I opened up the Times magazine this morning and saw Maureen Dowd in red pumps giving us the dirt on feminism, work, botox, dating, money, and relations between the sexes. I rubbed my hands together and said “BLOG POST.” This is so totally my topic.
Maureen is concerned that many gains for women from the 70s and 80s have been flushed down the toilet. And it’s women themselves who are doing the flushing. (Much of this article is a retread of past columns.)
Women are back to calling themselves Mrs. and are changing their names. They aren’t going dutch on dates. They want to stay home with the kids. They are buying frilly aprons at Anthropologie. They are back to flirting and holding back the sarcasm. Push up bras, anyone?
Why are women doing this? She doesn’t spell that out all that clearly. She seems to attribute this slide to women themselves. They have forgotten the lessons of the past. Maureen sneers at their retro choices and pictures a future for them locked in a suburban hell and dumped by a philandering husband.
In her kinder moments, Maureen says that women have made these choices because they are between a rock and a hardplace. The rock is men and the hardplace is the office. Men still like their women dumb. In movie after movie, Hollywood depicts men falling for women below their station. In The Girl With a Pearl Earring, Vermeer goes for the maid with the fat lips and no eyebrows. That the maid may have brains regardless of her education and training doesn’t occur to Maureen.
Maureen plays lip service to the fact that the workplace is inhospitable to women with kids, but also seems to sneer at women who aren’t up to the challenge.
Maureen and I have a lot in common, aside from the hair color. As I read the article, I nodded my head quite often. Like Maureen, I like clothes, but don’t like to be owned by fashion. I also love the smart repartee of 1930s romantic movies. I am disgusted by the dumb, silicone role models for girls today. Keeping my own last name was important to me. I do think that many men are intimidated by smart women, regardless of how many male bloggers write me to tell me that they think Daria is hot.
But here is where we part ways. People define feminism in different ways. I say that I am a feminist, because I love women. All women. I assume that women are smart and that they make rational decisions, even if I don’t get it. I don’t really care if you botox your face into a mask, blow your time in shoe stores, and have rhinestones glued on your nails. If more women are changing their names, because they think that it means a more solid marriage rather than because they want to submit to their husbands, whatever. I wouldn’t go that way, but to each to her own.
Maureen also doesn’t get relationships. If you want it to work, then you have to think about it as a team effort. Both players have to make sacrifices at some time. I’ve made my share, but so has my husband. He had to switch careers, because someone has to make money around here. Yes, you have to have some back up plan, but you also have to trust the other person quite a bit in order to make a marriage work.
Maureen, like other old school feminists, glamorizes the workplace. Most people hate their jobs. They mark off their weeks until retirement on the deskblotter. They do their time and dream about retirement. Why make the boardroom the ultimate life achievement? You can have economic freedom and security without being a CEO. And belittle the stay at home mother in my presence at your own risk.
I don’t think that feminism has been lost. The two big candidates in the next election may be Condi and Hillary. Stay at home dads are rare, but increasing in number. There is increasing discussion about work-family problems, even if much change hasn’t yet happened. There are more women in universities than men. Hell, Maureen herself ain’t doing so badly, as a columnist for the New York Times with access to the best parties and power brokers in our country. How much would I like her life?
A note to Maureen — Girlfriend, you need to stop griping that you are still single. You have a fine job and an exciting life. Brag a little.
Yes, I think that more needs to happen. The old dream of Having It All hasn’t happened. I know of very few people who are able to manage a family and career without some compromises. I’m not sure if it is possible to excel in both areas without unique circumstances. But we need to think about what we are going to tell our daughters (and sons). They need a new plan instead of propping the old one.
Right now, in this imperfect world, we are still faced with two choices — job/excitement/movies/cocktails/pantyhose without runs/urban life/dinnner alone vs. marriage/kids/compromise/compromise/contentment/hay rides/compromise/80 consecutive viewings of Dumbo. Until we get new role models and new ideas of how to get there, then women (and men) will be forced along one of those two paths.
I had to stop working after I had kids, because childcare in Manhattan would surpass my income as a professor. Also, my youngest son has a speech disability and needs special care. Then we had to move to the suburbs, because we lived with two kids in a four floor walkup and couldn’t afford to move within Manhattan.
It’s not a perfect life. I would love to return to work and will after the mute kid starts talking, but I will probably only work part time — it’s really very hard to do both well. In the meantime, I keep myself sane by keeping a dumb blog.
I made these choices, not because I’m an anti-feminist, but because there were real obstacles in my place. I never expected that I would be here, but here I am. In her article, Dowd minimizes the obstacles that women face and instead makes it out that women just want to be dependent, botoxed, and depressed. It’s really not like that.
UPDATE: Dowd’s bashlash: Pandagon, Brutal Woman, Our Word, Rox Populi.
Apt. 11d 
Extremely eloquent. Maybe you should consider sending it to her as a letter to the editor. Well, maybe you should send the long one along with a condensed version that could actually be published as a letter…
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I came to your blog last nite wondering if you’d seen the Dowd piece. I guess I was up way too late.
When I finished reading her article, I thought to myself ‘Well cry me a river, Maureen. You and your upper middle class single white friends can’t get a man. And it’s all feminism’s fault. Well, boo-hoo.’
This line was great: “How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men. An upstairs maid, of course.” Are you kidding me? Interesting observation she makes in light of the many NYC nannies (mostly women of color, mostly poor) who push the strollers of (luckily?) married NYC ‘modern’ profesional mommies.
It’s sad to me that race and class STILL gets dropped from a supposedly feminist critique. Of course, this is Dowd’s privilege, isn’t it?
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Hmm, I, on the other hand, am extremely skeptical about this article. For one thing, Dowd doesn’t provide much in the way of citations, other than the Stephanie Brown study which any first-year science student could pick holes in (I mean come on. Asking a few college kiddoes who they want to marry and then using this to make sweeping statements about the human race? I’ve pulled better work than Brown’s out of my ass at midnight), as well as the similarly discredited Louise Story story (about which Story’s interviewees themselves complained).
Dowd seems to move in a rarefied, upper-middle-class, New York world where no successful woman would dream of dating a high-school English teacher or something. Sure, it’s harder for single, over-40 women to date or marry, but harder does not mean “impossible.” In cases like Dowd’s, I suspect pickiness and/or arrogance as the real culprit.
And yes, I am a feminist. But not of the Eeyore variety.
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how can you say that most people hate their jobs? not all women work for the sake of working, there are, i am certain, many women who love what they do. the choice between career and stay-at-home i am sure is a difficult one. but i feel like there should be a line when you stop comprimising the things you want to do, because otherwise you start selling out.
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Steve Sailer has a stinging and rather nasty response to Dowd here: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/menopausal-spinster-maureen-dowds-long.html
I think Ailurophile has it largely right: Dowd seems to have the notion that if you don’t have it ALL, others have behaved badly, failed to do what they ought to do. And she is assuming that her own experiences are general.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I was picking up in Dowd’s piece. “I deserve to Have It All and if I don’t, it’s someone else’s fault.” Never mind that it’s not possible to have it all. Most of us eventually come to that realization; Dowd needs to grow up.
And since when has feminism made it more difficult for women to “marry up?” Did Dowd sleep through her English Lit class? Jane Austen was writing about the marriage market and its difficulties and travails way back in 1800. Does Dowd really envy Charlotte Lucas?
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Not every woman is looking to marry “up” — we’ve seen enough of the a**hole corporate types leaving their first wives that we know better. And not every man is looking to marry down, either.
When I chose a spouse I specifically dumped the bond trader, understanding that even if he took me to Ireland for my birthday, he’d never stick around for kids and long-term domestic bliss. Yes, I dumped him for a musician. That musician is a great dad and I feel like a genius for making that decision.
Maureen is from an older generation — she herself cannot envision marrying “down”. I betcha she could find her own younger or less powerful man who’d be happy to spend his life with her, if she’d just quit fixating on finding someone who made as much money as she does.
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A fine job and a exciting life is not substitute for an empty bed or anyone to share these things with.
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I hate these sort of generalizations about what “women” are doing these days–in the Times especially, it always always means “rich white women like ourselves.”
I am part of a whole community of women who married for love and companionship, not income, whose husbands (if they have one) respect them, who are raising their kids with as pro-feminist a viewpoint as possible, and who are constantly looking for ways to make their lives and work meaningful. There are lots and lots of us, just going by who I’ve met online and in real life, and to us, Dowd might as well be living on the moon. She certainly doesn’t speak for the majority of women in this country. I respect her achievements, but I wish she’d either do some real research or stop talking out of her ass.
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Dowd and some of the women she cites in her article need to realize something: A woman going on and on about how smart she is is not much different than a guy whining incessantly about how nice he is. Talking about yourself that way only telegraphs your own insecurities and self-regard, sending the opposite message than the one intended. Truly wonderful people don’t make their own wonderfulness the prime topic of conversation, let alone the main lure to catch a spouse.
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Laura, you wrote: “I would love to return to work and will after the mute kid starts talking, but I will probably only work part time — it’s really very hard to do both well.”
I have to quibble a bit. It’s hard *work* to do both well.
I work very hard to make sure I can be a good professor and a good mom and a good spouse. It’s not really an issue of the complexity of the task but, for me, of the willingness to put in the effort.
