The Sexes: The New Housewife Blues

(9 of 10)

daughters. Some of this experience has gone into Woman at Home (Doubleday; $6.95). Like the housewives she often speaks to and for, she is no antifeminist, but she objects sharply to the rhetoric of the women's movement—at least in its more extreme forms. It has done considerable harm, she feels, by lumping housework and child care together and dismissing them as something that women must escape in order to achieve "selfhood." It has also deluded women about both the pleasures and the problems of commercial work and about the ease of being a responsible parent and pursuing a career at the same time. (A large part of all work done by men and women is boring and unsatisfying and, as men know well, leaves little enough time for a family or any other form of commitment or self-development.) Most potentially dangerous for the family, Cardozo argues, is the fact that the women's movement has urged wives to follow men in their rush to be gobbled alive by the success ethic, emulating the American man at a time when he has never been "less in need of emulation, and more in need of searching his own soul."

Instead of helping these women remove the causes of their "boredom and loneliness at home," as Cardozo believes could (and can still) be done, feminists told them to leave home and become absentee mothers, just like their absentee husbands. Says she: "Their only quarrel with the success ethic was that it excluded women." The delusion that the mass of men chained to jobs are free or fulfilled (that kind of fulfillment is only sporadically true even for a handful of trained professionals and craftsmen) was never examined. "Men no longer have jobs; jobs have men," says Cardozo. "Now, jobs have women too."

Since two incomes are more and more necessary to keep marriages solvent, more and more women are going to work. The problem, as Cardozo sees it, is how to keep people's careers from damaging family life, and how to work out flexible and practical ways of individual child care in an impatient society more and more inclined to turn all problems over to the state. Cardozo, like a number of public figures, sees no panacea in care centers, now being urged by many feminists, because they would become increasingly compulsory and would deprive many children of an affectionate upbringing. An alternative: that women, and men, who take care of their own children be granted Social Security benefits for such work, and that tax benefits be offered to businesses that devise split work shifts and flexible schedules so that young husbands and wives will find it easier to spell each other in caring for their families—and each other.

"We have desacralized marriage," according to Robert Weiss, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and author of Marital Separation. It is no longer seen as a "calling" or a "social responsibility" but merely as an adjunct to the good life. This change, which Benjamin DeMott sums up as scrapping " 'in sickness and in health' in favor of 'I do my thing and you do your thing,' " is not so much the result of sexual permissiveness and easier divorce laws as, like them, an offshoot of what Weiss describes as the "intensity of our impatience with barriers to self-realization." Weiss adds: