The Feminine Mystique Read online

  In 1994–95, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., I led a seminar for policy makers, looking beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics, beyond gender—toward a new paradigm of women, men, and community. In 1996, we focused on “Reframing Family Values,” in the context of new economic realities. I have never bought the seeming polarization between feminism and families. A demagogic reprise of the old feminine mystique, the recent reactionary “family values” campaign is basically an attack on abortion, divorce, and, above all, the rights and autonomy of women. But there are real values having to do with families, with mothering and fathering and bonds between the generations, with all our needs to get and to give love and nurture that are women’s public and private concerns today and the crux of the political gender gap in 1996. The question is, when will men turn on the culture of greed and say, “Is this all?”

  The old separatism—women vs. men—is no longer relevant, is in fact being transcended. Just as the Playboy Clubs were shut down some years after the women’s movement—it no longer seemed sexy, evidently, for women to pretend they were “bunnies”—in 1997 Esquire magazine is in trouble. And the publisher of Ms. and Working Mother put them up for sale: all that was revolutionary twenty years ago, he said, but now it’s part of society. The trend-setting New Yorker is now edited by a woman, and devoted its signature anniversary issue in 1996 to women. In the 1996 campaign, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elizabeth Dole displayed but also tried to hide the power that comes from successful careers of their own. Both focused their power on traditional women’s issues—the Red Cross, children—but with all the new political sophistication and organizational machinery that women now command for those issues. No longer was it possible to hide the new image of marriage between equals coming from the White House—despite the backing and filing when a new strong First Lady’s voice is heard openly in the highest political councils. A clear sense exists on both sides of the political aisle of a partnership between women and men way beyond the feminine mystique.

  At the same time, the historic new gender gap between women and men in the presidential election race portends an inexorable shifting of the national political agenda toward concerns that used to be dismissed as “women’s issues.” So, as a result of women’s growing political power, the old feminine mystique is now being transformed into unprecedented new political reality and priority for both parties.

  It was the Wall Street Journal that first reported this with front-page headlines (January 11, 1996): “In Historic Numbers, Men and Women Split Over Presidential Race.” The Journal reported:

  If current trends continue, the split between men and women would be wider in the 1996 presidential election than in any in recent history. This could, in fact, be the first modern election in which men and women collectively come down on different sides of a presidential race.

  “The 1996 race is currently characterized by a gender gap of historic proportions,” says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct The Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls….

  Indeed, in a Journal/NBC poll early last month, the president and Sen. Dole were in a virtual dead heat among the American men. But among women, the president led Sen. Dole by 54% to 36%.

  The Journal also noted that:

  The president’s strength among women voters, which has increased amid fierce debate over the budget, is the principal reason he has bounced back in most recent polls. “In essence,” says Mr. Hart, “the president’s current strength comes entirely from women, who are leaning so strongly toward the Democrats today that even homemakers, a traditional GOP base group, are supporting President Clinton.”…

  Asked to name the main issues facing the nation, men are nearly twice as likely as women to cite the budget deficit or cutting government spending, which are the top GOP priorities. Women, in turn, are far more likely to cite social problems such as education and poverty…

  [A]ttempts to scale back Medicare…and the wrangling over social spending has affected women of all ages, who tend to assume greater responsibilities for caring for the young and the old. That often leaves them worrying more than men when social programs aimed at those populations are being scaled back.

  Significantly, it is such broad social concerns and not the “character” or sexual issues that now define the gender gap, even though the new frustrations of men became the target of the politics of hate, as played by Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries. The political gurus on both sides were nonplused: the old assumptions about the final power of the white male still held, but uneasily, for more and more white men were joining even more men of color in these new concerns. And it became apparent to old and new political establishments: they can no longer win without the women, not just token, passive supporters but active policymakers. For women elected the President of the United States in 1996 by a 17% gender gap. And a woman, for the first time, is now Secretary of State.

  It is awesome to see these waves begin to transform the political landscape. A lot of Republicans joining Democrats finally in voting to increase the minimum wage. The Republicans retreating from their brutal attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, food stamps, children’s inocculations, student loans, environmental protection, even affirmative action. The concrete concerns of life, women’s concerns, now front and center, taking priority over the abstractions of budget balancing. And new movement confronting the concrete new realities of the growing income discrepancy in America affecting women, men, and their children, fueling the politics of hate. I was happy in 1996 to join other, new, younger women leaders in alliance with the militant new leadership of the AFL-CIO in planning speakouts against this growing income chasm, in favor of a “living wage” for everyone, no longer women versus men. What has to be faced now by women and men together are the life-threatening excesses of the culture of greed, of brutal, unbridled corporate power. There has to be a new way of defining and measuring the bottom line of corporate and personal competition and success, and national budget priorities. The welfare of the people, the common good, has to take priority over the narrow measure of the next quarter’s stock-market price increase, escalating executive compensation, and even over our separate “single issue.” And some visionary CEOs as well as male politicians begin to see this.

