marriage today

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Forward titled “Occupy (Working) Motherhood, Anyone?“, which generated a, shall we say, interesting comment.  The post began like this:

Susan B. Anthony was born 192 years ago today; we share a birthday. I am 43. The late great suffragist once said: “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It’s to make them ungrateful so they keep going.” Much of my Jewish practice these days is about gratitude. But in light of our shared birthday this week, I’ve decided to dwell on some serious ingratitude.

I grew up in the 1970s listening to “Free to Be You and Me,” and singing joyfully that “Mommies Are People.” Who would have guessed, now that I’m one of those people, that the dilemmas my own working mother struggled with would become mine? In middle school, when I’d call home sick my mom would try to talk me into returning to class, so that she wouldn’t have to leave work or find a sitter. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d do, too….

The post ends with the following birthday wishes:

1). Affordable quality childcare, paired with a change in the cultural expectation that women’s careers are expendable. That ingratitude is owed to President Nixon, who vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill. That piece of legislation would have provided a multibillion-dollar national daycare system that would have circumvented much of our struggle.

2). Workplace structures and a society transformed to allow for the fact that workers have families, too. Though we’ve made progress, we’ve still got a ways to go. Ingratitude to employers who put paternity on the books but support a culture that makes The Daddy Track anathema to all but the bravest men. And why does it have to be a track, after all? Haven’t we learned that the women who opt out eventually, in various ways, opt back in?

3). A future so bright on the work/life satisfaction front that neither my daughter nor my son will have to write this kind of post.

(You can read the full post here.)

The comment in question was in response to the wish for more affordable (meaning, yes, subsidized) childcare.  It went like this:

“By ‘affordable,’ I assume you mean ‘subsidized by others outside my family.’ Thanks, I’m spending enough on my own kids (and my wife chooses not to work outside the home) without having to subsidize your parenting choices.” -morganfrost

Now, there’s nothing I appreciate more than when, just as I’m considering a response, the perfect retort pops up in my Inbox.  In this case, a number of folks emailed me comments directly, though they experienced technical trouble posting them on The Forward’s site. Here’s what some of them said:

“‘Affordable’ means ‘subsidized by all of us.’  We need to have a society where people can have children AND careers without having to face too many impossible choices.  My career isn’t optional–it’s what pays the bills in my family.  The same is true for my husband’s career.  So we must have childcare, and we’d prefer that it be quality childcare, because our child–like EVERY child–deserves to be well cared for.  This should be a value that our entire country embraces and will help to support.” -Alison Piepmeier

“Susan B. Anthony did her job well. I’m glad you make the point that childcare should be subtracted from parental income, not maternal income, one of my pet peeves.  what matters most in a relationship, I think, is not necessarily that domestic/parental tasks be divided evenly but that each partner respect the other’s contributions, whatever form they take.  That’s harder in a society that, for all its talk of ‘family values,’ makes childcare the responsibility of individual familes.@morganfrost, relax. We’d like fewer predator drones and bank bailouts, not a crack at your piggybank. And keep in mind that your wife has a choice that many do not.” -Ashton Applewhite

YEAH.

And hey, morganfrost’s comment also inspired a wonderful post by Cali Yost over at Forbes, titled “Think You Don’t Benefit Directly from Childcare? ‘WIIFMs’ That Will Change Your Mind”.

So thank you, morganfrost.  You inspired some great stuff.

And thanks Alison, Ashton, and Cali.  I get by with a little help from my friends.

This past week you might have noticed something different around here.

In addition to a guest post from Andrea Doucet (author of Do Men Mother? and a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’) about whether dads are facing discrimination on the playgrounds and a well-earned celebratory announcement from Veronica Arreola (go SCIENCE GRRL!), a number of regular GWP writers devoted our monthly columns to various aspects of historian Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.  Coontz’s book is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.  A forum about book about a book?  Sounds rather…discursive.  So why did we do it?

As “crossover” scholar type peeps, we think the way conversations about feminism play out in public, in this case the cultural conversation about a second-wave feminist text, are important to track.  As a generation, we’re indebted to Betty Friedan for her classic.  And we’re  indebted to Stephanie Coontz for reviving a conversation about the journey this book helped launch–not only for women at the dawn of the 1960s, but for those of us striving for egalitarian marriages and humane workplaces and raising our children here in 2011.

