourth printing and just
released in paperback, traces
the breakdown of what Shalit,
24, feels are natural instincts
for feminine modesty. Her
book advances the controversial
theory that our society's accep-
tance and promulgation of
loose morality is responsible for
an avalanche of misery, heart-
break, depression and other ills
among today's young women.
Shalit will be in town to
speak on behalf of Machon
L'Torah, the Jewish Learning
Network of Michigan, next
weekend.
She'll speak Feb. 4 on "The
Power of Unadulterated Intimacy" at
a women's-only dessert buffet fol-
lowing a Kabbalat Shabbat dinner at
the Jewish Resource Center in Ann
Arbor. On Sunday, Feb. 6, Shalit
will speak at the "Uniquely Ours"
breakfast program for women at
Machon L'Torah in Oak Park. Her
topic will be "Modesty: Discovering
the Virtue."
Shalit (pronounced Sha-LEET,
her father is Israeli) lives in New
York and is contributing editor for
the City Journal, a publication of the
Manhattan Institute. Her writing
also appears in the Wall Street
Journal, Commentary, Reader's Digest
and National Review.
Her 1997 essay in
Commentary, denouncing co-ed
bathrooms in college dorms, brought

Men need to be
retrained in the
values of honor and
dignity toward
women.

sion," she says. "They're afraid to
offend anybody, and say all choices
are equally good, but as human
beings we can't be neutral."
She says men must be taught to
recognize and respect feminine mod-
esty and vulnerability, to be
retrained in the old-fashioned values
of honor and dignity. Without that,
there's a breakdown in the social
code of conduct, resulting in
increasing boorishness and vulgarity
between the sexes.
"The media shape things in a
huge way," she says. "They constant-
ly hold women up to this perverted
ideal."
Young women, in trying to be
sophisticated and as cavalier as men
in intimate relationships, Shalit con-
tends, have had to repress their nat-