Really interesting interview with Stephanie Coontz about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, about the Feminine Mystique and its legacy (you can read the first chapter of the Feminine Mystique in Session 2 of Turn the Page). Her argument that feminism was good for marriage makes a lot of sense to me. The divorce rate has fallen since the days the Feminine Mystique was published and actually tends “to be lowest in states where more than 70 percent of married women work outside the home,” Coontz reports.

But what’s most interesting and disturbing to me is how much catching up culture still has to do in order to reflect the reality of men and women’s lives today.

Coontz sums this disconnect up perfectly, talking about our professional lives:

“What’s wrong with the ‘career mystique’ is that you prove yourself by being the last one to leave the office. It’s the flip side of the ‘feminine mystique,’ and it can only work as long as you do have one-half of the population that is taking care of the careerist. It doesn’t work if we’re both interested in having careers and having families.”

Read her thoughts on a host of issues including how she expects marriage to change, the current “masculinity crisis,” and more, below.

-Nicole

http://www.salon.com/life/gender_roles/?story=/mwt/feature/2011/01/12/coontz_qa