50 years after "the feminine mystique"--are you better off than your grandmother? [View all]

[niyad]

Let’s Talk About The Feminine Mystique, 50 Years After Its Debut: Are You Really Better Off Than Your Grandmother?


Believe it or not, it’s been 50 years since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique hit shelves. The book is credited with bringing second-wave feminism to the national spotlight, sparking women to rethink traditional gender roles. So how have women’s lives changed since then? Let’s take a look.

. . . . .

A few things that still haven’t changed…or have even gotten worse:

1
Women work more—but boy, is it hard sometimes. The United States lags embarrassingly far behind the rest of the world when it comes to guaranteeing paid maternity leave (i.e., we don’t have any, while women in other nations around the world, from Pakistan to Mexico to Canada, are guaranteed between 12 weeks and a year). We need paid leave for new mothers and fathers as well as quality subsidized child care so that when the 50 percent of families with two earners and the 26 percent of single parents need to get back to work, there are options available. Most important, we need to begin thinking of work-life balance not as a woman’s problem but as a human problem. Without that, we’ll never have as many women as men in politics, in boardrooms, in research labs, or in other important fields.

2
We’ve turned mothering into a competitive sport. Women are expected to research every aspect of parenting—strollers, naps, nutrition, sleep habits—from the moment they get pregnant. Researchers have found that today’s mothers—even the ones who work full time outside the home—now actually clock more hours with their kids than back in the days when Friedan wrote about the stranglehold of child care. Time for yourself? Forget it.

3
Our access to reproductive care is under siege. In states all over the country, lawmakers are trying to define life as beginning at conception—which would make many forms of birth control illegal—and to basically make abortion, which has been legal in all 50 states since 1973, unavailable. Our ability to control when and with whom we have a family is at the root of our ability to work, to earn money, to love, and to play on equal footing as men. When our reproductive freedom is compromised, so is our equality as citizens.

4
The wage gap persists. Today women earn 77 percent of what men do—up from 59 percent in 1963, it must be said—and the numbers are far worse for women of color. That wage gap and other factors—like the time women still spend doing unpaid caregiving and the interruption of earning for pregnancy—mean that American women of every race are more likely than men to live in poverty.

http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2013/02/the-feminine-mystique-50-years-after-its-debut