In short, as one . . .: Lois Verbrugge, “A Life and Death Paradox,” American Demographics, July 1988, pp. 34-37.
A U.S. National . . .: Ronald C. Kessler and James A. McRae, Jr., “Trends in the Relationship Between Sex and Psychological Distress: 1957-1976,” American Sociological Review, 46 (Aug. 1981): 443-52; J. M. Murphy, “Trends in Depression and Anxiety: Men and Women,” Acta Psychiatr. Scand., 1986, 73, pp. 113-27; Leo Srole, “The Midtown Manhattan Longitudinal Study vs. ‘The Mental Paradise Lost’ Doctrine,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 37 (Feb. 1980): 220; Jane M. Murphy. Richard R. Monson, Donald C. Olivier, Arthur M. Sobol, and Alexander H. Leighton, “Affective Disorders and Mortality,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 44 (May 1987): 473-80; Jane M. Murphy, Arthur M. Sobol, Raymond K. Neff, Donald C. Olivier, and Alexander H. Leighton, “Stability of Prevalence: Depression and Anxiety Disorders,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 41 (Oct. 1984): 990-97.
The changes, he wrote . . .: Srole, “Midtown Manhattan,” p. 220.
“There is a direct link . . .”: Witkin-Lanoil, Female Stress, p. 124.
“The overall rates for . . .”: “Psychiatric Epidemiology Counts,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 41 (Oct. 1984): 932.
But the ECA data . . .: Darrel A. Regier, Jeffrey H. Boyd, Jack D. Burke, Jr., Donald S. Rae, Jerome K. Myers, Morton Kramer, Lee N. Robins, Linda K. George, Marvin Karno, and Ben Z. Locke, “One-Month Prevalence of Mental Disorders in the United States,” Archives of General Psychiatry(Nov. 1988), 45: 977-80.
In fact, in some . . .: Murphy, “Trends in Depression and Anxiety: Men and Women,” pp. 119-20; personal interview with Jane Murphy; Olle Hagnell, Jan Lanke, Birgitta Rorsman, and Leif Ojesio, “Are We Entering an Age of Melancholy: Depressive Illness in a Prospective Epidemiological Study Over 25 Years,” Psychological Medicine, 12 (1982): 279-89.
While women’s level . . .: Murphy, “Trends in Depression and Anxiety,” pp. 120, 125; Murphy, et al., “Stability of Prevalence”: Ronald C. Kessler, James A. McRae, Jr., “Trends in Relationships Between Sex and Attempted Suicide,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24 (June 1983): 98-110; “Gender Health,” p. 5; Myrna M. Weissman, “The Epidemiology of Suicide Attempts, 1960-1971,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 30 (1974): 727-46; Kessler and McRae, “Trends in Sex and Psychological Distress,” p. 449.
In a review . . .: Kessler and McRae, “Sex and Attempted Suicide,” p. 106. The researchers also found that husbands who were the most resistant or hostile to their wives’ employment were the most likely to report higher rates of psychological distress. On the other hand, husbands who willingly participated in child care seemed to be weathering the social changes with far less psychological disruption.
The role changes that . . .: Kessler and McRae, “Trends in Sex and Psychological Distress,” p. 450.
“Have changes in . . .”: Murphy, “Stability of Prevalence,” p. 996.
In fact, as Kessler says . . .: Personal interview with Ronald Kessler, March 1988.
A 1980 study finds . . .: S. Rosenfield, “Sex Differences in Depression: Do Women Always Have Higher Rates?” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 21 (1980): 33–42.
A 1982 study . . .: Ronald C. Kessler, James A. McRae, Jr., “The Effect of Wives’ Employment on the Mental Health of Married Men and Women,” American Sociological Review, 47 (1982): 216–27.
A 1986 analysis . . .: Sandra C. Stanley, Janet G. Hunt, and Larry L. Hunt, “The Relative Deprivation of Husbands in Dual-Earner Households,” Journal of Family Issues, 7 (March 1986), no. 1: 3–20.
