Very interesting article in the Atlantic titled Marry Him! (The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough).
The thesis occurs early on in the story:
ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
I think she is confusing the primary and secondary motivations.
My opinion is that societal pressures actually gear women towards wanting to have a child (or children). If it were easier to raise a child without a husband, than all those 40-year-old single women would be just as fine without.
But it’s not easy; it takes a team, as Gottlieb points out (or a village, as Hillary is wont to say), and thus Gottlieb spends the entire article making the case (to her implied audience of firey feminists) that settling for a less-than-ideal husband is ok — as long as he can help raise *your* child.
In other words, this whole article is a conceit. It *seems* like an admission that Steinem was wrong, that “we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle”, but it’s *not* — Gottlieb is a fish who wants babies, and recognizes that a bicycle (built for two) is (or can be) more efficient than swimming upstream alone (apologies for the Abu Ghraib treatment on those metaphors).
That bit of deception bothers me somewhat on the “critical thinker” / intellectual level. But don’t take that to mean that I hated the article — I actually did find the discussion and justification quite interesting.
The stronger implication is that as long as society (ours or any) casts women in the role of nurturer, care-giver, child-raiser,
there is always going to be a patriarchy.
If I were a feminist (which I’m not, but I do believe strongly in equality), my tactic would not be to stand on the rooftops and roar, but to Copernicanize the discussion, and start demanding that men wear the child-raiser mantle.
That is to say, increased women’s rights won’t come from trying to snatch the pebble out of the hands of men. Rather, they’ll come from dumping a load of gravel on men’s heads and watching them struggle for air.
Everything Gottlieb wrote about why women should settle for husbands applies equally in the other direction if men had to raise children by themselves too.
Of course, I’ve only outlined the theoretical portion of my thesis. There are lots of practical matters I didn’t address, like biological reality and the like, but I’m interested in hearing feedback on the big picture idea (of judo-ing the relationship to gain more freedom/power for women).
