The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

During the Kennedy administration, polls showed no attitudinal gap of any kind, on any important issue, between married and unmarried women. Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried believed in the existence of a superior “women’s intuition.” Sixteen percent of married women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair, versus 15 percent of 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. Bureaucratic and judicial procedures first worked out to punish civil rights violations would by then have been analogized into remedies for other grievances. In the 1970s, a generation of women would come of age who could take advantage of them, not having already wagered their happiness on a traditional mating and family-forming system. 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.”