Posted on 04/18/2002 5:40:00 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Syndicated New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd sounded the alarm recently about the "scary" statistics on women, careers, and childlessness. "Fifty-five percent of 35-year-old career women are childless," she writes. "The number of childless women age 40 to 44 has doubled in the past 20 years," and "among [female] corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more...49 percent..did not have children."
Dowd observes that "yet again...men have an unfair advantage...the more women accomplish, the more they have to sacrifice.." And, of course, she knows exactly where to place the blame.
Men, she explains, "protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women." In the marriage market, female achievement is the "kiss of death for women" because "men veer away from 'challenging' women." Dowd even implies that her own childlessness is the result of this "male" problem. Yet there are many reasons for the "baby bust" besides male perfidy.
Reason #1: Women often do not adjust their preferences in a mate to their career goals.
High-powered career women need men who will support their careers by scaling back their careers to become the children's primary caregivers or even househusbands. Studies have shown that, under the right conditions, many men would be happy to exchange their long work hours for the primary role at home. Yet, paradoxically, career women rarely choose these men as mates.
Reason #2: Even successful women still usually choose to "marry up."
Obviously the pool of available candidates for women becomes smaller the more successful they become.
Reason #3: Some men prefer a less career-oriented woman out of legitimate concern for their future children.
Men believe, with justification, that even successful women still want men to be the primary breadwinner. Thus they know that if they marry a career-oriented woman, both of them will be tied to their careers, to the possible detriment of their children.
Reason #4: Having kids is not for everyone, and many women have made an intelligent choice to remain childless.
Feminism has spent 30 years teaching women to rebel against compulsory motherhood and domesticity and to focus on their careers. Many women have done it and are content with the choices they have made. For them, there is no 'crisis.'
Reason #5: Modern women's overreaction to the strict gender roles of the past.
As dissident feminist Danielle Crittenden points out in What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, the highly educated modern woman has been taught that any career sacrifice or accommodation made for men and/or children constitutes a patriarchal limitation on her freedom. The result of this understandable yet self-defeating overreaction is that the accommodations which all people, male or female, make when they marry and have children are resented. This resentment is often unfairly deflected onto men.
Reason #6: Educated modern women have been misinformed on men and marriage by the Women's Studies programs in their universities.
As a new report by the Independent Women's Forum notes, these programs focus on convincing young women that women are under siege and oppressed and that men take advantage of women. While serious researchers and scholars have generally concluded that these programs promulgate discredited research, the programs still imbue educated women with hostility and contempt for men, marriage, and child-rearing.
These programs exaggerate the disadvantages and burdens women face, and ignore or misrepresent as 'privilege' the disadvantages and burdens men face. For example, the fact that men earn more money than women, because they work the longest hours at the most hazardous and demanding jobs, is dressed up as pro-male "wage discrimination."
The problem with Dowd, and the many modern women who think like her, is that it never seems to occur to them that they, not men, are the cause of their own problems. Dowd is a successful career woman who has been endlessly critical of men. Yet, without a trace of irony, she chastises men for being afraid of successful women who, she says, may be critical of them. But how many women want to marry a man who is critical? Many domestic violence pamphlets even characterize men who are critical of their wives as "emotional abusers."
A friend of mine recently explained the break-up of his marriage to a successful woman along these lines. "My wife said the problem was her career success," he said. "But I was happy for her and her success. The problem wasn't her career. The problem was her negative, critical view of men. In the end I simply got tired of being wrong all the time."
Who wouldn't?
Glenn Sacks writes about gender issues from the male perspective. His columns have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and the Washington Times.
Glenn Sacks
Good article.
I'm not a woman, therefore I would qualify as a MSNBC or Fox analysit on women issues. Now, that my credentials have been established, I don't blame career women or any women for not coosing 'those' men as mates.
Dowd, like most liberals/leftists, holds dearly and unthinkingly to the mistaken concept that somehow, some way, their "ideals" and "progressive ideas" are all it takes to make nature itself alter it's laws to fit their preferences. When that doesn't happen (as it never does), they end up confused and bitter.
Nature has "designed" male and female amongst the varied species for some generalized purposes, and for some very specific purposes. Like it or not, those are the facts. And while you're welcome to argue and fight against nature all you like, be advised beforehand, you will lose.
A lot of those so-called "challenging women" tend to be castrating bitches.
Always leave a window of opportunity to bail out and move on.
Hey! That's me. I'd gladly stay home if my wife could pull the income I do. And it wouldn't bother me a bit.
Absolutely true. There is a downside to being a "successful" New York Times/DNC left-wing propagandist. Dowd better seriously up her Prozac dose, or she may one day do away with her vile self.
Memo to Maureen Dowd: You reap what you sow.
Their Op Ed page is supposed to be a forum for serious political and cultural analysis, and they haven't had that from Dowd for several years, if ever. I don't mean that she's insufferably leftist, because they all are, but that she's a bad writer whose mental confusion is all too evident.
It's bad enough to have failed theater critics as political columnists. Frank Rich couldn't write about theater so they switched him to movies; he couldn't write about movies so they switched him to politics; he couldn't write about politics, but they left him there, because that's the end of the line. But Maureen Dowd outdoes them all in sheer mindless awfulness.
Dowd possesses none of these qualities!
LOL My husband says the same thing. The problem is the vacuum cleaner terrifies him, he can't find the dishes in the kitchen, the washing machine confounds him with its complexity, and he and our son consider the floor to be the largest shelf in the house.
He's a wonderful provider, incredibly talented in his line of work (which has nothing to do with housekeeping, thank goodness), a great father, a devout Catholic, and all-around nice guy. But domestic? ummmmmm . . . no.
So unless you can wrestle a vacuum cleaner into submission and out-argue a washer, better not quit your day job.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.