When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

by Gail Collins

  “WE MEN MAY NOT BE PREPARED TO BECOME OZZIES.”

  Belkin, who had a gift for picking subjects that would fascinate and infuriate her female readers, once wrote an article that began with a book club in Atlanta, made up of women who had gone to an Ivy League college and then to top law schools such as Harvard and Columbia: “A roomful of Princeton women each trained as well as any man. Of the ten members, half are not working at all; one is in business with her husband; one works part-time; two freelance; and the only one with a full-time job has no children.” They were emblematic, Belkin said, of many high-achieving young American women who had claimed their share of the seats in good schools and professional training. “They start strong out of the gate. And then, suddenly, they stop.”

  Before most of these accomplished, ambitious women got to the top of the ladder—or even near it—they were leaving work to care for their children, Belkin wrote. A survey of women from the Harvard Business School classes of 1981, 1985, and 1991, she reported, “found that only 38 percent were working full-time.” While the older generation felt like failures if they missed having “it all,” the younger women were guilt-free. “I’ve had people tell me that it’s women like me that are ruining the workplace because it makes employers suspicious. I don’t want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight a fight for some sister who really isn’t my sister because I don’t know her,” said Vicky McElhaney Benedict, who graduated from Princeton in 1991, got a law degree, and was, within a few years, a full-time mother with two children.

  In some ways, it was the mommy-track fight all over again. The response to Belkin’s piece was “a tsunami,” she said. “Everybody knew women were leaving. I just wrote about it in the New York Times.” For a while, she was getting one or two hundred e-mails an hour. “I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back there were sixty more messages.”

  Was it possible that the women who were educated to be the leaders of their generation were going to opt out? In the early ’90s, Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, had taken a look at statistics on the work and childbearing history of college women who graduated between 1966 and 1979, and found that only 13 to 18 percent had both children and a career by age 40, even when “career” was defined only as having been working, mostly full-time, for the last three years. A surprisingly large group—28 percent—had not yet had any children, even though the oldest were reaching the end of their potential fertility. The rest had, in the main, focused on children and perhaps intermittent work. Goldin resisted the idea that she had unearthed bad news. A follow-up study, she said, showed that women who graduated in the 1980s had somewhat more success. And another study of graduates of Harvard/Radcliffe found that the amount of time those women took off from work had declined over the years. “There’s no indication of ‘opting out,’ ” she said.

  Nevertheless, some young, well-educated women in the latest generation made it clear that opting out was already in their plan. In September 2005, the Times ran a front-page article, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” that roiled the waters all over again. Louise Story, a young reporter who had done extensive research among the freshmen and senior women in two of Yale’s residential colleges, led off with Cynthia Liu, a brilliant, high-achieving sophomore who planned to go to law school—and then become a stay-at-home mom by the time she was 30. Interviews with 138 Yale women, Story said, “found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely.”

  There was so much outcry that Story felt constrained to publish a special note explaining her research methods. Even suggesting that high-achieving college graduates might be choosing not to work seemed to be surrender. How would women achieve equal power in the public world if that world saw their best and brightest as potential dropouts? What if less-privileged younger women took these upper-income stay-at-home moms as a new model and failed to prepare for a career? What if the academic hierarchy began to wonder if educating women was a waste of resources? “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?” Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of undergraduate admissions for Harvard, told Story.

  Nicholas Kulish, a 30-year-old editorial writer for the Times, responded with alarm on behalf of the men of his generation. “Well, some of you may want to be Harriets again, but we men may not be prepared to become Ozzies,” he wrote. “Returning to the 1950s just doesn’t look appealing. For one thing, the way you have us dressing these days, we would get beaten up. More important, though, we may not be able to afford it.” These days, Kulish concluded, the heroes of the old situation comedies such as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver could never support their upper-middle-class families on one paycheck. “Ward Cleaver wouldn’t be able to afford a house in the suburbs or Beaver’s tuition—unless June went to work, too.”

  “THE COST OF WOMEN LEAVING…”

  The whole “opting out” controversy was, in truth, rather irrelevant to the future of American womanhood. If a small sliver of mothers did not have the economic need to work, they had every right to take advantage of the chance to spend extra time with their children, volunteer at the local schools, work for a favored political candidate, or get serious about painting or cooking or yoga or whatever other avocation tugged at their hearts. Many men would choose that sort of life for themselves if they had the chance. In fact, some stay-at-home husbands were doing just that.

  But any idea that large numbers of women were going to retire permanently to their homes when they began to have families was buried in the economic meltdown of 2008. Women were going to work throughout their lives. The question was no longer whether they would have jobs but whether they would be able to stick with them consistently enough to make real progress when it came to paychecks and work satisfaction.

