Archive: 2011

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.

Here’s a review of (some of the many!) reviews of Stephanie Coontz’s A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

Was Coontz Dissing or Loving TFM?(Answer: Neither)

In the Wall Street Journal online, Melanie Kirkpatrick notes,

Ms. Coontz is clearly a fan of the book, and she quotes many early readers who said that The Feminine Mystique gave them the courage to pursue their dreams.

She highlights some of the debunking that Coontz’s book accomplishes, such as the myths that TFM was man-bashing or that Friedan was an apolitical housewife. It is a nice, uncritical connection to the story of TFM and A Strange Stirring.

A puzzling contrast was in the Washington Post (included in the print edition), where Elaine Showalter is troubled by Coontz’s story of her own (ambivalent) relationship to TFM because it didn’t match Showalter’s positive experience. Coontz, who isn’t one to reply to reviews too often, responded to the Post in a letter to the editor. In it, Coontz points out that while in 1963 Showalter was going through a very similar experience to that of Friedan (young, married with children), Coontz, though just a few years younger, was still at college, not in the job market, not in the domestic world, and thus the themes of TFM did not touch her personally (the way, for example, the civil rights movement did, which was where Coontz focused her stunningly intense sixties-style activist energies.)

The resolution between those first two reviews—was Coontz dissing or loving TFM?–came in Rebecca Traister’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Traister recounts Coontz’s personal journey with TFM and how, along with her concerns for those women whose experiences were not represented by TFM, she still came to value it. Traister writes:

Halfway through A Strange Stirring, the social historian Stephanie Coontz — parsing the reception of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s 1963 examination of middle-class female repression and despair — confesses to feeling some ambivalence over Friedan’s project, and hence her own.

Acknowledging the working-class and minority women left out of Friedan’s best seller, Coontz admits that while it is “pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more,” her own initial reaction to Friedan’s elite scope “was to dismiss the pain of the middle-class housewives as less ‘real’ than that of their working-class sisters.

Traister then describes how Coontz herself reconciles the “dissing vs loving” issue, by recounting a dialogue Coontz had had with TFM-loving colleague.

It didn’t matter, [Coontz’s colleague had said to her], that the women Friedan wrote about weren’t “representative either in size or even aspirations of most American women of their time.” What mattered was that they had spent “years of their lives with their noses pressed against the proverbial glass — looking in at a world that they would never be a part of.”

For a Traister personal bonus, the New York Times online includes an interview with Rebecca Traister about her own reflections on The Feminine Mystique. The interview highlights Traister’s connection with Coontz’s ambivalence, and offers her reflections on TFM. Such reflections on TFM across multiple generations (and microgenerations like Showalter vs Coontz)spurred on by SS are among my favorite benefits of this Strange Stirring phenomenon, as you can see in my own reflection and interviews with two men in their seventies here at Girlwpen.

Reviewers’ reflections on SS and TFM repeatedly engaged their own stories. When you read the reviews of A Strange Stirring, you’ll see how people write from their personal as well as their intellectual perspectives–sometimes without total self-awareness, but still, it reminds me of how much that linking of personal, political, and intellectual is part of what feminism is all about, what it gives us.

What are the uses of a book? (Answer: They are totemic, but that doesn’t tell us whether they cause movements…like the Women’s Movement)

At Ms Magazine online Carol King focused on historical context (“If you were to pick up The Feminine Mystique today, I suspect you’d wonder what all the fuss was about”) and writes appreciatively of the contextualizing of the Mad Men type experience of many of the women depicted in TFM, and those whom Coontz interviewed for SS. She concludes:

There would have been a Women’s Movement without The Feminine Mystique, but there would have been holes where those women described in the book should have been.

A variation on King’s point was in Louis Menand’s essay in The New Yorker. The essay provides a great review of many of the women’s movement publications around the time of TFM—which I had already read about in Coontz’s book. But the best part is where Menand argues “Why the Women’s Movement Needed Betty Friedan.” He picks an argument with Coontz around her assessment of the American reception of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and also with her contention that the cultural shift towards the Women’s Movement preceded TFM, rather than followed it. But he makes Coontz’s case any way, as well as a wonderful case for the value of books as a cultural intervention. Here’s how: Menand includes TFM with several other books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that made a difference because, as he says, “books became totems.”

These are books whose significance exceeds anything they actually said. For many people, it doesn’t even matter what they said or why they were written. What matters is that, when the world turned, they were there.

Yes! The books were there for people to point to to express the ideas that they were already starting to have.

In Bitch Magazine Eryn Loeb wrote a delightful reflection on the imagery of The Feminine Mystique (very Mad Men, very old issues of Good Housekeeping). The images help to conjure the myths of womanhood and the myths of TFM from the earlier era. Then, she draws our attention to Coontz’s skillful work on decomposing those myths—and links this myth-busting to Coontz’s body of work, especially The Way We Never Were and Marriage, A History. Loeb concludes with another important point. See, Coontz, like people Coontz interviewed, didn’t even realize that she hadn’t read the book “back in the day.” Still, it had stuck with her, and many others. Loeb notes:

The book’s legendary status had eclipsed its actual content. In some ways, this is a triumph: Friedan’s salvo for women’s liberation has been so effectively distilled and shared in the 47 years since its release that there’s no need to actually sit down and read 350-plus pages. As long as we get the gist of it, do the specifics really matter?

Where are women—and men—today? (Answer: “In it together”)

Tracy Clark-Flory’s interview with Stephanie Coontz for Salon.com focuses on “Why Feminism Was Good for Marriage.” The interview highlights links between growing gender equality and improvements in marriage, adding a coda to Coontz’s Marriage,A History. The interview links up what Coontz wrote in SS to how she sees gender and feminism today. Message: A big piece of it has to do with keeping men—working men, caregiving men, and really all men—in the equation.

And if you want to hear more of Coontz on where are men and women today—in relation to what she wrote about in A Strange Stirring—listen to her interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

…there’s more: I can only imagine what will be the lesson from Coontz’s interview on The Colbert Report later this month (slated for 2/23/11). But I bet it will have something to do with men and women “these days.”

What else? (Answer: It keeps coming!)

I’ll keep adding links here to other reviews and interviews, but here are a few more I found useful:

History News Network: “Puncturing Betty Friedan, but Not the Mystique: An Interview with Stephanie Coontz”: This engaging interview gives more details about how Coontz did her research.

The Feministing Five: Stephanie Coontz: Chloe Angyal presents a thoughtful, more personal interview with Coontz.

–Virginia Rutter

It’s my deep pleasure to introduce Andrea Doucet, who is a guest contributor for Global Mama this month. Andrea is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of the award-winning book Do Men Mother? and is currently completing research for her book, tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’. She is delighted to be a contributor to Girl with Pen. (And we are delighted to have her!)

Are Dads Facing Discrimination at the Playground?

Are men being kicked out of playgrounds? Are dads facing playground or playgroup discrimination? These questions, and some answers, were floating on the blogosphere and twitterverse over the last few weeks. It all started with a conversation between three leading and admired voices in parenting – Dad Labs, Free Range Kids’ Lenore Skenazy, and Jeremy Adam Smith’s Daddy Dialectic – on fear and mistrust of men in public spaces.

The pace with which this discussion unfolded would make any slow-moving scholar’s head spin. A newspaper article, then a blog post, a tweet, the creation of an online survey and voilà: the results were up on Daddy Dialectic and on The New York Times Motherload.

I’ve had a 20-year academic and personal interest in male exclusion and surveillance on the landscapes of parenting, so I followed the discussion with great interest. It speaks to an important social dynamic, one that is largely absent from much of the current thinking on (heterosexual) couples working to reverse traditional gender roles.

Yet, as I sat at my desk, watching the words ‘playground discrimination’ and ‘stay at home dads targeted’ tweeting from my computer, something troubled me.

I think the discussion, thus far, overstates the issue of discrimination. It also underplays change over time and the growing acceptance of fathers in community sites. Playground discrimination? With all due respect to those who blogged and tweeted about this, I disagree. Only 3 fathers (4.5%) who filled in the ‘playground discrimination’ survey were asked to leave a playground.

What about the nearly 25% (18 men) who reported being refused entry to a group setting? We need to know more about why, when and where men were refused entry. Was it direct or implied? Was it in an infant group with breast-feeding moms or a group with older children? Was it recent or 10 years ago? Was the father a new or a long-time caregiver? Did the community know him?

As for the 55% of fathers who indicate that their parenting skills are criticized or corrected in a public setting, this does seem to be a recurring problem, especially for fathers of infants. According to the Daddy Dialectic survey and many recent media articles, fathers who are forced into primary caregiving roles during this man-cession, can still face those ‘looks’ and questions from friends, an elderly neighbor, and the ever-present ‘woman at the grocery store’.

I also see positive changes. Looking back 20 years, many stay-at-home dads and single fathers did face serious discrimination as they tried to navigate through, what one of the fathers in my book Do Men Mother? called ‘estrogen filled worlds’. That was long before daddy blogging and the daddy shift. Today, many caregiving men have the support of their breadwinning partners and/or kin networks, access to amazing dads groups, and an overwhelming litany of online and community resources. Like women who enter work fields dominated by the other gender, men are also actively creating their own networks (often through children’s athletic activities) – and their own playgroups.

Mothers, of course, are also targeted with criticism, although in different ways (which Smith also notes). Some of the breadwinning mothers I’ve recently interviewed avoid those same playgroups that are turning some fathers away.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of radical change in daddy discrimination is a Canadian couple I’ve interviewed several times over the last 10 years. When Richard, a former mechanic, started staying home in 2000, he and his wife Aileen told me that “nobody spoke to him in the playgroups”. He kept going. By 2001, he went to three weekly playgroups as well as a library group. He also began caring for a few children in his home. Yet his desire to open his own day care was continually greeted with disapproval and rejection. The reason: he was male.

After four years of patiently waiting, Richard was finally granted a licence to open his daycare. In 2009, he told me: “The praise that I receive from the parents and the agency personnel and mostly the love I feel from the kids, make this the most satisfying job ever”.

Richard also captures the incredible change for men in community settings along with a subtle reminder that full gender parity on this issue remains a formidable challenge:

“Today my daycare is full with 5 kids and I have 8 kids on my waiting list who want to come to my daycare specifically. But I am not accepted by all. Some parents refuse to have a man as childcare provider. And I can respect that. But to many, it is an alternative they favor.”

Playground and playgroup discrimination, where and when it occurs, is undoubtedly an uncomfortable experience. The Daddy Dialectic’s survey was, according to Smith, meant to be a “catalyst for conversation”. I want to add a few questions to this ‘daddy discrimination’ conversation: What key changes are fathers observing on this issue over time in their own communities? What is supporting or inhibiting that change? What challenges remain, where and why? What can mothers, fathers, community organizations, policy activists and feminist scholars do to help facilitate more father-inclusion? Is it reasonable to accept some women-only, as well as men-only, spaces when it comes to caregiving?

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?

This week, Girlw/Pen writers are posting 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. Coontz explores the impact of Friedan’s work through archival research and interviews with nearly 200 women and men who read the book when it came out in 1963. A Strange Stirring makes the story of feminism contextual, approachable, personal…and hopeful. I’m a scholar of this area, but Coontz’s book put me in touch with The Feminine Mystique and the generation’s experience it documented, and gave me a way into conversations that I suspect will be part of the book’s impact on many people who read this accessible, compelling book.

While reading A Strange Stirring, the people I wanted to talk to were men who were becoming adults back then. So, I asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell me their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963.

They read my columns at GWP, so they knew where I am coming from. They are white, college-educated, professional men who have lived comfortable though not always peaceful lives, and when The Feminine Mystique was published, each was married and raising their families of late-wave baby boomers. “Mad Men” might give you a pretty good picture of the world they lived and worked in. Indeed, every time I watch that show, I map the experience depicted there onto the way I imagine the wallpaper of these men’s minds (as well as these men’s wives.) That said, these guys were not boozing or philandering (as far as I know!), and only one of them was smoking. (And you can thank Coontz’s column for making the “Mad Men” connection so clear to me.)

