The Fractured Fairy-tale & the Quiet Revolution vs. Second Stage: Observations of a CSO Rep at IMF/WB Spring Mtgs – Part 46
In my last blog, The MDGs, “Women’s Work” & Gender Equality – Part 44, I once again explored the many realities with court systems which are preventing the realization of rights for women, as well as contributing to her oppression and discriminatory norms against her. In today’s blog I will further explore how the Fractured Fairytale of the western feminist movement created an erosion of rights of women in the West as opposed to empowering women by upholding her Rights under constitutions, laws and international conventions. Economist Claudia Goldin provides a synopsis of the feminist movement and “Quiet” Revolution in her report Three Evolutions, the Quiet Revolution, and Beyond: A Summary,
What forces propelled the three evolutions in the lives of adult women and brought about the quiet revolution? At the risk of simplifying a complicated social and economic transformation that unleashed the most momentous change in the labor force of the twentieth century, I will summarize my argument.
I separated the approximately first three-quarters of the twentieth century into three phases of evolutionary change. During Phase I, few adult and married women were in the labor force. The income elasticity of female labor supply was large (and negative) and the substitution elasticity of labor supply was small. Virtually all change in participation had to come from shifts in labor supply. Until the two elasticities of the Slutsky equation changed, economic growth and the consequent increase in real earnings for women would not elicit an increase in the participation of adult and married women. But change they did during Phase II.
The income elasticity decreased considerably in (absolute) magnitude with the arrival of nice jobs that reduced the stigma surrounding married women’s work outside the home and with the increase in high school attendance and graduation rates that made nice work a possibility for many young women. The substitution effect increased substantially with the reduction in hours (and days) of work, the initial stirrings of part-time work, and the rapid diffusion of the electric household. Also of some importance, although often exaggerated, was the impact of World War II in demonstrating, to women and their families, that the workplace could be respectable and showing employers that women were profitable to employ. By Phase III female labor supply was rather elastic. The large increase in aggregate demand, especially in the 1960s, and the accommodation of married women with the expansion of part-time work, led to an enormous increase in married women’s labor force participation.
Put succinctly, demand raced over an elastic labor supply function. But these changes could hardly have been accurately predicted by the participants. Most—even those with college degrees—had not made plans to be in the workforce for an extended period. Work was a job to “fall back on,” not a career. The skill set of these women was not commensurate with their eventual life cycle labor force participation. But all of that would also change. Young women growing up in the 1960s could see that adult and married women had participation rates that were rapidly increasing. The young began to extrapolate to their own lives, possibly influenced by the resurgence of feminism that cautioned them to think independently. Two other important changes took place. One was the contraceptive innovation known as the pill. Aided by changes in state laws, the pill diffused to young, single women. The other was the enormous increase in divorce in the 1960s. The advent of the pill for young women allowed them to plan their careers before planning for their families and to be taken more seriously by their employers and advisors. A consequence of the pill was that the age at first marriage increased. Together with the rise in divorce, a far smaller fraction of a woman’s life would be spent married. Young women in the 1960s and 1970s were better able to predict what their future lifetime employment would be. As a result they increased their investments in formal schooling, majored in career-oriented subjects, and continued to professional and graduate schools in far greater numbers. They had longer horizons than did previous generations and an altered identity that placed career ahead or on equal footing with marriage. Wives were less often secondary workers, the flotsam and jetsam of the labor market. The income and substitution effects of labor supply changed once again, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. No longer was women’s labor supply highly elastic. It was influenced even less than before by husband’s earnings. The earnings of women rose relative to those of men, occupations changed from more traditional ones to those that had been considered nontraditional.
The quiet revolution was set in motion by the generation born in the late 1940s, but a noisier revolution, led by some in the older cohorts, preceded it. As opposed to the noisy revolution, the quiet revolution was accomplished by many who were unaware that they were part of a grand transformation. They were the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that would alter women’s employment, education, and family. But was Ely correct in asserting that “Revolutions do not go backward”? There is little evidence that this one has, at least for now.
As Goldin explains in the text above the “Quiet Revolution,” much of which was propelled by Betty Friedan’s first book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963; literally changed the world—as the Western feminist movement it started, has since, been exported to societies across the planet. However, that movement did not proceed at Friedan intended, and almost 20 years late, in 1981, she warned the world about the dysfunctional path the Fractured Fairytale Feminist movement was taking in her book The Second Stage. Friedan reprinted The Second Stage 4 times, in 1981, 1986, 1991, and again in 1998, in which she wrote the following;
The second stage is where we must move, women and men together. We need a new and politically active consciousness-raising to get us beyond the polarized and destructive male model of work and decision-making and the undervalued women’s model of life—the model that takes it as inevitable that having children is a woman’s free individual choice to short-circuit permanently her earning power and her professional future. Women have far more political power than they may realize. To take one strikingly important example, women elected the President of the United States in 1996 by a seventeen-point gender gap. The issues by which President Clinton was reelected were those that matter most to women: health care, social security, social welfare, protection of the environment, and education. The power that women indubitably have, voting as they do in increasingly higher proportions than men, and becoming an ever-larger proportion of the labor force, must be used to restructure the terms and conditions at work and the already changing roles of women and men at home.
