Dowd on feminism today.
Maureen Dowd has a provocative excerpt in the NYT Magazine today from her new book, effectively mourning the death of feminism. (*) The post-Baby Boomer generations of women have not been true to the ideals of 1969, she says, and now the return of the Stepford Wife is upon us. Men are attracted to maids and not their female peers. Successful white collar career women can’t find husbands. A man wants a soft, nice girl, not an intelligent, critical woman. With all the success of women in the workplace, what has really been achieved?
Dowd is not the first to make her basic point. It is a time of retrenchment if not retreat for feminism. Now is an appropriate time for feminists to engage in reevaluation and self-critical inquiry.
Dowd’s essay presumes that thanks to feminism, women “get to” have their own careers, and “enjoy” all of the things that men get to “enjoy” in their working lives. Work can be fun. A career can be fulfilling. If you choose it carefully and work hard at it, it can all be terribly worthwhile.
That said, no one wants to spend most of their life slaving away at a disliked job. Even in a career you love, you will have to spend time doing spade work and generally grinding out work you do not enjoy. So why do people go to work? They sacrifice their time largely because they are trying to help their family. They are trying to live in a nice place or save up enough to send their kids to school. They want to put food on the table and enjoy the quality of life they desire. While a carefully-chosen job can fulfill your desire to do good, and even be a lot of fun, the main reason you work is not because of the work, but because of the end result.
For most of the massive influx of women entering the US labor force since the early 1970s, the driving force wasn’t to seek power, privilege, or a good time in a career. The desire was to maintain or improve the quality of life for their families. Since that time economic pressure on families has been intense. Only recently since then has personal average income risen in real terms. To pay the mortgage or maintain what they already had, many families needed the wife and mother to get a job. It wasn’t really a question of seeking status or feminine liberation for them. They needed to become dual income families.
Career-oriented women are not really at an unfair disadvantage in the marriage market. Undeniably, however, men and women in America today have become distanced and even estranged from one another. There is no single cause of this alienation. My own feeling is that both men and women have too often forgotten that marriage and love involve deep sacrifice and compromise to be paid willingly. You can view it as a game, and play it ruthlessly. The ones who do, though, suffer mercilessly. A career is not something that you ideally “get.” It is something that you give. The same is true of a healthy relationship.
Feminism encouraged women to envy men. One of the key problems with modern feminism is that it has treated people as objects in that it urged women to “get” their own career, power, privilege, perks, and money. If you really want those things more than anything else, you don’t want a career. You should become a criminal, such as a mobster or a crime lord. You embark on a career because you want to make money in a good and decent way. If you really want a healthy intimate relationship, you must be prepared to give much and get little. Careers, like relationships, involve a steep cost that is paid on a daily basis and is rewarded meagerly until the long term, when you can look back and have pride and fulfillment.
You don’t get married primarily because you want a nice wedding. You get married because you want one day to be able to happily look back at all the years you spent together. You have a baby not because you enjoy giving birth. You have a baby because you want one day to look on your grown child and see him or her living a better life than your own. You have a career not for the power, but because you want one day to look back at all that you have accomplished with pride. You don’t have a family so that you can have a career. You have a career so that you can have a family. Feminism has too often missed that basic point.
Men do not outright object to intelligent women. In the 70s women’s lib era, feminists stated that they wanted men to be vulnerable. It wasn’t a new request. The ideal for men is versatility. A man is to be tough when needed, and kind when needed. We expect both from the same man. We always have, and always will. You can draw a line from that male ideal to the female ideal of being strong when needed, and kind when needed. You don’t have to point to the ambiguity in the word critical to recognize that while a man values the intelligence of his female life-mate because of how she uses her brain to help him, he also values her sensitivity to avoid misusing that intelligence against him. If you love him, you don’t want to nag him. You want to help him, as he wants to help you. There is no respectable objection to a smart bride, but no man wants a harridan. Walking that line isn’t easy for any woman. Nor is it easy for a man to be alternately tough and kind at the proper times. We make mistakes, and forgiving the mistakes of our loved ones requires us to bear great costs and emotional burdens. We take on that cost not out of a cruel calculus of maximizing our advantage, but because to do so is love.
Equal rights for women face real challenges today and in the future, but most likely we will not have a complete rollback to the era when women were unable to follow a lifelong career path if they wished, or escape abusive marriages. For the immediate future, we will have more of what we are already seeing: a backlash against the excesses of so-called “women’s lib.” Socially acceptable single motherhood, no-fault divorce, day care for children, and other changes have been mixed blessings for women from the beginning.
True feminists (believing in the political equality of men and women) should not fear the present crisis. They should embrace it. Now is a time to reevaluate and reexamine. Now is a time to learn from the mistakes of the past. Now is a time to craft a new, more effective feminism that can be given to subsequent generations so that they may have better lives, having learned from our mistakes.
Dowd is too pessmistic. The gains of the past need not all be lost, but many can be saved to create a firmer foundation for the future.
Some blogs with interesting reactions to Dowd’s excerpt are: Bumblebee Sweet Potato (†); Intolerantelle (‡); the Anchoress (a rather censorious blog) (§); A Few Thoughts (Elaina M. Avalos) (**); and Almost Girl (††).
Dowd’s book will be published next week. (‡‡)