John Tierney: Women want to return to the 1950's (or earlier)

John Tierney has a column today that, in David Brooks fashion, makes big assertions about all women, based on a survey of only married women. A substantial excerpt can be found here. There are dissenting views expressed by other bloggers (1, 2), and even Ann Althouse isn't on board.

Taking the excerpts provided by the bloggers, here is a rough summary of Tierney's column:

Freud confessed that his "thirty years of research into the feminine soul" left him unable to answer one great question: "What does a woman want?" Modern feminists have been arguing for decades over a variation of it: What should a woman want?

Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands," Wilcox says. "But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom.

... look at how men and women behave when they're living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners.

...there's a gender gap in enthusiasm for some outside jobs. Men are much more willing to take a job that pays a premium in exchange for long hours away from home or the risk of being killed. The extra money doesn't seem as important to women.

The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside home. Nock doesn't claim to have divined the feminine soul, but he does have one answer to Freud's question.

"A woman wants equity," he says. "That's not necessarily the same as equality."

Yup, those women. They want equity. Lots of it. And they're willing to stay at home to get it.

Tierney is following in the footsteps of George Will, who also tells you that, if you want to be happy, embrace conservative positions. But this is the bankruptcy of an ideology. Up until about now, the claim made by conservatives was, broadly speaking, that conservative policies would give you material things and other goodies (like a secure retirement and health services). But those things didn't come to pass. So now, with household earnings flat or worse and the middle-class feeling insecure - partly due to tax&budget cuts, extreme free-trade legislation, and other Social Darwinist policies - people are asked to take their eye off the materialist ball. Instead, they are exhorted to buy into the notion that happiness, in the abstract, can be obtained somehow by continuing to follow the conservative (or more properly, the Republican) path.


posted by Quiddity at 2/28/2006 08:23:00 AM