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ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE WAS HOSTILE toward marriage and that Friedan herself was a “man hater,” nothing could be further from the truth. Friedan may have disdained the mundane details of housework, but she was consistently, almost romantically, optimistic about heterosexual love and marriage in a world where women were men’s equals. She was, after all, a woman who once suggested that her tombstone read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”
The final paragraphs of The Feminine Mystique look forward to a day when “women’s intelligence . . . can be nourished without denying love.” When women do not need to find their meaning in life solely through their mates’ achievements, Friedan predicted, wives will be less “destructive to their husbands,” men will no longer need to “fear the love and strength of women,” and girls, seeing their mothers’ fulfillment, will be even more “sure that they want to be women.”
Who knows what possibilities may exist for love, Friedan asked, when men and women “can finally see each other as they are” and when they can share “not only children, home, and garden . . . but the responsibilities and passions” of creative work?
Friedan’s optimism that expanding educational and professional opportunities for women would improve marriage seemed crazy to marriage experts of her day. Sociologists were convinced that marital stability depended upon men specializing in earning income and women specializing in caring for home and children, with husband and wife exchanging their own distinctive products and services.
Conventional wisdom held that marital harmony would be threatened if a woman acquired educational and economic resources of her own. As one early-twentieth-century marriage expert put it, women who succeeded in school or work acquired “a self-assertive, independent character, which renders it impossible to love, honor, and obey.” Right up to the 1980s, sociologists and economists such as Gary Becker insisted that a woman with her own resources had less incentive to marry and was less attractive as a potential mate. If such a woman did marry, she was more likely to divorce than other females because she had the resources to walk away if she was dissatisfied. This was called the “independence effect.”
For generations, the independence effect seemed like a law of nature. Female college graduates and career women were considerably less likely to marry than women with less education. If a married woman took a job, the couple was in fact more likely to divorce. And just as the independence effect predicted, divorce rates soared as women poured into the labor force in the late 1960s and 1970s. By 1980, when Becker was sending his Treatise on the Family to press, half of all American marriages were ending in divorce.
But a few years later, this seemingly eternal economic principle unraveled. History has shown that in the long run, Betty Friedan came closer to the truth than did her critics. Although initially divorce rates rose as more wives went to work, that trend reversed after the mid-1980s. As working wives became more common and the momentum of the women’s movement continued to overturn old inequities at home and on the job, the divorce rate began to fall. The divorce rate dropped from a peak of 22.8 per 1,000 couples in 1979 to 16.7 per 1,000 couples by 2005. Today divorce rates tend to be lowest in states where more than 70 percent of married women work outside the home.
Women no longer need to choose between completing their education and having a family. The difference between marriage rates for female college graduates and women with less education has almost disappeared. Earning a master’s degree is now perfectly compatible with becoming both a Mrs. and a mom.
Educated women tend to marry and have children later than other women, but unlike during the 1960s, marrying later is now associated with a lower-than-average chance of divorce. In fact, divorce rates for educated women have fallen so much that such women are now more likely to be married at age thirty-five and forty than their less-educated counterparts. Educated couples, especially those with egalitarian gender views, also report the highest marital quality.
And fewer educated women than in the past are forgoing motherhood. As late as 1992-1994, 30 percent of forty- to forty-four-year-old women with a master’s degree and 34 percent of women with a PhD were childless. As of 2006-2008, that was true of only 25 percent of forty- to forty-four-year-old women with a master’s degree and only 23 percent of such women with a PhD.
High-earning women have also experienced a marked change in marriage prospects. Analyzing Current Population Surveys from the early twenty-first century, economist Heather Boushey found that women between twenty-eight and thirty-five who worked full-time and earned more than $55,000 a year were just as likely to be married as other working women of the same age. According to sociologist Christine Whelan, 88 percent of women thirty to forty-four earning more than $100,000 per year are married, compared to 82 percent of other women. Mate selection surveys reveal that men now find educated women and career women much more attractive as marriage partners than in the past, and are far less likely to feel threatened by a woman who earns as much or more than they.