It’s seventeen years now since I originally proclaimed the need for a “second stage” if women, men, and children were to be able to live the equality we fought for. I believed then, and I believe now, that the organization of the family—is the new feminist frontier. We must still transform institutions, physically and culturally, from the office to the home, and change the patterns of career advancement beyond the current models that tacitly assume that a worker always has a wife at home to handle life for him. In the seventeen years since I made that call in The Second Stage to restructure home and work, the real lives of women and men, living on new terms of equality, have changed in marvelous, messy, diverse, and still not yet completely chartered ways. Feminist theory, still preoccupied with sexual politics and mired in a stance of victimhood, has not caught up to this reality. It is time that we contemplate—and act on—the true dimensions of women’s own empowerment as a new majority. With us as allies are all those men who now carry babies in backpacks, and who have been supported by and strengthened by (or have at least gotten used to) women carrying half the earning burden, as they now do in over 50 percent of American families. The greatest political need for women and men now is to make the restructuring of the work-home relationship a part of the American political and economic agenda.
Just as women must not allow themselves to be sucked into the classic male power game in the workplace, we must not allow ourselves to be diverted by the emotion-ridden issues of sexual politics. The abortion hysteria is the desperate last gasp of those who are threatened by women’s autonomy, but do not dare attack it head on; they try to keep us concentrating on the issue of abortion—fighting that battle over and over again. I fear that feminists fall into a trap when they allow abortion to be seen as the feminist issue. Every social survey that is done indicates that though there is ambivalence and disagreement about some questions—for instance, abortion for minors—a national consensus exists on the right to choose. We must of course defend a woman’s right to choose when and whether to have a child, because that is basic to the personhood of women. Abortion is now a necessary recourse to exercise that right when birth control fails, but abortion itself I hope and believe will soon be obsolete. Abortion is not a value in itself and neither it not other aspects of sexual life are the most significant issues for women’s empowerment. What is most important is participating on equal terms in economic and political decision-making.
Just as it is now of urgent importance to move to the second stage, transforming life as it can be lived with men on a basis of equality both at home and at work, it is time to grow up and move beyond our obsession with having babies or preserving the beauty of our youth, to recognize the new challenges of the eighty-year life span that is women’s lot today. We may be amused or shocked (or both) by reports of a sixty-three-year-old woman’s having a baby. Although I can sympathize with the attraction of using new technology to obtain one’s heart’s desire, such belated parenthood strikes me as somehow a symptom of our inability to grasp the totality of the life now open to women and to men....
We are now doing our best to live the second stage. Although too few institutional adjustments have been made, in PTA conference schedules or office hours, whole industries of changes have arisen to recognize the new needs... The great majority of women who are now working in jobs outside the home are doing this with varying degrees of comfort, pressure, guilt, desperation, and pleasure, but all are required to accept the old male model of work. Women who make up half the workforce today and are getting 40 percent of the professional degrees, do not have wives at hoe to do the grocery shopping—but now neither do men.... The need to restructure the institutions themselves has not been faced adequately in terms of public policy. What women and men today need is not the right to have babies at sixty-three, but real choices about having children in their twenties, thirties, or even in their forties, without paying an inordinate price or facing impossible dilemmas in their careers. We need to restructure hours and conditions of work week. The technology of work today (not to mention the traffic jams of our cities) urge us to flextime, with staggered hours of starting and leaving work, and variable schedules during the work week.
But it also seems to me that living equality is not just a matter of sharing the care of babies or rearranging the hours or work... As long as men’s identity is defined in terms of simple dominance, either by winning the rat race or, if all else fails, by dominance over women, then women’s move to autonomy and power will indeed be threatening.
As seen in the texts above, the women’s right movement of the West since the 70’s has been travelling down a very dysfunctional path for women and children. However, since the press, along with the women’s rights and domestic violence cheerleaders are in the pockets of those who control the purse strings, namely the Koch brothers and other 1%ers, they have propagated an extremely misogynistic construct of women in the courts, rending them more of slaves to their families and society than they were before. These courts are even MORE OPPRESSIVE to women in the East, where women’s rights within the home and marriage are protected under the antiquated religious customs that western governments and their propaganda presses are denouncing as oppressive to women. When you “democratize” a society and separate Church & State; but the “state” does not “step up to the plate” in governing what was previously under the domain of the Church, chaos, anarchy, and corruption result.
