Political writers target today’s up-and-coming young women with especial vigor, because their choices are more valuable in a relative sense than they have been before. Because of this, opinion-molders take to the task with a daily frenzy.
In the outer right, it’s common to berate the choices that young women of a certain class tend to make. Mainstream publications tend to take the opposite view of lauding young educated women and lambasting their male counterparts. Women are the majority of American college graduates, which helps to ease their way into the world of white collar work. With this reversal, a major explicit goal of second-wave feminism has been achieved.
Numerous federal bureaucracies exist to ensure female parity in employment, regardless of the qualifications of the potential labor pool. When an industry is found to under-represent women in the workforce, it will make headlines, and those headlines can in turn spur government action and lawsuits to rectify the imbalance. This empowers individual women in a legal sense (rather than the sense used in feminist sloganeering) to threaten enormous damage to any company that can be construed as discriminatory in court.
The greater part of what we’d call middle class women tend to respond to these overwhelming positive incentives to cast aside their traditional role in the household economy to instead enter the corporate workforce (both public and private). Their path has been drawn out for them clearly. Their parents encourage them to go through at least 16 years of intensive education at enormous expense. Once they finish that course of education, she is supposed to work until she is about 65 or older before retiring. A sensible number of children tends to be seen as between 0-2.
Throughout this entire process, certified experts train her in how to think, what to think, and how to behave. On a basis of time spent, the only thing that comes close to matching exposure to education is exposure to the mass media, which is an auxiliary to refine the sensibilities created by the educational bureaucracy.
This extraordinary social engineering project has been in development since at least the mid-19th century if not for longer. It was thought that, by socializing elite women in a similar way to how elite men were socialized, women could eventually contribute just as much to the high arts and sciences as men could. Today’s women see themselves as at the vanguard of an attempted revolution in the species.
In the United States, as most other major social projects have essentially failed or stalled, the quest for equality has blotted out missions like that for space exploration, renewable power generation, or artificial intelligence, despite the paper-thin justification for the egalitarian quest as all in service to higher levels of human accomplishment.
Today’s educated women feel the weight of these expectations bearing down upon them like nothing else. Enormous quantities of credit have been extended to them in aggregate in speculation that their higher-than-ever educational attainment will result in stupendous leveraged gains for the rest of society. The entire state apparatus has built itself around this risky bet that devoting enormous financial and legal resources to women at the expense of men will result in an out-sized payoff.
Today’s woman feels the sheer weight of that expectation behind her. It’s reinforced every day for her in the classroom, on the radio, on TV, and on her favorite social networks.
This is why the hoopla around the leaning-forward women leaders of tomorrow is so frantic: the West’s leadership class has bet enormous amounts of capital on this particular thesis, and should said thesis be completely exposed as false, most of it will prove to be squandered, and countless political structures will need to be re-arranged.
“Today’s woman feels the sheer weight of that expectation behind her.”
No she doesn’t. She feels like status is her well-earned reward for conning somebody into giving her status. If it was simply handed to her, then she’s all the more fabulous for having been born deserving it.
If this was so, we would expect women to be happy, unless we assume she understands this and feels guilty for it. It may be the case that the elite women (who, by the way, would have had great power with or without feminism, as they always have had) feel this way and see their increased power and following as the fruits of their cunning and ambition, but the majority of women never conned anyone, don’t have any real power, and now have a lot explicitly or implicitly expected of them which they are ill-equipped to fulfill.
As the fear of Obama failing (and the ultimately impossible expectations front-loaded into his presidency: to be Black JFK and Black Abraham Lincoln combined) is the fear of all black men and women being regarded by proxy as failures, the collectivization of women in the form of feminism implies a rise and fall of all women riding on any notable woman’s rise and fall; and thus the tremendous anxiety (generalized) that women function under: if any of them fail, it may not simply be because they just didn’t have what it takes, or just made errors. No, it is an indictment of the system.
This is similar to the work-ethic problem of late Puritans: if I fail it is not merely that I was not up to the task and need to try harder, but my failure is a potential indictment of my personhood: the saints prosper and the evil are brought low. Therefore if I am brought low, I am evil, and in the Calvinist worldview, this was foreordained (even if I didn’t know it) and inescapable. Therefore the pressure to be seen as diligent and successful is overwhelming.
Essentially this is why the so-called Mommy Wars exist. Educated women who do “opt out” of career are viewed with much hostility as traitors to our sex because we must “represent all women.”
I would admit I failed feminism (and therefore “women”), but I think it failed me first. Inasmuch as many women who have no idea how to get it would love to have a life like mine, I think feminism is failing most women.