Here’s a recap:

To kick it off, Virgina Rutter (NICE WORK) asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell her their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963. The kicker: they’re both men.

Fueled by Coontz’s analysis, we cleared up some myths about TFM and encouraged readers to Test Your Feminine Mystique Cliche Quotient. In a Review of ‘Stirring’ Reviews, we offered a reading of the initial reviews of Coontz’s book appearing in in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Salon, Ms., Bitch, and feministing.

Natalie Wilson (POP GOES FEMINISM) asked whether “Housewives” today are just as “Desperate” as in the era documented by Friedan and offers up pop-culture infused Thoughts on Coontz’s A Strange Stirring.

Finally, Deborah Siegel (MAMA W/PEN) waxed intergenerational and mused on How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last. (Your comments on that one are giving me–it’s Deborah here–tons of food for thought…!)

We hope you find the discussion of interest.  We’d love your feedback.  And if you’d like to see more of this kind of group forum, or would like to propose one yourself for the future, please do let us know!

This is the fifth and final in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.

I’m obsessed, you could say, with second-wave feminism’s legacy.   Questions like “How has feminism’s past shaped its future?” and “Why are battles begun 40 years ago so damn difficult, still, to win?” keep me up at night.  So when I first heard that Stephanie Coontz—a pre-eminent social historian, and one tremendously adept at translating feminist research for popular audiences via the New York Times op-ed page no less—was writing a cultural history of The Feminine Mystique, I nearly peed in my pants.

Foremost on my mind was the question I hoped would be addressed: “What’s the relevance of The Feminine Mystique—book and concept—today?” Coontz’s book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, did not let me down.  But I’m finding that in the wake of finishing it, I’m more than a little depressed.

As ever, the personal is political.  And vise versa.  I can’t help but read this social history through personal history—my own.  Last week, after a year and a half of equally shared parenting with both of us working part-time from home, my paid hours were cut back and my husband Marco, who got an unexpected offer, went back to a full-time, on-site job.  Overnight, I became Primary Parent, Emergency Contact, and Master Coordinator for our beloved 15-month old twins.  I wrote—bitterly, I now confess—about the first day of the new arrangement at my other blog.  The source of my knee-jerk bitterness?  Though still a working woman, I feared being swallowed by the feminine mystique.  Is this feminism unfinished, or undone?

The feminine mystique.  I’m here to report that its ghost is alive and kicking in the psyches of a generation whose mothers knocked down doors so that we could walk through them. I won’t go so far as to say we’re haunted the way children of Holocaust survivors are (Betty Friedan wrote about the home as a “comfortable concentration camp”–she also, of course, and as Coontz expertly rehearses, wrote SO much more), but let’s just say that the term “feminine mystique” conjures up a vortex that women like me—highly educated, high-earning potential—dread.

Granted, to cut back momentarily (and temporarily) on paid work is not exactly the same as embracing the feminine mystique, but mentally it’s a slippery slope. I think back to Charlotte from Sex and the City at the very moment she quits her job at the art gallery to stay home: “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” she doth protest–too much.  That first shakey day at home, I spewed the opposite: “I didn’t sign up for this.”

After whining to my mother and counting my many blessings–battling the feminine mystique mirage in my head is a luxury compared to the real and punishing demons many single women with kids, for instance, face–I  came to my senses and realized that not much in my life had changed from the one day to this next.  Except that it had.  Because I had this revelation: it only took one day as Primary Parent for me to realize how tenuous the so-called battle lines between “Stay-at-Homes” and “Working Moms” really are.  At one point or another, we are each other.  And the reason for our resentment-filled (and highly media-fueled, let’s face it) fighting, apparently, is that we are largely unsatisfied ourselves.

As Coontz notes in the final chapter (“Women, Men, Marriage, and Work Today: Is the Feminine Mystique Dead?”), a chapter in which I found myself underlining every other word, wives who work paid jobs and those who don’t say they’d like to switch roles (according to a study conducted 10 years ago that is).  “In 2000 25% of the wives who worked full-time said they would prefer to be homemakers.  On the other hand, 40 percent of all wives without paying jobs said they would rather be employed.”  Those who work wish they could be working less—and that applies to men as well as women.

