This essay is awesome. It highlights not only how much good feminism has done for men and women, but illustrates that the golden 50s weren’t quite so great, and came fraught with moral and sexual panics of their own. In other words, today’s obsession with over-sexed college “girls” making immoral and deviant sexual decisions is nothing new; neither is the sexual schizophrenia that so many young women are caught up in. But I’ll take greater sexual liberties and more relationship bargaining power over fear of sex and waiting to be “pinned” any day.
I’m not going to excerpt much of the essay because you really, really should head over and read the whole thing. It does an excellent job of capturing just how trapped young women were, torn between the ease and safety of family life and a desire to have something more. The women have little negotiating power in relationships, and relationships are the expectation — there’s really no feasible alternative for the middle and upper-middle-class white people who inhabit institutions of higher education. Most of all, the essay emphasizes just how infantalizing the whole construction of womanhood was, and how easy it is for women themselves to become accustomed to wanting safety above all else (“What a feeling of safety not to have to worry about a date for months ahead! A boy might even get around to falling in love at some point, and that would solve the problem of marriage too.”).
Among other observations: Progressives (and women in general) have changed. Conservatives haven’t, and they’re still bleating about the same social ills that they were whining about 50 years ago (and 50 years before that). How familiar does this sound:
The modern American female is one of the most discussed, written-about, sore subjects to come along in ages. She has been said to be domineering, frigid, neurotic, repressed, and unfeminine. She tries to do everything at once and doesn’t succeed in doing anything very well. Her problems are familiar to everyone, and, naturally, her most articulate critics are men. But I have found one interesting thing. Men, when they are pinned down on the subject, admit that what really irritates them about modern women is that they can’t, or won’t, give themselves completely to men the way women did in the old days. This is undoubtedly true, though a truth bent by the male ego. Women may change roles all they wish, skittering about in a frantic effort to fulfill themselves, but the male ego has not changed a twig for centuries. And this, God knows, is a good thing, problems or not.
It also does a bang-up job of illustrating what feminists have been saying about sex: That if you keep it attached to a morality that requires women to refuse it unless a man invests sufficient capital, that refuses to “respect” women who give it away for free, and that punishes transgressions by making childbirth compulsory and pregnancy difficult to avoid, it’s generally going to be a shit deal for women. When sex is a shit deal, romantic relationships are probably going to be shit deals, too. And so marriage has to offer women something else. Here, it’s pretty clear that marriage offers women a few things: Security; a solution to the sexual land-mine of dating; and an escape from a real grown-up life.
Personally, I’d prefer marriage offered me companionship, love, stability, and life-long egalitarian partnership, not a live-in patriarch to make all the decisions while I smile and clean up after him. But then, I’m one of those crazy feminists you keep hearing about.
At no point in the essay was I thinking, “Wow, I wish life was like this again.” I wonder if even the “take back the date” crew at IWF want dating to look like this (answer: yeah, they’re probably nutty enough to think this all sounds dandy). But it was a nice juxtaposition of how far women have come, how much things haven’t changed, and how the morality police have been fighting the exact same battles since just about ever. The good news: They’re losing. When they have to resort to virginity rings and “abstinence is the coolest!” marketing gimmicks, you know they’re fighting an uphill battle. Society has largely moved on, social shame just isn’t making women feel guilty enough about sex, and a lot of us are doin’ it and having a fabulous time. Others are waiting (which may very well be until marriage), but I’m fairly certain that at least some of them are doing it because they can and because they want to, not solely because they feel socially obligated or pressured to be a “good girl” and refuse sex despite their own desires. Of course things are far from perfect and the sexual double-standards and disconnects remain; I’d argue that women and girls today face a whole new set of problems to parse through in being inundated with the “sex will kill you” abstinence crap at school and “show us your tits!” on TV at night. I don’t see us back-tracking to the good old days of this essay any time soon. And, unfortunately for the abstinence-only profiteers, there may be a declining market for “I was a virgin til marriage and all I got were these lousy stained bedsheets” t-shirts.
Thanks to Kyle for the link.