Stephanie Coontz reported in the New York Times recently that according to several studies, boys and young men aged 14-25 are more likely to value so-called traditional gender roles (which are, in fact, tenuously constructed and historically specific) and to believe families are best off when mothers of small children do not work outside the home. This is interesting for two reasons. First, it shows that progressive change—whether of public policies or of personal values—is not automatic and effortless. Without sustained pressure and mobilization, gains can be rolled back.
Second, as Coontz also relates, findings from a cross-cultural comparison of gender attitudes and public policy in twenty-two countries show that these findings are entirely—as in, 100%, no rounding necessary—explained by the lack of adequate parental leave, affordable and high-quality child care, and family-friendly workplace cultures in the United States.
I’m reminded of a passage from Nora Ephron’s 1983 divorce comedy (?) novel Heartburn, which I read recently and enjoyed more than I expected to:
“There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage—buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose—but in the early 1970s there were at least two more. You could go into consciousness-raising and spend an evening a week talking over cheese to seven other women whose marriages were equally unhappy. And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out in a wildly irrelevant fashion by drawing up a list of household duties and drawing them up all over again. This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table. They cleared the table. They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women’s movement went away and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out in the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyers’ market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.”
This passage is glib, yes, but it gets at something important: we haven’t come nearly far enough. The gains of the feminist movement have been tremendous and wide-ranging; it is no longer controversial to say that women should be able to vote, to own property, to live alone, to escape violent and controlling husbands or boyfriends or brothers or fathers (though barriers to all of these rights are still substantial). But we have not fundamentally altered the structures underlying the oppression of women, and we still do not value women’s work.
Thanks to declining or stagnating wages in the United States, most two-parent families can no longer thrive on a single income, and yet the working world is still structured around the assumption that all workers have stay-at-home wives. Domestic labor is still disproportionately allocated and un- or under-compensated. Men may clear the table now and then, but women still cook the food and wash the dishes—and now we have to split the grocery bill.
So it’s not irrational or unreasonable for young men to look around at the structure of the contemporary American family and conclude that something is not working—that we are stretched to a breaking point, exhausted, dissatisfied, with a lower quality of life than in previous generations. The task before us is to make the case that this is a public problem, not a private one, and that the solution lies in progressive reforms, not in regression to a fictionalized past.