On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

What determines that sort of thing is tradition, culture.” Well, our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally. This social mythology has kept us desperate to prove our basic goodness and worthiness.

In this ancient Creation story, common to all Judeo-Christian cultures (about one-third of the world’s population today), women are not only disempowered but spiritually depraved.

The witch hunts targeted women (and some men) of all ages, as well as children, but the first hunted were the “crones,” the wise women, the elders, typically widows who refused to remarry or had no options to do so.

But beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century (dramatically peaking from 1560 to 1760), these women, too old to be seen as sexual objects, and possessing knowledge and skills the church viewed as threatening, were persecuted as witches.

The patriarchal paradigm of femininity—selfless, physically perfect, nurturing, obedient, compliant, modest, responsible, self-effacing—persists.

The professor Gerda Lerner, who created the first graduate program for women’s history in the United States, argued that women have participated in our subordination because we’ve been psychologically shaped to see our inferiority as natural.

Lerner writes, “The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”

In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA), a bill with significant bipartisan support that would have implemented a high-quality, government-funded national daycare program, providing a significant boost to working families and a lifeboat for single parents.[*4] He labeled it a threat to the traditional family structure—and likened it to communism.

The reality of trying to make a living in the United States broke that contract, not the ambitions of women. Families couldn’t swing it on one paycheck. Many women certainly wanted to work, and in most cases they also had to. What was most remarkable, or perhaps insidious, about this shift was that while women’s roles changed, the roles of men largely stayed the same.

A [UK] survey…found that women have five hours less leisure time a week than men do. Furthermore, since 2000, men’s downtime has increased, while women’s has shrunk.”

According to a Gallup poll that tracked the roles of men and women in U.S. households from 1996 to 2019, while the gap between women and men is tightening, the gender roles are as entrenched as ever: Women are more likely to do laundry (58 percent to 13 percent), prepare meals (51 percent to 17 percent), clean house (51 percent to 9 percent), grocery shop (45 percent to 18 percent), and wash dishes (42 percent to 19 percent). Both sexes are equally likely to pay routine bills. And then men take over when it comes to decisions about money (31 percent to 18 percent), keeping the car in good condition (69 percent to 12 percent), and performing yardwork (59 percent to 10 percent).

The reality is, when men have access to paternity leave but refuse to take it, they’re reinforcing the enduring story that babies need their mothers and not their fathers. This myth is insidious: Not only does it shortchange the bonds between fathers and children, asserting that fathers will never be the most primary, but it piles additional pressure onto moms.

Data collected by the Captivate Network shows men are 35 percent more likely to take a break while on the job, ‘just to relax.’ Men are also more likely to go out to lunch, take a walk, and take personal time during working hours.”

reason the pay gap is so stark is that so many of the jobs of “care” in this country (teaching, nursing and home healthcare, food services, housekeeping, and childcare) pay the worst. This essential support is perceived as low-authority, low-status “women’s work,” of lesser value. (Men in the care categories typically outearn women, a double slap.)[*9] Culturally, we don’t think that “women’s work” is valuable, productive, or important, and we pay accordingly.

We’ve historically been cast as freeloaders and walking wombs.

If you’re single or childless, your value in the capitalist market approaches that of a man—but socially, you’re perceived as broken or selfish.

Like other women, I am the bulwark against the storm of life, even as our culture insists that I’m simply protected by the patriarchy and not using my own back to hold it up.

In Untamed, Glennon writes: “Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back into their cage.”

“Women struggle to acknowledge what they want,” she offered, “in part, because we’ve been conditioned to believe we don’t actually have wants.”

Glennon has written extensively about how the idea of the “selfless woman,” who sacrifices her own longing for a bigger life for her spouse, her children, her co-workers, is central to our culture and how unusual, if not controversial, it is to see women who put themselves first, who strive to realize the dreams they have for themselves.

the women who grate on our nerves are typically telling us what we want. They are the ones who are holding up a mirror.

What’s more, Gilligan’s research describes how boys shape their morality around being someone in the world, adhering to logical and legal codes, whereas girls are conditioned to see their morality as being in service to the world. Gilligan asserts that to achieve full women’s rights, which we still haven’t done, we must enable “women to consider it moral to care not only for others but for themselves.”

As Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider write in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, “We can believe in a woman’s equality and yet, as women, feel guilt when we put our own needs forward or uncomfortable when other women do the same.”

As they point out, children come to insert the word don’t before critical words: For boys, it becomes I don’t care; for girls, it is I don’t know

Our culture still insists that women’s ambitions should be at least partially crowned by children, that not wanting a family suggests something is wrong with you.

