The Nation's Pulse/Career Women Lash Out
Podhoretz, John
THE NATION'S PULSE CAREER WOMEN LASH OUT by John Podhoretz T . C. Wiatt and Alex Forrest are two J obsessive, intimidating, and respected careerists in their thirties. They work long hours,...
...The message is clear: J. C. is an incompetent when it comes to the things that most matter in life...
...This is particularly interesting considering the huge strides made by women in the professions, whose numbers are increasing exponentially across the board more quickly than the most ardent feminists could have predicted...
...Hewlett's solution for the woes of working women with families and to feminism's anti-family bias is federally funded universal daycare...
...And if you did have the dumb luck to find a mate, your home life would be full of the anxiety and tension of working and raising a family at the same time and would be far less fulfilling than you thought it would be or you think it ought to be...
...And if suicide wasn't your cup of tea, you would probably have suffered at some point from an eating disorder—anorexia seems to have been the most popular, but bulimia ran a close second...
...The makers of Baby Boom have an entirely different fate in store for J. C. A distant relative dies in Britain and leaves her an adorable year-old baby girl, thus making J. C. an instant mother...
...And after promising her boss that she did not want to "have it all," J. C. finds herself in the position of trying to do just that —and discovering that as a result she is failing at work and surrendering the nurturing of her child to a babysitter...
...The message, once again, is clear: If you are a woman, and all you 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 have is a career, you have less than nothing...
...Instead, they celebrate the virtues of home and hearth, and contrast the brittle neuroses (and psychoses) of their career women with the calmer and more contented spirits of women who stay at home with the children...
...Baby Boom is a comic assault on J. C. Wiatt, a ferociously efficient efficiency expert who is known around her office as the "Tiger Lady...
...Today 18 percent of all doctors are women, compared to 13 percent just seven years ago...
...On the surface, Alex and J. C. are the ideal post-feminists, Ms...
...Alex is pitifully solitary, but Dan's wife Beth is a blissfully contented woman who has stayed home to raise their six year-old daughter and wants nothing so much as to move out of New York to the suburbs and fix up a house for her family...
...and 37 percent of all managers and administrators are women, compared to 26 percent in 1980...
...And why...
...Dressed in the fearsomely severe Alcott and Andrews garb that has become the female version of the Brooks Brothers suit, J. C. works 5 to 9 (that's a.m...
...It is her discovery that she is pregnant with his child—a condition she believed she was incapable of—that finally pushes her over the edge...
...They are, rather, the product of a growing corpus of pop sociology about the dissatisfactions and unhappiness of successful career women...
...She attempts suicide when Dan tells her he has to go home...
...And the force aiming to destroy this ideal existence is a beautiful and lonely and insane career woman carrying a knife...
...Women a few years younger than they are now writing the histories of their lives thus far, and are revealing how they've really been miserable all these years...
...Single professional women in their late thirties and early forties are forever telling journalistshow they fear they have gained the world, only to lose their own souls...
...The ways in which their creators reduce J. C. and Alex from confident professionals to quivering wrecks, and the barely concealed glee with which audiences are greeting this spectacle, reveal that popular culture has declared open season on the professional woman...
...Like their mothers before them, they seem to be suffering from a bizarre malady first diagnosed by Betty Friedan in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique...
...he saves her, but not from the pit of her despair...
...The fling only reveals to Alex the nightmarish emptiness of her chic life...
...and lives with a man with whom she is intimate for no more than four minutes a night before they both return to the work they have left lying beside them on their Laura Ashley sheets...
...magazine cover women, pioneers in the world of work whose triumphs have paved the way for a new generation of professional women...
...But it seems that the illness is back and doing its debilitating worst among America's career women...
...In one powerful scene, Alex sits alone in her apartment desultorily flicking a light on and off while Dan and Beth and their best friends are spending a rollicking evening at a bowling alley...
...And though much has been made of a so-called wage disparity between men and women, at the rarefied levels atop corporations these distinctions barely exist...
...The Myth of Women's Liberation in America, chastises the feminist leadership for ignoring the virtues of motherhood in its quest to convince women of the virtues of the working world...
...Like Betty Friedan's housewife of twenty years ago, they, too, suffer a `problem that has no name.' " In their quest for answers, few look to the feminist movement...
...But that kind of panacea has little to do with the woes of America's professional elite, who can easily afford private nurses for their children (like J. C. Wiatt...
...T hese two movies would seem to .1...
...It is, of course, tiresome when people who have never suffered any real deprivation and make a lot of money complain and complain...
...The moviereally does teach its heroine a lesson in humility before, like Job's Creator, restoring to her all she once had and doubling it for good measure...
...They work long hours, participate in the expensive high life of New York, and are the possessors of chic apartments, chic apparel, and chic attitudes...
...They are almost subversively revivifying the 1950s image of domestic suburban tranquility, which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago and unimaginable to Betty Friedan...
...News and World Report...
...As a result, she is up one baby but down one workaholic boyfriend...
...Their woes are existential—are they living the right way...
...They are as representative of their time as Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt, the consummate Midwestern man of business, was of his...
...In the past two years, article after article and book after book have told the same story: despite the fact that women are more successful than ever, and despite the fact that they are breaking down barriers once thought impregnable, professional women in their late twenties and early thirties are rethinking the structure of their lives...
...They are congratulated so publicly on every achievement as celebrated in the media, that the vast majority of women—who don't thrive on imbalance, who question daily theirreasons for going to the office—are intimidated into silence...
...Only when she has learned to set her life in order—with Elizabeth and her veterinarian taking first place—does she find out that she can, indeed, "have it all...
...The dream woman of 1987 is not Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards, but Fatal Attraction's Beth Gallagher, who is busy painting the ceiling on the second floor while her husband spends a busy day at the office before climbing into his Volvo station wagon at close of day...
...And yet, and yet, these movies do not celebrate their achievements...
...Here is what you would have been like, according to Schumer, if you had been a female member of the Harvard class of 1974: You would almost certainly be on your way to having a successful career—that is, if you hadn't committed suicide right out of school because the pressure on you to succeed was too great...
...They were given what amounted to a blow in the solar plexus when they were informed by Newsweek magazine that they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband...
...Recent books like Sarah Hardesty and Nehama Jacobs's Success and Betrayal...
...She ends up with a successful business selling gourmet baby food and finds herself a veterinarian boyfriend to boot...
...Nor have they sprung up directly from the American collective unconscious...
...sic workaholics...
...It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the 100 executives interviewed by Hardesty and Jacobs for Success and Betrayal seem profoundly depressed...
...W omen like Schumer and her friends, who form a cross-section of America's professional elite, seem to dislike what they have become...
...And if not an eating disorder, then a completely unfulfilling romantic life characterized by the impossible task of finding an appropriate mate...
...Fatal Attraction's complex villainess is a readily recognizable character: the kind of beautiful and intelligent and admirable woman whose friends wonder at her inability to find a suitable male companion...
...The contrast here is between Alex's glittery but desperate existence and the luxurious comfort of Dan's married life...
...Except that these two consummate men of business are women, as rendered in two of the autumn's hottest movies, Baby Boom and Fatal Attraction...
...in other words, they had a better chance of being shot by Yasser Arafat than they did of marrying Yasser Arafat...
...Far from it...
...As portrayed by Diane Keaton, Baby Boom's J. C. is the corporate woman as high-strung neurotic, while Glenn Close turns Fatal Attraction's Alex into a modern Medea...
...Still, these books indicate that women have done very well at learning how to play the corporate and careerist game...
...But it is nonetheless significant that this trend in American culture has now manifested itself in two movies that look back longingly to a more placid age...
...But at what cost...
...Alex Forrest is not so lucky...
...She is flabbergasted, at a loss for words or action...
...She seduces Dan Gallagher, a charming and weak-willed married lawyer with whom she has a wild weekend fling...
...Friedan talked about an illness of the spirit that she said was caused by the cultural suppression of the American housewife...
...Fran Schumer's Most Likely to Succeed: Six Women from Harvard and What Became of Them tells the story of the author and her friends from the Harvard class of 1974...
...The Crisis of Women in Corporate America document the problems that women have had to face with male resistance to their advancement—men don't like competing against women, while women don't seem to have the killer competitive instincts men have, that sort of thing...
...Even though the term is not meant as an endearment, J. C. considers it a compliment...
...Alex, who is 36 years old and works as an editor at a New York publishing house, complains that "all the really interesting guys are always married...
...She lugs the child around like a rag doll, deposits her at the coat check of a fancy restaurant, and serves the infant linguini with freshly grated cheese for dinner...
...have they made the right choices?—and yet, say Hardesty and Jacobs, they are unable to talk about their concerns openly...
...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 29...
...to p.m...
...Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in her controversial study A Lesser Life...
...she may be a graduate of both Harvard and Yale, may know how to analyze a flash report in a flash and how to restructure a corporation in order to maximize profit, but she is a hapless and hilarious incompetentwhen it comes to handling baby Elizabeth...
...From 1980 to 1986 the number of employed women architects increased by 117 percent, lawyers by 61 percent, and doctors by 46 percent...
...Both she and her boyfriend are clasJohn Podhoretz is a contributing editor of U.S...
...Today's corporate woman is just confronting the costs of corporate affiliation," write Hardesty and Jacobs...
...I don't want to have it all," she says, thus turning her back on the professional woman's gospel of the late 1970s and early 1980s that you could be a great mother, a great wife, and a great careerist at the same time, no sweat...
...That's why we're together," she reassures her boss, who wants to make her a partner but is worried that she will hear her biological clock ticking and one day up and have a child...
...have little in common, yet they share a surprisingly bleak view of the workplace and of the life successful career women lead there...
...She is just about to give Elizabeth up for adoption when some dormant emotion compels her to keep the child...
...It is true that women hold only 2 percent of the chairmanships of corporations, but that is due largely to the fact that women executives are a relatively new mass phenomenon...
...So she quits her job and buys a farmhouse in Vermont where she proves to be a hapless homeowner and an even more hapless romantic conquest for a good-natured veterinarian...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
