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August 22 - August 28, 2020
During the Kennedy administration, polls showed no attitudinal gap of any kind, on any important issue, between married and unmarried women.
Fifty years later, married and unmarried women would disagree about almost everything. The conditions for women’s lib, not yet ripe in the 1960s, would be more favorable a decade later.
Universities grew, admitted more women, and insulated a critical mass of elite women from child-rearing expectations. It was they who would mobilize against “sexism.” The word did not exist when Friedan’s book came out.
Throughout the early years of women’s lib, men’s “objectification” of women seemed to be its main underlying grievance.
If that had been the real grievance, it would have been a logical thing for second-wave feminism to ally itself—as first-wave feminism had done—with those forces of prudery that had always worked to trammel or civilize male sexuality, above all the churches.
Feminists almost never allied with moral tradition. For all their outspoken misgivings about male sexuality, liberated women were on the side of more, freer, and “better” sex. Certainly a large part of feminists’ aspiration was simply to live with the same freedom that men did.
Sudden demographic spikes like the Baby Boom create shifts in power relations between the sexes. Men tend to marry (or, in our day, pair up with) women on average three years younger. Other things being equal, babies born at a time when the birth rate is rising will come of age, two decades or so later, in a society where eligible women outnumber eligible men. Men can therefore drive a harder mating bargain.
The reverse is true, too. When a society is in demographic decline, men outnumber the women they are most likely to marry or pair off with.
The 1960s were as wildly skewed toward an excess of women as any period since the aftermath of the Civil War.
Women’s rights and male license were traveling on similar tracks.
In 1974, Virginia Slims found that women backed “most of the efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society” by a margin of 2 to 1 (57 to 26 percent) but that men backed them even more strongly—by 3 to 1 (64 to 20 percent).
earning was at the center of second-wave feminism,
Women were being invited to “join” the male world in the same way blacks of the civil rights era had been expected to “join” the white one. This proved no more possible for the one group than for the other.
It was, in its essence, an ideology of the innovative, entrepreneurial, and managerial classes, an ally of technocracy, modernity, progress, and wealth.
In the eyes of almost all men, women’s liberation was not just by but for such women as Steinem. It aimed at improving the position of women in white-collar work.
Workplace feminism exacerbated inequality. It increased the number of intra-class marriages, and it undermined the New Deal culture of the “family wage”—the common-sense assumption among Americans of all classes that a wage paid to a “working man” went to support his wife and children as well.
The cost-benefit calculation that had traditionally governed choices about love and destiny was shifting. In the early twentieth century, an unwanted pregnancy generally meant a woman would get stuck in a cramped village existence with the first man she fell in love with, which is probably what would have happened anyway.
For more and more people by 1973, that was decidedly not what would have happened anyway. One risked missing out on an expanded roster of life choices involving education, travel, career advancement, class advancement, and sex.
Roe
was sloppily argued.
It pronounced on an issue on which Americans were divided, and froze those divisions in place. It laid down a fundamental moral and even religious order on a fickle and frivolous basis.
In diametric contradiction to what one would have expected in 1960, the Democrats became the pro-abortion, the Republicans the anti-abortion party. This reversal was a function of the new constitutional possibilities in the Civil Rights Act. The Democrats were the party of new, court-mandated rights—of all kinds.
There was a moralism behind Our Bodies, Ourselves: Sex was potentially a source of boundless pleasure for people, but crabby and envious older people, representatives of the old society, were conspiring to hide the truth about it.
the spread of Ms. was like a lot of other things after the 1960s. The lack of enthusiasm for it among the general public seemed to matter little. There was a moral certitude behind it, a missionary authority that could impose itself even in the face of resistance, though it was hard to tell where that authority came from. Over time, Ms. it was.
The sudden collapse of support for the ERA shocked activists.
The ERA promised to feminize public space just as the civil rights acts had promised to desegregate it. People didn’t want that.
