The Weaker Sex
How the new gender economics has more and more professional-class women looking at their mates and thinking: How long until I vote you off the island?
By SANDRA TSING LOH
Today’s women have achieved a goal that social commentators have inveighed against for centuries: economic independence. Railed The Times of London in 1868, in opposing property rights for married women: “The proposed change would totally destroy the existing relation between husband and wife.” An American letter-writer declared in 1903:
The wife who has her own income is thereby rendered a poorer wife [and,] feeling independent of her natural protector, she becomes more critical, less lenient to his faults and failings.
And—as Dr. Phil would ask—how’s all that freedom working … for us? Not very well, says Mary Eberstadt, author of Adam and Eve After the Pill. The sexual revolution’s legacy, she maintains, is “the paradox of declining female happiness.” She cites a 2009 study in which two Wharton School professors, using 35 years of General Social Survey data, found that despite educational and employment advances, women were reportedly less happy than they used to be. Ouch!
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