A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (27 page)

Later, the phrase also became a way to acknowledge, in Terry M.’s words, that “even those of us who strongly believed in the principles of gender equality had internalized a pattern of deferring to men and doubting our own capacities.” The phrase captured the two-sided nature of the struggle that unfolded in the late 1960s and early 1970s: against the external barriers that kept women from achieving their goals and realizing their potential, and against the internal voices that led women to doubt that potential and pre-shrink their aspirations.

Whatever the limits of Friedan’s book for today’s readers, her insistence on the need to break down prevailing assumptions about women, work, and family and to look for the societal origins of dilemmas that are often experienced as purely personal remains extremely relevant. This is especially true when it comes to figuring out how to balance the need for meaningful work and meaningful relationships, for creative fulfillment and for love.

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.