Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
It's been 12 years since "Backlash" -- it must be time to scare women into domestic submission again.
Apr 23, 2002 | In the 1980s, books like Srully Blotnick's "Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women" depicted unmarried female professionals as a bruised horde of dowdily besuited neurotics deafened by tolling biological clocks. By the late '90s, though, working girls were back in fashion. A rash of randy female sex columnists sprang up in publications nationwide, from Anka in Details magazine, to Amy Sohn in the New York Press. "Sex and the City" made singledom glamorous, even in its moments of melancholy. Single women were the hottest heroines in fiction, with books like "Bridget Jones's Diary" and "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing" racing up bestseller lists. (Of course, Bridget Jones craved matrimony, but by the end of the book it was clear that her spirit didn't depend on it.) The first episode of the new TV show "Leap of Faith" had the star throwing over her staid fiancé for a life of amorous adventure and boozy late-night confabs with her posse of loyal friends.
Alas, it is time for another backlash.
As history shows, childless women in America eventually provoke hysteria. Gail Collins recently pointed out in the New York Times that at the turn of the century, when women's education mushroomed, their professional options expanded and some of them declined to reproduce, the country panicked about "race suicide." In the '80s, there was fear about what one writer called "the Birth Dearth," and single females were either pitied, mocked or demonized. The unencumbered woman quickly wears out her welcome in popular culture.
So it's hardly a surprise to see the great swells of hype accompanying Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book that, according to its press material, "Exposes a crisis of childlessness among successful women." Warning that professional prestige tends to leave women with empty wombs and lonely hearts, the book has already spurred cover stories in Time and Newsweek, segments on "The Today Show" and "60 Minutes" and numerous mentions in newspapers nationwide. Hewlett's message -- that when it comes to children, successful women's options are "a good deal worse than before" -- is clearly hitting a nerve.
At the same time, the media is full of approving stories about powerful women quitting their jobs and retreating into domestic cocoons. A recent People magazine cover lauded female stars for "Putting Family First"; another one, just a few weeks later, celebrated actresses marrying young.
In the New York Times, an article titled "They Conquered, They Left" lumps together the retirement announcements of Oprah, Rosie O'Donnell and Massachusetts Gov. Jane M. Swift, saying, "[A]s long as women have been trudging into the workplace, they've been trickling out. [Perhaps] women are different; some say they have less of a psychic investment in a career -- both the power and the money -- as a source of their identity than men." Not long before, the paper did a puff piece on Candace Olson, who quit her job as CEO of iVillage to become "a born-again evangelist of power domesticity, seeking out a mate who embraced traditional family roles as fervently as she did, even going to the considerable inconvenience of changing her name after spending a lifetime, as she would say, building its brand."
Meanwhile, those women who aren't interested in holing up at home are getting slammed, '80s style. Witness the growth of widely publicized "Bully Broads" workshops for female executives, in which, according to the BBC, companies including Sun and Intel pay up to $18,000 to have "overly assertive women" workers taught techniques including "speaking more softly and deliberately and relying on self-deprecating humour."
Clearly, now is the perfect time for Hewlett's book, which warns women that success may leave them isolated and regretful. A Harvard-trained economist, Hewlett has made her career by touting her feminist credentials while lambasting feminism for neglecting the home in books like "A Lesser Life" and "The War on Parents," co-written with Cornel West. She gets a lot of attention for reiterating neoconservative social ideas from a liberal-center perspective: The message of "Creating a Life" isn't much different than that of right-winger Danielle Crittenden's "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman," but coming from a Democrat, it's much juicier.
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