For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Despite this threatening reality, many women in their twenties and thirties still dream of marriage, or something like it, and hope to have children, even as they struggle to establish their careers. Some of these women, especially young professionals in urban settings, have encountered confounding new obstacles to marriage. Bluntly put, in the marriage market (where antidiscrimination law does not apply) the changes wrought by the sexual revolution in many ways benefit men over women. The successful young man today may be quite comfortable with women colleagues at the office, even a woman boss. Still, he takes it as his right to enjoy being a bachelor until he is finally ready to settle down, perhaps by forty or later, and then may marry a younger woman. Women, however, if they want to procreate, especially without excessive help from the booming fertility industry, still face the necessity of doing so at a younger age than men.

  Since both men and women now marry later than ever, this state of limbo, for a marriage-minded woman, can go on for decades. The nadir of this predicament may have been unintentionally expressed best in Find a Husband After Thirty-Five Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, by Rachel Greenwald, MBA.14 No longer does the long-established notion of a marriage market suggest two equals searching for each other. Instead, the author puts forth the no-nonsense proposition that now, as they age, men can be more demanding consumers while women are time-dated perishables who need to “package their assets,” develop a “personal brand,” and sell themselves. In such a world looking ever-youthful is women’s new impossible aspiration—creating a market for everything from Botox to breast implants to foot-deforming high heels (followed by surgery in order to continue wearing them).

  The world confronting women today is still rife with both economic and sexual insecurity and competition. One woman succeeds as a single professional or executive, only to be panic-stricken, in her mid-thirties, not to have had children. Another tries to “have it all”—career, partner, and children—only to wonder if, in fact, she has enough time for any part of it. Still another has enough self-respect to walk away from a bad marriage—only to find herself shouldering most of the burdens of parenthood and, perhaps unenthusiastically back in the dating game, to boot. There are plenty of choices, all right … but these scenarios do not present a private life that girls and women might dream of.

  It’s not surprising then that rates of depression and anxiety among women are two times higher than among men. Antidepressants are among the most common drugs women take, and their makers lavishly advertise them, often in women’s magazines. The ads’ underlying messages about women’s inability to cope are sometimes all too reminiscent of prefeminist medical condescension.

  In light of so much pressure, women’s real-world success seems to have cast its own opposing shadow: a nostalgic yearning for a life that is simpler and less stressful. It is a kind of homesickness for an ideal that never really existed for most women—at least, not without the kinds of compromises that caused so many women to seek escape. Still, society once allowed women to feather their nests and have babies while they were still young, and gave women more time for cooking, family life, and gardening or entertaining. Now, she is interchangeable with any other qualified person in the workplace who can be had for the same pay. At home she can still be “herself,” a person with intrinsic significance to others.

  A new version of the home-versus-work dichotomy has emerged from the real disillusionment in women’s lives. At one extreme is a resurgence of faith-based conservatism, which seeks to restore a patriarchal model of the family. This movement developed in response to “the sixties” and feminism and has vastly increased its influence in the past thirty years. It demonstrated its formidable power in the seventies and eighties with the antiabortion movement, and when Phyliss Schlafly and her Eagle Forum successfully campaigned to keep the Equal Rights Amendment from passing. Cultural conservatives promoted their own brand of self-improvement in books and related courses like Total Woman and Fascinating Womanhood, which reminded women of their wifely duty to submit. Through such campaigns of the nineties as the Promise Keepers movement, men vowed to “retire” wives who had become heads of the household.

  While a socially conservative man may seek to restore the pride of an age-old dominance to his home, a conservative woman may be pursuing the ever-fleeting chimera of male protection. From her point of view, every advance in women’s legal status may represent a further erosion of male responsibility. “Equal rights” might threaten the only security she has left should her husband’s sexual interest wane—the sanctity of marriage. Abortion is threatening simply because it makes pregnancy a “woman’s choice,” rather than something that men must be held responsible for. So it is women who have provided the main constituency of the “family values” movement, even though its political and religious leadership is often male.

  By the nineties, the Christian right had succeeded in Republican Party politics by achieving a dominating presence in Congress, and, by the year 2000, the election of one of their own as president. Many of the movement’s goals—reducing the social safety net, restricting abortion rights, and relying on faith-based charities to meet human needs—moved high on George W. Bush’s agenda. As for single mothers, they must be taught to take “personal responsibility” by getting married even if few marriageable men are available, and by getting jobs even if there are none that pay sufficient wages. Poverty, religious conservatives preach, is the result of a moral failing. This is how they resolve the contradiction between advising well-off married mothers to stay home if they possibly can, and poor single ones to work, no matter what.

