by Moira Weigel
Choices: A Teen Woman’s Journal for Self-Awareness and Personal Planning was published in July 1983. Festooned with pastel flowers, it was marketed as both a textbook and a trade book. When schools purchased Choices, they also received teacher-training materials. Because the creators wanted Choices to be used in public schools, they developed a companion program for boys, called Challenges. The pagination of the two volumes was coordinated. They used different gender pronouns and slightly different examples so that public schools could use them together to teach coed classes. By 1985, they had been adopted for life-planning programs in twenty-two states. They offered a picture of formal gender equality, separate but equal. Challenges for boys; Choices for girls.
Choices aimed to teach girls about all the career opportunities that were now open to women and get them into the right frame of mind to seize them. “One must remain flexible enough to change,” the book admonished, “but once the basic decision-making skills are learned, the woman is empowered to make sound choices about anything.”
Pages of worksheets allowed students to conduct “Attitude Inventories” on a wide variety of subjects. You were asked to tick off an option from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree” in response to statements like “If a working couple buys a house, the husband should make the payments.” “At work, women are entitled to use sick leave for maternity leave.” “Men should not cry.” You tried to answer questions like “How much does a dress cost?” to realize how much you would have to earn. The self-knowledge that you gained from the process was supposed to help you choose wisely in all aspects of life.
Chapter 7 was devoted to family planning. The teaching materials said that by the time the student reached this stage, “she has learned to create a decision-making model for when to have a baby; she has, through values clarification, thought about childcare options. Through an exercise in role-playing, the student learns how much commitment a family requires. The young woman usually concludes that she is not ready emotionally or financially for the responsibility of a baby.”
The authors added that by the time she completed the family-planning unit, the student “has learned to be assertive, a helpful skill in responses that prevent pregnancies.” Being assertive enough to avoid being coerced into sex sounds like a good skill to learn. But you have to wonder what the corresponding page on Challenges said: Try not to rape your girlfriend?
The emphasis on planning and choice put the burden of policing romance on young women—precisely where it had been in the Steady Era. Only now, these women were also responsible for preparing themselves for careers.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, life-planning techniques continued to be incorporated into the curricula in a wide range of public and private schools. These programs told young people to look at their romantic lives as part of a grand strategy. More important, they taught students to think that any deviation from that plan was a personal failing.
A future of debt and loneliness continues to be the main theme of outreach aimed at teen girls who might consider becoming mothers. An ad campaign that the New York City Human Resources Administration plastered on the subways in 2013 confronted them directly. Got a good job? one baby asks, bawling. I cost thousands of dollars each year. THINK BEING A TEEN PARENT WON’T COST YOU? text slapped diagonally across the bottom reads. EXPECT TO SPEND MORE THAN $10,000 A YEAR TO RAISE A CHILD.
Another ad featured a tiny girl with an index finger pressed against her lips; she is looking off frame right, as if she is embarrassed for you. Honestly Mom … the thought bubble above her head says. Chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me? The banner confirms: 90% OF TEEN PARENTS DON’T MARRY EACH OTHER.
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Our culture sends very different messages to richer and poorer women about motherhood. Articles aimed at middle- and upper-middle-class women rhapsodize about the incomparable joy that having children will bring into their lives. Poor women, particularly women of color, are warned that having a baby will trap them in a lifetime of poverty. Both claims may be true. Motherhood may be a joyful experience if you can afford it. It may be ruinous if you cannot. But in both cases, the emphasis on planning serves to make the reproduction of the world look like a lifestyle choice—a purely private concern. The imperative to line up your life perfectly suggests that it is moral as well as practical to do so.
This fiction that it is female nature to take full responsibility for reproduction places a tremendous burden on women. And it strains many romantic relationships. The fiction that men and women who desire sexual and romantic relations are hardwired to want opposing things is not good for anyone. I bet you know at least one bachelor who has spent decades unable to commit to any relationship, despite professing that he yearns to do so; I know several. It turns out that even if cultural stereotypes say that a man can date around endlessly without lowering his stock, of course the experience will change him, just as it changes the partners whom stereotypes say he can dispose of at no cost to himself.
The success of the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up suggests how desperately men as well as women may want to get out of this impasse. In it, the young, hotshot career woman played by Katherine Heigl spends a wild night celebrating a recent promotion, falls into bed with the schlubby loser played by Seth Rogen, and several weeks later finds herself in the predicament that the title suggests. The first time I heard it summarized, I thought it was a horror movie. If we take the leap of faith that her character would not sprint to the nearest abortion clinic, we get to enjoy a fantasy in which two unappealing people can fumble their ways toward happiness without ever having to make any joint decisions whatsoever.
