How Feminism Failed Women

Call it a preemptive strike. Lisa Miller reports on the dissatisfaction experienced by millennial women who have chosen to follow the feminist life plan. Having put career ahead of family they have discovered, according to Miller, that the workplace has not fulfilled the feminist promise. They have not found in their careers the satisfaction and emotional well being that feminism promised.

Worse yet, many of them seem not to have families. They say that they want nothing more than to have a home and a family, but Miller, good feminist satrap that she is, insists that the problem can be solved by giving women more power in the workplace.

A rational human mind would conclude from Miller’s article that feminism has failed young women, that it has led them on a snipe hunt. They were promised everything, great careers, perfect work/life balance, husbands who change diapers, great sex…. The reality is: they have unsatisfying careers, trips to the Caribbean, and an empty household. Feminism promised women that they could have it all. Today’s millennial women have less than their mothers.

Feminism failed because it promised young women that once they had established successful careers they would not depend on a man for anything and thus would be less needy, less dependent and better able to be loved for who they really were. Feminism did not understand, inconveniently, that, in the marriage market, aging is not a woman’s friend. Independence and autonomy do not make a woman wife material.

Miller, however, wants these women to have promotions and more international assignments. She does not know or does not care that women with husbands and children are disinclined to take such postings, because they do not want to disrupt their families. As we pointed out a few weeks ago, women litigators with young children do not want to work twelve hour days and do not want to spend a week in Kansas litigating a case. Should we not respect their free choice?

Women with children often do not aspire to climb the corporate hierarchy. Women without children are less likely to find husbands or to have children. Since Miller ignores these salient points, she comes across as hopelessly wedded to her ideology, ignoring reality and refusing to accept that feminism has failed women.

Examine Miller’s opening gambit:

Millennial women — at least those who reside in professional bubbles — seem to have it all. They are better educated, more prosperous, less encumbered by cultural expectations than any previous generation of women. They delay marriage (if they marry at all) and children (if they choose to conceive). They can own or rent. They can save or spend. These women have been on familiar terms with their ambitions all their lives — raised by careful parents to aim high (millennial women are likelier than their male peers to have professional jobs, to be managers, and to work in finance), and tutored by their cultural icons to perform their empowerment, and never submit. You know, “Bow down, bitches,” as they say.

When Anne-Marie Slaughter famously explained that she, for one, could not have it all, and that trying to have it all had severely damaged one of her children, feminists were outraged.

Miller fails to note in her parenthetical remarks that delaying marriage is the basis of the feminist life plan and that many women do not marry at all they did know that the older they got the more difficult it would become. It also did not tell them that being ideologically committed to feminism is a turn-off for most men.

Miller also skewed reality by saying how wonderful it is that women can choose when they want to conceive. In truth, the problem is not the choice, but the fact that after a certain age women lose the freedom to choose. Happily for many women reproductive endocrinology has helped, but the supposed freedom to choose vanishes after a certain age. Allowing women to believe otherwise is dishonest.

As it happens, Miller does report, faithfully, that women are unhappy with their careers because they have nothing but their careers. What do they want? They want to have familes. They want to be more like housewives, not more like CEOs:

The women complain of the enervating psychic effects of the professional treadmill as white-collar piecework and describe their dread as they contemplate bleak futures — decade after decade, they imagine, unfulfilled. After a lifetime of saying ‘yes’ to their professional hunger — these are the opportunity-seizers, the list-makers, the ascendant females, weaned on Lean In — they’ve lost it, like a child losing grasp of a helium balloon. Grief-stricken, they are baffled too, for they have always been propelled by their drive. They were the ones who were supposed to run stuff — who as girls imagined themselves leaving the airport in stylish trench coats, hailing a taxi with one hand while holding their cell in the other.

Limp, desperate, they fantasize about quitting their good jobs and moving home to Michigan. They murmur about purpose, about the concrete satisfactions of baking a loaf of bread or watching a garden grow. One young woman I know dreams about leaving her consulting job, which takes her to Dubai and Prague, to move back home and raise a bunch of kids. Another, an accountant with corner-office aspirations, has decided to “phone it in” for a few years while she figures out what she wants to do.

Credit to Miller for reporting honestly about what these women really want. Discredit to her for ignoring these women’s express wishes in order to try to rescue feminism.

Miller’s rescue mission begins by denouncing these women for having misunderstood feminism. Her approach reeks of radical ideology. Fanatics and ideologues believe that when their schemes produce human calamities the fault is always that someone misread or misapplied their brilliant truths:

The female dissatisfaction chronicled by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique was prompted by a widespread awakening to the bullshit promises of domestic happiness, manufactured by culture to make female containment look good. Now another bullshit promise has taken its place, and another generation is waking up. The men in charge are still in charge. It is impossible for women to continue to have faith in a vision of their own empowerment, when that empowerment is, in fact, a pose. It is not true that a gleaming kitchen floor is the key to female satisfaction. And “Bow down, bitches” is a lie.

Apparently, the women quoted in the prior paragraphs wish for nothing more than what Miller disparages as “bullshit promises of domestic happiness.” Note the typical feminist denigration of any woman who would choose to marry young and to put family ahead of career.

Miller then blames the patriarchy. You see, the males who run companies have not given women sufficient power. Apparently, Miller was not paying to attention to what she wrote. These women do not want more power. They want more domesticity.

Miller explains:

What does it mean to grow up listening to “Roar” when female achievement has flatlined? The wage gap is about the same as it has been for a decade, which is to say since these women were in college, buckled down tending to their GPAs and loading up their resumes with extracurriculars. There is still no occupation in which a woman who works full time earns a lot more than a man, and few in which women have parity. Women have less savings than men, and are less likely to qualify for a mortgage. The cost of living, for everyone, has risen in urban areas. These are the parameters of the psychic vise, for growing numbers of women are the main or sole breadwinners for their families. When a woman delays children and partnership into her 30s to earn money and establish independence and then sees how her paths are blocked, it is perhaps no wonder that something like anguish is the result.

Miller insists that by the time professional women reach their early thirties they start complaining about the lack of opportunity. Perhaps she lives in a bubble, but unmarried women approaching their mid-thirties are far more concerned with their diminishing opportunities to have children.

Miller skews the facts here:

As they age, their dissatisfactions increase so that by the time they’re 30 or 34, two-thirds say their employer doesn’t do enough to promote and encourage diverse hiring; more than a third say they don’t have female role models; and just 39 percent say they believe they can rise to the top of the organization they’re in (down from 49 percent of younger millennial women). At all ages, millennial women say they feel that men get the plum international assignments — even though they also believe that the plum international assignments are crucial to advancing their careers….

It’s as if the women have cleared spaces in their lives for meteoric careers, and then those careers have been less gratifying, or harder won, or more shrunken than they’d imagined. And what’s there to fill the space, except more Insta images of female gratification — vacations! cocktails! — that inadequately reflect the lives they lead?

What does Miller want? You guessed it, an outpouring of rage and a revolution. Added to it she proposes that young women should dispense with their hopes and dreams for home and family and become more invested in their careers:

Rage and revolution are called for, and such upheaval requires more professional investment by more females, not less.

Do you honestly believe that these embittered angry feminists are going to have families? If millennial women want to set out on a better path they would do better to understand that feminism has failed them and that the promise of social revolution has been shown, over and over again, to be a massive con.