But then Vietnam happened and the world expanded. My mom was politicized, outraged, getting less “good” all the time. The word feminism penetrated even her small town of Fort Collins, Colorado, and she was an immediate convert. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Janis Joplin—each confirmed that Mom had been right all along: being a “good girl” was boring, unfair, and frankly, unnatural. She traded in her required home ec uniform—skirts, sweaters, girdle—for bell-bottom jeans and peasant shirts. She took military history courses, smoked grass with her social theory professors, and protested to her heart’s content. She read about the suffragist movement in the 1920s (the “first wave”) and attended consciousness-raising groups where she and her friends, the self-described “second wave,” spilled their long-held-in frustrations with femaleness. She was ecstatically liberated from goodness.
My parents first met in sixth grade and started dating as sophomores in high school. They fell in love all over again under new auspices—they would be equal partners in this war against the establishment. My dad adored my mom, not because she was “good,” but because she wasn’t. She was full-figured and bighearted. He was attracted to her fearlessness, her brilliance, even her stubbornness. The same qualities that had once made her mom’s head shake and her teachers put “disruptive” on her report cards now constituted her sex appeal. She was no longer “good,” but life sure was. In 1969, their summer of love, they were married.
But as my dad now openly admits, “We wanted to change the world, and instead we just got rich.” (Rich, to my dad, who grew up opening the door for bill collectors, is upper-middle-class). Mom put Dad through law school, then Dad put Mom through social work school, and they both moved to Colorado Springs, where Dad got an offer to join a firm. My mom hated the idea of living in a practically artless, cultureless town, but she bit the bullet. They spent most of the seventies working like crazy, discovering Jung and Buddhism, going to therapy, and having a lot of fun.
And then my brother and I came along.
Despite what most women of my generation have been taught by sensationalistic media, feminism was not about burning bras, becoming lesbian, or hating men. It has always been and will always be about two things: equality and educated choice. The second-wave feminist movement that blazed in the late 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the idea that being a “good girl” was actually an oppressive, unnatural state—that it endangered women’s capacities to develop real personalities and genuinely happy lives. Much of the activism that took place in the sixties and seventies can be traced back to this assertion. Raising their consciousness in groups, women shared their frustrations over “good-girl” expectations and brainstormed ways to defy them. The sexual revolution was, in theory, about freeing women from their pleasure-phobic personalities and finding out how fun being bad could be. Storming the Ladies’ Home Journal offices and protesting the Miss America pageant were just some of the ways buttoned-down, clammed-up “good girls” came out of their shells. Even the impassioned, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed was just another way for women to argue that neither “goodness” nor maleness should be a prerequisite for opportunity; only humanness should.
As bright young things, the baby-boomer feminists fared pretty well with this new identity. My mom certainly did and remembers her late twenties as some of the best years of her life—earning her own money, constructing intellectual and political arguments, reenvisioning traditional notions of marriage, love, and sex. She was traveling the world and taking on activist projects at home. She taught her own classes, made her own meat loaf, even changed her own tires.
Not surprisingly, my dad had to convince her to have kids. She had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t be a “good” mother (the first time in a long time that she’d worried about being “good”). She thought she was too independent, introspective, and spontaneous to behave responsibly, associated maternity with her own rigid and passionless mother, and had no model for an alternative.
Now, of course, she swears that my brother and I were the biggest gifts of her life. She turned out to be an incredible mother—loving, generous, innovative, fun. She was fascinated by my brother’s and my development, our quirks and nascent personalities, and took the opportunity to put into practice all of her psychological training and feminist ideology. She was determined to teach me, her little girl, that I did not have to be “good” or quiet or sweet or cute. She would never tell me I couldn’t climb trees or talk loudly at the dinner table. She raised my brother in her feminist image as well; she encouraged all of his sensitivities, teaching him that being a “real man” meant being vocal, emotional, relationship-oriented. She enrolled him in ballet lessons (he went because NFL players danced to increase agility) and seriously disciplined him when he shot a bird in the backyard with our neighbor’s BB gun.
Despite her best intentions, things didn’t work out quite as planned. My mom bought me overalls and I asked for skirts. She signed me up for soccer and I did cheers and cartwheels in the field. She resisted Barbies and I pursued them with fierce determination. She banned toy guns from the house and my brother constructed Uzis out of sticks and rubber bands in the backyard. He was hyperactive and aggressive. I was shy and passive. My feminist, hippie mother got a daughter who wanted to dance ballet and have a canopy bed with pink trim, and a son who was a cross between Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties and your average sports-obsessed all-American boy.
She also got another thing she hadn’t bargained for: a frequently absent partner. Even though my parents had the most visionary of equal-parenting plans, my dad had a lot to prove at the firm, where the senior partners were white-haired, cigar-smoking, and unaware of terms such as paternity leave. Mom’s field of choice was more flexible and her parenting skills more intuitive. Our whole young family slid down the slippery slope of compromise and landed in a loving dog pile of flailing appendages, hungry bellies, and dirty clothes. My momma, of course, was at the bottom.