I don’t mean to denigrate the choices of anyone who doesn’t work a full-time job and parent, but I also don’t want to denigrate the level of commitment I and other full-time-worker/parents put into our lives.
I guess I’d also like to point out how few men, particularly from earlier generations, have said that it’s hard to both work full-time and be a parent. It was never “hard” in the way you mean it for those men to do both. I feel like you “know” this already, but I also feel like it needs to be said again.
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Wendy — It’s funny. I just got off the phone with my husband who said that there was no way that he could leave work early because it is the end of the month and paperwork needs to be finished. So, he can’t go trick or treating with us. I can’t imagine how those things would happen if I had an equally inflexible job.
I’m really glad that you are making both things work. I know that you work very hard at it and I’m giving you many virtual pats on the back. I might be too much of a spaz to do both. But maybe when the kids are older, things will be easier. We’ll see.
I also think that doing both, as you are doing now, is very different from the “Having it All” myth. That myth didn’t involve any of the hard work and coordination that you are doing.
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I was just reading around women-type blogs and they are savaging this article for mostly the same reasons that you guys have. 1. Too much information about her personal life. No need to claim that feminism has failed just because she doesn’t have a man. It’s really quite a stretch. 2. No evidence, other than a few cover pictures of Jessica Simpson, that feminism has reversed itself. There are lots of grassroots examples of feminism, like what Emjaybee’s doing at home. 3. She’s very judgy-judgy about people who don’t fit into her little cool box. And even worse, very elitist about those who aren’t up to her standards.
I do think that feminism is evolving. Hopefully, it is evolving into something more realistic and more accepting of different preferences.
Well, that was fun! esp. the snarky link on Dowd’s ex-boyfriends. thanks, Dave.
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Wendy: “I guess I’d also like to point out how few men, particularly from earlier generations, have said that it’s hard to both work full-time and be a parent.”
I’m not from an earlier generation, but I’ll certainly say it: it’s hard to work full-time and be a parent. It’s especially hard to try to be a good father, a good husband, to meet the ideal of good scholarship, and to give at least a few moments of real attention each day to your students. In a corporate environment with less flexible scheduling, I’d say the analogous balancing act would be ridiculously hard, maybe impossible given prevailing norms. And it’s not simply hard work — which of course it is. It really is hard. Or so it seems to me.
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I made these choices, not because I’m an anti-feminist, but because there were real obstacles in my place. I never expected that I would be here, but here I am.
At last! Somebody besides me that is living the suburban SAHM life not because it’s what she originally planned for (like the Yalie bimbettes quoted in that infamous Times piece) but because she is dealing with what life has handed her the best way she knows how, and the way she believes is best for everyone in her family.
My father thinks I am wasting my education and my intelligence (incidently, he never paid for a second of my education or even lived in the same household since I was 11 months old). My husband seems to believe deep down that I could instantly step back into a professional Computer Science career despite having been out of the business for 15 years, with very little change to the way our household is run. When we go to a performance at a local university, my heart says, “I miss the academic environment, I’d love to go back to school.” And when I interact with my suburban neighbors I sometimes feel that they are only interested in their houses and cars and clothes and what sports their kids play.
But my 13-year-old autistic son believes he can get on a bus every morning that will take him to a school where there are people trained to make sure he gets as much education as he can handle, and that when he gets back off the bus in the afternoon his mom will be there to supervise his homework. His gifted brother and sister feel the same way. Guess what — they win. And I do not feel bad about that, not for myself, not for my bank account, and not for failing to meet the expectations of others. This is what is best for my circumstances.
But when the blogosphere discusses SAHMs vs. moms who work outside the home, everything is black-and-white. “Educated SAHMs are wasting their opportunities, education, the strides made for them by the feminist struggle.” “Moms who work neglect their kids, buy them off, are materialistic, exploit the minority day-care workers who then neglect their own kids.”
Every Individual’s Case Is Different, people. Yeah, in a lot of them, somebody loses out. But this issue has devolved into generalities, and that really tics me off.
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“I don’t mean to denigrate the choices of anyone who doesn’t work a full-time job and parent, but I also don’t want to denigrate the level of commitment I and other full-time-worker/parents put into our lives.”
Do you really view a discussion of the difficulty of doing something as a denigration of your own ability to do it? That strikes me as a curiously self-referential mode of interpretation.
There’s a fairly substantial body of literature on the work/family issue, much of which focuses on any number of difficulties and obstacles in order to put forth various proposals for reform. Do you likewise view this literature as a denigration of your own choices? When, for example, Joan Williams writes, in Unbending Gender, of “why work and family conflict and what to do about it,” do you see her argument and analysis as a disparagement of your own hard work, a belittling of your own level of commitment?
