The Liberated Woman

The dark side of the Women's Movement

My grandmother was born before women had the vote.  My mother worked as secretary to a man who summoned her into his office by clicking his gold wedding band against his water glass.  I graduated from high school when a woman went to college to find a husband with the potential to keep her in a decent income bracket.  But, in this modern era, women �" and more specifically, my daughters -- are slaves to their jobs, their significant others, and their children.  Where is the liberation in this?

 

Today’s Women:

Have we really come so far? Women today are virtual workhorses, stressed for success.  They drop the kids off at daycare, work eight hours as nurses, lawyers, bookkeepers, and domestics.  They pick up their children at the end of their long, arduous work day.  Then they cook and serve dinner, clean-up afterwards, toss in a couple of loads of laundry, monitor homework and baths, make the next day’s lunches, pay a few bills, and fall into bed.  No, they are not in the mood to fool around.  “Full-service” wife?  In your dreams, Buddy.   If a husband wants anything other than sleep when his head hits the pillow, he is going to have to start picking up some of the slack.  Sex with the dead is a criminal offense.

 

Visionaries and Dreamers:

“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”  Betty Friedan

 

If Betty Friedan wasn’t dead, I would like to challenge her idea of success with the reality of today’s woman, poke a few holes in it, and expose it for the lunacy that it is. 

 

Reality is Not Pretty:

Lying somewhere between submission and liberation is a deep, dark amalgamation of children who wake up in the morning with pinworm, lazy husbands, late house payments, dirty laundry, broken-down cars, head lice, irascible bosses, irregular mammograms, and deadbeat dads. This is the part that was airbrushed out of the picture because it was cosmetically unattractive.  Now we are on our own, Baby, jogging and quitting smoking �" in addition to our motherly, wifely, and occupational duties.

 

A Gender of Watchers:

The men are watchers.  They watch their women work.  They watch their wives raise the children and pay the bills.  They watch reality T.V. and sports events on Pay Per View.  Even though the women’s movement tells us that we are towers of strength that should be safely ensconced in white-collar careers, we don’t care anymore.  We are too tired to care.  Many of us who have lived the dream believe that the money and status were not worth the sacrifices.

 

Sleep is Necessary to Life:

It’s not that I am against equal pay and equal job opportunities for women.  I just think that women would be a lot happier if they could get eight, uninterrupted hours of sleep at night.  If a woman could afford a domestic worker to clean her house and feel confident in her childcare provider, she would be exceedingly more relaxed and happy on the job.  These practical considerations were simply thrown under the bus because they were too complicated to implement. 

 

Poverty and Broken Marriages:

For a long time, our culture was in transition because when it accommodated the ideology of women’s equality, it relinquished common sense.  How is a family supposed to be a two-income unit and still live in the real world?  What happens when the children get sick or when a husband has an affair or walks out?  Single mothers live at the poverty level, and one out of every two marriages ends in divorce.   

 

Fantasy Bond?

So where are women now?  Have we achieved what our mentors and leaders set out to do?  Or are we still in the transition phase of birthing an ideology?  Maybe we should just give it more time. 

 

The big problem, though, with giving the Women’s Movement more time to be implemented is that women will still suffer as their men fumble and fail at assimilating norms their fathers didn’t even dream of role modeling.  But this is how evolution works, and it is naïve to expect men to just pick up the ball and run with it, especially since chauvinism has existed since the beginning of time.  First the male gender must learn to play the game.  Along the way, we will continue to see subtle progress.

  

I shouldn’t care, really, because my time as a productive worker has passed, and I no longer have to nurture children or provide for a family.  I can do whatever I want because I have already done the rest.  But my hope is that through the travail of my tired generation, aiming blindly at a principle that was too narrowly defined, women will be able to �" someday �" achieve authentic equality, absent an undercurrent of overwork, fatigue, conflictedness and frustration.  Can this be achieved within our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our daughters and sons?    Only time will tell.