A 1987 study of . . .: Niall Bolger, Anita DeLongis, Ronald C. Kessler, and Elaine Wethington, “The Microstructure of Daily Role-related Stress in Married Couples,” to be published in Cross the Boundaries: The Transmission of Stress Between Work and Family, ed. by John Eckenrode and Susan Gore (New York: Plenum) pp. 16, 25. Numerous other studies have come up with similar findings. See G. L. Staines, K. J. Pottick, and D. A. Fudge, “Wives’ Employment and Husbands’ Attitudes Toward Work and Life,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 71 (1986), no. 1: 118–28; P. J. Stein, “Men in Families,” Marriage and Family Review, 7 (1984), no. 3/4: 143–59.
When Newsweek produced . . .: David Gelman, “Depression,” Newsweek, May 4, 1987, p. 48.
The anti–day care . . .: Deborah Fallows, “ ‘Mommy Don’t Leave Me Here!’ The Day Care Parents Don’t See,” Redbook, Oct. 1985, p. 160; J. L. Dautremont, Jr., “Day Care Can Be Dangerous to Your Child’s Health,” San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 20, 1990, p. A25; “When Child Care Becomes Child Molesting,” Good Housekeeping, July 1984, p. 196; “Creeping Child Care. . . Creepy,” Connaught Marshner, National Review, May 13, 1988, p. 28.
The spokesmen of the New . . .: For “Thalidomide of the ’80s,” see Richard A. Vaughan’s solicitation letter for Family In America, a New Right publication, 1989, p. 3.
“American mothers who work . . .”: “End-of-Year Issue,” Eleanor Smeal Report 1987, p. 4. See also Alexander Cockburn, “Looking for Satan in the Sandbox,” San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 7, 1990, p. A21.
In 1984, a Newsweek Melinda Beck, “An Epidemic of Child Abuse,” Newsweek, Aug. 29, 1984, p. 44.
Just in case . . .: Russell Watson, “What Price Day Care?” Newsweek, Sept. 10, 1984, p. 14.
“I had to admit . . .”: Ibid., p. 18.
Still later, in a . . .: Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz, “The Day Care Generation,” Newsweek, Special Issue, Winter/Spring 1990, pp. 86–92. The only new “evidence” that the story offered was a study of third-graders in Texas, which found that the children with more than thirty hours of day care during infancy were more likely to become discipline problems. But the study’s researcher herself concluded that poverty, not day care, was the more important underlying factor, and that problems with day care in Texas had far more to do with the state’s poor record of day-care regulation than with the nature of day care itself.
But the New York Times . . .: Warren E. Leary, “Risk of Sex Abuse in Day Care Seen as Lower Than at Home,” New York Times, March 28, 1988, p. A20.
The study concluded . . .: David Finkelhor, Linda Meyer Williams, Nanci Burns, and Michael Kalinowski, “Sexual Abuse in Day Care: A National Study,” March 1988, Family Research Laboratory, p. 18.
In fact, if there . . .: Ibid., pp. vii, xvii. Data also from National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, which reported in 1986 that 72 percent of all sexual abuse was perpetrated by fathers and stepfathers. Ironically, the press had cast doubt on reports of a child-molestation epidemic in the home; a spate of stories in the mid-’80s proposed that the problem was actually fabricated by conniving ex-wives who were angling for sole custody of the children. Although there undoubtedly were women who stooped to this tactic, they were the exception. In the ’80s, only 2 percent of divorce and child-custody disputes even involved allegations of sexual abuse.
“Day care is not . . .”: Ibid., Finkelhor et al., “Sexual Abuse in Day Care,” pp. 18-19.
Research over the last two decades . . .: Children of Working Parents: Experiences and Outcomes, ed. by Cheryl D. Hayes and Sheila B. Kamerman (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1983); Lois Wladis Hoffman, “Effects of Maternal Employment in the Two-Parent Family,” American Psychologist, Feb. 1989, pp. 283-92; Kathleen McCartney, Sandra Scarr, Deborah Phillips, Susan Grajek, and J. Conrad Schwarz, “Environmental Differences Among Day Care Centers and Their Effects on Children’s Development,” Day Care: Scientific and Social Policy Issues, ed. by E. Zigler and E. Gordon (Boston: Auburn House, 1982) pp. 126-51; Barbara J. Berg, The Crisis of the Working Mother (New York: Summit Books, 1986) pp. 58-60; Ellen Galinsky, “The Impact of Parental Employment on Children: New Directions For Research,” Work and Family Life Studies, Bank Street College of Education, unpublished paper; Hochschild, The Second Shift, pp. 235-36. See also Susan Faludi, “Are the Kids Alright?” Mother Jones, Nov. 1988, pp. 15-18.
