A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (28 page)

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.