THE HEARTS OF MEN, American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment. By Barbara Ehrenreich. 206 pp. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/books/who-started-this.html?pagewanted=all

OVER the past two decades we've heard many criticisms of the housewife's lot, mostly from women, and counterattacking complaints about the breadwinner trap, mostly from men. Now Barbara Ehrenreich offers a provocative new argument: Male complaints about their restrictions and responsibilities, and their grievances about women, did not follow the women's movement; they preceded it.

Indeed, Miss Ehrenreich says, men's weakening commitment to their wives and children gave rise to both feminism and antifeminism. Women, faced with the unpredictability of male commitment and the insecurity of the family wage system - which pays more to men than to women on the crumbling assumption that men support their families - had two choices. They could struggle for economic self-sufficiency (the direction of feminism), or they could try to bind men more tightly to them (the direction of antifeminism).

Miss Ehrenreich draws these conclusions from her study of ''the ideology that shaped the breadwinner ethic'' and the collapse of that ideology in the last 30 years. In the 1950's, she shows, the same ideology that was directing women to become steady wage spenders, docile wives and willing mothers was directing men to become steady wage earners, docile husbands and willing providers. According to the dominant ideology, men who resisted were not being ''mature,'' responsible or heterosexual; they were failures as men and redblooded Americans.

Over the years, as Miss Ehrenreich wittily demonstrates, the culture shifted to an ideology that celebrates ''irresponsibility, self-indulgence, and an isolationist detachment from the claims of others'' - in the name, of course, of independence, personal growth, physical health and emotional liberation. Our medical and psychological experts provided a scientific rationale for the new ideology with dizzying speed. The advicemongers of the 50's are easy targets of ridicule, but Miss Ehrenreich reminds us that today's experts are no less biased, even when their judgments are ''buried under the weary rubric of 'changing sex roles.' ''

Miss Ehrenreich does not consider the cultural shift a phenomenon to which men succumbed passively but the product of an active protest, a ''male revolt'' against maturity and responsibility in general and against women in particular. If the rebels were not always organized and conscious of their goals, she maintains, they were united in their rejection of the breadwinner philosophy.

The author begins her argument with a discussion of some ''early rebels'': the Gray Flannel Dissidents of the 50's, for whom ''conformity'' was a code word for male discontent with the demands of careers; the purveyors of Playboy magazine, for whom ''sexual freedom'' was code for discontent with the demands of marriage; and the Beats, who resented the demands of both work and marriage. Miss Ehrenreich is at her best here. Playboy (whose very name, she observes, ''defied the convention of hard-won maturity'') was not the voice of the sexual revolution, which accelerated in the 60's; it was the voice of the male rebellion, which had begun in the 50's. ''The magazine's real message was not eroticism, but escape ... from the bondage of breadwinning. Sex - or Hefner's Pepsi-clean version of it - was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn't have to be a husband to be a man.''

continued at http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/books/who-started-this.html?pagewanted=all

what else preceded feminism: