{"id":2110,"date":"2011-02-08T17:57:11","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T22:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2011-02-08T17:57:11","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T22:57:11","slug":"mama-wpen-how-the-choices-of-our-generation-are-shaped-by-the-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2011\/02\/08\/mama-wpen-how-the-choices-of-our-generation-are-shaped-by-the-last\/","title":{"rendered":"MAMA W\/PEN: How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last*"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This is the fifth and final in a series this week from Girlw\/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz\u2018s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s<\/a>, which is a biography of Betty Friedan\u2019s iconic book.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m obsessed, you could say, with second-wave feminism\u2019s legacy.\u00a0\u00a0 Questions like \u201cHow has feminism\u2019s past shaped its future?\u201d and \u201cWhy are battles begun 40 years ago so damn difficult, still, to win?\u201d keep me up at night.\u00a0 So when I first heard that Stephanie Coontz<\/a>\u2014a pre-eminent social historian, and one tremendously adept at translating feminist research for popular audiences via the New York Times<\/em> op-ed page no less\u2014was writing a cultural history of The Feminine Mystique<\/em>, I nearly peed in my pants.<\/p>\n

Foremost on my mind was the question I hoped would be addressed: \u201cWhat\u2019s the relevance of The Feminine Mystique<\/em>\u2014book and concept\u2014today?\u201d<\/strong> Coontz\u2019s book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s<\/em>, did not let me down.\u00a0 But I\u2019m finding that in the wake of finishing it, I\u2019m more than a little depressed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As ever, the personal is political.\u00a0 And vise versa.\u00a0 I can\u2019t help but read this social history through personal history\u2014my own.\u00a0 Last week, after a year and a half of equally shared parenting<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Overnight, I became Primary Parent, Emergency Contact, and Master Coordinator for our beloved 15-month old twins.\u00a0 I wrote\u2014bitterly, I now confess\u2014about the first day of the new arrangement at my other blog<\/a>.\u00a0 The source of my knee-jerk bitterness?\u00a0 Though still a working woman, I feared being swallowed by the feminine mystique.\u00a0 Is this feminism unfinished, or undone?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The feminine mystique.\u00a0 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. <\/strong> I won\u2019t go so far as to say we\u2019re haunted the way children of Holocaust survivors are (Betty Friedan wrote about the home as a \u201ccomfortable concentration camp\u201d–she also, of course, and as Coontz expertly rehearses, wrote SO much more), but let\u2019s just say that the term \u201cfeminine mystique\u201d conjures up a vortex that women like me\u2014highly educated, high-earning potential\u2014dread.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Granted, to cut back momentarily (and temporarily) on paid work is not exactly the same as embracing the feminine mystique, but mentally it\u2019s a slippery slope. <\/strong>I think back to Charlotte from Sex and the City<\/em> at the very moment she quits her job at the art gallery to stay home: \u201cI choose my choice! I choose my choice!\u201d she doth protest–too much.\u00a0 That first shakey day at home, I spewed the opposite: \u201cI didn\u2019t sign up for this.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>–I\u00a0 came to my senses and realized that not much in my life had changed from the one day to this next.\u00a0 Except that it had.\u00a0 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 \u201cStay-at-Homes\u201d and \u201cWorking Moms\u201d really are<\/strong>.\u00a0 At one point or another, we are each other.\u00a0 And the reason for our resentment-filled (and highly media-fueled, let’s face it) fighting, apparently, is that we are largely unsatisfied ourselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Coontz notes in the final chapter (\u201cWomen, Men, Marriage, and Work Today: Is the Feminine Mystique Dead?\u201d), a chapter in which I found myself underlining every other word, wives who work paid jobs and those who don\u2019t say they\u2019d like to switch roles<\/strong> (according to a study conducted 10 years ago that is).\u00a0 \u201cIn 2000 25% of the wives who worked full-time said they would prefer to be homemakers.\u00a0 On the other hand, 40 percent of all wives without paying jobs said they would rather be employed.\u201d\u00a0 Those who work wish they could be working less<\/strong>\u2014and that applies to men as well as women.<\/p>\n

Why are so many men and women with families unhappy with their lot?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because the job of feminism is far from done. <\/strong>Blinded, now, by the workforce ideal that \u201cdefines the ideal employee\u2014male or female\u2014as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work\u201d (some call it, as Coontz points out, the “career mystique”), our culture replaced one mystique with the next.\u00a0 And no one, so far, has had the power to take this new mystique down.<\/p>\n

The moment for Career Mystique warriors has come.\u00a0 They are out there already, rattling our collective cage. <\/strong> Conversations at places like Role\/Reboot<\/a> and Daddy Dialectic<\/a> and The Council on Contemporary Families<\/a> and work+life fit<\/a> and Viva la Feminista<\/a> and Pundit Mom<\/a> and The Motherlode<\/a> lead us in the charge.\u00a0 And in the meantime, books like The Feminine Mystique <\/em>remain relevant\u2014all the more so\u2014because their missions remain incomplete.<\/p>\n

*Title inspired by the last line of Lisa Belkin’s recent post, “New Fears of Flying”<\/a> over at The Motherlode.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the fifth and final in a series this week from Girlw\/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz\u2018s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan\u2019s iconic book. I\u2019m obsessed, you could say, with second-wave feminism\u2019s legacy.\u00a0\u00a0 Questions like \u201cHow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21107],"tags":[39268,13676,8959,245,21351,71,21554,3109,21938,1008],"class_list":["post-2110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mama-w-pen","tag-book-publishing","tag-childcare","tag-families","tag-feminism","tag-feminist-history","tag-intergenerational","tag-marriage-today","tag-motherhood","tag-worklife","tag-workplace"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}