The specialization into separate gender roles that supposedly stabilized marriages in the 1950s and 1960s actually raises the risk of divorce today. As late as 1980, a wife’s employment was associated with higher marital conflict. But by 2000, marriages in which wives were employed outside the home had less conflict and fewer marital problems than male-breadwinner marriages. Marriages in which one partner earns all the income and the other does all the housework are now more likely to split up than marriages in which husbands and wives each do some bread-winning and homemaking.
The independence effect has also benefited women who choose not to marry (or are not allowed to do so under current law). Unmarried heterosexual women and lesbians have many more options than they did half a century ago. Women who have left abusive or unloving husbands report being much happier than did divorced women in the 1950s. And unwed and divorced women face much less social stigma and discrimination than in the past.
Even stay-at-home wives benefit from the independence effect. It was working wives who first pressed husbands to take on more responsibilities at home, and the longer a wife works outside the home, the more housework her husband tends to do. But these new norms have trickled down to male-breadwinner families as well, with the result that men in all families now perform significantly more housework and child care than in the past. Comparative studies of Western nations find that the higher the proportion of women in a country’s workforce, the more housework men do, even when their own spouse is not employed.
In the United States in 1980, fully 29 percent of wives reported that their husbands did no housework. Twenty years later that figure had fallen to 16 percent, while one-third of American wives reported that their husbands did half or more of the housework and/or the child care.
It should come as no surprise that when one spouse does substantially more housework than the other, that spouse reports lower marital quality than the one who does less work. But husbands and wives who share the housework more equitably report above-average levels of marital happiness. Couples who share housework also spend more leisure time together, which is another plus for marital satisfaction.
When a man is not sure whether he is doing his fair share of housework, he might want to be “better safe than sorry.” Two big predictors of a man’s marital happiness are how little criticism he gets and how much sex he gets. Several studies confirm that a wife who feels the division of housework is fair is less likely to feel critical toward her husband and more likely to feel sexually attracted to him. A 2006 survey conducted by Neil Chetnik found that the happier a woman was with the division of household chores, the happier her husband was with his sex life. A fifteen-year study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concluded in 2006 that wives also feel more “marital intimacy” when husbands perform more child care. (But when husbands and wives work split shifts to maximize parental time with children, this lowers each spouse’s reports of love for the other.)
Fatigue is the biggest cause of decreased sexual desire for both homemakers and employed women, but surprisingly, employed women do not report fatigue at a higher rate than homemakers. Whether a woman is a homemaker or works a paid job—part-time, full-time, or even more than full-time—does not affect the couple’s sexual satisfaction or the frequency of sex. But job satisfaction does. Couples in which both husband and wife feel they have rewarding jobs report the greatest sexual satisfaction.
Another counterintuitive finding is that couples who spend more time at paid work and more time on housework have more sex than couples who supposedly have more time on their hands. It appears that women and men who work hard together and have fun at it also tend to play hard together and have fun at that too.
The increased participation of wives in paid work has had its downside. Dual-earner couples raising children, especially young children, report that they almost always feel rushed and that the constant multitasking they must engage in is stressful. Employed married mothers have nine fewer hours of free time per week, and get three hours less sleep, than stay-at-home married moms. And when wives work above-average weeks of forty-five hours or more, marital quality tends to fall.
Marital quality also suffers when wives who do not want to work are forced into employment. People are generally happier—and they make those around them happier—when they are doing something they want to do. Women who want to work and men who approve of their wives working have higher marital quality than couples where one or both are unhappy about the wife’s working.
Unfortunately, men and women often don’t get their first choice when it comes to family-work arrangements. In 2000, 25 percent 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. Forty percent of employed women and a third of employed men would like to reduce their work hours.