Yet, the actual studies . . .: Data from Child Care Law Cente
r and Children’s Defense Fund. See also Carolyn Jabs, “Reassuring Answers to 10 Myths About Day Care,” Child-Care Referral & Education, July-Aug. 1985 edition, p. 2.
But the research offers . . .: Sandra Scarr, Mother Care/Other Care (New York: Basic Books, 1984) pp. 101-104; Michael Rutter, “Social-Emotional Consequences of Day Care for Preschool Children,” Day Care: Scientific and Social Policy Issues, pp. 5-9; Kathleen McCartney and Deborah Phillips, “Motherhood and Child Care,” The Different Faces of Motherhood, ed. by Beverly Birns and Dale F. Hay (New York: Plenum Press, 1988) pp. 170-72, 176-77; Hoffman, “Effects of Maternal Employment in the Two-Parent Family,” p. 288.
Their evidence, however . . .: The data most widely relied on in making these claims comes from British psychologist John Bowlby’s studies of orphaned children after World War II. See John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 2 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Scarr, pp. 207-208.
Psychologist Harry Harlow . . .: Michael Rutter, Maternal Deprivation Reassessed (Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1972) pp. 36-37.
Up until this point . . .: Jay Belsky, “Two Waves of Day Care Research: Developmental Effects and Conditions of Quality,” The Child and the Day Care Setting, ed. by R. Ainslie (New York: Praeger, 1984); J. Belsky and L. Steinberg, “The Effects of Day Care: A Critical Review,” Child Development, 49: 929–49.
Then, in the September . . .: Jay Belsky, “Infant Day Care: A Cause for Concern?” Zero to Three, 6, no. 5 (Sept. 1986): 1–7.
Soon Belsky found himself . . .: Personal interviews with Jay Belsky, 1991.
Belsky peppered his report . . .: Belsky, “Infant Day Care,” pp. 4, 6.
Finally, in every press interview . . .: Personal interview with Jay Belsky, 1991. (Subsequent quotes from Belsky are from interview unless otherwise noted.)
What also got less attention . . .: Deborah Phillips, Kathleen McCartney, Sandra Scarr, and Carolee Howes, “Selective Review of Infant Day Care Research: A Cause for Concern,” Zero to Three, 7 (Feb. 1987): 18–21.
He focused on four . . .: Belsky, “Infant Day Care,” p. 7.
Belsky said he had . . .: Phillips, McCartney, Scarr, and Howes, “Selective Review,” pp. 18–21.
University of North Carolina . . .: Phillips, McCartney, Scarr, and Howes, “Selective Review,” p. 19.
Later behavioral problems . . .: Ibid., p. 20; Judith Rubenstein, Carolee Howes, “Adaptation to Infant Day Care,” in Advances in Early Education and Day Care, ed. by S. Kilmer (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1983) pp. 41–42.
But that person . . .: Ann C. Crouter, Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Ted L. Huston, and Susan M. McHale, “Processes Underlying Father Involvement in Dual-Earner and Single-Earner Families,” Developmental Psychology, 23: 431–40.
CHAPTER THREE. BACKLASHES THEN AND NOW
“The progress of women’s rights . . .”: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977) p. 199.
Women’s studies historians . . .: Deirdre English, “What Do Women Really Want,” The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 4, 1988, p. 20; Ethel Klein, Gender Politics (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1984) p. 9; Juliet Mitchell, “Reflections on Twenty Years of Feminism,” in What Is Feminism? A Re-Examination, ed. by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) p. 36.
“While men proceed . . .”: Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers, ed. by Dale Spender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) p. 4.
It is, as poet . . .: Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979) pp. 9–10.
“At the opening of the twentieth . . .”: Lois W. Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) p. 1.
Soon the country would have to . . .: Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) p. 39.
“The old theory that . . .”: Chafe, The American Woman, p. 179.
