A Brief History of How We Got Here

The collective white liberal feminist consciousness is apt to say it all began with Betty Friedan. Until Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and identified “the problem that had no name,” women were bored AF but largely didn’t have the language to articulate why. Many had solid educations, four-year degrees, and were putting their minds and life’s ambition into caring for the home and family. It sucked. Think Betty Draper. Think the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Think sharp, ambitious women with nothing at which to direct their smarts, talents, expectations, and desires. Think bat shit crazy because we know that’s what we’d turn into if we didn’t have the choice to work outside the home. 

With the unnamable problem properly sussed out and on display, American women--again, white, usually well-educated, liberal women--experienced a bit of a call to arms. Hey, they said to themselves and each other, why can’t I be a lawyer? A few years after women devoured Friedan’s book, many of them sought entry into places of work traditionally populated by men. They recognized the economic power available to them if they worked outside the home and knew that power also brought freedom. Women didn’t just want to be lawyers, they wanted to be doctors, executives, accountants, professors, engineers, directors, and more. They fought hard to gain entry into new professions and industries. Getting there wasn’t easy and staying was in many ways more challenging. But we did it! Women persevered and feminism did its thing and that, our dear friends, is why women today enjoy lives free from judgment and rife with opportunity. 

Except, that’s not really what happened or how it went. First, yes, white liberal feminism was the popular (read: “mainstream”) narrative at the time, but it wasn’t the only feminist narrative, and feminism--in all its forms--was about much more than access to jobs. Second, women worked outside the home for hundreds of years. African American women, for example, continued to work after abolition, usually for low wages and often tending to the homes and families of white women. Hispanic women were at the forefront of the labor movement in the mid 20th century, agitating for workers’ rights and better pay. In fact, not working outside of the home was a luxury of sorts, one experienced by a middle class of mostly white women. Yet that characterization is not fair or accurate, either. Just because (white) women did not work outside the home or collect a paycheck didn’t mean they weren’t working. Anyone, man or woman, who has stayed home with the kids for a week knows how stressful and demanding it is. It is work. Hard work. Invisible work. 

Wherein Women Do All the Things

My friend and colleague, Dr. Sarah Coleman Blithe, and I published an article on this topic a few years ago. In it, we state women’s care work has long been invisible in part because it lacks a tangible product. Unlike making a dining set, for example, you can’t brush off your hands after a day of care work and point to a result. Sure, the kids are alive but that is not really all that impressive. 

In the age of manufacturing following the Revolutionary War, this lack of product and the location of care work in the home and out of the public sphere rendered it invisible and therefore meaningless. If a woman works at her home in the forest taking care of five kids and grandma, and no one’s around to see it, is it even really work? The invisibility of care work is a battle women have fought over the centuries and continue to fight today. And it is one of many ways in which our economy has not caught up to the realities of women’s lives. 

Consider these two excerpts, one from Friedan’s 1963 book and the other from a 2012 Newsweek article by Deborah Spar titled, “Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect.” 

Friedan relays the dizzying range of tasks and expertise women were expected to command in their roles as wives and mothers: “how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents,” (p. 58). 

Only a few decades later, Spar’s excerpt echoes Friedan’s but includes an even wider range of activities. “Like most working mothers, I have snuck out of meetings to attend piano recitals and missed track meets when a deadline was looming. I have sprinted through airports in the futile hope of catching an earlier flight home and tried to comfort a sobbing child when, inevitably, the plane was late. I delivered my first lecture in a suit that reeked of infant throw-up from earlier that morning and crashed the minivan into a tree as I raced to retrieve the correct ballet costume.”

These two quotes are depressingly similar but with a pivotal difference. The tasks Friedan outlines haven’t gone away; Spar reflects the added pressure many contemporary women face. Women still dig the swimming pools with flatware, they just do it between the hours they spend in the boardroom or on a conference call. This now long-standing pattern of women “doubling up” is a fundamental feature of our modern economy. Without this central cog, many other machinations cease to function. 

Hence Little Headway

It is not difficult to understand how we arrived at this point. The mainstream feminism Friedan represented did a lot for women. It got us jobs. But what it didn’t do is change any of the systems in which we would have to tackle those jobs and make rewarding lives for ourselves and our families. It didn’t change the home. And it didn’t change the workplace. 

I don’t blame feminism. I love it. I am grateful for it every day. I am proud women have the right to run for public office. I find comfort in the fact women are not property belonging to their husbands. It sure is nice for women to have their own bank accounts and know if they file for divorce their kids won’t be automatically taken away from them. I also recognize the pragmatic choices feminist leaders and activists often had to make in order to gain the ground they could. 

I mean, c’mon, what’s the easier sell, tell women they have to work just like men and expect them to succeed or fail according to that standard or re-orchestrate entire social structures to accommodate the new reality of women in the workplace? Obviously, it’s the former. Bonus for the fact any shortcomings can be chalked up to individual women--”she didn’t have what it takes” or “we really do need a man for this job, Dennis”--rather than turning a critical eye to how we set women up for failure.

Can you imagine women in 1974 not only demanding they get hired as lawyers in a firm, but also demanding their husbands now take on at least 50% of all home and care responsibilities and that these firms install lactation rooms, adjust parental leave policies, immediately identify and eradicate all sexual and sexist behavior, and pay women the same as men? No, no, no. Baby steps. Women had to simply get in the door. That win was hard enough to secure. Once they were in, they figured things would change as a result. Fifty years later, we are still waiting. 

There’s always more to the story. In fact, women did agitate for changes in the home and workplace. They organized laundry strikes and filed some of the first sexual harassment (not a term widely recognized at the time) lawsuits. Feminism’s inability to gain greater ground for women was due more to the insurmountable social resistance the movement faced than the movement itself. 

We Arrive in the Present Day

But alas, here we are living with the fallout. And the fallout is an economic one. Women are 51% of the population, 51% of the professional workforce, and 47% of the total workforce. Women are pivotal yet we continuously fail to recognize their labor. For years, I thought it would take some large, daunting, external force to bring our society face-to-face with the work women do. You know, something like a global pandemic. Turns out, I underestimated our national collective power to dismiss the contributions women make and didn’t fathom we’d respond instead by brazenly doubling down–again–on the work we expect women to perform. 

So here I am. A woman. A white woman. The product of what white liberal feminism has afforded me and the freedoms I’ve been denied. I exist at the crossroads of privilege and second-class citizenship. I know my struggles aren’t the same as women of color and I believe enhancing the economic realities of women must begin with a firm grounding in women of color’s experiences. When you design for women of color, you create the best product for all women. 

The purpose of this newsletter is to explore what it looks like to build and design a Women’s Economy. To ask questions, share information, posit theories, and propose new approaches to many things we take for granted as natural or given. I cordially invite you to come along for the ride. 

Onward!