  The culture wars between conservatives on one side and feminists and liberals on the other have long since supplanted the once-standard feminist paradigm of male domination versus female oppression. Just as many women are culturally conservative, many men are cultural liberals who favor affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage. The two sides in the culture wars are separated not by sex, but over sexual rights, identities, and relationships. So it should come as no surprise that one of the best-selling cultural conservatives is a woman, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who specializes in blaming feminists for ruining marriage by giving women “selfish” ideas. In her 2004 book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, she writes, “Far from being oppressed in their marriages, most wives are the oppressors.” She makes the strange claim that heart disease is on the rise among stay-at-home fathers, due to the illness-inducing effects of role reversal. Her advice, she says, is simple: “To start with, a man likes and needs to be treated like he is ‘the man’ … and when did sincere stroking of a man’s ego fall into disrepute? Probably when the feminists decided that caring for a man was tantamount to a betrayal of the sisterhood.”15

  Cultural conservatives are not the only ones who feel the tug of the idealized home—or Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia would never have become as omnipresent as it did in the nineteen nineties. Some married women who are highly trained professionals have surrendered to cases of domestic nostalgia. Lisa Belkin, writing in The New York Times Magazine in October 2003, asked, Why don’t more professional women get to the top of their fields? Her answer: They choose not to. She called it the “opt-out” revolution—a choice made by those who, with the cooperation of a very well-off husband, are jettisoning their careers to head home to baby and, often, nanny. No longer is professional status the pinnacle of achievement for these highly educated women—staying home is. This is a small group but a significant one, since breaking into the professions was the signal accomplishment of the second wave. By dropping out, even if they do resume their professions, they will never be as successful—or as influential, perhaps, in changing the terms of entry for the succeeding generation of women. Still, with the engine of a consumer economy purring, fantasy constantly beckons women to plunge their desires into shops and catalogs showing sunny kitchens and cozy family rooms in luscious tones like butter yellow, honey, and cream.

  The less-than
-rich woman who cannot opt out of financial pressure, however, must break away from escapist fantasies of any kind, persist at work and, if she is married, cope with the stress of trying to do a good job both there and at home. In most cases the greatest concern of the working mother is how well she is doing with her children. Fortunately for her own mental health, the end of the romance with the scientific experts—and especially with the guilt-inducing Freudians who dominated discussion of the family after World War II—gave her some renewed self-confidence.

  If there is no prevailing theory of child-raising today, parenting, though it is occupied with fewer children per average family, has become a much more labor-intensive enterprise per child. The new brain imaging technologies create a vision of a baby whose mind is a hive buzzing with potential manufacture of neural connections, and who requires constant attention and stimulation for full cognitive development. The contradictory message as distilled by Ann Hulbert, author of the 2003 history Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children, is: “… relax and enjoy those first years and don’t forget for a minute that your child’s future is at stake.”16 At the other end of childhood, parents find themselves supporting the new adolescence, which starts earlier, with sexual activity at a younger age, and lasts longer, with economic independence delayed later than ever. All this while attempting to help kids cope with a society that is “inimical to children” in the words of best-selling author Penelope Leach,17 a cultural atmosphere universally decried as media-saturated, commercialized, and sexualized to the point of being pornographic.

  The confusion all this cultural disarray creates does nothing to diminish the vast selection of books for women at all stages of life offering a cacophony of advice: how to compete like a man and be a winner at work, how to be a domestic goddess, how to raise children to be successful scholars and athletes, how to recover from the loss of a love, how to lose weight, how to cope with insomnia, anxiety, and mood swings. If the old paternalistic experts were commanding, today’s marketplace of advice is demand-driven. Women themselves clamor anew for expert advice, and apart from conservative voices counseling prayer and return to tradition, what they find is that the ever-increasing panoply of self-improvement advice is still deeply indebted to the post-Freudian embrace of infinite “human potential.”

  The popular psychology of self-improvement bears a superficial resemblance to the feminism of the sixties and seventies. Every media-based adviser or newspaper columnist now will tell a woman to take time for herself and stand up for her rights and interests—ideas that before feminism were likely to be scorned or scoffed at. They call for an end to “codependency,” and zero tolerance of abuse or domination by others.

  There the resemblance ends. Feminism has always included a broader vision of social change. Women would not simply desert the home for the highway, they would organize for parental leave, flex-time schedules, and all the necessities of a life that would allow women and men to benefit equally from a balance between work and home.

  The psychology of self-improvement, though, too often ignores these ideas of community building in favor of absolute individualism. There is no justification for mutual help or social change in an ideology that assumes each person is wholly responsible for her own condition: every individual must break out alone.

  Whatever one’s problems are, in this view, their roots, as well as the path to transformation, lie deep within one’s self. As the behaviorist Phillip C. McGraw (TV’s Dr. Phil) asserts, “You create your own experience.” Once you acknowledge and embrace this Life Law, according to Dr. Phil, “You stop being a victim. It’s like sitting alone in a moving car; you can’t not drive and expect anything but an accident. Take the wheel.” His call for bold self-management is inspiring to Dr. Phil’s millions of mostly female fans, but it might give them some pause to read his personal acknowledgments in his 1999 book, Life Strategies: “I thank my sons, Jay and Jordan, for … putting up with the late nights and the long hours of absence and preoccupation required by this project.” Dr. Phil makes it abundantly clear that his ability to be a star depends on having a full-time wife and domestic manager: “I thank my wife, Robin … for the courage to live with three boys, and yet remain a lady. I thank her for being my soft place to fall.”18 Despite the self-sufficiency he preaches, Dr. Phil illustrates once again that every great man has a great woman behind him.