Why are so many men and women with families unhappy with their lot?

Because the job of feminism is far from done. Blinded, now, by the workforce ideal that “defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work” (some call it, as Coontz points out, the “career mystique”), our culture replaced one mystique with the next.  And no one, so far, has had the power to take this new mystique down.

The moment for Career Mystique warriors has come.  They are out there already, rattling our collective cage. Conversations at places like Role/Reboot and Daddy Dialectic and The Council on Contemporary Families and work+life fit and Viva la Feminista and Pundit Mom and The Motherlode lead us in the charge.  And in the meantime, books like The Feminine Mystique remain relevant—all the more so—because their missions remain incomplete.

*Title inspired by the last line of Lisa Belkin’s recent post, “New Fears of Flying” over at The Motherlode.

This is the fourth in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.

The Feminine Mystique, is a book that, as Coontz notes “has been credited—or blamed—for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home.” In her new study of the book, its era, and its reception (both at its publication and over the years), Coontz doesn’t shy away from documenting The Feminine Mystique’s faults (chief among these, the limited view offered by its white heterosexual middle class author that not only silenced issues of working class women and women of color, but also framed homosexuality as a menace).

The faults of Friedan’s book have of course been extensively analyzed and debated over the years, constructing Friedan as what Rebecca Traister names “a revered and reviled feminist foremother.” Coontz current work goes far beyond this debate though, placing The Feminine Mystique within the context of its time and then expertly weaving in analysis of how many of its key arguments have resonated in the decades since. As Traister puts it in her New York Times book review, the text functions as “a timely contribution to the conversation about what constitutes progress for women (and for which women) in these days of mommy wars and mama grizzlies.”

The continuing “mommy wars” and their particular pervasiveness in the contemporary cultural moment makes Coontz’ book (and the book her book is about – The Feminine Mystique) incredibly relevant. As I read it, I could not help but picture the ways in which current females on the cultural radar – Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Katie Perry, for example – STILL fit into the wife/mother-is –tantamount-to-a woman’s-identity model. Yes, Palin is a politician, but she and others actively highlight that it is motherhood and wifery that defines her. Yes, Jolie has famously said she will not marry Pitt until all people have the right to marry, but she is positioned by the press as a global mother, with news of her adoptions/mothering trumping her acting career. As for Katie Perry – she is not a mother, but her well documented marriage to Russell Brand (not to mention her bubble gum bright, salaciously sexy 50s era outfits) bring a sexed up cross between June Cleaver and I love Lucy to mind.

Another cultural zeitgeist – Twilight – similarly shapes women’s identities as dependent on their relationships to men, famiy, and the home, with the end goal (as it is for the series protagonist) to become an eternal wife and mother.

And – a show with a title that would fit very well between the pages of The Feminine Mystique – Desperate Housewives – has largely explored female identity as tied to what goes on in the home, between the sheets, and while chatting by the picket fences that populate Wisteria Lane, a block that, like Friedan’s book, is mired in white middle class heterosexual privilege.

In contrast, a show set in the past, Mad Men, is a much more valuable lens through which to view not only The Feminine Mystique but also changing gender norms (as Coontz expertly reveals – with many show spoilers – here).

So, what does it say that a show set in the 60s is more feminist, more astute about gender norms and the damage they do to both men and women, than too contemporary shows such as Desperate Housewives (and, I might add, pretty much all of Reality TV)? What does it say that current cultural icons such as Sarah Palin and Katie Perry (and yes, Bella Swan) would fit better in a 50s/60s world where women were presented as needing to be tied to the home on the one hand and beholden to the male gaze on the other? Are we, as I have heard so many discuss, heading so far into the backlash that soon the era Friedan and Coontz document will seem more liberated than our own?

I certainly hope not – and I hope this concern drives people to read Coontz timely work, a book that taps into something that should concern us a great deal – the continuing hold post-feminism and “enlightened sexism” has over our cultural imagination.

This is the second in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book, The Feminine Mystique.

