Kressel Housman's Reviews > A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue

Skylar's excellent review of this book did make me view it a bit more critically, but for the most part, I think Wendy Shalit has portrayed American society with dead-on accuracy. Her main contentions are these:

1. If women would hold themselves to higher standards of modesty and men would hold themselves to higher standards of honor, we would have a much healthier society overall.

2. The reason for such problems as anorexia and cutting amongst girls is not because the girls themselves are sick but because they are reacting to a sick society which pressures them to become sexualized before they really want to.

3. No change in the current climate will come about unless masses of young women begin saying "no" proudly. Otherwise, they'll always be thought of as "weird," "hung up," "repressed," etc.

Shalit defends each of these claims with extensive citations from psychological studies, headlines in women's magazines, personal anecdotes, Victorian literature, Western philosophy, classical and modern feminist thought, and Torah sources. Her target audience is secular, so she defends modesty by pointing out in painful detail the damage excessive immodesty has done to marriage, love, and relationships. As she admits herself, her discussion of modesty is NOT modest. So this is not an uplifting book on tznius like Doesn't Anyone Blush Anymore? or Outside/Inside. This is a scathing look at secular culture in the post-feminist era. Sheltered FFB women would be shocked. BTs will see a familiar world and be all the gladder they left it behind. May Hashem help that young secular women get hold of this book and be strengthened to take a new kind of feminist stand.