Katie Roiphe once needed bodyguards to give a book reading. In 1994, when she published The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, American campuses were awash with hysteria about the supposed date-rape epidemic. The 24-year-old doctoral candidate at Princeton attracted death threats for accusing anti-rape activists of conjuring a myth. Three years later, she drew more fire with Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End, which argued that America's youth culture had been deadened by puritanism since the Aids crisis. Roiphe claimed the backlash against the sexual revolution and relentless sex education campaigns were killing the mystery and excitement of sex. But with her new book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, critics have raised the white flag. Upon its American release last year, the New York Observer announced that 'Katie-haters will be sorry to hear that it's very absorbing.' A decade ago, Roiphe expected picketing whenever she spoke at a university. But since being hired last year as a journalism professor at New York University, she has been an insider in academia. With a scholarly titled new book on the bourgeois topic of marriage, Roiphe is mellowing as she approaches 40. 'I wrote my first book when I was 23, so I certainly like to think I've matured since then,' she says. In The Morning After, Roiphe charged campus feminists with depriving women of agency by encouraging them to view themselves as passive victims and see all men as potential aggressors. Rape awareness lectures, sexual conduct codes, Take-Back-the-Night rallies, key-chain alarms and blue-lit emergency phones did not empower women, in her view, but infantilised them. She regrets not using a milder tone to protect herself from attacks, but feels that 'the brash adolescent way it was written was really effective in getting people to talk'. To her detractors, such as Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem, the book called for the return to a culture of blaming the victim, where women were ridiculed for speaking up about sexual abuse. By the late 90s, the culture of political correctness had shifted. Wolf styled herself as a 'pro-sex' feminist, and Steinem defended Bill Clinton against the charges of sexual assault from Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones. Even though The Morning After won accolades from hard-line conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, Roiphe votes Democrat and comes from fiercely liberal stock. Her mother, writer Anne Roiphe, was a prominent 'second-wave' feminist, whose best-selling novel Up the Sandbox explored the fantasy life of a bored housewife and became a film with Barbra Streisand in 1972. 'My mother has an instinctive liberal sensibility that I don't have,' Roiphe says, 'but I wouldn't call myself a conservative.' Anne Roiphe supported her daughter throughout the storm over The Morning After, causing her to fall out with several feminist allies. 'It's hard for me to tell whether she agreed with me or whether it was just unconditional love.' When Roiphe and her four sisters were children their mother wouldn't let them play with Barbie dolls. She gave the girls trucks instead, which they used as beds for their stuffed animals. Roiphe recalls feeling exasperated at hearing her mother repeat, ad nauseum, that contrary to what fairy tales suggest, a princess shouldn't await rescue by a prince. 'My generation absorbed these ideas of equality so instantly and so totally that it seemed superfluous to have this constant polemic being told to you,' she says. Roiphe makes a lesser attempt to shape the views of her five-year-old daughter, Violet. 'The feminists of the 70s thought that they could create equality by just enforcing it,' she says. 'I don't think you can control those things.' By the time Roiphe reached her mid-20s, Anne Roiphe was pressuring her to marry and have children. 'A lot of women of her generation who were feminist in the 70s all of a sudden were, like, 'Wait, where are my grandchildren?'' But in 1997, Roiphe horrified her mother by publishing an article, The Independent Woman (and Other Lies), in which she described her desire to be provided for by a man. 'She spent all these decades trying to crush down these stereotypes, so the enduring power of these old-fashioned ideas of men and women to exert a hold over our imagination is bewildering to her,' Roiphe says. The idea of a dominant husband lost its allure, however. In 2005, Roiphe split with her husband of five years, lawyer Harry Chernoff. 'I didn't marry for money, but I had a fantasy of being taken care of. There is a cost in terms of your relationship and your identity in the world when you do that.' As her marriage collapsed, Roiphe was inundated with condolence notes and offers to help out around the house. It felt like her friends were determined to imagine her cracking up. 'For people who are unhappily staying together, it's particularly troubling to see somebody leave a marriage and thrive. In Edith Wharton's New York, there was a different kind of moralism about divorce. 