The Day of the Cougar

Is it a trend or an anomaly?

Christine Wicker reports that more and more middle aged women are, shall we say, redefining their marriages: "A lot of midlife women in my acquaintance are leaving what appear to be perfectly good and loving husbands. Or thinking about it. Or cheating on them. Or wanting to. Or staying married and faithful but buying their own houses, which they either live in or keep as a bolt hole." Link here. Via Dr. Helen.

It is fair to say that thinking about cheating, wanting to cheat, even cheating itself is not the same as leaving a husband and getting a divorce. Many marriages survive affairs. Almost no marriages survive divorce.

Let's stipulate that these women are at a stage in their lives when their children are grown up and in college. They could be looking for new challenges; they could be investing more in their work; they could be preparing for grandparenthood. Surprisingly, they are not. According to Wicker, they are looking for a romantic adventure, if not for the occasional hookup.


What is it all about? Are these women getting their second wind? Are they thinking that they can now find the love they have been missing in their marriages? If they are in their mid-forties, they may think that it is their last chance at true romance.

Or perhaps they are anticipating the possibility of being dumped for younger women and are trying to pre-empt the pain of rejection. After their husbands get over the shock of a broken home, many of them, as Dr. Helen points out, are going to do just fine out there.

Just as college girl hooking up, supported by feminists as a step toward liberation, is a boon for teenage boys, so perhaps is this new trend among their mothers a boon for middle aged men.

Then again, perhaps these midlife women are trying to recover their lost youth by emulating their daughters. At times, if they are what are now called cougars, competing with their daughters for the same men. Of course, this would put them in conflict with their own daughters, and would open the door to unimaginably painful emotional turmoil.

As Wicker reports, this tendency for women to redefine their marriages unilaterally seems to be far more prevalent among women of more progressive political leanings. Women who have more traditional ideas of gender roles in marriage seem to be happier with their marriages, and are not yearning for their liberation.

It might be true that more traditional marital roles foster greater and more durable love and affection? Making the kitchen into a battleground in some kind of politicized domestic warfare is not the best way to sustain affection and intimacy.

Dare we point out that progressive women are, almost by definition, feminists. In fact, today's midlife women were the first generation of women that was brought up on feminism, thus that had their expectations, their hopes and their dreams about marriage defined by feminism.

Perhaps their youthful feminist enthusiasms suffered something like a latency period while they were raising their children, only to re-emerge in full flower once those same children had gone off to college.

But they were also the first generation of women to have had their views of marriage imposed by an ideology, and not an ideology that was very congenial to marriage.

One woman explained that she got divorced because: "I realized my husband was of no added value." To which Wicker responds that we would all be outraged if a man said that of a woman, that is, if he implied that a wife was something to be used and discarded when she was no longer useful.

But, reflect for a moment on the concept of added value. It is a peculiar idea, one that comes to us from economics, and that easily evokes the famous Marxist idea of "surplus value." [Marx wrote in German, of course, and his German word mehrwert is normally translated as added value.]

Let's ignore the fact that this woman is using the term incorrectly. By using it at all she is identifying her own ideological proclivities, the prism through which she sees her world and defines her experience.

This recalls, for me at least, Joan Didion's famous essay on, "The Women's Movement," collected in: The White Album. The essay dates from 1972; thus it offers a view of the early childhood of today's feminism. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Didion disputed the notion that the women's movement was about a "collective inchoate yearning for 'fulfillment' or self-expression.'" There was, she continued, "an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women's movement could have any interest at all."

Having lost faith in the proletariat, and lacking any other class to lead the revolution, feminism invented a class out of thin air, by making women feel like they were the new vanguard of the revolution.

Many women did not understand or care much about the ideological underpinnings of the movement, but Didion was surely correct to see the "idea" as the basis for the movement.

The ideas continue to exert considerable influence today, even detached from their Marxist underpinnings. As Didion explained: "If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend [it] via technology...."

Clearly, the progressive women in question are prey to something like a class consciousness. They all seem to feel that marriage has been constructed to oppress them, that they sold out their hopes and dreams and sexual liberation in order to raise their children, and that now it's time for them to find self-actualization

Of course, if this is the attitude that these women brought into their marriages, if they offered grievances and complaints about their roles in their marriages and if they were never satisfied with anything that their husbands contributed to the marriages, it is not very surprising that love and affection, romantic and otherwise, would have long since been lost.

Wicker recounts a conversation she once had with an older woman. When the woman explained that it was now time for her to live her "real life," Wicker asked, somewhat incredulously: "What have you been living?" The woman responded: "I've been my children's mother. My husband's wife. Now I'm going to be myself."

What a remarkable statement. And ask yourself where she ever got the idea that when she was a mother and a wife she was not herself. What ideology persuaded her that those roles were alien identities? And if they were alien identities, does that mean that she should feel no sense of accomplishment for having fulfilled them well? Can she now feel no pride in her children because being their mother forced her, against her will, not to be herself?

What about the bright future that Wicker's friends and acquaintances are now looking forward to? I will allow Joan Didion to offer her comments on that dream, especially as, in her eyes, it represents a failure to accept adult responsibility.

Remember, Didion wrote this nearly four decades ago: "The childlike resourcefulness-- to get a job in publishing, to become a gifted potter!-- bewilders the imagination. The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words."

And finally: "These are converts who want not a revolution but 'romance,' who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their own life."

[A warm welcome to all of you who have arrived at my blog via Instapundit or Dr. Helen.  My thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith.]