Couples in which the wife works solely because of financial constraints but would rather stay at home, or where the husband wants to be the sole provider but cannot achieve that goal, have experienced declining marital satisfaction since 1980, even as couples with secure middle-class jobs have reported increased marital satisfaction. Lower marital quality is especially likely among couples where the man refuses to help out at home when his wife goes to work. And whatever their education or income level, when wives hold high standards for equality of housework and their husbands do not meet their expectations, they report worse-than-average marital satisfaction.
Still, Friedan’s claim that, on average, independence is good for women and good for their partners holds up across the board. Women who work outside the home have higher self-esteem and lower lifetime rates of depression than full-time homemakers. And married mothers with high-prestige jobs report greater well-being than any other group of women.
Men have also benefited from the increased flexibility that female independence gives families. Men who entered the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s often had to spend their whole life at jobs they disliked because of the pressure to be the sole provider, and they almost invariably report feeling regret for the time they missed with their children and envy for the greater intimacy their sons or grandsons have with their own kids.
DO ALL THESE CHANGES MEAN THAT WOMEN ARE “FREE TO BE THEMSELVES” today? Have we reached the point that men and women can, as Friedan predicted, “finally see each other as they are,” rather than through the distorted lens of gender stereotypes?
Societal attitudes toward women—and women’s attitudes toward themselves—have been revolutionized in the decades since Friedan’s book hit the stores. The mass media now regularly portray women as capable, gutsy, powerful, and smart. And in real life, Hillary Clinton nearly won the nomination for president in 2008, while Sarah Palin ran for vice president, drawing little criticism for taking on such a demanding task while the mother of five children, one of them an infant with Down syndrome.
In her book When Everything Changed, Gail Collins describes the new territory that opened up during each decade of the “amazing journey” American women undertook between 1960 and the early twenty-first century. In 1970, Collins reports, the dean of the University of Texas dental school limited females to 2 percent of all admissions, because “girls aren’t strong enough to pull teeth.” But by the turn of the twenty-first century, perhaps buffed up by their exploding participation in sports over the previous three decades, women made up 40 percent of dental school graduates. Today women receive a majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and in 2007 they pulled even with men as new recipients of PhDs.
Women’s academic achievement is no longer confined to traditional “women’s” fields such as literature or social work. On July 25, 2008—sixteen years after the talking Barbie doll chirped “math class is tough”—Science magazine reported that the long-standing gap between high school boys and girls on standardized math tests had disappeared. Today high school girls take as many advanced math classes as the boys, and women now earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and in the biological and agricultural sciences.
As late as 1970, less than 8 percent of physicians were female. Today women are a full quarter of all practicing physicians and compose nearly half the enrollment in medical schools. In 1972, women were only 3 percent of all licensed attorneys; by 2008, nearly one-third of all lawyers in the United States were female. As of 2009, women accounted for 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs. We have had two consecutive female secretaries of state, and currently three women sit on the Supreme Court.
But the glass ceiling is not yet shattered. A March 2010 study by the American Association of University Women found that among postdoctoral applicants, women had to publish three more papers in the most prestigious journals, or twenty more in the less prestigious ones, to be considered as productive as male applicants. Female legislators compose less than 20 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives. In the television news industry, two-thirds of the news producers, but only 20 percent of the news directors, are female.
Men make up more than three-quarters of all workers earning more than $100,000 a year, and as of 2010, women ran only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies. At the other end of the wage spectrum, women remain disproportionately concentrated in the low-wage retail and service sectors of the economy.
Women are still plagued by many of the same mixed messages that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s. Catalyst, an organization formed in 1962 to help women enter the workforce, surveyed more than 1,200 senior executives in the United States and Europe and titled its 2007 report “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t.” The organization found that when women “act assertively, focus on work tasks, display ambition,” or engage in other behaviors that receive high praise when done by men, they are perceived as “too tough” and “unfeminine.” But when women pay attention to work relationships and express “concern for other people’s perspective,” they are considered less competent than men.