The reviews are out (more on that coming soon!).  While some give an apt assessment of this rich new look at a classic feminist text, some lapse into cliche about both Coontz’s book and Friedan’s.  Here are four myths–cliches, really–about The Feminine Mystique, and feminism the movement, as cleared up in Coontz’s book:

1.  MYTH: Betty Friedan was a man-hater, and The Feminine Mystique was anti-marriage.

REALITY: Friedan hated housework (and her willingness to say that was considered shocking in the early 1960s), but she loved men and greatly enjoyed flirting with them. She even suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Friedan believed that marriages would be more harmonious and loving when wives were free to find meaning in their own work or community activities rather than seeking fulfillment through their husbands’ accomplishments. When wives have interests and skills of their own, she argued, they will stop nagging or belittling their husbands. Their daughters, seeing their mothers fulfilled instead of discontented, will grow up “sure that they want to be women.” And in fact, I interviewed many women who told me they had developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by seeing how unhappy their own mothers were. They were able to commit to family life only after they were sure they would not be trapped the way their mothers had been.

2.  MYTH: Friedan encouraged women to put their personal gratification and career ambitions ahead of family or community concerns, leading directly to a “sex-in-the-city” individualism.

REALITY: Friedan told women it was a mistake to think that better sex or a new man would meet their need to grow. She argued that only an un-liberated woman would believe that more money or a bigger house would fill the hole inside her. She also said it was better to do volunteer work, if possible, than to take a job just for the money, insisting that women, like men, could find themselves only by developing their individual capacities in the framework of socially useful work, whether paid or unpaid. She would have hated “Sex in the City.”

3.  MYTH:  The entry of women into the workforce and their growing educational advantage over men destabilized marriage and doomed many women to a life of loneliness.

REALITY: Divorce rates initially rose as more wives went to work, but this trend reversed as people adjusted to women’s new rights. Today the states with the highest percentage of working wives generally have the lowest divorce rates. And marriages where one spouse specializes in housework and the other in paid work are now more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses share domestic and paid work.

Divorce rates have fallen sharply over the past 30 years for college graduates and for women who delay marriage while they establish themselves in careers. In fact, every year a woman delays marriage, up into her 30s, lowers her chance of divorce.

Marriage rates have been going down for all Americans, but women with Ph.D.s are the only group with a higher marriage rate today than in 1950. And while a highly-educated woman is slightly more likely to reach age 40 without ever marrying than a woman with less education, she is also much less likely to divorce. As a result, educated women are now more likely to be married at age 40 than their less-educated counterparts.

Three-quarters of female college graduates aged 40 are married at age 40, compared to two-thirds of women that age with some college education, 63 percent of high school graduates, and only 56 percent of women with less than a high school degree. And 88 percent of women aged 30 to 44 who earn more than $100,000 per year are married, compared to 82 percent of other women in that age group.

And here’s a win-win scenario for women who can take advantage of the new educational options for women: Educated couples with egalitarian views have the highest marital quality. Educated women who remain single and enjoy their jobs report nearly equal levels of happiness as married women. And a never-married college-educated woman in her 40s who wants to marry has twice the chance of doing so as a never-married high school graduate.

4.  MYTH: The feminist movement has hurt homemakers.

REALITY: In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, only eight states gave stay-at-home wives any claim on their husband’s earnings, even if they had put their husband through school and then devoted themselves to raising the children for 40 years. The husband got to determine what was an “adequate” level of support, and if they divorced, the wife had no right to a fair division of the property. She could not even get alimony unless she could prove “fault” by a very stringent standard. Feminism has improved the security of homemakers as well as of employed women.

What are the cliches that come to mind when you think about The Feminine Mystique or any other classic second-wave feminist text–and more importantly, are they, or aren’t they true?

With Tiger Woods in the news for this latest round of Very-Public-Infidelity, guest blogger Ebony A. Utley weighs in with her expertise on the issue. A research expert on marital infidelity, Utley confronts common stereotypes and raises questions about cheating, talking, silence, and power.

The proverbial cats are out of the bag as the tabloid media collect stories from Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses. The mistresses are increasingly chatty — talking about “I was with Tiger here” and “he left me a voicemail there.” Woods is busy denying what he can and apologizing for what he can’t while Mrs. Woods remains silent.

