Iso,

Re your first paragraph. This is not true at all. It's not that they discovered they had it so good, well, not all of them anyway, it's that a certain lassitude prevailed. Consider the case of Florence Nightingale, who felt that women should be applying themselves to the betterment of their fellows rather than seeking suffrage. She said, "there are evils which press more hardly on women than the want of suffrage." And George Eliot felt that woman's harder lot should be the asis for a "sublimer resignation".

I agree with your irrefutable points about WWII and Vietnam. Your fourth paragraph articulates the phenomenon I'm trying to understand, I guess, and that's where Showalter is in the background of my own thinking. Fuck't, it's a discussion only, not a proscription or a post-mortem. I just don't get what war does ... as much to the victor as the defeated. I don't get why it was so much in the background during the primary, say, and what relationship it has, if any, to the perennial discussions about sexism, women's rights, feminism, activism and the writers' privileged detachment.