I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother. Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to school I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too. I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care, because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to loose time at work and not loose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working.
I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do the studying. I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school. I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need rest and change of scene.
I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.
I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the babysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that interest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the children are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they are comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed the hors d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they like it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself.
I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.
If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Naturally, I will expect a fresh, new life; my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free.
When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife’s duties.
My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?
By Judy Brady
Judy Brady, born in 1937 in San Francisco, where she now lives, earned a B.F.A. in painting from the University of Iowa in 1962. Drawn into political action by her work in the feminist movement, she went to Cuba in 1973, where she studied class relationships as a way of understanding change in a society. “I am not a ‘writer,’” Brady declares, “but really I’m a disenfranchised (and fired) housewife, now secretary.” Despite her disclaimer, Brady does publish articles occasionally – on union organizing, abortion, education in Cuba, and other topics. She published I Want a Wife in the spring of 1972. In the essay, Brady trenchantly divides the work of a wife into its multiple duties and functions, leading to an inescapable conclusion. She later published in 1990, Women and Cancer, an anthology of writings by women.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Feminine Mystique Revisited
By Stephanie Coontz
First Published: August 24, 2008
This year marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." Today, many social conservatives still blame Friedan and feminism for inducing women to abandon the home for the workplace, thus destabilizing families and placing their children at risk.
But feminism was always more of a response to women entering the labor force than its cause. In Western Europe and the United States, early capitalism drew huge numbers of young, single women into industries like textiles. Mill owners often built dormitories to house young female workers. Many of these workers became early supporters of both the anti-slavery and the women's rights movements, while middle-class women were energized by (and sometimes envious of) working women's vigorous participation in the public sphere.
By the time Friedan's book was published in 1963, capitalism was drawing married women into the expanding service, clerical, and information sectors. Friedan's ideas spoke to a generation of women who were starting to view paid work as something more than a temporary break between adolescence and marriage, and were frustrated by society's insistence that the only source of meaning in their lives should be their role as housewives.
Wherever women enter the labor force in large numbers, certain processes unfold. Women begin to marry later and have fewer children, especially as they make inroads into higher education or more remunerative careers. They are also more likely to challenge laws and customs that relegate them to second-class status in the public sphere or mandate their subordination within the family. Often, governments and employers then find that it is in their interest to begin to remove barriers to women's full participation.
The dramatic decrease in laws and customs perpetuating female subordination over the past 40 years has been closely connected to women's expanded participation in paid employment. Societies where women remain substantially under-represented in the labor market, such as in the Middle East, remain especially resistant to women's rights.
Political scientist Michael Ross argues that the extreme gender inequality found in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is not caused by the intractability of Islamic tradition. Rather, it is the result of how oil wealth shifted economic development away from manufacturing jobs that have historically pulled women into the labor force, while promoting jobs in construction, which tend to be dominated by men. Within the Muslim Middle East, the oil-rich states score much lower on indices of gender equity than oil-poor states such as Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Syria.
Social conservatives are wrong to blame women's entry into work on feminism. But women who work are much more likely to adopt feminist-inspired agendas and to reject traditional ideas about marriage. And when women gain economic and political clout, traditional family life is, indeed, destabilized. In Western Europe and North America, divorce rates soared as married women poured into the workplace in the 1970s and 1980s, with women initiating most divorces. Although divorce rates leveled off in the 1990s, cohabitation and unwed childbearing have continued to rise.
Nevertheless, the best hope for improving family life today is not to roll back women's rights, but to further women's economic and political integration. Increases in women's power and resources are most threatening to family stability in societies marked by gender inequality, where successful women often rebel against marriage. In countries such as Japan, Italy and Singapore, where the terms of marriage remain favorable to men, and women have a hard time combining work and family, working women postpone marriage and motherhood much longer than in the US, leading to declines in birth rates that threaten these societies' future.
As women gain collective rights, and especially as men accept women's changed roles, many of the disruptive effects of family change are ameliorated. In the US, divorce rates for well-educated women are now much lower than for less-educated women, and women with good jobs or who have completed college are more likely than more traditional women to be married at age 35. In the past, when a stay-at-home wife went to work, the chance that her marriage would dissolve increased. Today, going to work decreases the chance of divorce. In families where the wife has been employed longer, men tend to do more and better child-care, with measurable payoffs in child outcomes.
Of course, marriage will never again be as stable or predictable as when women lacked alternatives. But even where family change continues apace, it has far less negative consequences when women have access to economic rights than when they do not. In the Nordic countries, out-of-wedlock births are much higher than in the US, but children of single mothers are much less likely to experience poverty, and spend more time on average with both biological parents, because cohabitation there is more stable than in many American marriages.
