In his City Journal tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb — who recently died at age 97 — Myron Magnet called her "our foremost historian of ideas and one of the nation's greatest historians of any stamp."  He also paid tribute to Himmelfarb as a scholar of highest distinction in an era of "wide-ranging social, political, cultural and ethical" erudition.  She is considered by many to be among the most influential intellectuals of her time — including Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Barzun, Irving Kristol, Philip Rieff, and others.  In addition to her "brilliant and eminent" career, Daniel Bell, a friend who knew them well, remarked that the Kristols' marriage was "the happiest of their generation."  Himmelfarb and her husband, Irving Kristol, were known for their "long and intense disputes," their "intellectual jousting matches," and brilliant repartee as they discussed issues.  Adam Keiper's brilliant essay described the Kristols as having enjoyed "a long and fruitful partnership.  She advised him on his magazines and other projects, he helped her edit and think through her many books."  Keiper reported that Irving once wrote that he and Bea were "intellectually twinned" in that they pursued "different subjects while thinking the same thoughts and reaching the same conclusions."

How sad that women of the ilk of Gertrude Himmelfarb weren't media icons and held up as role models for young women.  Known simply as Bea Kristol among her friends, she was, according to David Brooks's wonderful essay in The Atlantic, an amazingly warm and vibrant personality who "listened more than she spoke."  She represented the best of both worlds by balancing her outstanding professional career with her fulfilling and meaningful personal life.  As a wife, mother, and homemaker, she rejected "the snobbery of the cultural elites and narcissism in all its forms" for the more "bourgeois values that prevailed in her personal life: work, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, cleanliness, moderation, and respect for tradition."

I worked briefly with her son, Bill Kristol, in the White House when I was a presidential speechwriter for the first President Bush, and Bill was chief of staff to the vice president, but I never had the opportunity to meet his mother.  I knew of her professional work as the foremost historian of Victorian England but nothing of her personal life.  I wish I had known her as a conservative role model of feminism at its best.

As opportunities for women became a top priority in education and all aspects of society, feminism abandoned the emphasis on opportunities for women to find balance in professional careers and personal life.  Feminism was distorted into a movement pushing the idea that women didn't need men or children to find fulfillment and meaning in life; instead, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood, and abortion were portrayed as necessary for women to find equality with men and career success.

It is more than merely a sad coincidence — indeed, it was the product of malign forces — that the movement for women to find ways to balance or sequence it all was debunked.  For the most part, the women who were thrust into the limelight as media icons were those chose to remain childless — like Gloria Steinem, who famously coined the term "reproductive freedom" and talked about her illegal abortion at age 22 as an opportunity to avoid "living a life that wasn't mine, that wasn't mine at all," or like Betty Friedan, who chose to repudiate her traditional role as wife and mother in her 1963 book, The Feminist Mystique, by identifying "the problem that has no name" and declaring, "Women have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaner!"

This thread of feminist thinking led to ever increasing polarization to the effect that the differences between men and women no longer were biological and mutually enjoyable distinctions, but came to be viewed as aberrant artifacts of social conditioning based on the results of patriarchy's baleful influence.  Harmonious complementarity morphed into acrimonious struggle and bitter conflict.  Instead of the band of erudite intellectuals made up of "wonks and pundits, pedants and ideologues" who produced extraordinarily influential essays and monumental academic works, "sisterhoods" began to crusade against the "subjugation of women" and produce high-decibel critiques of the influence of the "patriarchy and normative heterosexuality."  "Identity politics" and "political correctness" replaced the scintillating interactions of brilliant minds.

More contemporarily, businesswomen were told to "lean in" at work and learn to assert themselves in the corporate workplaces and around the business roundtables.  What a contrast to Gertrude Himmelfarb, who, by virtue of her professional accomplishments, became an integral member of the "family" of New York City Jewish intellectuals.  What a contrast to the way that group of scholars seamlessly moved from their exchanges of ideas and academic discussions to their philosophical "reflections and debates" around the dinner tables and at social events.

Himmelfarb recognized that the family is the source of national strength and the foundation of social order.  She advocated work over welfare with a goal of making "its rewards always surpass the wages of idleness."  She believed that morality "dignifies and civilizes human beings, removing us from our natural brutish state."  She strongly argued that "beliefs shape behavior and transform the environment, rather than vice-versa and that the ideals that a culture transmits its citizens affect whether they will be victims or masters of circumstance."  She eloquently presented arguments that our human faculty — our moral imagination or moral reformation — is capable of transforming us into "creatures of intelligence."  She allowed that Britain with its great Victorian achievement was able "to attain a degree of civility and humaneness that was the envy of the rest of the world."

More importantly, Adam Keiper described the myriad of ways Himmelfarb's work revealed "the complicated ways in which ideas and culture influence one another" throughout her seven decades of consequential writing.  She loved and revered books and education; as Keiper noted, she was a woman of "moral gravitas."

Like Lord Acton, the Cambridge historian who was the subject of her dissertation, Himmelfarb believed that "liberty and morality were inseparable from religion."  In many respects, her descriptions of the Victorians mirrored her interactions with the New York intellectuals of her time: they were "passionate seekers, arguing and stumbling their way toward answers to difficult questions."

Gertrude Himmelfarb's life reminds us that what's missing today are intellectuals and political leaders — including women who happily are also wives and mothers who have worked with their husbands and families to achieve balance in their own lives — who are willing in this day and time as well to follow Himmelfarb's advice to argue and stumble their way toward answers to difficult questions in the public arena.

Image: É Realizações via YouTube.