  But the women are beginning to get impatient. The Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, which had raised millions of dollars to elect liberal senators and President Clinton, voted to disband in protest against money as a dominant force in American politics, and against the betrayal of the politicians who supported so-called welfare reform, which abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

  New birth-control technology even beyond RU486, as well as the evolving national consensus, will soon make the whole issue of abortion obsolete. As important as it was, it should never have been a “single issue” litmus test for the women’s movement. The male spin doctors and political advisers to presidents and both political parties still do not “get” the totality of women’s new empowerment or they would not have advised the passage and signing of a welfare bill that pushed one million children into poverty.

  For the women’s movement, for this nation, other issues of choice must now involve us. Choice having to do with diverse patterns of family life and career and the economic wherewithal for women and men of all ages and races to have “choice” in their lives not just the very rich—choices of how we live and choices of how we die.

  The paradox continues to deepen, opening new serious consideration of real values in women’s experience that were hidden beneath the feminine mystique. There is much talk lately of a third sector, of civic virtue, Harvard professors and others discovering that the real bonds that keep a society flourishing are not necessarily wealth, oil, trade, technology, but bonds of civic engagement, the voluntary associations that observers from De Tocqueville on saw as the lifeblood of American democracy. The decline of these organi
zations is blamed in part on women working. All those years when women did the PTAs, and Scouts, and church and sodalities and Ladies Village Improvement Society for free, no one valued them much at all. Now that women take themselves seriously, and get paid and taken seriously, such community work, in its absence in 1996 America, is now being taken seriously, too. Some social scientists and political gurus, right and left, propose that the third sector can take over much of the welfare responsibilities of government. But the women, who constituted the third sector, know that it cannot all alone assume the larger responsibilities of government. Our democracy requires a new sense of combined public, private, civic, and corporate responsibility.

  In 1996 I flew back to Peoria, to help give a funeral eulogy to my best friend from high school and college, Harriet Vance Parkhurst, mother of five, Republican committeewoman and ingrained democrat. Harriet went home to Peoria after World War II, married a high-school classmate who became a Republican state senator, and while raising five kids chaired and championed every community campaign and new cause from a museum and symphony to Head Start and women’s rights. There were front-page news stories and long editorials in the Peoria papers on Harriet’s death. She wasn’t rich and famous, she had no male signs of power. I like to think this new serious tribute to a woman who led the community in nourishing those bonds once silently taken for granted as women’s lot was not only a personal tribute to my dear friend, but a new sign of the seriousness with which women’s contributions, once masked, trivialized by the feminine mystique, are now taken.

  In other ways, too, it’s the widening of the circle since we broke through the feminine mystique, not the either-or, win-lose battles, that stirs me now. A reporter asks me, in one of those perennial evaluations of whither-women, “What is the main battle now for women, who’s winning, who’s losing?” And I think that question almost sounds obsolete; that’s not the way to put it. Women put up a great battle, in Congress and the states, to get breast cancer taken seriously, get mammograms covered by health insurance. But the bigger, new threat to women’s lives is lung cancer, with cigarette advertising using feminist themes to get women hooked on smoking while men are quitting.

  The large sections in bookstores and libraries now given over to books analyzing every aspect of women’s identity, in every historical period and far-flung nation or tribe, the endless variations on “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” and how-to-communicate with each other (“They just don’t get it”), are surfeiting. Men’s colleges have become almost extinct in America. When the courts decree that the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel can no longer be funded by the state unless they give women equal, and not separate, military training, the new attempt to claim that separate sex colleges or high schools are better for women, that the poor little dears will never learn to raise their voices if they have to study and compete with men, is, for me, reactive and regressive, a temporary obsolete timidity.

  In colleges and universities from the smallest community college to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, women’s studies are not only taught as a serious separate discipline, but in every discipline now, new dimensions of thought and history are emerging as women scholars and men analyze women’s experience, once a “dark continent.” In June 1996 the first national conference devoted to female American writers of the 1800s, held at Trinity College in Hartford, received proposals for 250 papers. The level of interest and sophistication of those papers was “absolutely unimaginable” ten years ago, said the organizers of the conference. The nineteenth-century female writers “were dealing with the large social and political problems of the time, such as slavery, industrial capitalism and, after the Civil War, the color line,” said Joan D. Hedrick, a Trinity College history professor whose biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe won a Pulitzer Prize last year. “Women didn’t have a vote during this period—the only way they could represent themselves was through their writing.” But these writers were ignored as male deconstructionists and their feminist followers wiped out, in the postmodern canon, what professor Paul Lauter termed “the idea of sentiment, the idea of tears, the idea of being moved by literature, the idea of being political.”