Housewives and stay-at-home mothers don’t get a free pass either. Although they are seldom portrayed as the smothering matriarchal figures described in postwar diatribes, polls and surveys show that other Americans consistently rate housewives low in competence, often classing them with other stigmatized groups, such as the disabled and elderly.
Many women still internalize a self-effacing definition of femininity that reinforces second-class status. Young women are four times less likely than young men to negotiate their first salary to a higher level, and economists estimate that this unwillingness to assert their own monetary worth ends up costing women $500,000 in earnings by the time they reach age sixty.
Nevertheless, the feminine mystique may now be less of a barrier to gender equality than the “masculine mystique.” A recent study of middle school students in a southeastern American city found that the feminine stereotypes that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s were virtually dead. Not one girl interviewed by researchers Barbara Risman and Elizabeth Searle thought she had to play dumb or act “feminine” around boys. Girls aspired to be strong and smart, and they admired girls who were. None of them felt it would be inappropriate for a girl to do things that used to be called masculine, whether physical or academic.
But attitudes about masculinity had not moved all that far. If a boy participated in activities or expressed feelings traditionally viewed as feminine, he was teased, bullied, or ostracized. The boys harshly policed one another to make sure no one was “acting like a girl” and they were quick to label boys who did not conform to the “manliness” code as “gay.” The girls did not normally initiate such bullying or teasing, but they usually acquiesced to it.
Even as adults, some men still see masculinity as a zero-sum game where gains in female achievements or power take something away from their own identity. These men provide a ready audience for the shock jocks, TV shows, and video games that celebrate male violence and sexually objectify women even more crassly than was deemed acceptable in the past.
In historical perspective, however, the change in attitudes about gender has been enormous. One reason The Feminine Mystique seems dated today is that most of the belittling claims about women’s nature that Friedan rebuts have dropped out of mainstream culture. Few people today believe—or at least admit believing—that “being feminine means being submissive,” that the normal woman “renounces all active goals of her own . . . to identify and fulfill herself through the activities and goals of her husband, or son,” or that femininity can be “destroyed by education.” The idea that females are naturally passive or that their highest fulfillment comes from being a “happy housewife” is viewed as hopelessly retro.
And despite the raunchy, antifemale rhetoric that pervades so much of popular culture, most men have improved their attitudes and behavior considerably. Sexual assaults by young men against young women have dropped dramatically in the past two decades. Domestic violence rates have also fallen sharply. And men in families perform much more child care and housework than at any time in the past hundred years.
But two new feminine mystiques stand in the way of the equality and harmony Friedan envisioned. The first—the hottie mystique—reaches its height during the teen years and the early twenties, before most young women are thinking seriously about marriage and motherhood. The second—the supermom mystique—kicks in not at marriage, as did the happy housewife ideology, but at childbirth.
The middle school girls Risman and Searle interviewed had rejected the old behavioral norms for femininity. They did not feel there was anything they must do or could not do because they were female. But they held strong beliefs about how they must or must not look. Appearing “hot” was mandatory, although looking “slutty”—a distinction clearer to the girls than to their parents—threatened a girl’s social standing. The interviewers were astonished by how preoccupied the girls were with the “right” display of their sexuality—through clothes, makeup, hairstyle, and even how they walked and talked.
Such pressure to look sexy starts even before middle school. The Barbie doll, whose large, pointy breasts made 1950s parents nervous about buying one for preteens, is now a toy that most marketers—and children themselves—feel is appropriate for the three- to six-year-old crowd. By 2006, Margaret Talbot reported in the New Yorker, girls in the age range that used to buy Barbie dolls were clamoring for Bratz dolls, whose facial features and revealing clothes made them resemble Girls Gone Wild participants. Barbie’s marketers responded to the challenge with “My Bling Bling Barbie,” described on the Web site as wearing “an ultra hot halter top and sassy skirt sooo scorchin’.”
