Walk through any bestseller section of a bookstore today, or browse the ample supply of top-selling women's magazines, and you'll find evidence of a lot of female angst. Apparently there is an insatiable market for women who find that their men, their jobs, their family or their ambition leaves them full of conflict.
Why the anguish? Wasn't the women's movement supposed to dramatically change women's lives for the better? Well, commentator Danielle Crittenden argues the distress, particularly in today's under-40 crowd, has a great deal to do with "What our Mothers Didn't Tell Us," the title of her lively and provocative new book subtitled "Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman" (Simon & Schuster).You see all the social engineering in the world can't change the ancient desires the vast majority of women hold, no matter how ambitious or individualist they may be. That is, as Crittenden notes, to marry men who will remain faithful, who will support their families, who will be responsible and loving fathers and who will stick by their wives in old age.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to square with the panacea envisioned for women by their feminist foremothers -- often including a woman's own mother.
For starters, Crittenden argues, while the sexual revolution has given women equal rights, it's "the right to make love to a man and never see him again; the right to catch a sexually transmitted disease that, as a bonus, might leave her infertile; the right to an abortion . . . (or) the right to bear a child out of wedlock."
It is no longer generally held that men must commit to marriage and family to be granted a woman's sexual favors. (Nor must they stay married when someone else' sexual favors prove more interesting.) No wonder talk shows and magazine articles are filled with women agonizing over the men in their lives who won't commit.
And when we do marry, Crittenden says, our feminist mothers tell us that our husbands are supposed to make the compromises -- not us. They should happily change diapers, make sacrifices for our careers and always understand our feelings. Yet today's women have been so terrorized into believing they will lose their all-important "independence" or "self-identity" in marriage that many balk at making even the littlest compromises and sacrifices necessary to making a marriage work.
Crittenden notes the irony that today's married women have the most egalitarian marriages in the history of the world, but according to a recent Gallup poll have never felt more oppressed by her husbands! In her discussion of motherhood, Crittenden points out that the matriarchs of feminism convinced countless women to turn in many of the boring and stressful aspects of child-rearing -- for boring and stressful office jobs instead.
Only they didn't account for the gut-wrenching stomach churning that so many women experience when they hand their new baby off to a stranger after maternity leave. How true that in all the "public discussion of the problems faced by working mothers, the most animating aspect of motherhood -- that we love our children more than anything else and want to be with them as much as we possibly can -- goes unmentioned."
Crittenden does not suggest that women give up their dreams for marriage, family and fulfilling work; just that they better plan for and prioritize all the different aspects of life they hope to experience. For starters, she suggests a woman guard her sexuality; not push marriage and child-rearing off to some always indeterminate -- and then sometimes never realized -- future; and that she abandon the self-absorbed notion of total independence and self-identity, and instead embrace the sacrifices and compromises that men and women must both make if they are to be human and bound to those they love.
Many of today's women have already learned these lessons from their feminist mothers the hard way. What we can hope is that we've learned enough that our daughters, both literally and figuratively, will not find their lives full of angst because of what their mothers didn't tell them.
Betsy Hart may be reached by e-mail at mailtohart@aol.com