'Now we officially accept it as fine, but our moralistic attitude takes a different form - a worry that either the kids or the mother are falling apart,' she says. Her father, psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe, died in the year of her divorce. It was the worst period of her life, Roiphe says, but also the most productive. In an article for New York magazine, she wrote about 'the release of a strange jittery energy ... when you burn your entire life down', which made her more focused than ever. Uncommon Arrangements is the fruit of that energy. It examines complex literary relationships, including those of Vanessa and Clive Bell, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, H.G. and Jane Wells, and Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin. Reacting against Victorian hypocrisy, the unions are governed by reason rather than convention - experiments in what Katherine Mansfield called 'marriage a la mode'. Roiphe began reading about these couples to make sense of her own failed marriage. Though Uncommon Arrangements lacks the autobiographical anecdotes of her other books, Roiphe insists 'its energy is the energy of someone trying to figure things out'. Reading the letters, diaries and memoirs of these literary bohemians made her 'realise how much in a marriage can happen without you paying attention. One isn't aware of something falling apart until afterwards.' Belonging to a period before e-mail meant these writers' most private communications were preserved on paper: 'You can read their papers and get further into those marriages than you would your closest friends, who you see for dinner and you have no idea what really goes on in their house. Marriage is a mystery.' Early 20th-century intellectuals often believed that by speaking rationally and openly about their extramarital affairs they could avoid inflicting emotional pain. 'I don't think that's a popular mode of thinking today,' Roiphe says. 'People give in to overwhelming feeling more easily.' But she feels the era's conflicts resonate with contemporary discussion about women. 'We're half-enchanted with these old-fashioned, traditional ideas of wifehood and motherhood, and half-enchanted with our legacy of absolute equality and women working. We're torn between these two ideas of what women are, in a way that mirrors this very peculiar period right after Edwardian England,' she says. Uncommon Arrangements reflects her aversion to conceiving of women as victims. She writes that 'where a man has been monstrous, the woman has almost always had some hand in creating her particular monster'. The creativity of these relationships contrasts with the pettiness of contemporary discussion of marriage - dominated, as Roiphe sees it, by issues like whether husbands should share the duty of picking up Lego. 'Why,' she writes, 'when women have so many choices, are we still as angry as gloved suffragettes hurling bricks through windows?' Still, the book's contemporary relevance is mostly implied rather than stated. Roiphe 'wanted to write a more complicated and rich portrait of these marriages than some sort of polemic would have been allowed'. But, Roiphe is quick to add, she still often writes contrarian journalism and teaches a course on polemics at NYU. Her students are rarely identified as feminists, which Roiphe sees as healthy. She thinks the fact that they take feminism for granted means the women's movement has achieved its goals. 'If feminism as a movement doesn't have much of a future, that's a testament to its success.' When she began her PhD thesis on Freud and mid-20th century American writers, she wanted to be an academic. But convinced that no university would employ her following the brouhaha over The Morning After, she settled for journalism instead. Now she has an academic job, but her appointment as one of two full-time professors on NYU's cultural journalism programme was controversial. The post was vacated after the programme's founder, feminist critic Ellen Willis, died from lung cancer in 2006. Some saw the choice of replacement as an affront to her legacy. But, counters Roiphe, 'Ellen was the person who, before she died, kind of selected me and really wanted me to have this job.' Clearly, she still inspires fear and loathing from the sisterhood. But there's relish in her voice when she says: 'The Katie-haters still exist.' Writer's Notes Name: Katie Roiphe Age: 39 Born: New York Lives: Brooklyn, New York Family: daughter Violet, five. Divorced from lawyer Harry Chernoff Genres: literary biography, polemic, literary fiction Latest book: Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 Current project: another non-fiction book Other books: The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994), Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), She Still Haunts Me: A Novel (2001) Other jobs: teaching journalism at New York University What the newspapers say: 'She has done something constructive, for a change, with her contempt for the contemporary age's lily-livered female psyche.' - The New York Observer on Uncommon Arrangements From The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism: 'In this era of Just Say No and No Means No, we don't have many words for embracing experience. Now instead of liberation and libido, the emphasis is on trauma and disease ... The possibility of adventure is clouded by the spectre of illness.'
