Feminism: The Price to be Paid

By

William D. Dannenmaier

Janice Shaw Crouse had an interesting, but sad, article in Townhall.com on April 3, 2007. entitled “Washington’s Working Women.” She commented on a couple she had observed on a commuter train one morning. She guessed the woman to be in her early thirties: well dressed and attractive but with that slightly worn, tired, look which carves the faces of so many men and women after ten or fifteen years in the world of work. She said the woman made those small, tentative, gestures towards the man so often seen in dating couples who are uncertain of one another. The man appeared slightly younger and disinterested.

In her essay (well worth reading), Ms Crouse drew a parallel between what she observed and what she had known of so many reasonably successful working women in our nation’s capitol. As young women, enamored with the world of work in which they found themselves and, perhaps, with visions of great and meaningful futures, they forsook marriage and family. All things were new, and all seemed possible. But possibilities fade with the years. Having contented themselves with casual relationships and casual sex in their twenties, they found themselves career women in their thirties, unlikely to create a family, and unhappy with the future they anticipated as they viewed the lives of women in their forties who had preceded them on the same path.

I told my bride that there was nothing new in this, nor was the problem limited to our nation’s capitol. Fifty years ago in St. Louis I was employed as a counseling psychologist in Washington University’s Adult Counseling Service. Young women in their late twenties who had ignored marriage and family possibilities for careers were reasonably frequent clients. At twenty-nine or thirty they found their “careers” disappointing and saw their age as a limiting factor in developing the loving bond that would lead to a stabile marriage and family. (In fact, Achenbach reports that the chance is one in five that women who have a first child after the age of thirty-five will have a child with a serious disability. “Developmental Psychopathology, 1974.” This does not apply to women who have had previous children.)

My bride told me that I was wrong, that I didn’t understand the real problem because it was a “woman thing” not a “man thing.” She pointed out that beginning in early adolescence and continuing for years girls receive special treatment from boys their own age as well as from men in general. While this is obviously sexual, it is neither predatory nor sensual. Men of all ages will do things to help girls without expecting anything in return, simply because they are girls. This gradually changes. Favors are expected in return, typically sexual favors. The young woman finds that she is paying for the attention she receives, but there is no lack of men willing to assist her, so it appears as a minor matter. Popularity is pleasant.

The problem begins as she ages. As Ms Crouse points out, there are a decreasing number of men interested in the favors of ageing, female, junior executives. Sometime in their thirties most women realize that they are probably at the end of the ladder in the career they have chosen (this same realization occurs to most men at about the same age). Marriage becomes less certain. Men of their own age, who are interested in starting families, are more interested in younger women. The possibilities of having a family are limited to meeting some divorced man with children. Remaining single provides a bleak future, one, as Ms Crouse points out, in which the only person truly interested in “you” is the person for whom you work and that interest is tied to your productivity at work.

Considering Ms Crouse’s article and my bride’s comments, I would add only one change. It begins much earlier than the teens. I have watched girls of two and three dancing about at church and in our community center. Little girls of two or three with their long hair and pretty clothes attract much more favorable attention - hugs and kisses - than little boys of the same age. The men at these meetings, fathers and grandfathers, are “safe” men, men from whom girls can learn that care and affection are independent of sex.

But everything has a price to be paid. Just as all objects in a store have a cost, all activities have a cost. A family attending church has its costs of the time and energy: the donation is probably the least of these. But non-attendance has its costs also: the loss of a family activity and the loss of friendships with people of similar beliefs. Marriage and the raising of children have a cost. But single life has its costs also. All long term studies of happiness in life report that more people are satisfied with the cost of marriage than are satisfied with the cost of a single life and a professional career. Whatever the choice made, the price must be paid.