The Parent Trap - New York Times
The New York Times

February 8, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor

The Parent Trap
By JUDITH WARNER

Washington

I FIRST encountered "The Feminine Mystique" in college, in 1986. We read it
not in women's studies, but in a class on intellectual history; and indeed,
from the vantage point of a young woman coming of age in the mid-1980's, the
world that Betty Friedan depicted - a world in which a married woman
couldn't
get a job without her husband's permission, couldn't open a checking account
and couldn't get credit in her own name - seemed like ancient history.

And yet, five years ago, as I settled, for the first time, into a life where
I worked minimal hours, spent maximal time with my children and was almost
entirely dependent on my husband's salary and health benefits, ancient
history became a current affair. I lived surrounded by women whose lives
were much
like mine, and the sentences that swirled around me on the playground
stirred memories of thoughts and phrases I'd read long before.

The voices coalesced into a chorus of discontent that haunted me until one
evening, after my daughters had gone to sleep, I went through a pile of
boxes
and dug up my old copy of Ms. Friedan's book. This time, as it had for many
of the homemakers who read it when it was published in 1963, "The Feminine
Mystique" felt horribly familiar. Looking back convinced me that we needed
to start working toward a different future.

You could say that the "plight" of 21st century stay-at-home moms - or
part-time working moms like me - is vastly different from "the problem that
has no
name" experienced by the women of Ms. Friedan's generation, and in one key
respect you'd be right: Girls and women today are no longer kept from
pursuing
their educational dreams and career aspirations. They're no longer expected
to abandon their jobs when they marry and - in theory - are no longer
considered
"unnatural" if they keep working when they have children.

We women have, in many very real ways, at long last made good on Ms.
Friedan's dream that we would reach "our full human potential - by
participating in
the mainstream of society." But, for mothers in particular, at what cost?
With what degree of exhaustion? And with what soul-numbing sacrifices made
along
the way?

The outside world has changed enormously for women in these past 40 years.
But home life? Think about it. Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts
away
the laundry and picks up the socks in your house? Who earns the largest
share of the money? Who calls the shots?

The answer, for a great many families, is the same as it was 50 years ago.
That's why when I read the obituaries of Ms. Friedan, who died on Saturday,
I
was sad, but also depressed: their recounting of her description of the
lives of women in the 1950's sounded just too much like the lives of women
today.

Although it often seems anecdotally to be true that domestic tasks and power
are pretty evenly divided in families where both parents are working full
time,
the statistics argue quite differently. The fact is, no matter how time- or
sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of
household
chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well
in most of our households. After all, no one really wants to do the
scrubbing
and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs.
(I'm leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it
doesn't
feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it's the
lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the
lower-status
member of the household who is called a "nag" when she repeatedly tries to
get other members of the household to share in doing them.

This is just one indication that the feminist "revolution" that was supposed
to profoundly reshape women's lives remains incomplete. Another is the fact
that there are no meaningful national policies to make satisfying work and
satisfying family life anything but mutually exclusive for most men and
women.

Ms. Friedan herself anticipated this issue, in the final pages of "The
Feminine Mystique," when she called for changing "the rules of the game" of
society
at large. In 1970, she came back to this thought, arguing that if we did
"not only end explicit discrimination but build new institutions," then the
women's
movement would prove to be "all talk." Thirty-six years later, with women
having flooded the professions and explicit gender discrimination outlawed,
the
institutions of our society simply have not changed to embrace and
accommodate the new realities of women's lives.

The problems of home life seem to me now to be an all but hopeless
conundrum. Yet the enduring failure of our social institutions to realize
the larger
promises of the women's movement is something we can address,
straightforwardly and comparatively easily. We owe to Betty Friedan, to our
daughters and
to ourselves.

Ms. Friedan said last year, "We are a backward nation when it comes to
things like childcare and parental leave." That's just the beginning. We
need universal
preschool, more and better afterschool programs, and policies to promote
part-time work options that don't force parents to forgo benefits, fair pay
and
career prospects.

We desperately need leadership on these issues. Without it, our national
commitment to family values is truly "all talk."

Judith Warner, who has been writing the
"Domestic Disturbances"
blog for the last month on TimesSelect, is the author of "Perfect Madness:
Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety."

List of 11 items
. Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company
POsted by Miriam V.