In poorer countries, women's access to paid labor is a better predictor of children's well-being than the stability of marriage. In parts of Africa and Latin America, children are better nourished and have more access to education in female-headed households where the woman has a job than in two-parent households where the man earns the income. Children from female-headed households in Kenya, Malawi and Jamaica, for example, do as well or better than children from male-headed households in their long-term nutritional and health status, despite lower household income.
Far from being a threat to family life, the further progress of women's rights may be our best hope for well-functioning families.
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
First Published: August 24, 2008
This year marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." Today, many social conservatives still blame Friedan and feminism for inducing women to abandon the home for the workplace, thus destabilizing families and placing their children at risk.
But feminism was always more of a response to women entering the labor force than its cause. In Western Europe and the United States, early capitalism drew huge numbers of young, single women into industries like textiles. Mill owners often built dormitories to house young female workers. Many of these workers became early supporters of both the anti-slavery and the women's rights movements, while middle-class women were energized by (and sometimes envious of) working women's vigorous participation in the public sphere.
By the time Friedan's book was published in 1963, capitalism was drawing married women into the expanding service, clerical, and information sectors. Friedan's ideas spoke to a generation of women who were starting to view paid work as something more than a temporary break between adolescence and marriage, and were frustrated by society's insistence that the only source of meaning in their lives should be their role as housewives.
Wherever women enter the labor force in large numbers, certain processes unfold. Women begin to marry later and have fewer children, especially as they make inroads into higher education or more remunerative careers. They are also more likely to challenge laws and customs that relegate them to second-class status in the public sphere or mandate their subordination within the family. Often, governments and employers then find that it is in their interest to begin to remove barriers to women's full participation.
The dramatic decrease in laws and customs perpetuating female subordination over the past 40 years has been closely connected to women's expanded participation in paid employment. Societies where women remain substantially under-represented in the labor market, such as in the Middle East, remain especially resistant to women's rights.
Political scientist Michael Ross argues that the extreme gender inequality found in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is not caused by the intractability of Islamic tradition. Rather, it is the result of how oil wealth shifted economic development away from manufacturing jobs that have historically pulled women into the labor force, while promoting jobs in construction, which tend to be dominated by men. Within the Muslim Middle East, the oil-rich states score much lower on indices of gender equity than oil-poor states such as Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Syria.
Social conservatives are wrong to blame women's entry into work on feminism. But women who work are much more likely to adopt feminist-inspired agendas and to reject traditional ideas about marriage. And when women gain economic and political clout, traditional family life is, indeed, destabilized. In Western Europe and North America, divorce rates soared as married women poured into the workplace in the 1970s and 1980s, with women initiating most divorces. Although divorce rates leveled off in the 1990s, cohabitation and unwed childbearing have continued to rise.
Nevertheless, the best hope for improving family life today is not to roll back women's rights, but to further women's economic and political integration. Increases in women's power and resources are most threatening to family stability in societies marked by gender inequality, where successful women often rebel against marriage. In countries such as Japan, Italy and Singapore, where the terms of marriage remain favorable to men, and women have a hard time combining work and family, working women postpone marriage and motherhood much longer than in the US, leading to declines in birth rates that threaten these societies' future.
As women gain collective rights, and especially as men accept women's changed roles, many of the disruptive effects of family change are ameliorated. In the US, divorce rates for well-educated women are now much lower than for less-educated women, and women with good jobs or who have completed college are more likely than more traditional women to be married at age 35. In the past, when a stay-at-home wife went to work, the chance that her marriage would dissolve increased. Today, going to work decreases the chance of divorce. In families where the wife has been employed longer, men tend to do more and better child-care, with measurable payoffs in child outcomes.
Of course, marriage will never again be as stable or predictable as when women lacked alternatives. But even where family change continues apace, it has far less negative consequences when women have access to economic rights than when they do not. In the Nordic countries, out-of-wedlock births are much higher than in the US, but children of single mothers are much less likely to experience poverty, and spend more time on average with both biological parents, because cohabitation there is more stable than in many American marriages.
In poorer countries, women's access to paid labor is a better predictor of children's well-being than the stability of marriage. In parts of Africa and Latin America, children are better nourished and have more access to education in female-headed households where the woman has a job than in two-parent households where the man earns the income. Children from female-headed households in Kenya, Malawi and Jamaica, for example, do as well or better than children from male-headed households in their long-term nutritional and health status, despite lower household income.
Far from being a threat to family life, the further progress of women's rights may be our best hope for well-functioning families.
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
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