The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [5]
The fact is women are now carrying some 50 percent of the income-earning burden in some 50 percent of households.2 Women are now nearly 50 percent of the labor force.3 Fifty-nine percent of women work at jobs outside the home, including the mothers of young children.4 And women’s wages are now about 72 percent of men’s.5 They are not equal at the top; most of the CEOs, law partners, hospital heads, full professors, cabinet members, judges, and police chiefs are still men. But women are now represented in all levels below the very top. And more Americans now work for companies owned or run by women than by the Fortune 500.
But it’s troubling to learn that the closing of the earnings gender gap has come only one-third (34 percent) from increases in women’s earnings; most of it (66 percent) is accounted for by a drop in men’s earnings.6 And while more and more women have entered the labor force in these years, more and more men have dropped out or been forced out.
It is men, first minority men, now white men, first blue-collar, now middle management, who have been the main victims of corporate downsizing. Because it’s the blue-collar and middle management jobs held mainly by men that have been eliminated, not just by technology but in the short-term interests of increasing the stock-market price by getting rid of men’s higher wages and benefits. Women’s service jobs, in areas such as the health professions, are the part of the economy that is growing, but those jobs are increasingly being “contracted out,” put on a temporary or contingent basis without benefits.
Many women’s jobs, especially those contingency jobs, are not brilliant careers, but poll after poll shows women today feeling pretty good about their complex lives of job, profession, and their various choices of marriage and motherhood. Women feel that zest still, with so many more choices than their mothers had, since they broke out of the feminine mystique. But the sexual politics that helped us break through the feminine mystique is not relevant or adequate, is even diversionary, in confronting the serious and growing economic imbalance, the mounting income inequality of wealth, now threatening both women and men.
Men, whose very masculine identity has been defined in terms of their score in the rat race, knocking the other guy down, can no longer count on that lifetime climb in job or profession. If they themselves are not yet downsized out, brothers, cousins, friends, co-workers have been. And they are more dependent now on wives’ earnings. The real and growing discrepancy affecting both women and men is the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich—the top 10 percent, who now control two-thirds of America’s wealth—and the rest of us, women and men. In the last decade, 80 percent of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline.7 The only reason more families are not pushed into poverty is that both women and men are working. But in the present culture of greed, where all of us are told we can get rich in the stock market, it’s easier to deflect the anxiety and insecurity that is growing among Americans, women and men, according to the polls—despite the booming stock market and corporate profits and the Dow Jones Index going through the roof—into sexual politics, and racial and intergenerational warfare. Easier to deflect the rage by turning women and men, black and white, young and old, against each other than to openly confront the excessive power of corporate greed.
I would like to see women and men mounting a new nationwide campaign for a shorter work week, as over half a century ago, labor fought for the 40-hour week, now perhaps a 30-hour week, meeting the needs of women and men in the childrearing years who shouldn’t be working 80-hour weeks as some do now. A six-hour day, parents at work while kids are at school, also fitting the needs of men and women who from youth on will have to combine work with education and further training, and people over sixty who we know now need new ways