Something about Betty Friedan’s famous line has always bothered me.
She spoke of the “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” that gripped stay-at-home mothers during the 1950s. What bothers me is that her “problem with no name” is shared by these women’s apparent opposites – the swashbuckling professionals who emerged from the feminist movement. Some of them long for the pleasures of marriage and children. And the many who manage both jobs and family are wrecks, because they toil 16 hours a day.
An Englishman – I forget who – once said that a sense of inadequacy is the birthright of every American. That’s so true, and it goes double for the American woman, who, no matter what she does, doesn’t feel she is doing the right thing.
The story of Elizabeth Vargas unleashed gasps in all sectors of American womanhood. Vargas was co-anchor on ABC’s nightly news with Bob Woodruff, who was badly hurt in Iraq. She is now pregnant and being replaced by Charlie Gibson. Vargas is 43. Gibson is 63.
No one really buys her current story – that she wants to give up the opportunity of a lifetime because of a “difficult pregnancy.” Vargas had talked eagerly of returning to work after a few months’ maternity leave.
Everyone assumes that ABC forced her out, and she’s not coming back in any big job. Few women over 45 get to show their faces on American television, even the news shows.
A group of 40-something mothers in a Virginia suburb watched the Vargas saga with great anguish. They had careers, which they suspended for child rearing. They’d like to eventually re-enter the workforce but fear doing so as mature women. They know that the culture sees 45-year-old women as past their prime but their male contemporaries as still up-and-coming. Even older men have an advantage, witness the Vargas-Gibson story.
These women surf the channels, groaning at the standard news-team formula: a middle-aged man and a blonde half his age. “I can’t even watch Fox news anymore,” one of the mothers, whom I’ll call Lisa, said. “The women are all Barbies.” Manless professionals often harbor different dreads. Newsweek now says it’s sorry for a story 20 years ago that tried to whip up the anxieties of single women pursuing careers. It said that the odds of a white, college- educated woman finding a mate after age 25 were slim.
And a 40-year-old woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to ever marry.
In addition to being cruel, the article was wrong. Newsweek had hung its cover story on a highly flawed study. Actually, a single woman at 40 had about a 20 percent chance of getting married, according to a later Census Bureau report – not 2.6 percent, as Newsweek contended.
These were truly the Dark Ages for feminine ambition. The movies were full of she-demon professionals preying on sweet girls and unassuming businessmen. In “Fatal Attraction” (1987), a woman editor goes psycho after a family man calls off their brief affair. “Working Girl” (1988) centers on a female boss from hell, who steals her secretary’s bright idea.
Lisa in Virginia has an advanced degree but now tends full-time to her three young children. She marvels at a recent visit by her “exact opposite,” a never-married friend from Seattle, who is a professor.
“She’s turning 40 – doesn’t even have a boyfriend,” Lisa said. “She has a career that you would drool over, but she’s miserable, because all her assumptions of life are not working out. Meanwhile, I’m a cliché. I’m a stay-at-home mother who lives in the ‘burbs. We were both fulfilled in our respective lives, but still feeling like we’re not measuring up.”
Women find themselves up against two clocks, a biological one driven by nature and another by society.
The prime years for making a family are the same ones for advancing careers.
Single, married, childless, caring for family, job holding or homebound: Most women know they are giving up something to follow their current path. They certainly don’t deserve the harsh critiques of their juggling acts, whether coming from the outside or within.
To them, Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” really feels like several problems, some with names, some not.