Sexuality researchers find that most young girls don’t associate the sexy clothes they want with sex itself. They just think it’s cool to look like a big girl. But so much emphasis on looks can be dangerous. By age nine, half of all girls report having been on a diet, and by the eighth grade, 80 percent of girls say they are dieting. According to a February 19, 2007, report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, an early emphasis on being sexy can not only push a girl into initiating sex before she is emotionally ready but can also stunt the full development of her other interests and competencies.
What Betty Friedan labeled “The Sexual Sell” in one chapter of The Feminine Mystique may be more pervasive and powerful than ever. Even though the students to whom I assigned Friedan’s book found most of it irrelevant to their contemporary concerns, they responded viscerally to that chapter and to another called “The Sex Seekers.” Almost all testified to the pressures they felt not only to buy consumer goods but to present themselves as objects to be consumed. In Friedan’s day, commented one, “women were supposed to accessorize and display their homes. Now women—and increasingly men too—are supposed to accessorize and display our bodies.” Many suggested that Sex and the City was simply an updated version of the marketing myth Friedan exposed back in 1963, falsely promising women they will be empowered by buying more things and having more orgasms.
Yet while the hottie mystique may hold many teens and young women in its thrall, by their late twenties or early thirties most contemporary women have learned to integrate their search for sexual or romantic fulfillment with a range of aspirations and interests far broader than those available to women in the past. Although their options are still constrained by inequalities connected to race and class, young women know they have more choices than ever before. If they marry, they are far less likely to enter unequal and constricting relationships than did their grandmothers. If they do not marry, they can still have satisfying and productive lives.
Once a woman becomes a mother, however, her options tend to narrow. New limits, mystiques, and mixed messages come into play. Motherhood may in fact have replaced gender as the primary factor constraining women’s choices.
Young childless women have made dramatic gains in the workplace, in part because of their growing educational advantage over men. Today in a number of major urban centers, including New York, Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, women between twenty-one and thirty earn more than men the same age. Nationwide, females in this age group earn almost 90 percent of what their male peers of the same age make, a much smaller wage gap than exists between older men and women. In addition, a growing proportion of wives outearn their husbands.
Perhaps these young women are the leading edge of a new wave of females who will be able to work alongside men on equal terms. But as things now stand, these same women are likely to fall behind their male peers once they have children. Many women who become mothers temporarily drop to part-time work or leave the workforce for a period of time. This creates a wage gap that continues to widen over the years, even after they return to full-time work, costing women hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their lives.
Meanwhile, women who stay on the job after they become mothers face new prejudices, along with outright discrimination. Employers and coworkers often assume they will be less committed and less effective at work, and many professional working women describe having had important projects or clients handed over to others after they had a child, even though they did not decrease their work hours.
In 2007, researchers at Stanford University constructed fake résumés that were identical in all respects except gender and parental status and asked college students to evaluate and rank them. The students consistently rated the supposed mothers as less competent than the nonmothers. Applicants identified as mothers were 79 percent less likely to be offered jobs, and when hired, they were offered an average of $11,000 a year less in salary. The students also held the mothers to higher standards of performance and punctuality than women with identical résumés but no children, and were much less likely to recommend them for promotion. When the researchers sent out similar résumés in response to more than six hundred actual job advertisements, applicants identified as childless received twice as many callbacks as the supposed mothers.
These penalties for motherhood may help to explain why, although almost 90 percent of women who earn $100,000 or more per year are married, half of them have not had children by age forty.
AMERICANS GREATLY VALUE THE IDEAL OF MOTHERHOOD, AND WE ALSO greatly value the work ethic. But we often find it difficult to value both at once. For impoverished women with children, society comes down firmly on the side of work. Poor women get no social kudos if they try to stay home with their infants. Instead they are pressured to find any job that gets them off public assistance, even one that pays less than poverty-level wages or requires them to leave their kids in inadequate child care and unsafe neighborhoods for ten hours a day. Yet many Americans simultaneously believe that the gold standard for middle-class women is stay-at-home mothering and that good mothering—the kind that middle-class children deserve—is incompatible with work outside the home.