The unplanned pregnancy is not presented as a disaster. It is a godsend. Especially for Seth Rogen’s character. Stereotypes say that the kind of man-child he epitomizes—unemployed, directionless—is terrified of the responsibilities of monogamy, marriage, and fatherhood. But it is clearly he, not Heigl, who is saved by their chance encounter. Knocking up a stranger rescues the man-child from himself.
The movie makes it clear that if, for whatever reason, the woman played by Katherine Heigl wanted to have a deadbeat’s child at this juncture, she could have managed on her own. This is precisely what makes her a heroine. Indeed, if we thought that she was desperate to snag Seth Rogen, the movie would be unbearably depressing. It is her willingness to take on all the work of reproducing the world that is supposed to make her worthy of the happiness she stumbles into. She earns a man and a family by proving that she would have been willing to do everything herself.
Is it worth it? The greatest risk run by the Clock-Watcher who plans every day of her life, fearing that any misstep or wrong “choice” will derail her, is being disappointed.
How many Career Women have grown into exactly the women they planned, only to find that the future they thought they wanted was not what they expected? How could it not be disappointing after so much work? Like the housewife of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, I imagine the Career Woman who returns to work two weeks after giving birth dismayed. The new Feminine Mystique has created a new problem with no name that feels disarmingly familiar. Is this all? Is this what all of that was for?
CHAPTER 10. HELP
There is a word for the route taken by the Clock-Watcher who decides that her time is up and bravely resolves to make the best life she can with whatever partner she has on hand. That word is settling.
The Oxford English Dictionary shows that “settle” has been used to mean “marry” since the 1600s. For centuries, settling did not necessarily sound like a bad thing. Indeed, many young men and women seemed to regard it as an opportunity. “The prudent gentlewoman … wishes to settle her daughter,” the novelist Theodore Edward Hook observed in 1825. “I am come to years of discretion, and must think … of settling myself advantageously,” a male character reflected in Thomas Love Peacock’s satire Crotchet Castle six years later.
So why do we cringe at any hint that two
people may be “settling for” each other today?
In recent years, the subject has seemed to come up more and more often. It started with an article by Lori Gottlieb that appeared in March 2008 in The Atlantic. “Marry Him!” the headline shrieked. “The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.”
Gottlieb declared that every woman she knew was preoccupied with the problem of finding a partner. “Every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried,” she claimed in the opening paragraphs. “If you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying.”
To make matters worse, Gottlieb continued, her friends were approaching their husband hunts all wrong. She knew it, because she had, too. Gottlieb explained that she opted to have a child using an anonymous sperm donor in her late thirties so that she could hold out for a man she liked better than the men she had been dating. In retrospect, she says, she vastly overestimated the importance of sex and romance.
“Marriage isn’t a passion-fest,” she wrote. “It’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.” If they want to make it through this drudgery, she tells her readers that they should hurry up and lock a partner down.
Shared widely both by people who loved it and people who were enraged by it, “Marry Him!” spread rapidly around the Internet. It still inspires strong feelings. “Lori Gottlieb ruined my twenties!” a friend balks when I mention the article. She read it when she was twenty-five and falling out of love with the boyfriend she had been living with since college. Gottlieb persuaded her that she should slog through two more years. At that point, he confessed that he had been cheating and they both realized that there had been no point; they parted amicably.
In 2010, Gottlieb published a book of the same title. Marry Him invites us to accompany Gottlieb on her quest to find a man to settle for. The jacket copy describes it as a “wake-up call.” But the book reads more like an odyssey of self-blame and regret. Once upon a time I was a girl who had the whole world at her feet, but I was too picky and now look at me! Along the way, Gottlieb makes occasional pit stops to criticize other high-achieving women.
Gottlieb uses two metaphors as touchstones for what these women do wrong when they date. The first is the “Husband Store.” The second is the “Shopping List”—meaning the characteristics you want the husband you buy to possess. Citing a few statistics and anecdotes, she proposes that this kind of foolish choosiness may be why fewer and fewer American women are marrying. Gottlieb claims to have broken up with a man once for his taste in socks.
At some level, what Gottlieb is saying is unobjectionable. No, you should not go into dating thinking that you can find a partner premade to your highly detailed specifications. Yet Marry Him does not really offer an alternative to the logic that says dating is like shopping. It just tells readers to lower their expectations. Fast.
By the end, Lori Gottlieb seems ready to marry literally anyone. She says she would take a man who made bad jokes or had bad breath. But—spoiler alert—after 260 pages, she is still alone. She says that the moral is that she should have settled earlier. But to me, Marry Him reads more like an allegory of the limitations of the self-help genre. It tells its readers to mold themselves and their desires into very particular forms to try to attain a kind of happiness that is unimaginative at best.
Are straight women really still doomed to choose between a foolish, futile quest for Mr. Right and a mad dash after the equally elusive Mr. Anyone at All?
