Jane Austen Saves Woman From Feminism, by Rod Dreher.

I will never forget the time I went to see Ang Lee’s masterpiece “Sense and Sensibility” with one of my feminist, Foucault-spouting girlfriends from the department. Say what you will about Jane Austen, her lovely marriage fantasies are like heat-seeking missiles in the female psyche. We love them.

When the film was over, after the gallant and self-sacrificing Colonel Brandon had rescued the wayward sister, married her and set her up in a big house, my friend turned to me and said, “I just want to go back there.” And, as the depth of feminist hypocrisy revealed itself, whatever remaining feminist platform I still stood on cracked underneath me. “If this woman wants to go back to the 18th Century, why am I even pretending to care about feminism?” I thought. And so I became an apostate.

In New York I experienced urban life as a single woman first hand. I saw the entire pipeline: young women entering, giving all their energy to their jobs and the city, and exiting in their late thirties, childless, lonely, broke.

After I got my priorities straight, I met a man from Milan. We married, I moved to Italy and had two boys. We just celebrated our twentieth anniversary last month.

hat-tip Stephen Neil