It is vital that policy-makers, public authorities and regulators understand the many social issues at work in societies that are guiding Adam Smith’s famous “invisible” hand. And, one of the most important thing to examine is how, and why social and professional networks are used to uphold the law, as well as break the law.
One of my greatest personal challenges as an adult was my absolute firm resolve to have children; and have as many as my bank accounts would allow. Contrary to popular belief in the courts, “trophy-homemaking-wives” are not only a rare commodity in the present Fractured Fairytale. But, they are a very valuable asset to their husbands and families, through the many, many services they provide to their families on a daily basis. For courts to turn women who have “serviced” her families for decades onto the streets with no means of support (due to a workforce that denigrates her and her experience and abilities) is not only discriminatory it is cruel and unusual punishment—and renders homemaker’s slaves in these societies. If I had a penny for every time I have been denigrated, belittled and told “callate tonta” in the past decade, I would be a very wealthy woman. I have an enormous amount of skills, at the administrative level, as well as managerial level in various domains; and is precisely why I am “unemployable.”
Another myth within the international development community, as well as the public in general, is that “trophy-wives” are “parasites” off of society. The REAL parasites are all the lawyers, judges, cottage industries, and lazy, unethical, dishonest civil servants around the world—who are profiteering from not only the hard-work of homemakers, socialites, and trophy-wives, but also the pain and suffering of millions and millions of victims of domestic abuse.
As seen in Figure 10 above the participation rate of women with young children, dropped dramatically, in the ‘60s, and into the late ‘70s. But, in the late ‘70s, up to the turn of the century, participation rates of young mothers, as well as the general female population, began to rise, with an almost total reversal for young mothers starting in the early '80s (and the Reagan Era). Additionally, seen in the graph is the fact that young mother’s participation rates in the USA have returned to slightly higher levels than before the ‘60s. This is cause for concern, due to the fact that before the ‘60s it was the poorer women in society that had to work outside the home to compliment husband’s salaries, or were young unmarried women, many of who lived with their parents until married. While before the ‘60s it was only the poor women with the burden of the Second Shift, who were in the workforce. At present, upper and upper-middle class women are experiencing the same difficulties poor women always faced, and is in large part why children in poor families (or countries) have lower school participation rates, as well as success rates in their lifetime.
The socialization process of young children is extremely, extremely important in a good functioning society. And, it is both irresponsible of policy-makers and public authorities to turn a blind-eye to such rampant greed and corruption that presently reigns in family courts around the world—reminding everyone the victim toll rises another 2-4 million children each year for victims of sexual and physical abuse, with psychological abuse much, much higher. While in most cases of divorce, an estimated 85% of parents arrive at financial and custodial agreements between themselves. And, this is the way it should be. When two people who have respected and loved each other, for whatever reasons decide they can no longer live together, they should divide assets in a fair and open manner, make financial arrangements so that women are assured financial security from husbands to whom they have dedicated decades in helping them to build careers and nest eggs, without leaving husbands with excessive financial burdens of maintaining 2 homes. At least in the East men can only have as many wives as they can afford to provide for, unlike in the West were wives and children are disposable property, due to misogyny and corruption in its courts.
The prevalent idea in the courts that homemakers “don’t work” is misogynistic rhetoric being force-fed to the legal community by decades of alpha-male, patriarchal rights, right-wing extremism in Washington, started under Nancy and Ronald Reagan, with the assistance of socialite CZ Guest, with her daughter, Deb of the Decade Cornelia Guest, as one of her principle tools. One of the things people do not understand in the Fractured Fairytale and fish-bowl existence of those who live it, is that an existence without meaning, direction, and purpose, as well as a Greater Good, is an existence without Soul.
So today’s Ostrich, Toad, Bellowing-cow Award goes to National Press Radio (NPR), and its former Ombudsman Alicia Sheppard, with whom I met in 2010 regarding my CEDAW case against Spain (naming the American and French governments as accessories under their failure to act). During the interview, Ms. Sheppard, brushed off discrimination against women with family courts as unimportant due to its “habitual” custom. However, as I have demonstrated in the interim, misogyny and discrimination against women (and children) in the courts is not “insignificant” –it is “insignificant” neither in the number of women and children it effects nor, in the gravity of the crimes against them. The discrimination in family courts around the world has created the Holocaust of the 21st century, with the numbers in the tens of millions--the same as the Holocaust of the 20th century.