Different kinds of backlashes . . .: Vern L. Bullough, Brenda Shelton, and Sarah Slavin, The Subordinated Sex: A History of Attitudes Toward Women (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1988) pp. 73–82; Mary R. Beard, Women as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (New York: Octagon Books, 1976); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979) and Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1961) p. xxii.
White European women . . .: Bullough, Shelton, and Slavin, The Subordinated Sex, p. 261.
This transaction was billed . . .: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1974) p. 1.
“It may be said that she . . .”: Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American History (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970) p. 91.
As scholar Cynthia . . .: Cynthia D. Kinnard, ed., Antifeminism in American Thought: An Annotated Bibliography(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986) p. xv.
Educated women of this era . . .: Ibid., p. 307; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1978) p. 128; Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America—The Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press) pp. 32-33.
They, too, faced . . .: Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, pp. 125-31.
And Victorian women . . .: Nancy Sahli, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis, no. 8 (Summer 1979): 17-27.
Then as now, late . . .: Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1977) pp. 137, 138-42.
The media and the . . .: Ibid., pp. 49-71; William L. O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) pp. 33-56; Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 4.
By the late 1800s . . .: Gordon, Woman’s Body, p. 57.
The word “feminism” Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) p. 13.
The International Ladies’ . . .: Banner, Women in Modern America, p. 71.
And Heterodoxy . . .: Cott, Modern Feminism, pp. 38-39.
The U.S. War Department . . .: Ibid., pp. 241-60; Banner, Women in Modern America, pp. 152-53; Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1978) p. 233.
The media maligned . . .: Cott, Modern Feminism, pp. 272, 362; Kinnard, Antifeminism, p. 183.
Young women . . .: Jessie Bernard, The Female World (New York: The Free Press, 1981) p. 146.
Postfeminist sentiments . . .: Cott, Modern Feminism, pp. 271-76.
“Ex-feminists” began . . .: Ibid., p. 276. “For us to even use the word feminist is to invite from the extremists a challenge to our authority,” explained Ethel M. Smith, a top officer in the Women’s Trade Union League—an explanation that would be largely restated in the 1980s, in that decade’s near redlining of “the F-word.” See Ibid., p. 134.
In place of equal rights . . .: Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 204-14.
The ’20s eroded . . .: O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969) p. 305.
When the Depression . . .: Hymowitz and Weissman, A History of Women in America, pp. 306-307.
“All about us we see . . .”: William O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave, pp. 292-93.
“It looks sometimes as if . . .”: Margaret Culkin Banning. “They Raise Their Hats,” Harper’s, Aug. 1935, p. 354.
As political science scholar . . .: Klein, Gender Politics, p. 17.
The spiral swung . . .: The federal govern
ment’s support for day care, however, was more verbal than financial: it provided day-care programs for only 10 percent of the children who needed them. See Banner, Women in Modern America, p. 221; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 420.
Women welcomed their . . .: Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 276; Hymowitz and Weissman, A History of Women in America, p. 312; Degler, At Odds, p. 420.
Seventy-five percent reported . . .: Hymowitz and Weissman, A History of Women in America, p. 314; Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 178–79.
Women’s political energies . . .: Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, pp. 290–91, 296.
This time, the amendment . . .: Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) pp. 15–16, 19, 21.
In a record outpouring . . .: Klein, Gender Politics, p. 18.
Two months after . . .: Hymowitz and Weissman, A History of Women in America, p. 314; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 287.
Employers revived prohibitions . . .: Hymowitz and Weissman, A History of Women in America, pp. 314, 316, 323; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 309; Chafe, The American Woman, p. 190; Banner, Women in Modern America, pp. 222–24.
An anti-ERA coalition . . .: Harrison, On Account, p. 20.
When the United Nations . . .: Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 306–7.
Employers who had . . .: Harrison, On Account, p. 5.
Advice experts . . .: Chafe, The American Woman, pp. 176–77, 187.
Better watch out . . .: This Week, cited in Catherine Johnson’s “Exploding the Male Shortage Myth,” New Woman, Sept. 1986, p. 48.
Feminism was “a deep . . .”: Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1947), cited in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: A Laurel Book/Dell, 1983 ed.) pp. 119–20.
Independent-minded women . . .: Chafe, The American Woman, p. 176.
The rise in female autonomy . . .: Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 304; Banner, Women in Modern America, p. 234.