“What my generation may have discovered is that we have reached the biological limits of our freedom. Having had every legal, economic, and social impediment removed, we have run up against the impediments-if you wish to call them that-of our sex.”
So claims Danielle Crittenden in her book, “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Elude The Modern Woman.”
Crittenden divides her book into six chapters, “About Sex,” “About Love,” “About Marriage,” “About Motherhood,” “About Aging,” “About the Political-and the Personal.” Relying on thirty years’ of back issues of women’s magazines like Glamour, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vogue, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and McCall’s, Crittenden sets out to tell us why feminism (at least the 1960’s, 70’s brand) is no longer sustainable because of women's biology and overall innate desire to at some point have children.
First of all, let me mention the book is eleven years old but thanks to the last presidential election, we’re back to discussing feminism, who is a feminist and what it means to be a feminist. I feel like Crittenden’s views serve as a nice summation of what many women at least on one side of the contemporary debate about feminist believe.
I have tried to think of different ways to approach talking about this book but in the end, as this is my first post, I’ll just relate a few of the points I felt were important enough to note as I read through the book. I’ll refine the process as I go.
· Crittenden claims that all the walls of inequality between men and women have been broken down. You can expect to see women paid the same, treated the same and working in the same positions as men. Now like Crittenden, I do not have any sources to back this up (I’m not that committed to this blog yet) but I wager that if you stroll through a number of boardrooms, you would instantly have to reject her assumption.
· Sexual liberty does not equal sexual equality. Biology tells us that yes this is true, but “ah ha” you say, that is what birth control did for women. Crittenden’s answer to this is an exceedingly long and condescending section about women and their “sexual shelf life,” and how men rejoice in having a readily available market of sex without strings. The inequality, Crittenden claims, comes when women are thirty plus and wanting a family but can’t have it because there are too many younger women out there without families on their minds for men to sleep with. Now here as well as throughout many other points in Crittenden’s book, I have to plea some bit of ignorance. I never did the whole “Sex in the City” thing, the “hooking up thing” etc. I got married at 20, welcomed a child into our lives at 21. Not too much time for running around, sexing it up. So perhaps in that world, Crittenden has a point. Despite that, I cannot help but be a little annoyed at the whole idea of men win and women lose. A society with a whole gender, generation or ethnicity that loses, is not winning.
· One point she makes that I would like to see her address now is that ‘sexual shelf life’ of women. She claims that women are essentially washed up as far as being sexually desirable by their thirties, but I wonder how this critique would play in the current Hollywood prescribed era of cougars.
· Following a poll in Mademoiselle about sexual encounters, casual, one night stands etc, the summation of findings was thus, “ ‘You don’t want to get embroiled if it’s not going to pan out…If there’s no love, there’s no point.’” Crittenden continues, “The question is, though, what does ‘pan out’ mean these days?” While Crittenden’s question is important, I think she ignores the more complex and in the end, more important question- what is love these days? If love is the justifiable reason for a sexual entanglement, isn’t it important to first figure out what that is, or how at least an appropriate way to determine that en masse is?
· “…the truth is, once you have ceased being single, you suddenly discover that all that energy you spent propelling yourself toward an independent existence was only going to be useful if you were planning to spend the rest of your life as a nun or a philosopher on a mountaintop…in preparation for a life spent with someone else, however, it was not going to be helpful.” This I feel fits nicely in conjunction with this: “By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only of yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.” I had to laugh as last week my husband brought home a copy of the Daily Universe with an article that described the growing number of college students delaying graduations and become ‘super seniors.’ Here, I really have few qualms with what Crittenden describes. I would even say that applying this to my own LDS culture, I think singles wards should (if they must exist) have a two year limit and then boot singles back into family wards. You want to see a group of very good, well meaning, passionate people who want to do good things but end up spending all their time dwelling on their tiny, trite problems because they see nothing else? Yeah, you know where to go.