  Unlike people in many other developed countries, Americans were not, in general, responding to work stress by opting not to have children. In 2006 the United States reached a 2.1 fertility rate—or just over two children per woman—for the first time in thirty-five years. That’s almost precisely what demographers regard as replacement level, and it was far higher than in nations such as Italy and Spain. A study at the University of Turin theorized that Italian women’s reluctance to have children had to do with the traditional nature of Italian men. Dutch women, whose husbands were much more likely to help with child care and housework, had outside jobs more often than Italian women but still had, on average, more children. French and Scandinavian women, who had access to federally funded child care, also appeared more eager to have families.

  But none of those countries matched America’s fertility rate. Part of the reason was the increasing number of Hispanic Americans, who tended to have larger families. But even non-Hispanic whites were having babies at rates higher than most of their European peers. Russell Shorto, who examined the issue for the New York Times, suggested that the critical factor might actually be employer flexibility—not in offering child care but in being more open to women leaving and reentering the workforce, or agreeing to flexible schedules for those who want to continue working while taking care of small children.

  The feminists had worried that if women who were educated in the top colleges dropped out to take care of their kids, the top colleges would stop admitting women, and the top law firms would be reluctant to hire them. But it was conceivable that it might work the other way around. If half of the lawyers and accountants and MBAs were potential mothers, employers might feel compelled to make concessions in order to keep them on the job. “The cost of women leaving and the cost of turnover—and the fact that the majority of accounting graduates were women—were strong drivers of our initiatives,” said Wendy C. Schmidt, a principal in the giant accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche in New York, which was a leader in offering flexible
schedules and generous sabbatical programs while raising the number of women partners. Lisa Belkin, writing about law firms’ growing willingness to reexamine their policies, noted that one “hard-driving white-shoe firm” had successfully petitioned a New York judge to reschedule a hearing set for December 2007 because “these dates are smack in the middle of our children’s winter breaks.”

  “THE CHIEF SOURCE OF IDENTITY AND MEANING.”

  There were other changes in the way women structured their lives that were both more sweeping and more clearly permanent than any opting-out trend among the most privileged. While the vast majority of Americans still got married, they were spending a larger and larger part of their lives single. At any given point in time, slightly over half of adult American women were either divorced, widowed, or never married. The percentage of women ages 20 to 24 who had never been married jumped to 69 percent in the 2000 census. For ages 30 to 34, the never-married proportion tripled to 22 percent. On all parts of the economic scale, matrimony was being seen less as the start of life and more as a culmination of the achievements of young adulthood. On the upper-economic end, women expected to finish their education, begin careers, and amass either some wealth or money-making capacity before they committed themselves to a husband and children. Poorer women very often saw their path as one that would begin with having children, perhaps move on to a job and savings, and then finish with marriage as the capstone.

  While in 1950 only one in twenty American children were born to single women, by 2007 the proportion reached 40 percent. Some of them were the well-planned progenies of lesbian couples or single career women who had concluded that a husband was not going to come along before the biological alarm clock went off. (Of the fifty thousand children who were adopted in the United States in 2001, a third went to single women.) “I can’t count how many young women have told me if they don’t meet the right man by their early to middle thirties, they’ll either adopt or make a trip to the sperm bank and pursue motherhood on their own,” wrote Laura Sessions Stepp. But for the most part, the unwed mothers were poor—only 3 percent of children born to college-educated women were out of wedlock, compared to 40 percent of those whose mothers were high school dropouts. While most of those women would get married eventually, fewer than one in six would marry the father of their baby.

  In the late 1990s, a team of sociologists led by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas began trying to figure out what caused poor women to choose motherhood before marriage. They moved into low-income neighborhoods in the Philadelphia area that had a mix of white, Hispanic, and black families. After living with the people they were studying for some time, they concluded that poor American women “saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve.” Children, on the other hand, were seen as “a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.” The world Edin and Kefalas described was one in which poor women believed they could rely on only themselves to build a good life. Men would not necessarily stick around, and those who did would not necessarily treat them properly.

  These women thought of having a baby as something that happened early, well before the search for a reliable mate was likely to be completed. During her research, Kefalas got pregnant at age 30 and found that the poor women she was living with “couldn’t believe that any woman would postpone childbearing into her 30s by choice.” Having babies early, out of wedlock, was a strategy that made perfect sense for the mothers, who generally were not educated for the kinds of careers that needed to be cultivated and built up before the distraction of motherhood arrived. But it was not all that great for the children, who were far more likely than the offspring of two-adult families to be born poor, to be raised poor, and to grow up to be poor adults.

  “IT WAS NO BIG DEAL.”

  Laura Sessions Stepp, who thought she was compromising her career in order to spend more time with her family, created a beat for herself covering adolescent issues for the Washington Post and wrote a book on guiding children through their early teens. Rather than downsizing, she had refashioned her work to suit her talents and interests. She was hardly alone. American men and women of all economic groups had to continually retool themselves to keep pace with an economy that no longer had the interest or ability to offer its workers long-term predictable careers. Women, who had been forced to take that kind of approach to their lives anyway, were in some ways better prepared for that economic world than their husbands and brothers.