Most people do not realize this, but contemporary mothers and fathers now spend more time with their children than parents did in 1965—and much more time than parents did in the first four decades of the early twentieth century. In fact, although employed mothers today spend less time in primary child-care activities than stay-at-home mothers do, they spend more time than stay-at-home mothers did at the time that The Feminine Mystique was published—the heyday of the male breadwinner-female homemaker family. Furthermore, husbands of employed mothers do more child care than husbands of full-time homemakers, and they have greater knowledge of their children’s interests, activities, and social networks.
Nevertheless, a new ideology of hands-on motherhood has taken root in some middle-class and affluent circles, one that requires a really good mother to devote herself to organizing a constant round of playdates, sports activities, enrichment experiences, and teachable moments for her children. In her book Perfect Madness, Judith Warner describes this ideology at its most extreme as the “mommy mystique”—an all-consuming search for perfection in child rearing, accompanied by an equally consuming anxiety that Mommy may have overlooked something.
While Friedan’s housewives were often haunted by the sense that they were not doing anything meaningful, the mothers Warner interviewed were convinced that every decision they made and every detail they controlled was incredibly meaningful, both for their children’s future and their own standing as good mothers. If 1950s housewives obsessed about the cleanliness of their kitchen and the whiteness of their laundry, these women obsessed over what snacks to take to school, where to hold a child’s birthday party, and what clothes and toys to buy for their children.
Still, the kind of obsessive mothering Warner describes is confined to a minority of mothers. And although the presence of even one such mom in a classroom or play circle can trigger immediate guilt in the rest of the mothers, there are signs of a growing reaction against overparenting.
A more insidious problem facing American women today is the tendency to pit stay-at-home moms against working moms as if the two groups had incompatible values and priorities—the “mommy-wars mystique.” Its premise is that mothers who stay home and mothers who work for pay are divided into two hostile camps, and we must take sides about which group is “right.”
Some pundits encourage women to opt out of the workforce to raise their children. Others, in the titles of two recent books, urge mothers to “Get to Work,” warning that if they quit work or downgrade their hours they are falling prey to “the Feminine Mistake.” But arguing about what choices a mother should make to resolve the caregiving crisis in contemporary America disregards the shared dilemmas all mothers face. It also misses the opportunity to make common cause with fathers on an issue that concerns them as well.
The mommy-wars mystique ignores the women who don’t have a choice either way. Some would like to opt out or cut back on work hours but cannot, either because their families need the money, or because in the United States the long-term financial and career penalties for part-time work are prohibitively large—often far out of proportion to the actual reduction in hours. Other women, whose families need the money even more, would like to get a job but cannot opt in because they don’t have access to affordable child care or cannot earn a wage that would cover their child care and transportation.
Paradoxically, the only group in which stay-at-home mothers outnumber those who combine paid work with parenting is women married to the most poorly paid men in the country. Of the women whose husbands’ earnings are in the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution, 52 percent are outside the paid labor force.
The second highest percentage of stay-at-home moms is found in families where the husband is in the top 5 percent of earners, making more than $120,000 a year. But even in this group, 60 percent of mothers work outside the home. Among wives whose husbands’ earnings are in the middle range, 80 percent work outside the home.
Another misconception promoted by the mommy-wars mystique is that educated professional mothers are abandoning work to stay home with their kids. In fact, highly educated women are more likely to combine work with motherhood than less-educated women, and less likely to take extended time off after childbirth. And such women are less likely to drop out of work after becoming mothers today than were their counterparts back in the 1960s and 1970s.
But educated women are the most likely to read the newspapers and magazines that repeat the myth that educated mothers like themselves are leaving the labor force in droves. This creates the impression that there is something deviant in their decision to continue working, which can make them, like their middle-class counterparts in the 1950s, feel guiltier about their choice to work than their working-class sisters.