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Some religions describe desire as a blessing. Others label it a curse. But none deny that all humans long for others with whom to share our lives. Almost all individuals seem to feel a deep need to live lives that include close and caring relationships. Given how vitally important this is, and how challenging it can be, it makes sense that they turn to experts. The intense, almost religious feelings that self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey inspire in their fans reflect a real need that those fans experience to do something to address their frustrations.
America has a long tradition of bestsellers that offer readers guidance about how to cultivate their inner lives and achieve professional success. Over the twentieth century, a string of male self-help authors became household names. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People sold well even during the Great Depression. Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking became a bible to Company Men of the Steady Era. In 1989, Stephen Covey instructed readers in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; he promised that learning to attend to your inner voice can make you a better person and a better manager all at once.
Each of these books encourages readers to look inside themselves and trust their instincts. They advise you that you must have the strength to buck received wisdom and challenge authority—including the authorities in psychiatry or sociology who usually say that the folksy wisdom of these books is bogus. Romantic self-help, however, tends to offer the opposite advice.
Where business self-help says to trust your gut, romantic self-help warns you to question every instinct. Where the managers hear that they should listen to their coworkers, the daters hear that they should never trust a partner to mean what he says. If you hope to find love, you will have to learn to read between the lines and plot your actions accordingly. These books promise that they can help.
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Courtship did not always seem this mysterious. Popular books of romantic advice are older than dating. During the Calling Era, many publishers stayed in business by telling young people and their families how they should behave.
In The Ladies’ Home Journal, an etiquette columnist who answered questions under the pen name the “Lady from Philadelphia” delivered firm instructions to female readers about how to manage their gentleman callers. The questions she answered showed that callers were just as capable of obsessing over the details of how to act as daters are today.
In July 1905, someone named Madge wrote asking how to react when a young man failed to show up after saying he would drop in. The Lady from Philadelphia advised her to “be charitable until you hear his explanation or apology,” but “if no apology is ever made and he never comes you should treat him as the merest acquaintance, recognizing him when you pass, but without cordiality.”
Sadie had the opposite problem. “What to do when a man persists in holding your hand in spite of all that you can say?” she pleaded.
The Lady from Philadelphia replied sternly that “no man, who is fit to be welcomed in your home, would refuse to release your hand if you asked him as if you meant it.”
Single men, too, were eager for tips on how to conduct themselves. Putnam’s Handbook of Etiquette (1913), a manual aimed at men, devoted a section to “The Question of the Hat, Gloves, and Stick.”
“When a gentleman ventures a chance call upon women, and is asked by the servant to step into the drawing-room while she ascertains if the ladies are home, he retains his overcoat and gloves, and waits hat in hand,” Putnam’s instructed. “If the answer to his request is propitious, he then removes his top-coat and leaves it in the hall. With the coat, hat, stick, and gloves may also be left.”
To the twenty-first-century reader, two things jump out about Calling Era advice. The first is the tone of voice in which it is dispensed. This tone is confident. It suggests that there are clear protocols for how people pair up to reproduce society. To find a mate, all you have to do is follow them. In addition, the ritual of calling reflected and reinforced a set of strong beliefs about gender roles and relations. A long tradition argued that a man should always be running after the woman he desired—that he could not, by definition, want something that he had.
Barriers built into the ritual of calling ensured that during courtship, young men and women followed this script. The custom of calling rendered wo
men passive and immobile. The setup required men to act in order to express interest. A woman did not have to pretend that she had somehow overlooked a text message in order to strike her crush as desirable. The mere fact that he was talking to her meant that he had already waited for her appointed day “at home,” presented his calling card to her servant, and stood there fumbling with his hat, gloves, and stick.
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The age of dating inherited its ideas about love and courtship from this earlier era. It held on to the idea that women were essentially passive and that men wanted to pursue them. But as women streamed into public workplaces and educational institutions, the real barriers that had made men into agents of desire and women into its objects were breaking down.
Men and women could now meet in many different settings; they might run into one another at work or on the street. A woman no longer had her family and her home to protect her against the embarrassing possibility of feeling attracted to a man who was not interested in her. Moreover, among the working-class pioneers of dating, men had the money that bought access to the spaces where courtship took place—bars or restaurants or dance halls. This meant that in order to have any fun, women had to chase men.
“The lure of the stage, of the movie, of the shop, and of the office make of it the definite El Dorado of the woman,” the sociologist Frances Donovan wrote in 1919. “Owing to present day conditions of city life, the man is the one pursued, the woman the pursuer.”
As more middle-class women with disposable income began dating, the idea that men paid remained the norm. This made men the hosts of courtship. In order to be wooed, women had to woo men—without ever giving away that they were doing it.
To many observers, this reversal of traditional gender roles seemed to pose a threat to romance. Therefore, early books of dating advice urged women that in order to make themselves desirable, they would have to create the illusion that they were still feminine. That meant, still as passive as they had been when they were homebound.