Let Them Eat Lead: Our Modern Obsession With Safety

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]

A lot has changed since Betty Friedan dropped her Dustbuster and raised the torch of women's liberation, back in the 1960s. And weirdly enough, although I wasn't there, I find I miss those golden times. Motherhood was far less complicated than it is today, far less of a moral referendum, far less of a teeth-rattling competitive sport.

Consider pregnancy in the 1950s. In suburbia past, ducking in and out of their woody station wagons in their capri pants, pregnant women breezily smoked cigarettes, drank martinis, and took doctor-prescribed amphetamines to keep their pregnancy weight gain to about 12 pounds. It was key that their babies weren't too big because, during that high-water era of unnatural birth, upon going into labor, mom would be wheeled off to the hospital and knocked unconscious so Dr. Kildare could pull the baby out with forceps.

I remember spending much of my 1960s childhood riding in the (unbelted) seat of a grocery cart while my mother pulled brisket, strawberry Jell-O, and Wonder Bread off the shelves. Mid-afternoon, after a stop at the hairdresser and the shoe repair shop, came the day's high point: a trip to pick up one of the frosted, illuminated cakes at the bakery while gossiping vociferously with Babs and Carol. Once a kid was in school, a mother was on her own. Weekends you trolled the neighborhood with other packs of kids on bikes, not even seeing an adult until the dinner bell chimed at 6 p.m., signaling that it was time for....Pigs in blankets! Sweet 'n' sour pork! Meatloaf (in the days when "ground beef" was just "ground beef"—there was only one kind)!

A fascinating statistic: Today, even working mothers spend the same number of hours weekly with their kids as did stay-at-home moms in the 1950s—even though it's today's working mothers who are routinely charged with child abandonment. But of course, the bar for contemporary mothers is ever so much higher. By contrast to Friedan's era, today's mothers are expected eschew cigarettes, alcohol, sushi, and red meat while pregnant. They should stretch Mozart headphones over their wombs, use yoga to give birth naturally, breastfeed religiously, feed their children only organic homemade food, and, as they grow, conscientiously entertain them on weekends by taking them to toddler classical music concerts and co-building DNA models with them at science museums.

One can lay today's unnaturally high expectation of mothers at the feet of the patriarchy and its continued cultural campaign to enslave all women. But I don't think that's the whole story. If children are not allowed to roam free on bikes all day, it is largely because their mothers themselves will not let them. Indeed, I believe today's "problem that has no name" is the overwhelming fear that our world is utterly unsafe, and that, to compensate for social, corporate, and medical carelessness, it is mothers who must rush into the void. What are modern women's domestic chains made of? Lead! Lead from Chinese toys!

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