We must be likable and unthreatening enough to ensure everyone else feels comfortable—our power must be cushioned.

In the push for power, we have prioritized competence, convinced that effort and excellence are our best path: We raise our hands and speak up only when we’re sure of the answer; we keep our heads down and put in the hours at work; we hope to be recognized for our value, rather than needing to state it on the record.

After all, women are much better at listening to other people, acknowledging what they don’t know, and not interrupting.

Oprah said: “Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility.”

He put me in a double bind: be impeccable, be of service, maximize your potential—and don’t feel proud. He cut me off with a danger sign, made me feel as if expanding further into self-expression would surely lead to my destruction. He cautioned me by preemptively shaming me,

Culturally we despise fat people. Fat-phobia is the last bastion of acceptable bias, disguised in the morality of health.

She explains, “The ways that thin people talk to fat people are, in a heartless kind of way, self-soothing. They are warnings to themselves from themselves. I am the future they are terrified of becoming, so they speak to me as the ghost of fatness future.”

No man will ever experience anything as insidious as the way women’s bodies and appearances are rated and judged.

The classification of greed as a Deadly Sin became a very useful exhortation for getting wealthy citizens to give the church money; a lack of generosity came to be the sin’s most pronounced dimension, not the accumulation of wealth.

Research suggests that high-net-worth women are significantly more other-minded than their male counterparts: According to a report in Barclay’s, women give away nearly twice as much as men.

“We always talk about the gender pay gap: 82 cents on the dollar, which is so frustrating,” she explained. “But do you know what the gender wealth gap is? It’s 32 cents on a man’s dollar. The gender pay gap at least is moving slightly in a positive direction. The gender wealth gap is going the wrong way. Part of that reason is that men have invested more than women have, and wealth compounds—even with tough markets.” Part of this inequity is the lack of discourse around money for women: We are less financially literate and more pressured to spend on consumer goods rather than stocks.

In essence, we’ve agreed to be valued for less because we’ve been sold a story of shame around money, and we don’t know how to ask for it, get comfortable with it, or demand it.

Dependence on a spouse for money is terrifying, and this dependence is the root of the patriarchy’s power.

Steinem also remarked how revolutionary the episode was because women were conditioned to not talk about money, to hide their wanting it, to silence their real fears of being ditched for a younger model and left with nothing—and accused of freeloading in the interim.

I don’t know what was more frustrating—that this man did so little or that I felt compelled to do so much.

While the desire for more has a masculine energy—the energy of conquering, of taking, of pillaging—women experience it differently. I don’t know many women in the West, at least, who feel as though they have enough: enough money, enough time, enough support, enough opportunity.

Women have been programmed to believe money is like a pond, finite and boundaried, whereas men perceive it as a roaring and endless river.

We didn’t even understand that the clitoris is just the tip of a vast pleasure network—more nerve endings than the penis!—until the pioneering research of Helen O’Connell in 1998.

We don’t hear about our sexual organs as pleasure centers; we hear about them as odiferous “boxes” that bleed and seep and will end our ambitions through unwanted pregnancies.

It does little except impart that girls get periods and unwanted pregnancies, while boys get erections and ejaculation. As Orenstein elaborates, “We are more comfortable talking about girls as victims of sexuality rather than agents of sexuality.”

For millennia, and one could argue this rule still holds, women have been divided into two categories: those who are respectable and those who are not. Respectability is determined by whether a woman is a sexual partner to one man or many.

In one longitudinal study, two researchers lived with college women for five years (through their first year after graduation) and watched how they navigated the world and their relationships. While the researchers were evaluating many factors as they tracked these girls and their trajectories, they ultimately published a study about their observations around class and the perception of sluttiness. They discovered that while all the women were slut-shamed an equivalent amount in private, the lower-class women faced far more public slut-shaming, particularly when they tried to befriend richer girls. As a journalist who covered the study writes, “The rampant slut-shaming…was only a symptom of the women’s entrenched classism. But more importantly, the allegations of sluttiness had little to do with real-life behavior. The woman with the most sexual partners in the study, a rich girl named Rory, also had the most sterling reputation—largely because she was an expert at concealing her sexual history.”

While we’re not short on words to describe and objectify “loose” women,[*5] we do lack language and definitions to describe women’s desire.

What did seem clear was that romance was a prerequisite for desire, but the desire needed to come from outside of you. A girl was supposed to be a passive object, waiting patiently for the moment a boy parted the crowd to find her, when she was “seen”—always chosen, never choosing.

There’s the immediate physical trauma of assault, and then the insidious and invisible trauma from the event—including the way our culture programs girls and women to accept responsibility and blame.