My father was born and brought up in the 1950s – a time when women were kept in the home. He was raised traditionally, with a mother who would have a hot meal on the table every night, a clean home always, and seldom openly disagreed with her husband.
My father grew up, and got married. He considered himself much more open-minded than his father had been, and fully supported the women’s rights movement. He would do a few dishes, perhaps take the garbage out, and then settle down to his paper. My mother famously asked him once, “Do you really think you’re done for the evening?” and my father looked up and said, “But I helped!” My mother was of the opinion that household tasks were to be shared equally – and Dad would soon come to realize that the best way to keep the peace was to help out.
Now, I live with my boyfriend – a truly lovely human being, who believes firmly in equality for all, and supports me in all that I do. When I ask him why it is that I still seem to end up being in charge of keeping our home tidy, he claims to not live up to my cleaning standards. If I have to do the job over again, what is the point in him even attempting it in the first place?
Two generations later, and the reasoning may have changed, but I am still somehow stuck scrubbing our toilet.
The Economist tells me that women are doing better than I think they are – the cover of their first issue this year was Rosie the Riveter doing her familiar flex, with the triumphant “We Did It!” caption. The message is clear – women have made it, have arrived, and are now truly equal. They follow this by saying women now make up 50% of the job market, and by 2011 there will be 2.6 million more female than male university students in America. However, what they leave out is interesting. Are they forgetting that women still only earn 80 cents on the male dollar? And when they say that women are in control of many powerful corporations, they neglect to tell us that only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women.
In a recent issue of ELLE magazine, Rachel Combe reports on a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which says that women have experienced a steady erosion of happiness from the 1970s – we are now notably less happy than men (clearly a shady state of affairs). Does the women’s movement have anything to do with our sudden sadness? Consider the 1970s – a time when “girl power” was hitting its stride, when “I am Woman, hear me roar” was an anthem for the hope felt by women who wanted equal rights and equal pay. And it’s been one long bout of not doing as well as we hoped since then. And above and beyond that, we are still doing the double shift of working at work and then coming home to make the dinner, clean the house, and take care of the kids. We are also expected to do it cheerfully, and to rejoice in the fact that, quite literally, we have the opportunity to do twice as much as our mothers did. It’s no wonder we’re feeling depressed.
Our troubles really began with the shift away from matriarchal rule. In prehistoric, so-called primitive societies that operated under a hunter-gatherer method of life, women were in a position of power. And why was this? Essentially, because women can make babies – and as the child bearers, were responsible for making sure a tribe didn’t die out. In many of those societies, the history of the tribe was passed down through the “wise women” who were responsible for remembering the tribe’s history, which could go back for 45 to 50 generations. “Civilized” societies have tended to be male-dominated, and that may have had a lot to do with the fact that men were no longer in danger of being killed by sabre-tooth tigers. It is telling that the first place in the US women got the vote was in the Montana territories. Again, this was a situation where men were in daily danger of being killed – it was a rough life out there in Wild West Montana. And as that was the case, it was natural that women be in a position of more importance in the community. Really, where we went wrong is inviting men to come home reliably at the end of each day.
One of our biggest troubles in the here and now is complacency – this feeling that we have gotten to a certain point, and feel that we no longer have any right to complain about a lack of equality. After all, compared to so many less fortunate women, we are so lucky! We do not have to live in fear of honor killings or genital mutilation, and in theory we are able to do anything we want. What is therefore so sad is that we still seem to find it difficult to really assert our own personal power. I have yet to talk to a female friend who says she would be comfortable earning more than her (future) husband – that things are just so much more natural and easy if women are kept in a lower earning bracket. On our own sliding scale of equality, we are still allowing men to dictate how far we can go.
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