Whine, Womyn, and Thongs

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]

The goals of feminism were always brilliant in their clarity: Convince women that they were an oppressed class that should agitate for political change. Hold out the promise that political change would yield a world of greater freedom that would eventually bring them greater happiness.

This project has failed. In a recent presentation at a meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania outlined what they called the new paradox of declining female happiness. After noting that by most objective measures, “the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years,” they showed that, nonetheless, “measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”

Instead, the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos; institutionalization in the form of women’s studies on college campuses; and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act—in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.

It is not a surprise that the feminist movement of the late 20th century morphed into vanity and voyeurism rather than sustained political action. Its notions of women as a class were never inclusive. It had little room for women who couldn’t or wouldn’t embrace the Manichean worldview of organized feminism, and no place at all for women whose views rested on the more conservative end of the political spectrum.

Today’s feminism—a kind of Facebook feminism that elevates personal experience and personal performance above all else—allows everyone from Madonna to Martha Stewart to serve as icons of female empowerment, and is a label largely devoid of meaning. It also allows women living in the prosperous West to avoid confronting the challenges and ambiguities of women’s condition in other parts of the world. (Has there ever been an international conference on women that didn’t include at least one moment of exasperation on the part of non-Western women who are forced to endure tiresome lectures on the evils of patriarchy from American feminists who take literacy, access to clean water, and democracy for granted?)

Betty Friedan’s problem that has no name, based on the idea that women are an oppressed class, has no real constituency today. Instead we hear about the “mommy wars,” that tiresome trope that has women bickering over the choices of other women like so many pecking hens, or we read about “work-life balance,” which usually includes calls for government-funded daycare. In fact, for women today, the challenge is not a problem with no name that can be solved with a few simple changes in public policy. It is a paradox: the paradox of choice. The more options we have, the more anxiety we experience about the choices we eventually make, as economists who study choice theory have shown but as the feminist movement never acknowledged.

If, as Joan Didion noted of the women’s movement in 1972, “to make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them,” today you need the women who spend their days buying organic eggs from Whole Foods and mommy-blogging about the frittatas they made for their kids to question seriously their life choices. This is a much harder proposition than merely claiming membership among the oppressed. The generations of women now in their twenties, thirties, and forties were raised to believe they could be anything and do anything they wanted to do. Now that they have educations, jobs, husbands, and children, they are finding that doing all of these things well isn’t so simple. They don’t suffer from a problem that has no name so much as they nurture resentments with no obvious cause.

In the end, the modern day querelle des femmes often reveals more about class (and status anxiety) than it does about the particular experience of being female. It is the maddening demands of an ever more competitive meritocracy, and not the malevolence of men, that challenges these daughters of the second wave. How well they will meet these demands, particularly at a time of global economic recession, remains to be seen, but it is unlikely they will do so in the name of feminism.