The biggest problem with the mommy-wars mystique is that most women want the same basic things from work and family life. Only a minority of moms who work outside the home really want to return to full-time schedules as soon as they have exhausted their maternity leave, and an even smaller percentage of so-called opt-out mothers really want to leave paid employment completely.
For many working mothers who end up leaving their jobs, a more accurate description of their actions is that they were pushed out, says Joan Williams, director of work/life law at the University of California’s Hastings Law School. Williams’s claim is supported by sociologist Pamela Stone’s in-depth interviews with educated, professional women who quit work to stay home with their children. Stone found that in most cases, beneath the wistful assurance that this was “my choice,” the decision to quit work was usually taken as a last resort, after a woman’s employer rejected her request for more flexible hours or part-time work, or after her husband refused to adjust his own work schedule and household commitments so she could continue to work. Only 16 percent of the women Stone interviewed reported that their first preference had been to stay home with the children full-time.
The rigid work policies and practices that push some women out of their jobs when they become mothers also penalize women who freely leave work because they want to be with their children full-time. Most women who leave their jobs for family reasons plan to return to work within a few years. But in one recent study, more than a quarter of mothers who wanted to reenter the workforce were unable to do so, and many others had to take part-time jobs even though they wanted to work full-time.
Mothers pay a high price for whatever choices they make—or are forced to make. Working mothers find it hard to negotiate flex time or are looked down upon for doing so, and often run themselves ragged trying to juggle competing demands on their time. Women who temporarily opt out discover that their work as mothers counts for nothing when they try to find a new job. And full-time homemakers may find themselves dismissed by people they meet at parties or other events as “just a housewife.” Meanwhile, their husbands often put in longer work hours to make up for the loss of two incomes, cutting into the shared parenting time most modern couples hoped for when the baby was on the way.
These problems all have a common source. Despite the rhetorical reverence our society accords motherhood and fatherhood, in reality the everyday work of parenting garners little social respect and even less practical support.
Mirra Komarovsky pointed to this contradiction back in 1953, at the height of the feminine mystique, commenting on the oft-repeated assurance that motherhood was the most important and difficult job in the world. If society actually believed this, she remarked, “a nursery school teacher would rate a salary at least equal to the beginning salary of a street cleaner, and the curtailment of social services to children would not be the first economies that politicians feel safe to propose in a period of retrenchment.” Not much has changed since then in America’s real, rather than rhetorical, social priorities.
The devaluation of motherhood and fatherhood is part of what may be the biggest contemporary mystique of all: what sociologists Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling label the “career mystique.” This is the idea that a successful career requires people to commit all their time and energy throughout their prime years to their jobs, delegating all caregiving responsibilities to someone else.
The feminine mystique defined the ideal wife as having no interests or obligations outside the home. The career mystique defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work.
The career mystique is not the inevitable or the only way to organize work and family. Through most of history, workers didn’t balance work and family. They combined the two, integrating responsibilities rather than juggling them. Men and women worked together on farms and in household businesses where the rhythms of labor had to take into account the rhythms of birth, child rearing, illness, death, and neighborly obligations. Even during the early period of industrialization, workers often labored alongside other family members or lived close enough to work to come home for lunch.
When middle-class careers first developed in the last third of the nineteenth century, what made them more desirable than working-class occupations was not just their larger salaries but their shorter hours. A hundred years ago, the most prestigious and remunerative careers were those that required the least amount of time away from home. In those days, blue-collar workers envied the “bankers’ hours” that allowed managers and professionals to arrive at work later and leave earlier than less-well-paid employees.
The middle-class career mystique developed hand in hand with the middle-class feminine mystique over the course of the twentieth century. Both were based on new assumptions about the nature of work and the nature of the family.
The assumption about work was that if a man displayed company loyalty, he could earn a wage adequate to support a family, steadily move up the job ladder, and eventually retire with a pension. The assumption about family was that each ideal employee came with a wife who would take care of the house, do the shopping, raise the children, care for ill family members, and have dinner waiting when he came home.
But the assumptions of the career mystique are out of touch with the further evolution of both family life and work life. Today few workers have the luxury of a full-time caregiver at home, even though obligations to children last longer than in the past and many have responsibilities to aging parents as well. Seventy percent of American children live in households where every adult is employed.
And few workers have the security of a lifetime job or guaranteed pension plan any longer. For all families except those in the top quarter of the income distribution, male wages have stagnated over the past twenty-five years, so that most families have been able to achieve upward income mobility only by adding a second income. The young male high school graduates who made the most dramatic earnings gains in the 1950s have experienced the greatest losses in real wages and job security.
Meanwhile, employees who do earn enough to support a family, especially professionals and managers, are often forced to work more hours than they really need or want and to be almost constantly available by e-mail or cell phone even while at home. For example, in the legal profession a forty-hour workweek is widely viewed as part-time, and a person who drops back to that level often takes a pay cut of 20 percent per hour, magnifying the income loss associated with reducing one’s hours.
This too-much-or-nothing approach to hours and income is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Almost one-quarter of all American men spend fifty hours or more on the job each week, compared to only 7.3 percent of Swedish men and 3.5 percent of men in the Netherlands. U.S. workers also get less vacation time than Europeans, who typically get three to six paid weeks per year. The United States, unlike 134 other countries, has no laws limiting the maximum length of the workweek. And the United States stands nearly alone among the major industrial powers in not mandating subsidized parental leaves. Only about half of all American workers qualify for the twelve weeks of unpaid parental leave provided for by the Family Medical Leave Act.
We are beginning to see a wave of dissatisfaction with the career mystique, much as we did against the feminine mystique in the 1950s. And this dissatisfaction is now widely felt by men as well as women.
The Families and Work Institute first began measuring workers’ reports of work-family conflict in 1977, when 41 percent of mothers and 35 percent of fathers in dual-earner households with children under eighteen reported either some or a lot of work-family conflict. By 2008, there had been a slight rise in the percentage of mothers reporting such conflict, from 41 percent to 45 percent, but the number of fathers complaining about it had soared to 59 percent.
As men’s dissatisfaction with the demands of the career mystique has grown, so has their willingness to challenge it. In 1977, only 12 percent of fathers in dual-earner couples reported having taken time off from work to care for their child. Today almost one-third of fathers say they have done so, even though they recognize that supervisors typically view fathers who take parental leave as less committed workers.
Of the men who work more than fifty hours a week, 80 percent say they would prefer shorter hours. Even hard-charging executives are changing their priorities. In a Fortune poll of male executives, 64 percent said they would choose more free time over money and 71 percent said they would choose time over advancement. Such sentiments are even stronger among younger male workers.
Men’s growing discontent is a positive thing. As so many women who read Betty Friedan’s book in the 1960s can attest, people can begin to change their lives only after they identify their discontent and recognize its causes. So we must get beyond the notion that resolving work-family tensions is a women’s issue, a notion that threatens to perpetuate or even revive the old feminine mystique. As long as women continue to make all the compromises needed for families to coexist with the career mystique, we deny children the benefits of involved fathers, we deny men the rewards of shared parenting, we reinforce gender inequalities in pay and work opportunities that have been largely eliminated for childless women, and we risk once more forcing women to choose between love and work.
Oscar Wilde once remarked that it’s a sorry map of the world that contains no island of Utopia. And it’s a sorry map of our human relationships that cannot envision a better way to meet our work and caregiving commitments than by continuing to accommodate the false choices the career mystique imposes on us.
Betty Friedan asked us to imagine a world where men and women can both find meaningful, socially useful work and also participate in the essential activities of love and caregiving for children, partners, parents, friends, and neighbors. Today that goal is even more relevant than when she wrote The Feminine Mystique.