The Feminine Mystique Read Online Free

family. The divorce rate of those 1950s feminine mystique marriages exploded from the 1960s to the 1980s. Before, no matter who went to court, it was only the man who had the economic and social independence to get a divorce. Since then, women in great numbers can and do get out of bad marriages. In some instances, women rebelled against that feminine mystique narrow role by getting out of the marriage altogether. But in others, the marriage moved to a new kind of equality, and stability, as women went back to school, went to law school, got promoted in serious jobs, and began to share the earning burden, which before had been the man’s sole inescapable responsibility. And men began to share the child care and the housework, which before had been her exclusive, defining domain, her responsibility—and her power.
    It has been fascinating to see all this changing, the new problems, and joys, working it out. Feminist rhetoric conceptualized “the politics of housework,” which most women began practicing in their daily lives. Men are not yet taking absolutely equal responsibility for children and home, just as women are not yet treated as equal in many offices. I was delighted at a front-page article in the New York Times some years ago proclaiming “American Men Not Doing 50% of the Housework.” How wonderful, I thought, that the Times would even consider it possible, desirable, front-page stuff that American men should do 50 percent of the housework—the sons of the feminine mystique, whose mothers made their sandwiches and picked their dirty underwear off the floor. It was progress, it seemed to me, that men who once “helped” (barbecuing the hamburgers while she cleaned the toilet bowl) were even doing 20 percent. Now, according to the latest figures, American men are doing 40 percent of the housework and child care. 8 I doubt they’re doing much ironing, but neither are the women. I’ve seen reports that sales of all those soaps women were supposed to throw in those appliances to keep them running twenty-four hours a day went way down during those years. And families started buying 25-watt light bulbs to hide the dust, until Saturday when they all cleaned house together. But it didn’t make me happy to read recently that only 35 percent of American families have one meal a day together.
    The fact is, the divorce rate is no longer exploding. And most of the divorces now are among the very young, not those who have gone through these changes. In the second decade after the women’s movement, I came across statistics from a population institute in Princeton that more American couples were having sex more often and enjoying it than ever before. 9 In my early research for The Feminine Mystique , I’d seen data from history that with every decade of women’s advance toward equality with men, measures of satisfying sexual intercourse between women and men increased. There’s a lot of data now that equality is strongly related to a good, lasting marriage—though there may also be more arguing between equals. At the American Sociological Association meetings in August 1995, I was asked to speak on the future of marriage. I saw that future in terms of new strengths of women and men, and new challenges for society. For instance, in all the arguments about men not doing enough of the housework and child care, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men take over so much of it that the kid comes to Daddy first with her report card or cut finger. “I wouldn’t consider letting Ben take him to the doctor,” my friend Sally said. “That’s my thing.” There was a lot of power in women’s role in the family that wasn’t visible even to the feminists according to the male measures. More studies need to be done to test what strengths are added to families when mothers and fathers share the nurturing power.
    All we hear about, all we talk about, are the problems: the stresses, for women, of