The Feminine Mystique

and men in the presidential election race portends an inexorable shifting of the national political agenda toward concerns that used to be dismissed as “women’s issues So, as a result of women’s growing political power, the old feminine mystique is now being transformed into unprecedented new political reality and priority for both parties.
It was the Wall Street Journal that first reported this with front- page headlines (January 11, 1996): In Historic Numbers, Men and
Women Split Over Presidential Race The Journal reported:
If current trends continue, the split between men and women would be wider in the 1996 presidential election than in any in recent history. This could, in fact, be the first modern election in which men and women collectively comedown on different sides of a presidential race.
“The 1996 race is currently characterized by a gender gap of historic proportions says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct The Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls….
Indeed, in a Journal/NBC poll early last month, the president and Sen. Dole were in a virtual dead heat among the American men. But among women, the president led Sen. Dole by 54% to
36%.
The Journal also noted that:
The president’s strength among women voters, which has increased amid fierce debate over the budget, is the principal reason he has bounced back inmost recent polls. In essence,”
says Mr. Hart, the president’s current strength comes entirely from women, who are leaning so strongly toward the Democrats today that even homemakers, a traditional GOP base group, are supporting President Clinton.”…
Asked to name the main issues facing the nation, men are nearly twice as likely as women to cite the budget deficit or cutting government spending, which are the top GOP priorities.
Women, in turn, are far more likely to cite social problems such as education and poverty…
[A]ttempts to scale back Medicare…and the wrangling over

social spending has affected women of all ages, who tend to assume greater responsibilities for caring for the young and the old. That often leaves them worrying more than men when social programs aimed at those populations are being scaled back.
Significantly, it is such broad social concerns and not the
“character” or sexual issues that now define the gender gap, even though the new frustrations of men became the target of the politics of hate, as played by Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries. The political gurus on both sides were nonplused: the old assumptions about the final power of the white male still held, but uneasily, for more and more white men were joining even more men of color in these new concerns. And it became apparent to old and new political establishments they can no longer win without the women, not just token, passive supporters but active policymakers. For women elected the President of the United States in 1996 by a 17% gender gap. And a woman, for the first time, is now Secretary of State.
It is awesome to see these waves begin to transform the political landscape. A lot of Republicans joining Democrats finally in voting to increase the minimum wage. The Republicans retreating from their brutal attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, food stamps,
children’s inocculations, student loans, environmental protection,
even affirmative action. The concrete concerns of life, women’s concerns, now front and center, taking priority over the abstractions of budget balancing. And new movement confronting the concrete new realities of the growing income discrepancy in America affecting women, men, and their children, fueling the politics of hate.
I was happy into join other, new, younger women leaders in alliance with the militant new leadership of the AFL-CIO in planning speakouts against this growing income chasm, in favor of a living wage for everyone, no longer women versus men. What has to be faced now by women and men together are the life-threatening excesses of the culture of greed, of brutal, unbridled corporate power. There has to be anew way of defining and measuring the bottom line of corporate and personal competition and success, and national budget priorities. The welfare of the people, the common
good, has to take priority over the narrow measure of the next quarter’s stock-market price increase, escalating executive compensation, and even over our separate single issue And some

visionary CEOs as well as male politicians begin to see this.
But the women are beginning to get impatient. The Hollywood
Women’s Political Committee, which had raised millions of dollars to elect liberal senators and President Clinton, voted to disband in protest against money as a dominant force in American politics, and against the betrayal of the politicians who supported so-called welfare reform, which abolished Aid to Families with Dependent
Children.
New birth-control technology even beyond RU, as well as the evolving national consensus, will soon make the whole issue of abortion obsolete. As important as it was, it should never have been a single issue litmus test for the women’s movement. The male spin doctors and political advisers to presidents and both political parties still do not get the totality of women’s new empowerment or they would not have advised the passage and signing of a welfare bill that pushed one million children into poverty.
For the women’s movement, for this nation, other issues of choice must now involve us. Choice having to do with diverse patterns of family life and career and the economic wherewithal for women and men of all ages and races to have choice in their lives not just the very rich—choices of how we live and choices of how we die.
The paradox continues to deepen, opening new serious consideration of real values in women’s experience that were hidden beneath the feminine mystique. There is much talk lately of a third sector, of civic virtue, Harvard professors and others discovering that the real bonds that keep a society flourishing are not necessarily wealth, oil, trade, technology, but bonds of civic engagement, the

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