from How to Be a Man

The feminist revolution has fundamentally altered the relationship between men and women.
But has the rise of identity politics and the loss of the "family wage" left too many men trapped
in perpetual adolescence?

In little more than one generation, the pillars that supported traditional masculine identities
have collapsed. Millions of skilled working-class jobs that once gave men status and purpose
have gone. The male solidarity that was the backbone of the labor movement has gone. So has
the family wage, and increasingly men can no longer follow their fathers and grandfathers in the
role of family breadwinner. Old fashioned, maybe, but any parent of the bride wants to know the
prospects of their future son-in-law.

In 1968, 86 per cent of household gross employment income came from men and 14 per cent
from women. In 2008-2009, 63 per cent came from men and 37 per cent from women. Work
once provided men with the means to self-respect and self-reliance. For growing numbers, that,
too, has gone.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s has given men unprecedented sexual opportunities, but
the collapse in the "family wage" and changes in the structures of social reproduction have
diminished their prospects for enduring relationships of social anchorage--marriage,
fatherhood, head of household--which conventionally affirmed their patrimonial status. The
effect for many, particularly at the top and bottom ends of society, has been a prolonged form of
masculine adolescence without obligations of paternity or responsibility for others. While
women have taken on the burdens of the neoliberal revolution, many men appear to have been
disorientated by a profound sense of loss.

Traditional ways of being male, rooted in the Industrial Revolution and its domestic division of
labor, are becoming obsolete.
from On Language: Choice

by Summer Wood (2004)

“You can bake your cake and eat it, too!” declares Julia Roberts, playing bohemian Wellesley
art-history professor Katherine Watson in the period chick flick, Mona Lisa Smile. She eagerly
proffers an armful of law-school applications, standing on the doorstep of the imposingly stony
house where Joan (played by Julia Stiles), one of her best students, resides. But it’s too late, Joan
replies. She has eloped, and now that she has her MRS, she won’t be getting that law degree after
all. “This is my choice,” she says earnestly, but her character, like most of the others in the film,
is written so flatly that it’s impossible to tell whether we’re supposed to believe her. The
filmmakers clearly meant for women in the audience to breathe a sigh as we watched Roberts’
signature grin crumble on hearing the news--a sigh of pity for those poor, repressed Wellesley
girls, and a sigh of relief that women today are free of such antiquated dilemmas as having to
choose between work and family.

Fast forward fifty years, however, and the media is full of stories of real-life Joans: intelligent,
ambitious women, educated at the country’s top schools, trading in their MBAs and PhDs for
SUVs with car seats. Sylvia Ann Hewlett claimed to have revealed an epidemic of “creeping
nonchoice” in her much-publicized 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the
Quest for Children, while Lisa Belkin last year tagged a related trend “The Opt-Out Revolution”
in New York Times Magazine cover story. While Hewlett profiles high-powered women who
“chose” to put their careers first and postpone childbearing, only to find out their ovaries hadn’t
gotten the memo, Belkin focuses on impeccably credentialed younger women pre-empting the
challenges of balancing career and family by dropping out of the rat race soon after it begins.
Neither writer bothers to examine the ways decisions to work or stay home are rarely made
solely as a function of free will, but rather are swayed by underlying socioeconomic forces. But
both Hewlett’s book and Belkin’s article do illustrate something crucial--namely, the deep,
complex, and uneasy relationship between the ideology of feminism and the word “choice.”
from Domestic Arrangements

by Andi Zeisler

There’s an idea floating around out there that a revolution occurred sometime during the
heyday of second-wave feminism, a moment of collective consciousness when women flung
down their aprons and dustpans and, like Network’s Howard Beale, announced that they were
mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Then they streamed out of suburban houses
en masse and, perhaps led by Gloria Steinem herself, flooded the wood- paneled hallways of
corporate America, never to return to the drudgery of domesticity. This didn’t actually happen--
or at least it didn’t happen that way. For one thing, the choice between working inside the home
or outside of it is a fairly modern development enjoyed only by middle- and upper-class women;
it’s long been meaningless to women who never had the economic option not to work. For
another, married or partnered women who worked outside the home invariably kept working
when they got home, taking on what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “the second shift” in her
book of the same name--all the cooking, cleaning, and child care that was still expected of
women even if it wasn’t their paid work.

The idea has always been that women inherently want domesticity, and the media is quick to
report facts and figures that support this notion. In 2000, for example, a study by the market-
research firm Youth Intelligence found that of three thousand married and single women
between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, 8 percent said they would opt to live a domestic
life if it were economically feasible; that same year, Cosmopolitan revealed that of eight hundred
women polled by the magazine, two-thirds would choose to be a full-time housewife rather than
a worker bee. More recently, The New York Times has been tireless in running “trend” stories
trumpeting the desire of Ivy League-educated women for good old-fashioned house-wifery;
though the stories themselves (Lisa Belkin’s 2003 article “The Opt-Out Revolution” and Louise
Story’s 2005 “news” item “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood”) have
been widely criticized for overly anecdotal and sloppy methodology, the fact that the paper is so
eager to make them front-page news says it all.