There is some concern about writing some things too soon. That's not why I didn't write last week; that was just too much else to do. (Things have been less overwhelming this week, for now.)
My real worry - so there is a spoiler alert now - is that no matter how much of a foundation I lay for it, and as much as I write about the harm that patriarchy causes to women and people of color, that when I write that it harms white men by making them mediocre it will result in a big WHAT? FORGET YOU! and all other points will be for naught, despite their importance.
I am making my peace with that anyway, but it is a shame to not be able to move past things like this. Something I read recently gave me a way of approaching it.
One of the books I am reading is Backlash by Susan Faludi. Early on she recounts several points that could be considered to be failures of feminism and women's rights, coming out mostly in the '80s, so not long after the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade, and other things that would have people talking about feminism. I remember hearing many of these things then, and some of then being trotted out again in the '90s.
I am going to focus on the one about college educated, unwed women and the precipitous drop in their marriageability, most dramatically stated as "A woman over 40 has a better chance of getting killed by a terrorist than of getting married."
That particular phrasing misrepresents the chances of getting killed by a terrorist and ignores that the original study was specifically about university-educated women, but still had some pretty good legs on it, showing up in movies like Sleepless in Seattle and The Holiday, and frequently being referenced by depressed singles, though I admit to not having heard it lately.
What was fascinating in the book - and Backlash was published in 1991, so this knowledge has been out there for a while - was that the original study was wrong and they knew it was wrong.
Jeanne Moorman, a census bureau worker who found flaws with the original data tried to work with the study publishers and did not meet with much interest. The actual data showed that education does tend to delay marriage. Therefore, women who only complete high school tend to marry shortly after high school, but women who go to college tend to marry after that.
The first thing that makes me wonder is whether that means marriage is bad for education. Would those women who married after high school have been interested in further education but found it impossible? We all know people who have combined marriage with formal schooling, so it can be done, but what works best? What helps?
Those are questions you can get to if you are open to the truth.
This is what Jeanne Moorman got from her bosses - not the scientists who refused to let accurate data spoil their conclusion, but her bosses:
The head office handed down a directive, ordering her to quit speaking to the press about the marriage study because such critiques were "too controversial." When a few TV news shows actually invited her to tell the other side of the man-shortage story, she had to turn them down. She was told to concentrate instead on a study that the White House wanted--about how poor unwed mothers abuse the welfare system.Yes, of course it was Reagan.
Let's say that you are religious and that you know marriage is good, ordained of God. It could be possible to feel threatened by data that seems to argue against that. However, is the data arguing against that, or against some patterns in the way we do marriage?
The other introductory studies were about how divorce was economically devastating for women after women's lib (without bothering to compare to divorce before), an infertility epidemic affecting professional women, and a great emotional burnout affecting single and working women. In some cases they didn't even involve wrong data so much as assumption.
If you think marriage involves a man providing and a woman staying home with children, finding that professional women can be happy and fulfilled and can still get pregnant might be an existential threat. What if instead it's just the wrong idea about what makes marriage work and what marriage needs?
If you are committed to defending your idea, you stay wrong. That's all the worse if marriage is important. We could be doing it perpetually wrong because we are so willing to lie about it, and that leads to great harm and stagnation.
So a really big step forward is being able to resist your leap to defensiveness and learn. If you are willing to do that, everything else needed can follow.
It's not just about being able to bear discomfort, though that relates. This is about having a willingness to, based on a desire for truth.