What they said made me confident that the message of The Feminine Mystique was a legitimate one in its time. One of my friends said:

Looking back, I recall how different I assumed women were from men. For me, the Human Race had two types of participants: men and women. Both were members of the Race but men were the real representatives and transmitters of the Race. Women were a necessary and wonderful part of the Race but they were not “real” members (you should pardon the expression). So, I saw all women through the prism of “different,” and implicitly inferior because they were not “equal.” Women were similar but not the “same.”

My other friend put it more starkly: He said: “I was one of those arch male-chauvinist pigs that one used to hear about. When TFM first came out, I readily dismissed it in that I heard (never read it) all kinds of things — the usual anti-family etc. [claims].”

Then they described how they changed. In their recounting, their change came as a consequence of their experiences with women at work who were competent, capable, ambitious, serious-minded. Out in the world—with more and more women out there too—these two men were able to learn that women had sexual desires that were no different from what they understood “men’s desire” to be. And from what I know about my two friends, they continued to work in their professional lives from the 1970s to the present to counteract sexism in hiring, to promote women in leadership, and to mentor young women (like me!) with the same tenacity and high standards that they mentored young men.

But here’s the other piece, and it brings us back to Coontz’s book: these guys recalled the past with some regret, managing with dignity to fight against being defensive. This was a “touchy subject” they said. They “simmered” before answering my questions. I think that was because they had been contained in the same culture that Friedan’s women were. The conversation we opened moves me, and gives me hints of just how much change there has been (as Coontz writes) and also why and how after so much progress gender inequality can persist…and be so sneaky.

A Strange Stirring rightly reminds us about Friedan’s neglect of racism, economic inequality, and homophobia. Coontz writes about her skepticism at the beginning of her project about the The Feminine Mystique because of these absences: but she concludes that the work speaks to a common experience, and made a meaningful, progressive, and humane difference in the lives of many women. I would suggest also in the lives of many men.

Coontz gives us the means to recall the past with full understanding and compassion for women and for men. I think dialogues about the status of women in society and about feminism will improve, thanks to this book. Stephanie Coontz has quite a track record for doing so with her other books (such as The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage) as well as her public education endeavors with the Council on Contemporary Families.

Stay tuned for more on Coontz and A Strange Stirring this week.

-Virginia Rutter

I’m collaborating on a study of traumatic childbearing experiences, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the types of injuries that can occur as a result of pregnancies, labors, and different types of deliveries.  My research partner forwarded me a recent blog post on a board-certified urogynecologist’s website titled “Cesarean on Demand Does Not Eliminate Risk of Prolapse.”  This post highlights the findings of a 2009 research article published in the International Urogynecology Journal. In this research, three groups of women were studied: “vaginal delivery with sphincter tear (n = 106), vaginal delivery without sphincter tear (n = 108), and cesarean without labor (n = 39).” [The numbers reflect how many women were in each of the three groups.]

Now, I’m no urogynecologist, but I found it hard to believe that c-sections “on demand” (a.k.a. without labor) would not at least reduce the risk of pelvic floor damage, including pelvic organ prolapse (pelvic organs “slipping out of place” when the supportive muscles and ligaments are weakened or torn).  Prolapse can greatly impact the health and quality of life: for example, women with prolapse may suffer one or both types of incontinence and/or painful sexual intercourse.

I recognize that many medical practitioners, authors and laypeople have come to believe we have too high a rate of c-sections here in the U.S.  Research studies, such as the one celebrated in the recent blog post, call into question whether there are any health benefits of c-sections without labor.  As a medical sociologist who teaches research methods, I consider it to be of utmost importance to discuss research findings with the highest degree of accuracy.  No study is perfect: no study is without bias and no study is without limitations.  So, I read the complete research article to find out if it truly supported the blog author’s contention that these researchers “found NO DIFFERENCE in moderate prolapse between the three groups.” 

