The Feminine Mystique (2 page)

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s we approach a new century—and a new millennium—it’s the men who have to break through to a new way of thinking about themselves and society. Too bad the women can’t do it for them, or go much further without them. Because it’s awesome to consider how women have changed the very possibilities of our lives and are changing the values of every part of our society since we broke through the feminine mystique only two generations ago. But it can’t go on in terms of women alone. There’s a new urgency coming from the changing situation of men, threatening to women unless men break through. Will women be forced to retreat from their empowered personhood, or will they join with men again in some new vision of human possibility, changing the man’s world which they fought so hard to enter?

Consider the terms of women’s new empowerment, the startling changes since that time I wrote about, only three decades ago, when women were defined only in sexual relation to men—man’s wife, sex object, mother, housewife—and never as persons defining themselves by their own actions in society. That image, which I called “the feminine mystique,” was so pervasive, coming at us from the women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, all the mass media and the textbooks of psychology and sociology, that each woman thought she was alone, it was her personal guilt, if she didn’t have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor. No matter how much she had wanted that husband, those children, that split-level suburban house and all the appliances thereof, which were supposed to be the limits of women’s dreams in those years after World War II, she sometimes felt a longing for something more.

I called it “the problem that had no name” because women were blamed then for a lot of problems—not getting the kitchen sink white enough, not pressing the husband’s shirt smooth enough, the children’s bedwetting, the husband’s ulcers, their own lack of orgasm. But there was no name for a problem that had nothing to do with husband, children, home, sex—the problem I heard from so many women after I served my own time as a suburban housewife, fired from a newspaper job for being pregnant, guilty anyway as women were made to feel then for working outside the home, that they were undermining their husband’s masculinity and their own femininity and neglecting their children. I was not quite able to suppress the writing itch, so, like secret drinking in the morning because no other mommy in my suburban world “worked,” I freelanced for women’s magazines, writing articles about women and their children, breast feeding, natural childbirth, their homes and fashions. If I tried to write about a woman artist, a political concern, “American women won’t identify,” the editors would say. Those editors of women’s magazines were men.

All the terms in every field and profession then were defined by men, who were virtually the only full professors, the law partners, the CEOs and company executives, the medical experts, the academicians, the hospital heads and clinic directors. There was no “woman’s vote” women voted as their husbands did. No pollster or political candidate talked about “women’s issues” women were not taken that seriously, women didn’t take themselves that seriously. Abortion was not a word printed in newspapers; it was a sleazy crime that shamed and terrified and often killed women, and whose practitioners could go to jail. It was only after we broke through the feminine mystique and said women are
people
, no more no less, and therefore demanded our human right to participate in the mainstream of society, to equal opportunity to earn and be trained and have our own voice in the big decisions of our destiny, that the problems of women themselves became visible, and women began to take their own experience seriously.

Consider, in the summer of 1996, that the women athletes taking the Olympic medals—from tennis, track and field, to soccer, basketball, kayak, mountainbike—in every possible competition, were virtually the main show, the target of prime-time television. In my growing up, or my daughter’s, there were no women playing in major sports—no serious athletic training for girls in schools, only boys—until the women’s movement demanded and won an end to sex discrimination in education, including athletic training, in Title 9 of the Civil Rights Act as Title 7 banned discrimination in employment—equal opportunity to work, and play, to the limit of one’s ability, for women and men.

Consider in 1996 that the issue of abortion as women’s choice was the crucial issue splitting the Republican party. Long since the women’s movement declared the basic right of a woman to choose whether or when to have a child, long since the Supreme Court declared that right as inalienable as any right specified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, as they were originally written of by and for the people that were men, long since the Democratic party committed itself to the right to choose, and long since the fundamentalist Religious Right has been fighting a vicious rearguard action, harassing and bombing abortion clinics. The Republican party won elections in the past inflaming fears and hate over the issue of abortion. In 1996 their platform’s demand for a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion again, putting the fetus over the life of the woman, alienated many Republican women and men, a last desperate attempt to turn the clock back. As it became clear that women, now registered to vote in increasing majority over men, would elect the next president of the United States, not just choice but issues like family leave, the right to women not to be forced out of hospitals less than 48 hours after giving birth, the right of parents to take time off to take children to the dentist, or for a parent-teacher appointment became serious political business.

While some media, ads, and movies may still try to define women only or mainly as sex objects, it’s no longer considered chic or even acceptable by much of America. Far from being unspeakable and invisible, sexual abuse of women and less overt forms of sexual harassment are now considered serious enough crimes to bring down a senator or Supreme Court justice or even a president. In fact, the media’s, political muckrakers’, and even feminists’ obsession with such charges, which originated as an expression of women’s new empowerment, now begins to seem almost diversionary. In the focus on sexual harassment, sexual politics has become obsessed with what may in fact be a dangerous symptom of increasing male rage and frustration over economic anxieties, job downsizing, stagnant wages, and career impasse or decline. Sexual politics, we remind ourselves, started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique. It was an explosion of women’s pent-up anger and rage against the put-downs they had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, the rage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands and kids. That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement, and subsided with each advance woman made toward her own empowerment, her full personhood, freedom.

