By Hope Rees, The Atlantic

Glyn Lowe Photoworks/Flickr
Glyn Lowe Photoworks/Flickr

An interview with Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

On subjects ranging from reproductive rights to gay marriage to the role of the First Lady, there is, perhaps, no more widely quoted expert than Stephanie Coontz. Professor Coontz, whose background is in history, has taught Family Studies at Evergreen College since 1975—before the discipline was even created. She is also Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families and a frequent contributor to The New York Times’ Sunday Review.

You wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that the gender revolution “has hit a wall.” What do you mean by that?

To start, I should say that one of the differences between me and my sociologist colleagues is that more of them are willing to say that we have a stalled revolution. They look at the kind of plateau we got in the ’90s, the fact that the wage gap hasn’t really changed a lot overall, and they’re more willing to say that it was an incomplete revolution. Which, of course, it is. But as a historian, I’m more conscious of how far we’ve come, and also tend to take a longer-term framework before I say we’ve stalled out. I think there’s considerable evidence that a lot of change is going on. There are a lot of rapid changes going on right now in terms of what men are doing in the home. So I don’t think we’ve hit a real stall in terms of what people want, and how they want their families to develop and gender relations to develop. What I am trying to argue is that we have gotten to the point where it’s hard to move forward without more structural changes.

What kind of structural changes do you think we need?

It’s so hard to continue the revolution in family life in a situation where there’s so little support for family-friendly work policies, where there’s not good child care available, when there isn’t parental leave. Why don’t we have them? America has this long history of asking people to purchase everything, from their own playgrounds to hospitals, instead of seeing that there should be a collective investment in playgrounds for everybody, in health care for everybody. The result is that for those who are lucky enough and skilled enough, or just lucky enough to inherit it, all sorts of opportunities are there. But for others, you hit a wall.

“I don’t describe myself as a feminist teacher. If I’m giving a lecture in public I never, initially, identify as a feminist.”

In the US, in many ways, we have higher opportunities for high-earning women and highly-educated women than in many other countries. Sweden and Norway have fewer women who earn above the average male salary than we do. But our gender gap is wider because our gap between high and low wages is wider, and because many more women have to drop out of work for periods of time. That said, the very fact that we don’t have these work policies means that women who can, for whatever reason, be a Sheryl Sandberg, have a supportive husband, get ahead enough to get the kind of salary where they can get help—they can really move forward. The big problem for the US is to get a parental leave policy in place, particularly for low-income women, to juggle work and family. At the same time, we need to go the route of Norway and Quebec and get a use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave, so we don’t reinforce women’s association with family life and childcare.

(…)

You mentioned men’s changing role in family life. What do you think of the “end of men” type arguments?

In some senses, men are where women were 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, women were told, this is your place, stay in it. But about 30 years ago, it was, yes, you can do other things, but you must not compromise your femininity in doing it. You still have to be attractive and sexy. A lot of women have learned that you can throw out the old ideas about what makes you feminine. Men are at the point where they’re beginning to discover that there are things beyond the old notion of masculinity that are rewarding. Yes, intimacy is important. You ought to share housework with your wife. At the same time, they’re being told—and not just by society but by women who subscribe to these conflicting messages about masculinity—that they should be disclosing but not weak. They should be gentle but still willing to kill a mouse. They’re getting these messages that somehow they have to live up to a norm of masculinity that includes all the old protective, provider roles, but also the new ones.