I was struck by significant methodological flaws and limitations which, while acknowledged by the authors of the original article, were glossed over or flat out ignored by the author of the blog post.  I found myself asking several questions:

Question #1: how healthy were the women before this childbearing experience?  No one knows: the researchers admit, “our findings cannot be attributed with certainty to delivery method, since some women may have developed prolapse before delivery or pregnancy and prolapse was not assessed prior to delivery in this population.” 

Question #2: who were the women who participated in this study?  The women for this study were recruited from prior studies performed through the Pelvic Floor Disorders Network, specifically from the follow-up study to their CAPS Study (which focused on “fecal and urinary incontinence after childbirth”).  How can we rule out a self-selection bias of those women who said “yes” when they were recruited to this initial study?  Could it be certain women who had C-sections, perhaps those feeling some pelvic/vaginal discomfort immediately following delivery were more likely to say “yes” because they saw value in being interviewed about incontinence?

Question #3: did the researchers recruit enough women for each of the three groups to be able to answer their main question?  No.  The authors wrap up their article by noting that “further research would be required to determine whether cesarean delivery before labor reduces the incidence of pelvic organ prolapse.”  So, this research doesn’t actually determine anything about what they claim as their primary research question.  Why not?  The short answer is that they never got enough women to participate.  The authors claim that they would have needed 132 women per group in order to test the statistical significance of the difference in rates of stage II prolapse between those women who had C-sections without labor and those women who had vaginal deliveries.  While they got reasonably close to their sample size goal of 132 for the two vaginal delivery groups (106 and 108), they only got 39 women to participate in the C-section group.  Is this acceptable?  Statistical significance is key to evaluating any study because it means that the results are “probably true (not due to chance).”  The researchers finally own up to the likely irrelevance of their study towards the end of the published journal article: “Furthermore, our sample size was not sufficiently large to exclude a significant difference between groups.”  In plain language: they didn’t study enough women to know whether or not there are not real differences between the health outcomes for women who have c-sections without labor and those experience other types of labor and delivery.

Question #4: can the researchers say anything definitive that might help improve women’s health?  Hmmm.  The only factor they definitively connect with less pelvic floor damage is lower birth weight: I’m betting that it won’t surprise many to find out that smaller babies causes less damage.  But, what are we supposed to do with this finding? 

The author of that recent blog post dares to call it a “beautifully executed study,” and that’s why I had to wrote this post: to help those of us who are not medical researchers better understand what we should value and what we should question when it comes to research studies that can impact women’s health.

A mere 3% of books published in the U.S. each year are translations.  An even smaller number of these books are written by women.  What are the obstacles facing women writers around the world?  What are their successes?  Given the different barriers surrounding literary production and distribution, how can U.S. readers find excellent fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays by women writing and publishing outside of the U.S.?

Read about the experience of Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur in the new column Jean Casella (former editorial director and publisher of the Feminist Press) and I are co-editing over at She Writes.  Jean’s debut post introduces readers to Shahrnush Parsipur’s story and her books, which include the novels Touba and the Meaning of Night and Women Without Men, recently made into a film by Shirin Neshat.

What we know: the dudes are getting better at childcare and housework, and the ladies are easing off. But are they undoing gender? If so, how much? Men have increased the average amount of childcare and housework they do each week from 12, in 1965, to 21, in 2000. Meanwhile, women have decreased their hours in the same tasks from 53 to 41 hours. Also note that these days, women now provide about 43 percent of household income.

So, there’s progress. It even looks like “convergence.” But there’s “something” that keeps dragging us back into the past, into unequal shares of domestic work, that gives us the feeling that there may be more for us to look at than counting hours of care and percentage points of household income.

Take the case of sleep. New research in Gender & Society (abstract) illustrates how even in dual-earner families, men’s sleep takes priority over women’s sleep. Sleep is valuable for short term health and mental functioning and long-term well-being related to things like immune function and maintaining a healthy weight. Sleep matters.

How’d they learn this? Sociologists David Maume, Rachel Sebastian (University of Cincinnati) and Anthony Bardo (Miami University) interviewed 25 white, two-earner, heterosexual families where at least one partner was employed in the food services industry. Partners were interviewed separately in order to learn about how these families organize their sleep routines.

