The Feminine Mystique (3 page)

Violence against women seems to be increasing in the United States, partly because women are reporting as abuse what they used to accept passively as private shame, but maybe also because men’s increasing frustration and desperation is being taken out on women. Studies and reports from California, Connecticut, and elsewhere show an increase in sexual abuse and violence against women, as well as suicide, child abuse, and divorce, in the face of corporate downsizing, and the lack of community, the dwindling of time and concern for larger purposes in the “me” decade. But women’s concerns now go beyond their own security. It was concern for their families, and not only their own families but those poorer or otherwise less fortunate, that motivated American women in 1996 to rise up against the Republican’s threats to cut Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Social Security, student loans, child immunizations, and the protection of the environment. Co-opting feminist rhetoric did not get women’s votes for politicians who threatened the welfare of children, old people, the sick, and the poor. Abstractions of “balance the budget” did not mask for women the danger of gutting government programs that protect children and older people, the sick and the poor, to provide tax cuts for the rich. A decade after the women’s movement, a study by the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University showed that the addition of even two women to a state legislature changes the political agenda, not just in the direction of women’s rights, but to basic concerns of life—the lives of children, older people, the poor, and the sick.

And so, paradox or full circle, or transcendent thesis, in these thirty-odd years, women breaking through the feminine mystique to their own political and economic participation and empowerment in the mainstream of society are not becoming more like men but are expressing in the public sphere some of the values that used to be expressed or allowed only in the private nurture of the home. The mystique we had to rebel against when it was used to confine us to the home, to keep us from developing and using our full personhood in society, distorted those real values women are now embracing, with new power and zest, both in the privacy of the home and in the larger society. And in so doing, they are changing the political and personal dimensions of marriage and families, home and the society they share with men.

Marriage, which used to be a woman’s only way to social function and economic support, is now a choice for most women as well as for men. It no longer defines a woman completely as it never did a man; she often keeps her own name now or husband and wife take each other’s hyphenated. In breaking through the feminine mystique, some early feminist radical rhetoric seemed to declare war on marriage, motherhood, family. The divorce rate of those 1950s feminine mystique marriages exploded from the 1960s to the 1980s. Before, no matter who went to court, it was only the man who had the economic and social independence to get a divorce. Since then, women in great numbers can and do get out of bad marriages. In some instances, women rebelled against that feminine mystique narrow role by getting out of the marriage altogether. But in others, the marriage moved to a new kind of equality, and stability, as women went back to school, went to law school, got promoted in serious jobs, and began to share the earning burden, which before had been the man’s sole inescapable responsibility. And men began to share the child care and the housework, which before had been her exclusive, defining domain, her responsibility—and her power.

It has been fascinating to see all this changing, the new problems, and joys, working it out. Feminist rhetoric conceptualized “the politics of housework,” which most women began practicing in their daily lives. Men are not yet taking absolutely
equal
responsibility for children and home, just as women are not yet treated as equal in many offices. I was delighted at a front-page article in the
New York Times
some years ago proclaiming “American Men Not Doing
50%
of the Housework.” How wonderful, I thought, that the
Times
would even consider it possible, desirable, front-page stuff that American men
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 to me, 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 child care.
⁸
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 25-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 1995, 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 child care, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men take over 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 a new 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 pre-school program.
¹⁰
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 best-selling book in 1996. There’s a new awareness of the values of diversity—and of the need of all families for a larger, stronger community. It’s a far 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, play groups with other parents, company, church, or community child care. 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, D.C., I led a seminar for policy makers, looking beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics, beyond gender—toward a new 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 shut down some years after the women’s movement—it no longer seemed sexy, evidently, for women to pretend they were “bunnies”—in 1997
Esquire
magazine is in trouble. And the publisher of
Ms
. and
Working Mother
put them up for sale: all that was revolutionary twenty years ago, he said, but now it’s part of society. The trend-setting
New Yorker
is now edited by a woman, and devoted its signature anniversary issue in 1996 to women. In the 1996 campaign, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elizabeth Dole displayed but also tried to hide the power that comes from successful careers of their own. Both focused their power on traditional women’s issues—the Red Cross, children—but with all the new political sophistication and organizational machinery that women now command for those issues. No longer was it possible to hide the new image of marriage between equals coming from the White House—despite the backing and filing when a new strong First Lady’s voice is heard openly in the highest political councils. A clear sense exists on both sides of the political aisle of a partnership between women and men way beyond the feminine mystique.

At the same time, the historic new gender gap between women 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:

The
Journal
also noted that:

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.