President Richard Nixon, through an ambitious program of internal polling, had already made a discovery of more general application: Americans were happy to run their mouths about all kinds of experimentation, but they did not much like it up close. In this political sense, women’s lib was very much like civil rights. Whenever you personalized the issue, rather than speaking in lofty abstractions, people got suspicious.
They had come to identify the constitution-changers as a class—a new elite that had been formed in the crucible of protest against the Vietnam War.
The top managers and “leading experts” were on the war’s side. The war’s prosecution had been placed in their hands, and for understandable reasons. For two decades America’s bureaucratic and corporate experts had met every challenge they had been set,
It was the war itself, and not the protests against it, that was the sister movement to the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society.
Because of an extraordinary coincidence in American demographics and American politics, the surrender would mark an epoch. The U.S. military was, as we have noted, the template on which the whole civilian order had been patterned. As trust in the military plummeted, a lot of other things went down with it.
the leadership class that emerged out of the late 1960s was not a sociological cross section of the generation, the way the leadership class that came out of World War II had been. It was highly atypical, and that was a contingency that would warp American society and politics in the half-century that followed. For one thing, it was heavily selected for non-participation in, and even opposition to, the war. It had been mostly the working class and the poor who had fought overseas and mostly the university-educated elites who had protested back home.
As civil rights had divided the country by region into those who were heroically fighting for equality and those who could justly be assigned to receive moral instruction, Vietnam did the same by class. The defenders of peace and justice were disproportionately to be found at rich men’s universities—and their innocence of military involvement would give them much more in common with those who came of age in the demilitarized decade or so that followed. The working class would wind up tainted by the popular culture’s portrayal of the military as burners of villages and marauders in free-fire
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When the whites of South Boston and Charlestown protested, their neighborhoods were put under military occupation.
Relative to their fellow citizens, privileged Americans took out of the Vietnam era a sense of their own moral authority that was not battered but strangely enhanced.
Things already going on at the time of the Vietnam War inclined privileged people to look on “average” Americans as the country’s problem.
When people came to distrust modernity as a kind of corruption, it was not just the corporate world’s supermarkets and sitcoms and dandruff shampoos they resented. It was also Washington’s dams and highways, regulations and bureaucracy. Over time it would be Johnson’s Great Society, which expanded the welfare state to undreamed-of and undesired levels.
In certain lights, the 1960s counterculture looks like a reactionary movement disguised as a progressive one.
An important strand of 1960s “radicalism”—the individualistic strand—would wind up fitting 1980s “conservatism” like a glove.
The dominant American culture, for more than a generation after the Vietnam War, would be the culture of those who passed through universities during the war—that
The sources of this generation’s dominance lay not in its exploits or ideas but in its sheer demographic might.
All Boomers were born into a pre–civil rights America, and they were the last generation to grow up wholly outside the shadow of what would be known as political correctness.
The Boom was split into two parts chronologically, in a way that would produce something like a class division within it. Those born at the front end of the Boom, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were educated in a traditional America.
special role as emissaries of the “younger generation” to the broader culture. What we now think of as the culture of the Baby Boom was actually the culture only of its older age cohorts.
For three quarters of a century, other generations would be forced to share the preoccupations of their fellow citizens born in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The country was always “about” these older Boomers.
A burgeoning educational bureaucracy increased the leverage of the Baby Boom over other generations and shaped the ends to which it would exercise that leverage.
Earlier generations would have wondered what kind of clean-hands work could be found for all those bookish people to do—and they would also have asked who would do the dirty work now that education had unsuited much of the population to it.
Reforms conceived for a country that was provincial, dutiful, and 4 percent immigrant are not necessarily well suited to a country that is cosmopolitan, hedonistic, and 15 percent immigrant. The America of the 1960s had a leeway for safe experimentation that it would not regain.
by the 1970s, Americans were drifting away from the idea that they were in the middle of some kind of renaissance and beginning to worry that their country was going down the tubes.