The women wake up more because they are largely the “default parent.” That means they wake up for the kids, for problem solving, for doing things for the men. The men’s paid work (and their need to be rested for it) took priority. The women even expected themselves—and the men they were with expected them—to stick around in the “marital bed” even when the men’s snoring kept them awake. In the mornings, men woke up refreshed, women woke up tired, just in time to rejoin an endless cycle of falling behind and playing catch up again.

Any exceptions? Overall the researchers found that of the 25 couples they interviewed, 4 qualified as equal partners—where men and women were similarly engaged in all kinds of childcare and domestic work. The remainder were couples that were “pragmatic egalitarians”–accepting the practical necessity of both partner’s working. For these couples the men were committed to gender essentialism—a deep seated belief that women really are the appropriate and natural caregivers at home. You know, the “they’re better at it” view. They also found that some of the women held a “family first philosophy” and the rest spent time worrying about their partner’s qualifications for caring.

So, there’s something about sleep here, but there’s something about marriage here, too. While all of these couples had some features that looked like they were “egalitarian,” they weren’t living up to the dream. That seems to be harder than we thought. Back in the 1990s Pepper Schwartz looked for truly egalitarian couples when she did her research on peer marriage. She found a lot of couples who thought they were egalitarian, but they were what she called “near peers,” recreating subtle and not so subtle versions of traditional gender roles. Let’s celebrate the changes since Schwartz’s Love Between Equals – there’s more convergence of roles and opportunities for men and women in families with each passing year. But let’s stay on the look out, as Maume and colleagues did, for the ways that couples recreate gender inequality.

–Virginia Rutter

My daughter Maya turns 10 today.  You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.  Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however).

Now that I can talk about motherhood in terms of decades (well, at least a decade) instead of just years, it feels like a big deal for me, too.

In fact, motherhood has been getting a lot of media play these days.  If recent coverage is any indication, we’re either too harsh or too self-involved.  Consider the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s Why Chinese Mother’s are Superior excerpt in The Wall Street Journal and Judith Warner’s roundup of recent memoirs in The New York Times. Warner claims that in contrast with their own feminist moms, today’s mothers are turning inward and embracing home and family with a “deep desire for rules and regularity”

Neither the overbearing mother nor the self-involved ones hunkering down at home sound especially new to me (Freud, anyone, or Cinderella?).  But I am wondering where I fit into these public accounts of motherhood and how to define my own mothering.

For example, learning to ski would certainly have been low on my list of life pursuits before parenting despite growing up in the Northeast Ohio snowbelt.  Now as a steward of my kids’ (I have a 7-year-old son as well) health, I try to cultivate an active lifestyle and exercise habits that can serve them throughout their lives.  Thus the skiing lessons, which I have found that I love, and which allow me and my kids to learn something together.

And while I have given a lot of thought to teaching students about social constraints and feminist responses to them, I have also discovered that it’s altogether different teaching my children how to be change agents.  For one thing, I have my children for more than a semester, so if I get things wrong we can always try again!

Last year Maya ran for class representative and found herself in a runoff, which she lost, much to her disappointment.  Talking at home later she explained that she voted for a classmate in the first round because she “wanted to give someone else a chance.”

Although her generosity of spirit is one of her admirable qualities, I explained that it is sometimes fine and even important to pursue what you want.  That is, if you want to be class representative, vote for yourself.

This year, I’m happy to report that Maya was elected class representative.  But before you congratulate me for offering a successful lesson on assertiveness, I should add that Maya explained that she did not vote for herself in the first round of balloting: she voted for a friend, and the friend voted for her.

That same friend and Maya spent their Martin Luther King Day “on” by selling “Cocoa for a Cause” at our local sledding hill and donating the proceeds to an area soup kitchen.  They raised $47.

Sometimes working together is the best way to make a difference.  That’s not a bad vision for either of us to have as we enter double digits as mother and daughter.

And GWP readers, what’s your take on the latest mommy wars? Do you have favorite accounts of motherhood to share, and what does feminist mothering look like?