There are many ways to move backwards. One of the more popular ways is to embrace what we perceive as tradition. We view a seemingly idealistic pattern of behavior that has been rejected perhaps by previous generations and see it with fresh eyes and renewed vigor. We see the upside, forgetting or ignoring that a downside ever existed.
It is perhaps even natural to want to return to the past. The present is unsettling, and the future is obscure and insecure. In the past it seems like values and virtues were firmly set. People were honest artisans who farmed organically and used beasts of burden and not dreadful gasoline guzzling, sheet metal monsters to travel about. Men were genteel and women were kind and gracious, capable of walking on air. People has a special sense, a sixth sense, if you will, to perceive things that escape us today.
Of course, no one wishes to dwell on the realities. The health issues, the dangerous horse doody and the piles of garbage in the streets. We forget the levels of ignorance, illiteracy, and genetic maladies that left us with goiters, wall eyed, hairlipped, or with an extra leg hanging out of our chests. We ignore the millions who starved because organic farming wasn’t quite getting it done. We admire the honest craftsman but ignore the fact that until here was mass production most went without most things. Many went without even shoes. Most people had two outfits. Every day and Sunday. There were no color choices or the need for shoe racks or designer hangers.
And then we have the Women’s Movement. First off, there is no denying that there are great many skilled, highly intelligent and competent women practicing in any number of professions. These are great women who have changed the course of history and made tremendous contributions to their industries and disciplines, and to society as a whole.
More women than men are graduating from medical school and law school. Women, overall, earn more money than they ever did. On the less grand scale, there are more working women, showing up at the office or working diligently from remote locations, mainly because they have to contribute to the household income. They work because they have to, they want to, to the point perhaps where they never give it a thought.
But then there are increasingly more younger women who lack the desires of the women who pioneered the Women’s Movement. Maybe it is a generational thing. Perhaps it is even rebelliousness or a backlash of sorts. Or maybe some have arrived at the harsh reality that sitting at home is a lot better than showing up at an office where you are forced to deal with politics, harassment, and the duties inherent with your profession or job.
Some may argue that this is not the case. And some may argue that these women have the freedom to do whatever they choose. It’s about choice. Yes. Certainly it is. But when you are taking up space in an elite law or medical school so you can be a better marriage prospect, rather than a contribution to that community, something may be wrong with this picture.
As Marilyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, was quoted in an article in the New York Times, “It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?”
In the same article Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, ” What does concern me is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”
Simply put, a lot of precious space is allocated in schools that produce influential inhabitants in their disciplines, people who move forward to assume places at the highest levels of their professions. People who become inventors and innovators, judges, developers of vaccines, leaders in their communities and their nation. This is not necessarily the place where someone takes up one of the few seats to practice for a couple of years and then move on to stay-at-home motherhood.
And with this type of behavior, we are referring to the achievers. We are referring to the elite. Beneath the elite we have those who quite simply just want to marry the richest guy with the most stuff on the best career track who can let them stay at home. Where professional challenges were once the major concern for young women in college, it seems now the big ticket it merely to find the guy. Find the guy. Marry well. Marry rich. As for love…maybe?
That way you can stay home, have lunch with your girlfriends and wax for hours on the celebrity hit list and other people they don’t know. This new attitude, as noted before, may be an act of rebellion. It may be a reflection of the economy. It is tough economic times and life is tough out there. Find someone who will take care of you. Not someone you can be with and share the joys and misery. Someone who will take care of you.
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There is no blame, really. And this is hardly a rant. It’s an examination of the overall policies, social and financial, that have left this nation, hurting, wanting, and very insecure. As a market driven society where consumerism made up two thirds of the economy, going cold turkey on the shopping impulse is like being a junkie at a revival meeting. You don’t know what to do with yourself or when the pain will start to fade.
In a society where air brushing as created the perfect form of beauty that no living being could ever recreate, it is bound to drive women crazy. To think that our celebrities and movies stars, who appear to us after sixteen hours having designers, makeup artists, etc., preening, fussing, and dressing them, can be copied in real life is bizarre. Truly bizarre. Yet that belief is the standard. It is an accepted reality, in spite of the facts. In spite of the facts that the celebrities and models can’t duplicate in real life the perfect image of themselves.
Yet here we are with women believing that with a few good beauty tips and some high priced cosmetics they can actually look as good as their aspirations. So women, smart women, exchange beauty and dressing tips, talk about their favorite celebrities and seem never wonder how they allowed themselves, no voluntarily, jumped into this box in the first place.
Men don’t escape responsibility. When it comes to romance and related social issues. Most men are idiots. Inarticulate idiots, at that. “Dude. Dude?” The idolize the marketing version of the sex symbol that is both unwieldy and unachievable. It makes them feel awkward to think they have settled for less than the stay at home beauty queen.
It is understandable. Most men really don’t have much to work with. They have their jobs and the things they buy and they things they believe they possess. Like their women. Most men have been programmed that anything remotely resembling taste, outside of cars and lawn care, is effeminate or gay. They are taught to believe their wives know better about everything except the job and the industry they compete in nearly every day of their lives.
More importantly, many men are threatened by thinking and successful women. They want their women to stay at home. They don’t want them competing. It is tough to have a bigger penis contest with someone who has you out outmaneuvered because they aren’t wearing one. It is tough to go up against the traditional social pressures that have evolved since Mom and Pop partnered as equals in the Mom and Pop shops.
After all, your mother and father probably set up the family that way. Others around you have condemned you as less of a man if you can’t carry the weight of a stay at home wife and three kids in the self-indulgence program on the weight of your designer shoulders. This is your job. Nay. This is your duty. Sit there and be mute, forgetting the lessons of the past.
What past? When the little woman sat home and allowed her brain to atrophy on nonsense and more nonsense. When the high point of the day was doing battled with that dreaded ring around the collar. When the woman was viewed as chattel, because as such they had no real ownership other than what was allowed by law. When soap operas and smores took priority over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the advent of social change.
Part of that change was Women’s Liberation. More succinctly, Women’s Rights. I remember when a good job for a woman was being a teacher. “You could always teach,” or so it went. “Or teach for a couple, few years until your husband gets his career off the ground. And then you can stay home and go out of your mind with the children.”
Okay, it’s different now. With the advent of illegal immigration and cheap labor, many women have a helper. They have a nanny and a housekeeper. They don’t clean, they don’t have to clean, cook, or do the laundry themselves. The maid does it. If you explain it correctly in broken Spanish, then she may even hang the delicate fabricates and not cram them into the dryer.
It is different. Women’s careers. Been there done that. Women are free to go to the top schools in the country and then be the stay at home mother. They can nosh with friends on salad and sushi. They can discuss the merits of Young Einstein. Rather than try to be one themselves.
As for the women that still march on, working to achieve at the highest levels of profession and society. Bless you for keeping the bar at some civilized level of progress. I realize it is tough sledding in the face of those who criticize you and wonder if you have a screw loose for not seeking out the perfect fellow and settling down. At home. But you are the ones who the next generation may use as role models. You may yet inspire the next generation of women, not to stay at home but to take advantage of their talents, their brains and, yes, their sexuality. Take advantage so that society can benefit from your unique and special skills.
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