In 1951, when Jean Elshtain was ten, she contracted polio. In the small Colorado town where she grew up (then as now, the population was under 200), the medical system did not understand well how to deal with polio. Her doctors sent her to a hospital, separated her from her parents, withdrew fluid from her spinal cord without anesthetic, and, for fear of contagion, sequestered her in a single room where even the nurse feared contact. Elshtain said later, “The only person I saw during that time was a nurse who [would] … put a meal down and leave a bedpan.” After the nurse hurriedly left the room, this ten-year old girl faced the walls and her condition by herself.Footnote ¹

Her mother had had no more than eighth grade schooling because her immigrant parents had needed her help working in the northern Colorado beet fields. But she was, in Elshtain's words, “fiercely dedicated to her family.” So when Elshtain was in the hospital all alone, her mother acted in a way that Elshtain later called “astonishing.” Elshtain reported, “She thought, rightly, that kids shouldn't be separated from their families. So my mother, who had never been out of these little rural areas, took the nurse's training course, went to Denver, took a room in a crummy section of town, and got a job as a nurse's aide in Children's Hospital so she could come in and see me.”

Eventually the hospital staff discovered that the new nurse's aide was Elshtain's mother and transferred her to a different ward. But her mother still visited whenever she could. Finally her parents convinced the doctors to release her.

The doctors told Elshtain that she would never walk, but she refused to believe them, and her parents backed her. Her mother and father both took courses in physical therapy to learn how to help her. Her grandmother knew carpentry, so she built Elshtain a padded therapy table as well as a bookcase specially designed so that Elshtain could slide her bed under the bookcase to reach her books. About a year after she had contracted polio, Elshtain tried to walk for the first time. She fell. But she tried again and again, moving eventually from the bed to a wheelchair, to a full brace using crutches, to full brace alone, then to a half brace, and finally to a brace below the knee.

When she was 18, just out of high school, Elshtain married her “high school sweetheart” and had three daughters in quick succession. Sheri, her first-born, arrived with mental disability, a condition that her husband “could not accept.” So, five years into the marriage, Elshtain divorced her husband, much against her parents’ wishes. Later, in 1966, she married Errol Elshtain, whom she had met at the University of Colorado. He adopted her daughters Sheri, Heidi, and Jenny, and after a time he and Elshtain had a son, Eric. Eventually Elshtain and Errol also adopted Sheri's child, Bobby, who, like his mother, had been born with developmental problems, and whom Sheri could not care for.

So Elshtain was on the receiving and the giving end of a caring family. It was not always lovey-dovey—“There was a kind of severity” about her mother, Elshtain reported—but her family was there for her. In turn, she and Errol were there for their children, and Errol supported her. In the acknowledgments to Public Man, Private Woman, Elshtain wrote, “My husband, Errol L. Elshtain, drew articles to my attention, undertook monumental Xeroxing assignments, picked books up and dropped them off, proofread, and suffered with me through bouts of Angst.” By detailing the boring, repetitive work Errol did to help her—because she surely found it hard to stand to copy or to carry books—I believe that Elshtain was, in addition to her thanks, making a conscious political point about the importance of family.

Elshtain may have thought about the family the way she reported once feeling about the Catholic Church, to which she eventually converted in 2011. In 1975 she wrote, “What, finally, do I think of the Church? Well, it is something that is always there, one secure point of reference in a fragmented and apparently random world. I am happy that it is there, but then I'm happy that Long's Peak in my home state of Colorado is always in the same place when I journey westward each summer.” She continued, “I know what I expect of [the Church] in a time of pervasive despair: there are hungry to be fed, trembling to be clothed, homeless to be housed, frightened to be comforted” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1975, 528). This is what she also expected of the family. In the end, it was also what she expected of a just government and a hegemonic power on the world stage.

Elshtain's own experience, understanding, and vision of the family may help explain her strong negative reaction when she encountered Betsy Warrior writing gleefully in 1969 that man is “an obsolete life form. … [with] aggressive, destructive drives. … Sperm banks and test-tube babies can take over his last function … (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1993, 207). Or Susan Brownmiller in 1975 writing of the “conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (208). Or Mary Daly in 1973 writing in her classic over-the-top way that “like Dracula, the he-male has lived on women blood” (209). Or Shulameth Firestone in 1972 seeing oppression in “the sexual division itself” (211). Or Monique Wittig in 1979 urging women to “move beyond the category of sex entirely by becoming Lesbian” (211). In the feminist claim that “the personal is political,” Elshtain saw an attempt to erode “any distinction between the personal and the political” and thus make nothing “personal” exempt “from political definition, direction and manipulation—neither sexual intimacy, nor love, nor parenting” (217). When Elshtain contemplated the destruction of the walls around the private realm, she saw no room for the family as the haven she had known it could be.

My own horizons at the time Elshtain wrote were being expanded almost daily by the radical feminist, liberal feminist, Marxist feminist, and psychoanalytic feminist writers whom Elshtain attacked so seriously. For my part, I more callously took what I wanted from them, ate it up, looked around for more, and sloughed off the parts I did not want to digest. In retrospect, I still appreciate those writers, even when I disagree with most of what they say, because I now see their role in social change as part of a larger deliberative system where political enclaves act as hothouses for a great variety of radical, and often impractical, counter-hegemonical ideas. The ideas shoot out into the everyday world, exposing their listeners to startling perspectives they could never otherwise have imagined. Some of the ideas stick. Others do not. The more vulnerable populations outside the hothouse ignore many of the ideas, laugh off many, select some, adopt some, and adapt some to their own circumstances.

Entranced by the plenitude of new perspectives, I rejected much of Elshtain's condemnation. I also supported many causes that she opposed. Yet I never doubted Elshtain's own feminism. I shared her commitment to the virtues of mutual responsibility and care. I learned from her insights. I respected her as a person. When I learned more about her background, I could see more clearly why she so wanted to protect the family, with its commitment to supporting the vulnerable.

I particularly appreciated Elshtain's insistence on trying to see events, life situations, and human interpretations of such situations from “the point of view of social participants themselves” (259). In the section on Marxist feminism in Public Man, Private Woman, she wrote, “[A]sk any mother whether she would accept ‘producing the future commodity labor power’ as an apt characterization of what she is doing” (265). She concluded, “We need an account of women's liberation that will incorporate … self-understanding” (302) and that will “take a human being as the object of political inquiry without patronizing, manipulating, or distorting her world.” That, she insisted, “must be every critical feminist thinker's concern” (303). Her goal was an open form of inquiry that tried to take people on their own terms.

Jean Elshtain had in many ways a genius for friendship. I liked and admired her as well as disagreeing with her on many points. We roomed together twice at the APSA's annual meetings. We loved talking over both the panels and our lives before we went to sleep. I will miss her courageous, fiercely intelligent, caring insight. In losing her, the world has lost a passionate and probing critic.