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The Modern Woman

Elise Phillips explores the little-recognised struggles that the ‘modern woman’ faces in a man’s world.

Mar-May 2007

The year is 1963. Betty Friedan, in her book The Feminine Mystique, has challenged “the problem that has no name” — the culturally entrenched belief that the role of a woman is to raise children and keep the home while her husband ‘brings home the bacon.’ Women are inspired to seek more from their lives and reach their potential.

The year is 1983. Women from western societies around the globe, clothed in pinstriped power suits and killer heels, are taking on the corporate world. They’re fighting for equal opportunities and equal pay, postponing or choosing not to have children in favour of advancing their careers. Women are inspired to work their way to the top and become top executives and CEOs.

The year is 2003. Sex and the City has been running for six years, glamorising the single life. Despite the fact that the lives of these four women revolve around designer shoes and finding a decent man, the show is touted as proof that women don’t need men to have fulfilling lives. Women are inspired to love themselves and their girlfriends. Stuff men – the bastards are only good for one thing anyway.

The year is 2006. A young woman, soon to finish a double degree at a well-respected university is on the brink of entering the full-time workforce. She’s been bombarded for five years with the ‘continuing and all-pervasive oppression, objectification and exploitation of women’ and taught to take on those conservative, misogynistic, middle-class, white men. She’s seen all the alarmist media coverage of ‘career women’ who have left it too late to have children and found themselves infertile at 40. She’s read all the articles about ‘How to balance a career and a family’ and ‘How to attract the man of your dreams!’

The fact is that over 40 years of widespread, now almost mainstream, feminism have not made the situation much clearer for young women, or any women for that matter. Conflicting messages abound and there are no easy answers as to what role we as women of the 21st Century will, or should, play.

Obviously one size does not fit all, and it comes down to individual choices regarding if, or when, to get married, have children, and return to work, and no judgements are being made here as to the relative merits of any such choices. What is unsettling, for a woman yet to face these decisions, is the apparent absence of any acceptable options.

If a woman chooses not to engage in paid employment, or becomes a homemaker and mother of five, she is clearly a doormat stuck in the dark ages and a sad product of patriarchal society. If she is professionally ambitious and chooses to pursue a career, she is power-hungry and lacking in femininity. If she feels strongly about women’s rights and lobbies the government regarding gender equity, she must be a man-hater. If she attempts to have both a successful career and a family, we shake our heads at another ‘misguided’ woman, pushing the limits while her biological clock ticks away. And heaven forbid she does have a child and returns to work ‘too soon’, placing her son or daughter in childcare. She is obviously cold and unfeeling — unfit to be a mother at all.

When was the last time you heard a man complain or worry about these issues? Despite the advances of the past decades, dilemmas of this type are still exclusive to women. And while there is certainly plenty of personal anxiety and distress involved for individual women, there are bigger implications. As long as women’s struggle to manage their professional and private lives continues to be ‘a problem’, it will remain easier for employers to choose a man over a woman for that job, that promotion. It will remain easy to stereotype women according to their choices, and limit them to pursuing only one aspect of their lives. Workable solutions need to be found which truly satisfy, for the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s women.

In the words of Clare Boothe Luce, American playwright, social activist and politician: “Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn't have what it takes.’  They will say, ‘Women don't have what it takes'.”