The Atlantic on women, from 1859 to now

Via the Hairpin.

The Atlantic Magazine gives an overview on its articles about women and men, from the 1800's to now. The first is all the way from 1859, and is admirably radical for being so pompous, sprinkled as it is with Classical references and snippets of Latin and French. (Spoiler: his answer is "Probably yes".)

"Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here or nowhere. Obsta principiis. Woman must be a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of wisdom,—"For men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?

"Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1859

And from 1932, a wonderfully sarcastic essay by Helen Keller about the implications of labor-saving machines in the household. (Basically the domestic equivalent of the song "Now That We've Found Love [What Are We Gonna Do]".) This essay is a good one to curl up with, I think - warm laptop by a warm fire?

"Early that afternoon when Mrs. Jones came downstairs on her way to a meeting of her church club, she found her husband seated before the living room fireplace smoking a fragrant cigar and contentedly immersed in a book. He looked up guiltily as she entered.

‘Is something wrong, John?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t at all like you to be wasting time in this fashion. Surely you don’t sit in your office and read a book in the middle of the afternoon! Even when you have nothing to do, you at least try to appear busy.’

‘I won’t need to start dinner for another hour,’ Mr. Jones explained, ‘and everything else has been attended to.’

‘Have you finished the luncheon dishes? Yes, I suppose you have. It takes very little time with the new dishwasher. But, really, I don’t know how to suggest making efficient use of the time you save. I don’t know how to provide more raw material for a machine which transforms soiled dishes into clean ones. I hope you won’t be driven to the extremity of having to invent a dish-soiling machine so that the dishwasher may be kept operating at capacity.’

Mr. Jones’s cigar turned bitter in his mouth and he lost interest in his book, but his wife hurried out the door and went her way.

"Put Your Husband in the Kitchen"
Helen Keller, 1932

There are many more on the work force, abortion, college girls having sex (the horror!) but I'll finish with Anne-Marie Slaughter's excellent essay, published this year.

"Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed."

"Why Women Still Can't Have It All"

Anne-Marie Savage, 2012

The gist is that the professional work system in America is still designed for half of the population. The old distribution of labor relies on the implied assumption that the other half will raise the children and keep the house, but both genders are in that first category now. Long hours, little vacation (compared to Europe), little or no paternity leave.

The result is that everyone's working themselves into the ground, men and women, and it's doing nobody any good. Especially since women still put most of the expectation on themselves to "have it all" - run a house, raise kids, have a full-time career. This current system doesn't make sense at all - it's descended from an outmoded system in the past, and we need to see its dysfunction and change it.

Sort of like how the layout of streets in Boston is descended from the horse paths from the past, which is why Boston is a continual snarl of hopeless traffic. (I spent much of my youth in this traffic.)