  In the spring of 1998, Stepp found her next big subject when she heard that twenty-five parents in her son’s school had been called to a special meeting and told that their children had been involved in a sex ring. About a dozen 13- and 14-year-old girls had been regularly performing oral sex on two or three male students for the better part of the school year.

  “It was no big deal,” one of the girls told Stepp later.

  Stepp’s project expanded into an examination of sex among high-achieving high school and college women, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both. The girls she talked to strove for straight As and excelled in extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or the school newspaper. But they set their sights much lower when it came to romance. Those who weren’t permanently attached went to parties with their girlfriends and then “hooked up” with a boy for a sexual encounter that could mean anything from kissing to oral sex to intercourse, depending on the age, sophistication, and level of attraction of the newly merged parties. Then the partners unhooked and went their separate ways.

  “Jamie would flash her fake ID, have a couple of drinks, and dance, either with her girlfriends or, as the night passed, with a guy,” Stepp wrote of one of her subjects. “Occasionally, they would kiss while dancing, which the guy took as a signal that she was willing to go back to his room. It seemed awkward to turn him down, she recalled, given the fact that her friends had usually paired off already. Rather than be stranded, she’d go with the guy to his room and fool around in her underwear because it was easier to hook up than come up with a reason not to.”

  Stepp saw the practice as an avoidance of commitment, a dangerous trend that left young women, especially well-educated young women, with little experience in how to build relationships with men. Not everyone agreed with her dismay. Some felt hooking up was just a new term for sexual behavior that had been going on for decades. “Dating does exist,” said Jessica Valenti, the author of The Purity Myth and editor of a Web site for young feminists. “The hook-up culture—I’m pretty sure kids always did that. My friends date. Some people hook up without dating, but they do have serious relationships.” And, she said, in all the hand-wringing over hooking up, “the idea that it’s supposed to be pleasurable is kind of lost. There is such a thing as orgasm.”

  But Valenti, 29, had her own problems with a culture where preteens wore shirts that said I’M TIGHT LIKE SPANDEX and women had plastic surgery to make their labia smaller. (“In Africa they call it female genital mutilation. Here we call it designer vaginas.”) And she worried that young men were so overexposed to pornography that they had trouble getting aroused by regular women—or at least regular women over 25. She saw young women as caught between a conservative culture that obsessed about virginity and a porn culture in which they were urged by jaded cameramen to take off their clothes and writhe for the next edition of Girls Gone Wild. “The message is still the same—that women’s sexuality doesn’t belong to them.”

  In the new millennia, girls grew up in a world awash in sexuality, thanks to the Internet and cable TV. They connected sex and power very early, shaking their booty at middle-school talent shows and calling up boys to talk dirty in ways they didn’t entirely understand but knew would leave the males on the other end of the line flummoxed. A 16-year-old boy told a reporter that girls in his school “overpower guys more. I mean, it’s scary.” The successors to Madonna sang about men as “prey” who were expected t
o service them and then go away. The Bratz dolls, sexy competitors to Barbie, wore miniskirts, midriff-baring tops, fishnet stockings, and feather boas, and adults were unnerved to see their owners dressing the same way. Meanwhile their older sisters, who were supposed to be preparing to take over the world, sometimes looked more as if they were planning on a career in the sex-services industry. They had spent their formative years watching Sex and the City, whose messages were: (1) Only girlfriends last forever, and (2) Anything worth doing is worth doing in a tutu and stiletto heels.

  Valerie Steele, the fashion historian, found it to be just business as usual. “If you’re young, you’re trying to attract sexual attention. Nothing new whatsoever,” she said, recalling the see-through blouses and tight jeans of the ’70s. “Short of bringing in an ayatollah, they’re not going to get teenagers to dress modestly.” Gloria Steinem, who remembered “walking around in a miniskirt and a button that said ‘Cunt Power,’ ” was philosophical. “Are they doing it because they are enjoying it or are they doing it because they feel forced into it? That’s the basic question, but body pride and sexuality and adventure is positive.” Once, at a lunch, Steinem was seated next to Reese Witherspoon, who had played the Chihuahua-bearing, couture-clad sorority girl who turns out to have a mind like a steel trap in Legally Blonde. Steinem recalled that Witherspoon told her she had decided to take the part because of her: “I heard you say we should be able to wear anything we damn well please and still be considered human beings.”

  There is never going to be a straight narrative when it comes to what women choose to wear and how they want to look. In the early twenty-first century, women were going bare-legged and tossing away the panty hose that had felt like such liberation to an older generation that was used to being encased in girdles. “I stopped wearing panty hose a long time ago because it was painful and they’d always rip,” said Michelle Obama. But at the same time, many were embracing Spanx, übergirdles made of nylon and spandex, some of which contain the entire body up to the bra line.