Two famous women
died last week. And surely Betty Friedan would have noticed the
irony that the one whose funeral made the national news was the
woman who became famous through her husband.
None of which is to
take away from the grace and dignity with which Coretta Scott
King bore her widowhood. Living up to the position of national
symbol is difficult work. So the nation paid fitting tribute,
in the person of Coretta Scott King, to the passing of a great
era of civil rights.
But of the two women,
just as surely it is Betty Friedan who has the better claim to
have actually changed history.
For the better or
for the worse? Her death might be the occasion for a serious and
long-delayed re-evaluation of the social revolution of the last
40 years known as feminism. Conservative critiques of feminism
have a certain time-warped quality, a reluctance to acknowledge
that the fruits that all women enjoy are the product of this tree.
Social movements do not succeed on this scale unless they identify
and respond to some real and deep human need.
Yet too many orthodox
feminists have made of feminism a dogmatic religion; they seem
more interested in defending its purity and goodness than in reflecting
on the decidedly mixed impact of social changes of the last 40
years on women's lives. No woman I know wishes to "turn back
the clock" to a time when women were blocked from fulfilling
their career dreams. But how do we move forward without acknowledging
the losses, as well as celebrating the gains?
Feminism arose on
the left, but it succeeded in large part because its primary goals
were so congruent with the broad sweep of capitalism: eroding
barriers to market production. Today, thanks to feminism, anything
a woman wants to do that she can do on her own -- or with the
help of the market -- she is now more free to do. But anything
that requires social support to accomplish -- such as getting
stably married and having children -- has become immeasurably
harder.
The problem that feminism
has never yet named is that women want to have children, and children
compete with our ability to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into
market production. Our children, by turning us into mothers, make
us vulnerable, economically and emotionally.
Orthodox feminism's
most persistent answer to this problem has been to call for a
network of daycare centers. Well, we have them now. Certainly
affluent, educated women have no problem with access to child
care, and yet the problem of motherhood remains. The problem is
that love, care, connection and intimacy with our children compete
for our time and energy with ambition, power, glory and money,
in ways that are different for mothers than for fathers.
Orthodox feminism's
secondary solution, to make men more involved in children's lives,
has been stymied by its simultaneous commitment to divorce, unwed
parenting, and female sexual "autonomy" as signs of
social progress. If men aren't in the home, they can hardly do
any of the housework, can they?
Until feminism can
come to grips with sexual reality -- with the ways in which men
and women differ -- it will remain flummoxed and silent about
some of the most important problems women now face.
We come into this
world not only as human beings, but as boys and girls who long
for and need a culture that affirms the value of both male and
female. The sex roles of the 1950s were unsatisfying to too many
women, and so in need of reform. But to jettison the idea of sex
itself, to make androgyny the goal, was feminism's fatal mistake.
We are still waiting
for the next generation's Betty Friedan to lead us anew.
Copyright
2006 Maggie Gallagher