  And now women are bringing back those larger issues and concerns with life, beyond the dead abstractions, into politics, and not just letters. And so, today, women are no longer a “dark continent” in literature or any academic discipline, though some feminist scholars continue to debate “victim history.” In a review of The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity by the eminent historian George L. Mosse (The New Republic, June 10, 1996), Roy Porter says:

  What remains hidden from history today is the male. Not that the accomplishments of men have been neglected. Historical research has always centered on men’s lives—tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman…The very term “men” could automatically serve a double function, referring equally to males or humans…when those who strutted on the historical stage were almost invariably male. Being a man—performing in the theater of works, politics, power—was simply assumed to be natural; and when allegedly male traits such as fighting were occasionally questioned by pacifists or protesters, the dead white European males dominating the academy and the airwaves were deft at belittling such criticisms as hysterical or utopian, on the grounds that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do…. It was the women’s movement, not surprisingly, which first put maleness under cross-examination….

  But the books so far that take on the masculine mystique and the so-called “men’s studies” and “men’s movement” have too often been literal copies in reverse of “women’s lib”—and thus, by definition, inauthentic. Or a revisionist desperate embrace of the outmoded, stunted, brutal youth-arrested machismo that still in America seems to define masculinity. Robert Bly in his poetry may exhort men to tears, but in those forest camps he led them to tribal chest-thumping, breast-beating exercises in caveman male impersonation, banging those drums in their fake-lion loincloths. The gun-obsessed militiamen have threatened the very foundation of society with that obsolete masculinity. We feminists have become so obsessed with the liberating force of our own authenticity, breaking through that obsolete feminine mystique, embracing the new possibilities of our own personhood, that we have lately regarded men mainly as they oppressed us—bosses, husbands, lovers, police—or failed to carry their share of the housework, child care, the relationship, the feelings we now demanded of them, even as we learned the professional skills and political power games and started to carry the earning responsibilities once expected only of men. Those straight-line corporate and professional careers still structured in terms of the lives of the men of the past whose wives took care of the details of life, we now know, pose real, sometimes insuperable, problems for women today. What we haven’t noticed is the crisis, the mounting desperation of the men still defined in terms of those no longer reliable, downsized, outshifted, disappearing lifetime corporate and professional careers. Because we know men have all that power (dead white men did!), we just don’t take seriously (and they don’t admit the seriousness of) those eight years American women now live longer than men: seventy-two, men’s life expectancy today; eighty, women’s.

  The research I explored for my 1993 book The Fountain of Age showed two things crucial for living vital long lives: purposes and projects that use one’s abilities, structure one’s days, and keep one moving as a part of our changing society; and bonds of intimacy. But for men whose project was laid out in that no-longer-to-be-relied-on lifetime career, there’s chaos now. They need the flexibility women were forced to develop, raising kids, fitting profession, job, and family together somehow, inventing a changing pattern for life as it came along. For that long lifetime, men desperately need now the ease in creating and sustaining bonds of intimacy and sharing feelings that used to be relegated as women’s business. For, let’s face it finally, what used to be accepted—man-as-measure-of-all-things—must now be reconsidered. Wom
en and men are now both occupying the mainstream of society and defining the terms. The standards, the definitions, the very measures we live by, have to change, are changing, as women’s and men’s shared new reality sweeps aside the obsolete remnants of the feminine mystique and its machismo counterpart.

  And so, in a politics where women’s newly conscious voting power now exceeds men’s, life concerns—care of young and old, sickness and health, the choice when and whether to have a baby, family values—now define the agenda more than the old abstractions of deficit and the missiles of death. In August 1996, the New York Times reports a fashion crisis: Women are no longer buying high-style clothes, men are. Ads and commercials sell “dad’s night to cook,” perfume, and face-lifts for men. That baby in the backpack makes young men now strong enough to be tender. They may grow up, those men, out of the child-man that has defined masculinity until now. And those women athletes, taking the spotlight at the ’96 Olympics, what standards will they change? The ads and the fashion magazines may still feature American prepubescent child-women, or push silicone-stuffed breasts that can’t even respond to human touch—but young girls growing up now are also sold the training shoes and the new ideals of strength. Will new women no longer need men to be taller, stronger, earn more?

  Grown-up men and women, no longer obsessed with youth, outgrowing finally children’s games, and obsolete rituals of power and sex, become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.