More broadly: Have people like Joan Williams and Nancy Folbre and Arlie Hochschild just got it all wrong? Here they have been concerned to map out the complex interplay of social, familial, economic and ideological forces, when maybe they should have devoted themselves to sermonizing on the value of hard work and the importance of commitment to one’s calling? So many studies completed, so much ink spilled, when all that’s really required is an update of Horatio Alger for a new generation of women? Some admonitory “pick yourselves up by the bootstraps, mothers,” with perhaps a few “you go, girls” thrown in for encouragement?
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I don’t think I expressed myself well, but I think my point was more complex in some ways than it came across. 🙂
I think one aspect of what I was responding to has to do with hard work being something that is often avoided. It’s hard; therefore, I shouldn’t do it. Or, it sounds like an excuse, like when people used to say to me “Isn’t it harder to breastfeed than to bottlefeed?” Well, yes. And no. Or maybe the difficulty level has nothing to do with why I did it. Maybe I can’t help thinking of Ferdinand in _The Tempest_: “There be some sports are painful, and their labour/Delight in them sets off.”
And then there’s another issue of what we expect out of ourselves. My husband and I were talking about this the other night, after I replied. I asked him: Do you think it’s hard to work full-time and be a parent? And he immediately said yes. Then I asked, Do you think it’s hard to work full-time and be a good parent? Is it hard to also be a good employee? He said he feels he is not as good an employee (or father) as he could be. Talking it through, it’s clear we have expectations of ourselves as employees and parents.
And then, coincidentally enough, he had a performance review where his boss gave him the highest evaluation possible, and a few weeks ago I had a similar meeting with my chair. And it made me think that maybe our expectations of ourselves are higher than those of our employers or children for us.
Just some stuff to think about. I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t hard to work full-time and be a parent, and it isn’t hard to be a good full-time employee and a good parent, but maybe it is hard to be the kind of employee and parent we think we should be.
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I teach at a community college and parent a 5 and 7 year old. I love my job passionately.
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Wendy – I appreciate your point. I’m really glad that you and your husband have been able to do things well enough. 🙂
I’ve been thinking about your point today and my conclusion is that in our family working two high powered jobs wouldn’t be hard. It would be impossible.
My husband is only around for three hours a day. Between 7 and 10 in the evening, he warms up his own dinner, reads the kids stories, brushes their teeth, and puts them to bed (I’m back in front front of the computer at that time). He puts in the laundry, cleans up after dinner, and pays the bills. Maybe he has an hour to wind down. I can’t squeeze any more work out of the guy.
How could I do all the other chores and put in similar hours? Who would make them breakfast, pack the lunches, make dinner, do the homework, suddenly run home if someone was sick, keep track of red shirt day, book day, color the turkey day? Who would read the books on speech disabilities, keep track of the special education paperwork, pick up the antibiotics, attend parent teacher conferences, and bring in the Dunkin Donuts into school? What daycare facility would accept a nonverbal kid who screams on the top of his lungs when people don’t understand him?
For us, not everybody, two full time jobs are impossible and not just hard, due to the lack of support for families with disabilities, the cost of childcare, the inflexible workplace, and a school system that assumes that there is an at home parent.
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Laura, I don’t know what to say. My husband and I do all of that. He is gone from 8 am to 6 pm. I’m gone from 7:30 to 4:30, though I have most Fridays off. My 3 year old has had bad asthma attacks and a case of pneumonia in the last 2 months, and he is having trouble with potty training, causing tension at his day care. My family lives 3+ hours away and does not help.
I am not a superwoman. But this life is not impossible. It’s not even that hard most of the time. It’s been hard these past two weeks because my husband and I have both been sick. But we have a routine that works most of the time, and we communicate pretty well and share the load for the unexpected stuff (kids’ illnesses, mainly).
Mostly we have supportive bosses, too; we both work at universities, he as staff, I as faculty. I think that makes a huge difference. And maybe that’s the lesson to take from this. Society can do a better job of supporting two-working-parent families, and it just needs a bit of adjustment, not wholesale change.
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Yes, it really does dependent on one’s occupation, doesn’t it. University life is very different from the rest of the world. My husband cannot take off any time for teacher conferences or sick kids. Ever. He’s gone from 7 to 7 and has an 1 hour and 15 minute commute. On a good day. If it rains, he’s home at 8. That’s actually pretty good for around here. He uses up his vacation days to mind the kids, so that I can go to the occasional conference, but we have to arrange these things very far in advance.
Look, if there are good models out there for how to make things work, I’m all for supporting them and replicating them. They just may not be all that typical.
I hope you feel better. We’ve had a killer cold around here for weeks and just can’t shake it.
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