Second-wave feminists hit a series of brick walls when they became mothers circa 1980. The first was the illusion of shared parenting in a world unaccustomed to the idea. Throw in some residual 1950s conditioning, a traditional workplace or two, and some crying, needy babies, and you have the recipe for failed experiments in shared parenting. My dad meant well, but when push came to shove, he was at the office sweating over a brief and my mom was at home, doing all the ten thousand unrecognized tasks that have to be done to keep a family going. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
Shared parenting is a lot harder than equal relationships sans kids. When it is just Mom and Dad together, they have things pretty well figured out. If I cook, you clean. I’m not your laundress, cleaning lady, or secretary, and you aren’t my sugar daddy, protector, or father. But having kids throws all that equanimity into a tailspin, until what is left is a smattering of empty promises, faulty systems, cold dinners—what feminists call the second shift.
This inequality is one of the most widely shared stories of my generation’s upbringing and has been confirmed by psychologists. A study appearing in the Journal of Family Psychology, for example, confirmed that wives’ marital satisfaction decreased when they became mothers. Researchers hypothesize that the shift “likely reflects the high stress associated with taking care of children.” Those of us who heard our fathers say “Oh, I could have done that, sweetie!” right as our mothers put the last dish in the cabinet will be unsurprised that the same study shows that husbands-turned-fathers experienced no such decrease in satisfaction.
Women with jobs outside the home still spend about twice as much time as men taking care of children and household chores, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The average American woman spends one hour and twenty minutes on household chores every day. The average man, by contrast, spends under forty-five minutes. Most of my friends saw this, whether they grew up rich or poor, in the suburbs or the city, with their biological parents or three half brothers, an a
dopted sister, a stepdad, and a grandma. Regardless of the peripheral players, the story starring our moms also features undone chores, a few unrealized dreams, and muffled outrage.
The failure to share parenting meant mothers went into major superwoman mode, overdrive. Already sold on careers and community activism, they made the bulk of parenting responsibilities one more hat on the rack. Women in my mother’s generation still had the notion that “having it all at once” was a very real possibility (silly, silly girls), so they heaved the weight of the world onto their shoulders and tried to run around with it (gracefully, of course). And guess who was watching the whole time?
Our mothers learned, albeit too late, that “superwoman” is simply a superhero fantasy that, when attempted in the real world, spells disaster. Your mother may have, indeed, appeared to be “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive” on the outside, but inside she was stressed out, often sick, and more than a little pissed off.
The second brick wall that many superwomen mothers ran into in raising us watchful daughters was pop culture. No matter how much my mom worked to make our home a “hate-free zone” (we actually had a sign in our front window with these words emblazoned on it), the misogyny crept in. She couldn’t keep me from Get in Shape Girl! or Dirty Dancing or YM, any more than she could keep my brother from NBA games or Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! or gangsta rap. We were American kids watching American television, playing American video games, and reading American magazines, i.e., having our minds filled with backlash, booty dancing, and unrealistic body ideals.
We were also into good old-fashioned rebellion. My brother didn’t declare himself a Republican at seven years old because he understood Reaganomics (he has since recanted); his affiliation had more to do with the fact that my parents stuck a Jimmy Carter sign in the front yard. The second the word feminism escaped my mother’s lips, I had a built-in reason to avoid it like the plague.
After I went to grade school, I became insufferably precocious and ambitious. The tender little girl got buried beneath layers of drive and curiosity. I wanted to be great at everything, better than everyone else (especially the boys), and I believed in the power of my own intellect at the tender age of eight, whereas it took my mom until eighteen even to begin to entertain the idea that she might not be destined for a dead-end job. Holding our lives up side by side like this makes mine seem even further from the “good-girl” paradigm in which she had been caught.
While discovering the fun of being smart, I certainly didn’t lose my interest in being pretty. When I raised my hand to answer one of Mrs. Fanning’s questions, I hoped my friends would notice my new shirt. I still liked to wear skirts, but I didn’t mind getting them dirty on the playground. Friday flip-up day fascinated and horrified me, my first indication that there was something under my skirt a boy would want to try to see. I started to understand how sweetness could be a useful tactic rather than a benign quality. I was shy but not scared. I didn’t act out, not because I was worried about being “bad” but because I was so damn determined to be the best.
My generation grew up with Title IX. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, a New York-based advocacy group for women’s athletics, girls who are active in athletics have higher self-esteem, more confidence, higher achievement test scores, less depression, improved mental health, more academic success, and as if that weren’t enough, greater lifetime earning potential.
My little pack of girlfriends and I valued achievement over attachment, bravery over manners, beauty over kindness. We wanted to be fierce competitors and understood early on that fierce competitors could not care too much about the next girl’s feelings. We craved attention, sought it by trying out for school plays and sports teams, winning spelling bees and finishing our math timed tests the quickest. This all meant beating out other people, making them cry behind the backstop, being self-focused and determined.