· Crittenden relates an incident that took place during a couples’ tennis lesson. She and her husband ran over to the net to listen to the coach who called everyone over. They both had forgotten their tennis rackets and when Crittenden noticed, she went and grabbed both hers and her husbands rackets and returned. When she did, one of the women expressed how she was disappointed and would have congratulated Crittenden if she had made her husband get his own racket. Crittenden goes on to explain the fear that behind every husband there is oppression lurking and women feel the need to strike preemptively, so to speak. This reminds me of men in the 1950s’ fearing domesticity prompting the rise of popularity in cowboys and dens to keep men away from the encroachment of domesticity on their masculine identity.
· Something I have seen, even in Provo, the tension between women who work and women who stay home. Crittenden recounts dinner parties and meetings where when women identify their roles, ‘I am a banker. I am a lawyer. I am a stay at home mom,” a dance of insecurity and contempt begins between the two groups. Women who work feel threatened by those who don’t and those who don’t work, feel judged by those who do. This is something that, like the winners and loser situation, has to go. If women could support each other in their choices to work or stay home in meaningful ways, offering professional advice, being willing to help with childcare, carpools etc, the threat would give way to a general enrichment and broadening in women’s lives. Lets go for that.
· Crittenden often mentioned how the belief that women can do anything they want morphed into women have to do it all. She mentions how women try to move up in their jobs and then all the work in taking care of children, school, extra curricula, sports, music lessons, dance etc. As she enumerated the different activities mothers had to organize and shuttle their children to, I thought, it is not just parents who have to reduce, children need to, too. They are programmed from their first school days to “do it all” as far as being a child is concerned.
· Crittenden’s discussion of the personal and political is essentially a tirade on women for voting with their emotions rather than their brains. Yet Crittenden uses emotions and logic as her whipping boys depending on which suits her purpose. She claims women cannot listen to the likes of Virginia Wolf because she never had children, she never knew the emotional change one undergoes in becoming a parent. According to Crittenden, women think with their hearts when they ought to think with their heads and visa versa. Men on the other hand are always shown as logical, rational creatures, except for where sex is involved, but even then, they’re just following rational, economic laws. Women have to use sexual pull and social pressure to lure them into fulfilling family life before fifty. In some ways, it sounds a little like benevolent sexism on Crittenden’s end.
Overall, I was interested while reading this book. We never read anything as blatantly conservative as this in my women’s history class, so it was interesting to see this view given full vent.
I have to admit that Crittenden’s socio-economic status does not sync with too many other women outside of her elite circle. Due to her pushing against the society in which she moves, he comments to a stay at home mom like me appear to be almost too bitter, too emotionally invested rather than rationally meted out.
Mothers who stay at home will read it and feel validated, mothers who work will go away from it thinking, “well, she is rich and doesn’t understand my situation.” The rest will praise it or completely dismiss it.
While Crittenden’s main point that unless women want to actually become men, they will have to look to compromise on some of the promises their mothers made to them, perhaps the most provocative thought she leaves us with is this:
“At a recent party, a highly respected academic and author approached me. She knew I was writing a book about women and, having an inkling of my views, warned me not to romanticize the past too much. ‘I was there,’ she said, recalling her days in the 1960s as a young professor struggling to earn distinction. She told me that her husband, also a professor, wrote a book at the time that won a much-coveted literary prize. She received a note of congratulations from her own college that read, ‘How nice [your husband] has someone as intelligent as you to talk to over breakfast.’ She bristled as she recalled this letter, still incensed by its patronizing tone. ‘That’s what it was like back then,’ she cautioned me. We moved on to different topics, and she began telling me about her daughter, now in her thirties and also an author, who was unmarried. The woman said that she was longing for her daughter to marry and have children, although of course she respected the younger woman’s choices. I bean to laugh and said, ‘Don’t you see what you’re telling me? You had to put up with a certain amount of professional disrespect and prejudice, like that letter, but you got everything else-children, a husband who is still devoted to you, and in the end, enormous professional success, albeit success that took longer than it might have [she spent time away from academia to raise her kids]. Today, women like me and your daughter take for granted the professional respect you craved, but we can no longer expect marriage, stability, and children when we want them. Who is the bigger loser?’ And she admitted she didn’t know.”
