When Wendy Shalit moved from Whitefish Bay to Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., she didn’t expect that a decision related to bathrooms would launch her career.
Students at the small liberal arts college were given the choice: Single gender or co-ed bathrooms? The majority voted to share the loo, but Shalit said no, unisex bathrooms would make her uncomfortable.
A lone voice, she lost that vote and consequently attracted a lot of negative attention. Fellow students told her that she was obviously ashamed or uncomfortable with her body. She must have been a prude, a Midwesterner, a throwback.
“I was made to feel that there was something wrong with me,” she told a group of about 30 women at the Jewish Parenting Conference held earlier this month at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Shalit turned that college experience into an article, “Ladies Room of One’s Own,” which was printed in Commentary magazine and later reprinted in Reader’s Digest.
In it, she argued for boundaries. “A little mystery and romance” are good, she insisted.
Shalit expected to receive some mail but not the deluge she got from both critics and supporters, including many expressions of solidarity and relief, along the lines of “I thought I was the only one.”
Shalit, 33, has since written two books, “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue” (The Free Press, 1999) and “Girls Gone Mild” (Random House, 2007), which was released in paperback under the title, “The Good Girl Revolution.”
“My first book was my attempt to find out what modesty was all about,” Shalit said. “It has been tied to shame. But what it’s really all about is protecting the intimate center of a person.”
“I wanted to present modesty as a compelling ideal so that it could be considered a legitimate option once again, and also to say to those who are forever attacking those who favor modesty, ‘You’re not as liberated as you think because you only allow for one narrow notion of liberation.’”
In Milwaukee, Shalit spoke on the topic, “Raising Good Rebels.” Mother to a 4-year-old son, she offered tips for practical solutions — “on a familial and societal level.”
• Be a loving role model: In the thousands of interviews Shalit conducted with outspoken girls, she found that they all had one parent who believed in them.
• Speak out and teach your children to speak out: When parents are ambivalent about setting boundaries, they teach their children that same discomfort.
• Give your children the power to rebel: Though we all fear being teased, there’s something worse, Shalit said. “It’s the fear of living an inauthentic life.” Trying to divorce emotions from our actions, particularly sexuality, is never productive. Neither is it fun or satisfying, Shalit said.
• Raise your standards: Many feminists choose to be aggressive or promiscuous to be like men. But why, Shalit asked, “do we always have to imitate the most adolescent male?” Why not insist on more from both genders?
‘Judaism is pro-woman’
Shalit calls herself an “unlikely advocate” for sexual modesty. A graduate of Whitefish Bay Middle School and High School, she was editor of the school newspaper and captain of the debate team. The youngest daughter of baby-boomers Liz and Sol Shalit, she celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah at Congregation Shalom.
Her mother may have planted a seed when she pulled her out of sex education classes during fourth grade. As the rest of her class learned about masturbation, Wendy sat in the library, feeling immune from the information and the subsequent teasing the girls endured from snickering boys.
As a philosophy major at Williams College, “one of the things that bothered me was that so many philosophies sound good on paper but never seem to ‘work’ in real life,” Shalit wrote in an e-mail after her Milwaukee visit.
At the same time, the unisex bathroom conflict — and the college hookup scene — led her to rethink where her values were coming from. That led her to think more deeply about Judaism. A few years later, she moved to New York, began to take classes and observe kashrut. She now lives in Toronto with her husband and son.
“Spiritual growth is an ongoing process and I definitely don’t see my journey as ‘over’ by any means,” Shalit wrote. “In some respects, I still feel like a beginner.”
For Shalit, Judaism holds the answer for today’s young people. Rather than being puritanical and denying sexuality, which, Shalit said, has created waves of sexual repression and a reaction to that repression, Judaism has an integrated view of sexuality.
“There is no contradiction between profound feelings and modesty. There is not this idea to separate yourself from sexuality to be spiritual,” she said. Further, saving physical love until marriage allows individuals to trust completely and love deeply, she said.
A critic of modern culture, Shalit has become something of a lightning rod for feminists, many of whom have advocated sexual experimentation as part of women’s liberation.
But she is a feminist, she said. “I believe that Judaism is so pro-woman that is encompasses and subsumes feminism in terms of the protection of women’s sexual rights within marriage and the high standards the Torah holds up for both sexes,” she said.
And she hopes that her work will create more options for girls. “I am hoping that the inspiring role models in my book, both Jewish and non-Jewish, will give young women permission to stand up for themselves and seek an alternative to the ‘bad girl’ script currently demanded by our society.”
“I do not prescribe a particular path for girls of motherhood, etc. To the contrary, the problem I have with encouraging girls to be sex objects at age 8, before the onset of sexual feeling, is precisely because it gets them continually thinking about how boys perceive them instead of focusing on their own hopes and dreams.”
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