  The ideology of winner-take-all individualism tends to ignore stress-producing realities that cannot be willed away: the time trap; the two-income trap; single parenthood; gender, racial, and age discrimination; major misfortunes such as illness or death in the family; lack of options and social support. Dr. Phil and others like him orient themselves to counseling would-be “winners”—and leave the “losers” to look out for themselves.

  These then are the ideological poles that compete to define the social landscape today—nostalgic paternalism versus the stark individualism of take-charge independence. The horde of pop psychologists, sex therapists, counselors, coaches, surgeons, diet doctors, fertility experts, etc., who reply to women’s anxious calls for advice finally offer no answer to this dilemma. It’s in their best interest that the anguish provoked by women’s social roles remains, insofar as possible, private—compressed into the psyche of each individual woman, for this is the most fertile terrain for their marketing efforts.

  Despite pronounced ideological differences, women from all points along the political spectrum wander the aisles of the same Great American Advice Mall without necessarily ever seeing one another. Probably the thunder and lightning of the culture wars play only as background music in most women’s lives. Few women dwell at either end of the spectrum—either extremely self-centered and individualistic or extremely domestic and self-sacrificial. They are somewhere in between, no matter whether they go to church on Sundays or perch in cafés drinking cappuccinos. Conservative women with traditional moral standards still must often bring in second incomes, and polls show they certainly are for equal pay. Women who are liberal on social issues are nevertheless often the ones who most tend children and keep the home fires burning. Divorce rates are even higher in the Southern states than on the coasts (twice as high in Mississippi as in Massachusetts, for example), probably partly due to younger ages at marriage.19 Many women will use contraception or have abortions whether or not they are religious. (One in five women having abortions are bornagain or evangelical Christians, and Catholic women, who tend to use contraception less, have an abortion rate almost one-third higher than Protestant women.)20 Their jokes and complaints about men—from drinking to driving to remote-control hogging—are remarkably similar.

  In most women’s lives, daily efforts to balance home and work are the order of the day, no matter what their politics or religion. An evangelical in Charlottesville, Virginia, may enter the Christian bookstore there at the end of a workday and pick up a magazine like Health First: Weight-Loss and Wellness for Christians, which will tell her how she can “get more done with less stress” by putting Christ first.21 At the same time, a graduate student in Boston may be browsing book stores to learn how to calm her spirit through meditation, while a lawyer in Denver may note down that number she can call for antianxiety medication or sleeping pills. Their personal and ideological differences may be large—but in significant ways they each read from the same menu of unwholesome choices for a woman’s life.

  Where is feminism in all of this? Is it prepared to project its own ideal, a moral outlook, a way for women—and men—to live? It was feminism that comprehended the suppression implicit in the male-dominated family, and saw through the psychomedical doctrines of subordination, the systematic segregation of women workers, and the imposition of phallic sexuality. Yet now it hangs back, as if it had exhausted its energy in the assault on enforced domesticity.

  In its uncertainty, feminism at this moment seems to hedge with a philosophy of broad personal freedom: let there be rights; let there be choices; let
there be no right or wrong way for all women. The vast marketplace of competing, contradictory answers targeting women as individuals is thus left unchallenged. As the idealization of home life regains ground, fueled by the subjective crisis in women’s lives, feminism seems to become less and less prone to ask how women’s options could be expanded.

  Yet the key insight of modern feminism was the realization (“click!”) that gender identities are largely socially constructed roles, neither God-given nor derived from anatomy. Any challenge to them requires social organization. The Woman Question, in the end, is not only the question of women but the broader question of how we—women and men together—will manage our civilization. This is the question feminism must fully address.

  It remains possible, if optimistic, to foresee part of the answer in the continued growth of women’s influence—but only if women decide, in their journey to power, that the point is not merely to adapt to the world men made but to change it. Women have the vote; they need only use it to put women into political power equal to men, and to hold elected representatives accountable to principles of gender equality.

  Women occupy ever more and higher positions in every institution in society. As professional experts themselves now, they can use their authority to change those very institutions, making them more humane, rational, and respectful. To that end, women doctors today must not only know medicine but also something of the inglorious history of misogyny in a field that tried to keep them out of it for so long, as well as the stories of the women activists who fought for their inclusion. Doctors can act as fierce protectors of women’s and consumer’s health rights. In their practices, they should inform clients about when medicine is certain and when it is less so, where bias can influence opinions, and how commercial manipulation may prevail. Clients too need to keep raising their collective consciousness—seeking and sharing critical resources for evaluating the quality of the advice they get, from medicine to psychology and child care.