If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the
odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted
the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign
the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not
your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was
paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket
money.
It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we
realize they've changed completely. It's expected that by the end of the year,
for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women
— largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary
change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like
nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary
breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income
for the family's bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater — and
their choices have seldom been harder.
It is in this context that the Rockefeller Foundation, in
collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess
how individual Americans are reacting. Is the battle of the sexes really over,
and if so, did anyone win? How do men now view female power? How much
resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have
rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles? And
what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work?
The study found that men and women were in broad agreement about what matters
most to them; gone is the notion that women's rise comes at men's expense. As
the Old Economy dissolves and pressures on working parents grow, they share
their fears about what this means for their children and their frustration with
institutions that refuse to admit how much has changed. In the new age, the
battles we fight together are the ones that define us.
A Quiet Revolution
In the spring of 1972, TIME devoted a special issue of the
magazine to assessing the status of women in the throes of "women's
lib." At a time when American society was racing through change like a
reckless teenager, feminism had sputtered and stalled. Women's average wages
had actually fallen relative to men's; there were fewer women in the top ranks
of civil service (under 2%) than there were four years before. No woman had
served in the Cabinet since the Eisenhower Administration; there were no female
FBI agents or network-news anchors or Supreme Court Justices. The nation's
campuses were busy hosting a social revolt, yet Harvard's tenured faculty of
421 included only six women. Of the Museum of Modern Art's 1,000 one-man shows
over the previous 40 years, five were by women. Headhunters lamented that it
was easier to put a man on the moon than a woman in a corner office.
"There is no movement," complained an activist who resigned her
leadership position in the National Organization for Women two years after it
was founded. "Movement means 'going someplace,' and the movement is not
going anywhere. It hasn't accomplished anything."
That was cranky exaggeration; many changes were felt more
than seen, a shift in hopes and expectations that cracked the foundations of
patriarchy. "In terms of real power — economic and political — we are
still just beginning," Gloria Steinem admitted. "But the
consciousness, the awareness — that will never be the same."
So it's worth stopping to look at what happened while we
were busy ending the Cold War and building a multicultural society and enjoying
the longest economic expansion in history. In the slow-motion fumblings of
family life, it was easy just to keep going along, mark the milestones, measure
the kids on the kitchen door and miss the movement. In 1972 only 7% of students
playing high school sports were girls; now the number is six times as high. The
female dropout rate has fallen in half. College campuses used to be almost
60-40 male; now the ratio has reversed, and close to half of law and medical
degrees go to women, up from fewer than 10% in 1970. Half the Ivy League
presidents are women, and two of the three network anchors soon will be; three
of the four most recent Secretaries of State have been women. There are more
than 145 foundations designed to empower women around the world, in the belief
that this is the greatest possible weapon against poverty and disease; there
was only one major foundation (the Ms. Foundation) for women in 1972. For the
first time, five women have won Nobel Prizes in the same year (for Medicine,
Chemistry, Economics and Literature). We just came through an election year in
which Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Tina Fey and Katie Couric were lead
players, not the supporting cast. And the President of the United States was
raised by a single mother and married a lawyer who outranked and outearned him.
It is still true that boardrooms and faculty clubs and
legislatures and whole swaths of professions like, say, hedge-fund management
remain predominantly male; women are about 10% of civil engineers and a third
of physicians and surgeons but 98% of kindergarten teachers and dental
assistants, and they still earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. They
are charged higher premiums for health insurance yet still have greater
out-of-pocket expenses for things as basic as contraception and maternity care.
At times it seems as if the only women effortlessly balancing their jobs, kids,
husbands and homes are the ones on TV.
Written By Nancy Gibb
