It's the Men, Stupid!

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 and 70s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But there have been more waves, and more ennui, and now, once again, we're faced again with a problem (or problems) in search of a name. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's "problem that had no name," what would it be? What is the primary challenge women face today?

When Betty Friedan identified “the feminine mystique” as “the problem with no name,” she was talking about only one of the many inequities between men and women in 1963. Employers often had separate pay scales for men and women, could refuse to hire women for many jobs, and had the right to fire them if they married or became pregnant. In several states, women couldn’t serve on juries. Women could be denied access to birth control, and abortion was illegal.

Wives did not have equal property rights or decision-making powers in marriage, and nowhere was it illegal for a husband to rape his wife.

Friedan did not tackle these legal and economic inequalities; instead, she focused on critiquing the then-overwhelming cultural consensus that women could only find fulfillment through complete devotion to housewifery and motherhood.

“The feminine mystique” of the 1950s and 1960s did not just tell women to become “happy homemakers.” It also laid out a laundry list of things that a woman was not supposed to do or feel. Women were told that it was “abnormal” to want to excel, either athletically or academically. A “normal” woman, according to the mystique, found emotional and sexual fulfillment in dependence and passivity.

While it was acceptable for a wife to work outside the home if her family needed the income, she was supposed to make sure her job was neither interesting nor well-paying enough to threaten her husband’s sense that he was the center of her life. American women took this advice seriously. Through the 1950s and mid-1960s, surveys showed that girls believed it was “unfeminine” to play sports. Almost half of female college students reported they had to “play dumb” if they wanted to get their “MRS degree.” And according to a 1962 survey by pollster George Gallup, the vast majority of housewives believed it was a wife’s duty to make her husband feel “superior.”

Today the cultural consensus is very different. At this April’s conference of the Council on Contemporary Families [2], researcher Barbara Risman reported on a recent study, with Elizabeth Seale, of middle school boys and girls. Although the girls were deeply preoccupied with their appearance, the kind of feminine mystique that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s was virtually dead.

Not a single girl who was interviewed thought she had to play dumb or act “feminine” around boys. Girls aspired to be strong and smart, and admired other girls who were. There was no sense that it would be inappropriate for a girl to do things that used to be called masculine.

On the other hand, Risman and Seale found that the masculine mystique was alive and well, and in some ways stronger than ever. If boys participated in activities or expressed feelings traditionally viewed as feminine, they were teased, bullied, or ostracized. Boys brutally policed each other to make sure that each lived up to the masculine mystique. And most girls agreed that while it was great for a girl to like “boy” things it was not okay for a boy to like “girl” things.

Today’s feminine mystique is women’s belief that we can free ourselves from the restrictions of “femininity” without challenging the restrictions of “masculinity.” Psychologist Joshua Coleman [3] points that the culture of middle school and high school punishes all the traits in males that are later predictive of men’s ability to form good relationships with women at work or in marriage—empathy, sensitivity, and other forms of emotional expression. Even after reaching adulthood, men continue to be penalized by other men for being “soft,” while many women continue to devalue in their choice of boyfriends the very traits they will demand in their husband once they are married. After marriage, most women do encourage their husbands to embrace behaviors and feelings once defined as feminine. But all too often we discourage men from confronting the masculine mystique in their role as fathers by defining the question of work-family balance as a woman’s issue.

When we fail to encourage men to fully share the formerly feminine role of child-rearing, we perpetuate a modern “problem with the wrong name”: the issue of “women’s right to choose,” which all too often becomes women’s duty to choose. Examples include the debate over whether mothers should “opt out” of paid work when their children are young and the extraordinary acrimony over whether and how long women should breastfeed [4].

As long as these debates focus on what mothers choose to do, and ignore the choices that fathers could make, we won’t take the next step needed for gender equity—the fight to make parental leave and reduced work hours available for both mothers and fathers, and to convince men as well as women to take full advantage of work-family policies.

It is understandable when women cope with the constraints of our current social policies and work patterns by choosing to cut back or quit work. But this practice denies children access to truly involved fathering and recreates gender inequalities in pay and opportunity that have been largely eliminated for childless men and women. Today’s problem with no name is how to maximize women’s choices in work and family life without letting those choices bolster men’s primary position in the labor force and reinforce their secondary position in the family.