Are Men the Second Sex Now?

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

Betty Friedan's 1962 classic, The Feminine Mystique, opened with these words:

It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"

The problem Friedan described no longer exists. For most young American women today, the problem is not the futility and monotony of domestic life; it is choosing among the many paths open to them. Finding men as ambitious and well-educated as they are is another challenge. Life for women may be difficult, but the system is no longer rigged against them.

In 1962, two-thirds of the American workforce was male. Most well-paid and prestigious jobs were off-limits to women. Women worked, of course, but it was the custom for many employers to think of their salaries as "pin money." Advertisers and psychologists sought to persuade women that the fulfillment of their femininity was their highest calling. Adlai Stevenson, the liberal politician and diplomat, condescendingly advised the Smith College graduating class of 1955 that it was their destiny to participate in politics solely through their roles as wives and mothers. "Women," he said, "especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy." One magazine ran an article titled "Do Women Have To Talk So Much?" Pop psychoanalysts even warned women that too much education could ruin their sex lives.

Friedan—a stocky, disheveled, volatile Jewish iconoclast from Peoria, Ill.—had no patience for such nonsense. She was given to wild overstatement, calling the suburban home a "comfortable concentration camp" where women suffer a "slow death of mind and spirit." (Friedan later regretted those remarks and apologized.) But the middle-class homemakers she was addressing tuned out her eccentric rhetoric and took away the parts of her message that suited them.

The late Erma Bombeck, a popular syndicated humorist and columnist, wrote about the night in 1963 when she and two other suburban housewives drove to Columbus, Ohio, to hear a lecture by Friedan. "This is a sexist society," shouted Friedan. "You are not using your God-given abilities to their potential." Bombeck was stunned by Friedan's harangue. She found her message too sweeping, too humorless, and too unforgiving of ordinary women. "I had a life going here. Maybe it needed work. But I had a husband and three kids whom I loved." But then Bombeck had a second thought: "I liked the part about using your God-given potential. I wondered if I had any." A few weeks later, she went to her local newspaper and asked whether she could write a humorous column about life in the suburbs.

Fast forward to 2009, and you find that women are now fully half of the American workforce. They earn 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, 59 percent of master's degrees, and half the doctorates. Females have achieved parity with males in law school and medical school and left their male counterparts in the dust in fields like veterinary medicine and psychology. Women serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other leading research universities. Today American women are among the healthiest, freest, best-educated women in the world, and they score near the top on international surveys of happiness and life satisfaction.

True, the 1970s feminist vision of a fully egalitarian society has not been fulfilled. Contemporary women and men are not pursuing identical career paths. Vast numbers of women—including many with advanced degrees—cut back or drop out of the workplace when they have children. In a 2007 Pew study, parents of children under 18 were asked, "What working situation would be ideal for you?" Seventy-two percent of fathers, but only 20 percent of mothers, said "full-time work." (For a majority of mothers, part-time employment was the ideal.) Hard-line feminists interpret such results as more evidence of "deeply ingrained gendering," and they work ceaselessly to reset priorities. But isn't it possible that in following the venerable feminist dream of "not being at the mercy of the world, but as builder and designer of that world," women do things their own way?

In Friedan's day, women were clearly the second sex. Not so today. Yes, many women are struggling with the challenge of combining family and work. But men do not have it easy either. They are increasingly less educated than women. They are bearing the brunt of the recession. The New York Times recently reported that "a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men." Reuters referred to the surging male unemployment rate as a "blood bath." Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "FastStats" show that men are less likely than women to be insured—and more likely to drink, smoke, and be overweight. They also die six years earlier than women on average.

Why are there no conferences, petitions, workshops, congressional hearings, or presidential councils to help men close the education gap, the health care gap, the insurance gap, the job-loss gap, and the death gap? Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men's studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.

The struggle for women's rights is far from over, but the serious battlegrounds today are in Muslim societies and in sub-Saharan Africa. In these and other parts of the developing world, most women have not yet seen so much as a ripple of freedom, let alone two major waves of liberation. We should be directing our efforts toward the millions of women who have never had the luxury of coping with the problem that has no name.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo