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By Root 1905 0

very young, not those who have gone through these changes. In the second decade after the women’s movement, I came across statistics from a population institute in Princeton that more American couples were having sex more often and enjoying it than ever before.9 In my early research for The Feminine Mystique, I’d seen data from history that with every decade of women’s advance toward equality with men, measures of satisfying sexual intercourse between women and men increased. There’s a lot of data now that equality is strongly related to a good, lasting marriage—though there may also be more arguing between equals. At the American Sociological Association meetings in August 1995, I was asked to speak on the future of marriage. I saw that future in terms of new strengths of women and men, and new challenges for society. For instance, in all the arguments about men not doing enough of the housework and child care, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men take over so much of it that the kid comes to Daddy first with her report card or cut finger. “I wouldn’t consider letting Ben take him to the doctor,” my friend Sally said. “That’s my thing.” There was a lot of power in women’s role in the family that wasn’t visible even to the feminists according to the male measures. More studies need to be done to test what strengths are added to families when mothers and fathers share the nurturing power.

All we hear about, all we talk about, are the problems: the stresses, for women, of combining work and family; the deficit for children, growing up in a single-parent family. We don’t hear about the studies at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women which show that combining work and family reduces stress for women, is better for women’s mental health than the old either-or single role, and that women’s mental health no longer declines sharply after menopause as it used to do. We don’t hear about the different kinds of strengths and support single-parent families need and could get from their communities. But there is a new awareness that something has to change now in the structure of society, because the hours and conditions of jobs and professional training are still based on the lives of the men of the past who had wives to take care of the details of life. Women don’t have such wives, but neither do most men now. So the “family friendly” workplace becomes a conscious political and collective bargaining issue—flextime, job sharing, parental leave. It turns out that companies on the cutting edge in terms of technology and the bottom line are also the ones adopting “family friendly” policies. The United States has been backward compared to other advanced industrial nations in this regard; 98 percent of three-to four-year-olds in France and Belgium are in a pre-school program.10 The United States was the last industrial nation except South Africa to adopt a national parental leave policy, only after Bill Clinton took office.

There’s also a growing sense that it takes more than one mother-one father, much less a single mother, to raise a child. “It takes a village to raise a child,” First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a best-selling book in 1996. There’s a new awareness of the values of diversity—and of the need of all families for a larger, stronger community. It’s a far cry from that single model of the isolated suburban feminine mystique family of the sixties, not only the many variations—some couples having babies in their forties, women and men, well established in careers; some juggling work, profession, training, and home with babies in their twenties and thirties; sometimes the woman taking a year or two off, or the man, if they can afford it, and single parents—all of them relying more than ever on support from grandparents, play groups with other parents, company, church, or community child care. And more and more women and men, living alone or together, young and older, in new patterns. The recent campaign to legalize same-sex marriage shows the powerful appeal of lasting emotional commitment