The Feminine Mystique
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| should do 50 percent of the housework—the sons of the feminine mystique, whose mothers made their sandwiches and picked their dirty underwear off the floor. It was progress, it seemed tome, that men who once helped (barbecuing the hamburgers while she cleaned the toilet bowl) were even doing 20 percent. Now, according to the latest figures, American men are doing 40 percent of the housework and childcare I doubt they’re doing much ironing, but neither are the women. I’ve seen reports that sales of all those soaps women were supposed to throw in those appliances to keep them running twenty-four hours a day went way down during those years. And families started buying watt light bulbs to hide the dust, until Saturday when they all cleaned house together. But it didn’t make me happy to read recently that only 35 percent of American families have one meal a day together. The fact is, the divorce rate is no longer exploding. And most of the divorces now are among the very young, not those who have gone through these changes. In the second decade after the women’s movement, I came across statistics from a population institute in Princeton that more American couples were having sex more often and enjoying it than ever before. 9 In my early research for The Feminine Mystique, I’d seen data from history that with every decade of women’s advance toward equality with men, measures of satisfying sexual intercourse between women and men increased. There’s a lot of data now that equality is strongly related to a good, lasting marriage—though there may also be more arguing between equals. At the American Sociological Association meetings in August, I was asked to speak on the future of marriage. I saw that future in terms of new strengths of women and men, and new challenges for society. For instance, in all the arguments about men not doing enough of the housework and childcare, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men takeover so much of it that the kid comes to Daddy first with her report card or cut finger. I wouldn’t consider letting Ben take him to the doctor my friend Sally said. “That’s my thing There was a lot of power in women’s role in the family that wasn’t visible even to the feminists according to the male measures. More studies need to be done to test what strengths are added to families when mothers and fathers share the nurturing power. All we hear about, all we talk about, are the problems the stresses, for women, of combining work and family the deficit for children, growing up in a single-parent family. We don’t hear about the studies at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women which show that combining work and family reduces stress for women, is better for women’s mental health than the old either-or single role, and that women’s mental health no longer declines sharply after menopause as it used to do. We don’t hear about the different kinds of strengths and support single-parent families need and could get from their communities. But there is anew awareness that something has to change now in the structure of society, because the hours and conditions of jobs and professional training are still based on the lives of the men of the past who had wives to take care of the details of life. Women don’t have such wives, but neither do most men now. So the family friendly workplace becomes a conscious political and collective bargaining issue—flextime, job sharing, parental leave. It turns out that companies on the cutting edge in terms of technology and the bottom line are also the ones adopting family friendly policies. The United States has been backward compared to other advanced industrial nations in this regard 98 percent of three- to four-year-olds in France and Belgium are in a preschool program The United States was the last industrial nation except South Africa to adopt a national parental leave policy, only after Bill Clinton took office. There’s also a growing sense that it takes more than one mother- one father, much less a single mother, to raise a child. It takes a village to raise a child First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a bestselling book in 1996. Theresa new awareness of the values of diversity—and of the need of all families fora larger, stronger community. It’s afar cry from that single model of the isolated suburban feminine mystique family of the sixties, not only the many variations—some couples having babies in their forties, women and men, well established in careers some juggling work, profession, training, and home with babies in their twenties and thirties; sometimes the woman taking a year or two off, or the man, if they can afford it, and single parents—all of them relying more than ever on support from grandparents, playgroups with other parents, company, church, or community childcare. And more and more women and men, living alone or together, young and older, in new patterns. The recent campaign to legalize same-sex marriage shows the powerful appeal of lasting emotional commitment even for men or women who depart from conventional sexual norms. In 1994–95, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, I led a seminar for policymakers, looking beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics, beyond gender—toward anew paradigm of women, men, and community. In 1996, we focused on “Reframing Family Values,” in the context of new economic realities. I have never bought the seeming polarization between feminism and families. A demagogic reprise of the old feminine mystique, the recent reactionary family values campaign is basically an attack on abortion, divorce, and, above all, the rights and autonomy of women. But there are real values having to do with families, with mothering and fathering and bonds between the generations, with all our needs to get and to give love and nurture that are women’s public and private concerns today and the crux of the political gender gap in 1996. The question is, when will men turn on the culture of greed and say, Is this all?” The old separatism—women vs. men—is no longer relevant, is in fact being transcended. Just as the Playboy Clubs were shutdown some years after the women’s movement—it no longer seemed sexy, evidently, for women to pretend they were “bunnies”—in 1997 Download 2.16 Mb. Share with your friends:
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