When Mom wasn’t “consulting”—which I understood in terms of babysitters—she was pumping artistic and cultural life into Colorado Springs by running the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival (which she cofounded in her “free time”). She was the queen of multitasking—informal therapist to all of her friends, bona fide therapist to strangers, president of the film festival, cooker of meals, cheerer at sports games, coordinator of social lives, house repairs, and holidays. Somehow she never appeared particularly ruffled. Part of her responsibility, in fact, seemed to be to hide the blood, sweat, and tears involved in all of this running around—to make it appear “effortless.” In retrospect, I see that this let her pursue her varied aspirations without leaving her kids feeling she was overburdened or bitter about our arrival. In fact, when my mom came down with a chronic immune illness when I was around twelve, she used to wake up with a smile on her face, chat happily during the carpool, and then head back to bed for hours on end, trying to sleep off the excruciating ache of her muscles and the pain in her head. When I got home at four, she was back on her feet, whistling as she made dinner. Womanhood, I was acutely observing and intuitively sensing, was characterized by a lot of rushing around, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of accomplishment—all dressed up in a pretty, seemingly easy package. We were supposed to deny the ugliness of exhaustion or pain.
My mom, like most, never said “Do what I do,” of course; it was all “Do what I say.” She told me that I could go after any goal I set for myself, but that I didn’t have to excel at everything. I begged to be signed up for pottery wheel throwing, basketball, ballet, drama, Brownies, and Cotillion (yes, the kind with the white gloves), and was horrified if I wasn’t immediately adept at every activity. My mom said that what was most important was my personal best. I cried my eyes out when I got an A- in algebra because I knew Katie got an A. My mom emphasized that honesty is important, beauty complex, and creativity vital. It all sounded too sweet and idealistic in a world of celebrity scandal, Cindy Crawford, and underfunded art classes.
My mother taught me not to be “good,” but this lesson fit into my sense that perfection was necessary. Goodness was a shade short of perfection, and being “good” was not good enough to be competitive. She told me that I should always stand up for myself, that I should value speaking my truth above protecting relationships. She taught me that it was sometimes fun to let a swearword fly if the situation called for it. I didn’t have to make nice. I didn’t have to say “sorry” if I wasn’t. I didn’t have to go out with boys, but if I felt like it, that could be fun.
In the 1980s, even women who didn’t ascribe to feminism and thought of it as the F-word were benefiting from the fallout and seeing the world through feminist-colored glasses. They too were teaching their daughters that they could do anything they wanted, that they were as smart and capable as the boys, though they may not have identified feminism as the source of their teachings or of their own increased capacity for earnings and independence. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1970, when the second wave of feminism was sparked, and 2004, women increased their participation rate in the formal workforce from 43 to 59 percent. Likewise, in 2004, 33 percent of women ages twenty-five to sixty-four had four-year-college degrees, compared with 11 percent in 1970. Seems like more than a coincidence to me.
Nonfeminist feminists—who believe in choice and equality but deny they are feminists—may have clung to the “good-girl” script a bit, but I challenge you to find an eighties mom who didn’t have a suit coat with some serious shoulder pads and an oft-repeated “Go, girl” speech for her daughter.
Remnants of these speeches made it into many of the surveys I received:
I was taught that I had all the potential in the world—I could accomplish anything I wanted. My parents always told me I was capable of anything. They told me I was “special.”
Both my parents always told me I could do and be whatever I wanted. As a child, this was reinforced through being accepted and enrolled into “gifted and talented” education in grade school, and more
or less succeeding in everything I tried in high school. Both my parents still tell me I’m “special.”
When I was younger I was a perfectionist, because I was told I was “a gifted child.” I always felt compelled to be the best in school, in sports, and to never be wrong in general.
And this response, from a nineteen-year-old in Newark, Delaware, traced the trajectory of her current obsession with food and fitness back to her first motivational pushes from her parents:
Mediocrity is a large pet peeve of mine. To be average is not acceptable. I am an only child and sometimes I feel that my parents feel unsatisfied with their own education and lived vicariously through me. I was pushed to always succeed in academics. A B was fine, but it wasn’t an A.
I believe the academic aspect really shifted my whole personality into perfectionism. I was very independent and things needed to be done exactly how I pictured them. While taking notes, if we needed to draw a shape, I would erase it until it was symmetrical. It did not matter if I wasn’t caught up with what the teacher was saying. The lopsided circle would bother me.
This obsession with getting the two-dimensional shape right on paper evolved into an obsession with getting her three-dimensional shape right in real life—a pressure that many young women feel from their parents. A survey of almost six hundred tenth-graders found that 41 percent of girls thought their fathers wanted them to be thinner, and a whopping 45 percent thought their mothers wished their daughters weighed less. The Delaware native went on:
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 6