But sexual politics now feeds the politics of hate and the growing polarization of America. It also masks the real threats now to women’s empowerment and men’s—the culture of corporate greed, the downsizing of jobs hitting even college-educated white males, with nearly a 20 percent loss of income in the last five years, to say nothing of minority, blue-collar, and those with less education.
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A backlash from the men, egged on by media and political hatemongers, can make scapegoats of women again. But women are no longer the passive victims they once felt themselves to be. They cannot be pushed back easily into the feminine mystique, though some very shrewd women like Martha Stewart are making mega-millions on elaborate do-it-yourself decor and cuisine, selling pretend feminine mystique pursuits as chic new choices.

The fact is women are now carrying some 50 percent of the income-earning burden in some 50 percent of households.
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Women are now nearly 50 percent of the labor force.
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Fifty-nine percent of women work at jobs outside the home, including the mothers of young children.
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And women’s wages are now about 72 percent of men’s.
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They are not equal at the top; most of the CEOs, law partners, hospital heads, full professors, cabinet members, judges, and police chiefs are still men. But women are now represented in all levels below the very top. And more Americans now work for companies owned or run by women than by the Fortune 500.

But it’s troubling to learn that the closing of the earnings gender gap has come only one-third (34 percent) from increases in women’s earnings; most of it (66 percent) is accounted for by a drop in men’s earnings.
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And while more and more women have entered the labor force in these years, more and more men have dropped out or been forced out.

It is men, first minority men, now white men, first blue-collar, now middle management, who have been the main victims of corporate downsizing. Because it’s the blue-collar and middle management jobs held mainly by men that have been eliminated, not just by technology but in the short-term interests of increasing the stock-market price by getting rid of men’s higher wages and benefits. Women’s service jobs, in areas such as the health professions, are the part of the economy that is growing, but those jobs are increasingly being “contracted out,” put on a temporary or contingent basis without benefits.

Many women’s jobs, especially those contingency jobs, are not brilliant careers, but poll after poll shows women today feeling pretty good about their complex lives of job, profession, and their various choices of marriage and motherhood. Women feel that zest still, with so many more choices than their mothers had, since they broke out of the feminine mystique. But the sexual politics that helped us break through the feminine mystique is not relevant or adequate, is even diversionary, in confronting the serious and growing economic imbalance, the mounting income inequality of wealth, now threatening both women and men.

Men, whose very masculine identity has been defined in terms of their score in the rat race, knocking the other guy down, can no longer count on that lifetime climb in job or profession. If they themselves are not yet downsized out, brothers, cousins, friends, co-workers have been. And they are more dependent now on wives’ earnings. The real and growing discrepancy affecting both women and men is the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich—the top 10 percent, who now control two-thirds of America’s wealth—and the rest of us, women and men. In the last decade, 80 percent of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline.
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The only reason more families are not pushed into poverty is that both women and men are working. But in the present culture of greed, where all of us are told we can get rich in the stock market, it’s easier to deflect the anxiety and insecurity that is growing among Americans, women and men, according to the polls—despite the booming stock market and corporate profits and the Dow Jones Index going through the roof—into sexual politics, and racial and intergenerational warfare. Easier to deflect the rage by turning women and men, black and white, young and old, against each other than to openly confront the excessive power of corporate greed.

I would like to see women and men mounting a new nationwide campaign for a shorter work week, as over half a century ago, labor fought for the 40-hour week, now perhaps a 30-hour week, meeting the needs of women and men in the childrearing years who shouldn’t be working 80-hour weeks as some do now. A six-hour day, parents at work while kids are at school, also fitting the needs of men and women who from youth on will have to combine work with education and further training, and people over sixty who we know now need new ways to continue contributing their experience to society rather than draining it as candidates for nursing homes. More jobs for everybody, and new definitions of success for women and men.

The old wars still divide us. In the Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, ten miles from Peoria where I grew up, a group of women have filed the largest lawsuit in sexual harassment history, against men alleged to have subjected them to mauling of buttocks and breasts and obscene name-calling, “slut” and “whore,” as well as refusing to give them the training and support they needed in their nontraditional jobs. In that part of Illinois, with the Caterpillar strike lost, those Mitsubishi jobs were the only good jobs left. The men were clearly threatened as women began to take those jobs. I was proud of NOW, the National Organization for Women (which I helped start when I saw we needed a movement to get beyond the feminine mystique and participate as equals in the mainstream of society), when it went to Japan to be joined by forty-five Japanese women’s organizations to take on Mitsubishi in its own base. But women’s victory over male abuse can’t last, isn’t solid, until the
causes
of that insecurity and rage are addressed by and for women and men.

Still, the new power of women is being felt all over the world now as was made clear in 1995 at the Beijing conference. When the authoritarian Chinese government could not get the Olympics, it welcomed the UN World’s Women’s Conference, expecting the women to shop and pose in pretty pictures against picturesque Chinese backdrops. When 40,000 women from women’s organizations, in movement all over the world, demanded visas, and protested at Chinese embassies when they were denied, the Chinese government tried to wall off the nongovernment conference into an isolated suburb. But they could not stop the women of the world. Told they could demonstrate only at a children’s playground, women from Tibet who had been denied visas brought CNN to that playground and, shrouded in black, took their story to the whole world. Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted “women’s rights are human rights” to the whole world. The official delegates to that UN conference were, of course, women now, empowered women, where twenty years ago they were men or wives and secretaries of male officials who took their government’s seats at the crucial votes. The women this time not only declared a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and her childbearing as a universal human right, but declared the genital mutilation of little girls a crime against humanity. Under the feminine mystique, men all over the world took for granted their right to beat or abuse their wives. Now, in the United States and, after Beijing, in the world, they no longer can assume that right. In the United States, the Department of Justice has set up an office to train police to deal with violence against women.