None of this is unusual. With a slew of high-profile unfaithful men in the news lately, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. These men haven’t come out in public to say, “I had inappropriate sexual relations outside my relationship” without first facing an impeachment trial, sexual-assault accusations, blackmail threats, texts, sexts, voicemails … you get the picture.  Rarely have these men come clean without some sort of provocation.  Often, famous unfaithful men confess to their infidelity because the other woman beat him to it.

Mistresses are notorious for telling their side of the story because the world wants to hear it. The sex secrets of sexy women are titillating. Be honest with yourself. You wanted to know whether Tiger’s mistresses were prettier than his wife. Some of you readers out there also wanted to know whether she looked like she was better at sex than the wife. Admit it. Those are our society’s infidelity stereotypes. The other woman had to be offering something that the wife did not.

The wife wasn’t giving it up. Or if she was, her sex was boring.
The wife let herself go.
The wife was too invested in the kids.
The wife didn’t (emotionally) support her man.
The wife was emasculating.
The wife was never around.

Mistresses are quick to perpetuate these stereotypes, but the husbands are quick to offer their wives $4 million diamond rings and $80 million prenup revisions.  If the wives were such horrible people, why dish out all the cash to keep them? Since the husband can no longer keep the mistress quiet, is he buying his wife’s silence? I don’t think so. Men who cheat on their wives rarely want to leave them; usually they’re genuinely sorry. The silence on the wives part is not about his money. It’s about power.

A mistress has power because she is the secret. She is the one tasked with being discreet. Once the secret is out, the mistress loses her power. She scrambles to get it back with revealing details, but the more she talks, the more her power diminishes. People know who she is, where she was, what she did, how she did it, and who else she did it with. Once the prurient details are all out there, people are free to pass judgment on the mistress and she rapidly moves from sexy story to object of public scrutiny to obscurity.

But the wife who refuses to talk gains power. Now she is the one deciding to be discreet.  No one knows what she’s thinking and everyone wants to. Did she know?  Did she have a revenge affair? Why didn’t she leave him? Does she love him that much? How is she going to spend those millions? The quieter she remains, the more dignity that wife regains.  Long after we’ve forgotten the mistress’ name and the seedy motels and the racy voicemails, the silent wife is still standing in the spotlight with an air of mystery about her. We might not understand her, but her secrets are the ones that garner respect. The most understated gift a chatty mistress gives to the wife is power.

Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an expert in infidelity. She is currently writing about her interviews with wives who have experienced infidelity during their marriages. See more of her research at http://www.theutleyexperience.com/

My dear friend (and fellow member of my writers’ group) Rachel Lehmann-Haupt appeared on Good Morning America this week discussing women’s fertility options without that note of sensational panic with which this topic is usually covered.  Remember the one about how a woman over 35 has a better chance of being in a terrorist attack that getting married and having kids?  No more.

I heart Rachel for writing In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood, for celebrating choice in an age of mixed messages about the “proper” timing of women’s lives, and for honoring the myriad configurations of the modern family these days.  Watch her, right here!

(“Love the purple.  It’s working for you.”)

I’ve been busy working up my comments for this Saturday’s 2pm panel at the Brooklyn Museum, billed as “a fresh conversation among feminists in honor of Father’s Day.” We’re an editor’s pick over at the Daily News and Time Out is supposed to be featuring us too!

We’ve been launching a multimedia publicity attack, so if you receive email from me and another from Facebook, please bear with us.  As always, it’s one great experiment in getting the word out in the age of social media.  (Learning lots along the way!)

For a taste of WomenGirlsLadies, you can check out this YouTube video from one of our past events:

My fellow WGLs Courtney Martin, Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent Zook, and I REALLY like to make these talks interactive, so it’d be so great to have YOUR voices there! And if anyone’s game for liveblogging it here on GWP, the door is open!  Just email me and let me know.  K?

We’ll be at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, June 20 at 2pm for what promises to be one of our liveliest versions ever. There’s more over at the WomenGirlsLadies blog, and on a YouTube channel coming soon. Please spread the word!

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