“Barbara Bush, wife and mother of presidents, dies at 92,” noted the Houston Chronicle. That headline made me think of when, in 1990, Bush was invited to give the commencement address at Wellesley College. Students complained that Bush’s role as a wife and mother of six wasn’t enough to warrant speaking status — that it didn’t represent how a modern woman is supposed to live her life: devoted to a career, rather than to a husband and family. She’s supposed to be the president, not be married to one.
That singular narrative, that women should devote their entire lives to the pursuit of a career and let marriage and motherhood come along for the ride (if it comes along at all), has done more to harm women — and by default, to men, to women and to society — than any other narrative America champions.
If the message to women had simply been, “It’s absolutely okay if you want more out of life than just to get married and have kids. The sky’s the limit on what you can accomplish — you can even be president. But beware that there are trade-offs, and here’s what they look like …” everything would’ve been fine. But that is not what women heard. Instead, they heard this:
- “Never rely on a man.”
- “Don’t put a relationship ahead of your career.”
- “You have plenty of time to get married and have kids down the road.”
- “You don’t need a man to be happy.”
Forty years after hearing this negative drumbeat about men and marriage, this idea that a career will be more fulfilling than anything else women do, here’s what we have to show for it: A 2009 study by the University of Pennsylvania concluded that, despite all the progress women have made since the 1970s, they are decidedly unhappier than men.
“We look across age groups, across marital patterns, across labor force participation rates, across whether or not you have children,” notes Betsey Stevenson, one of the study’s authors, “and we find that there’s not a particular group of women that are less unhappy, but rather all women across all these categories have become less happy relative to men.”
One doesn’t even have to know of this study to find evidence of women’s unhappiness — it’s all around us. How many women do you know who are single and unhappy about it? (The media touts singlehood ad nauseam, but the reality of such a life, at least in today’s culture, paints a different picture.)
How many women do you know who married too late and are struggling to conceive? How many women do you know who appear to have it all, but in fact their lives are utter chaos? How many wives do you know who’ve given up on sex? How many women do you know who are alcoholics or who rely on a host of drugs to get though the day?
Indeed, women use anti-anxiety medication at twice the rate of men. Women also initiate 70 percent of divorce, yet again an indication of their unhappy lives.
So it’s a bit ironic, isn’t it, to look at this woman who was married to the same man for 72 years and who’s largely responsible for producing an impressive and for the most part drama-free brood whose respective accomplishments are in large part due to the hard work of a woman who took pride in marriage and motherhood while also carving out a passion of her own via her literacy foundation, and think she didn’t have something to offer young women graduating from college.
Seems to me she could teach modern women a lot.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, Fox News contributor, and trustee of Leading Women for Shared Parenting. Her fifth book, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: HOW LOVE WORKS, was published in February 2017.
