College and Kids Have Switched Positions

Continuing our class discussion of The Feminine Mystique.

For the feminine mystique women in the '50s, marriage and children seemed obligatory, while the substance of college education, or even a college degree, were optional.

Now, the women in class agreed that a college education was essential, as they viewed their lives. Marriage and children, though desired by most of the women in the class, were optional.

I think this says as much about the changing class mores of the middle class as it shows a revolution in women's options.

Since children are not really optional for society as a whole, and smart educated people know that marriage is the best institution to raise children in, I expect that there will be another swing of the pendulum.

What we will try to think through and model, starting with my social theory class, is a view of life in which both college-and-career AND marriage-and-children are equally valued core aims in life.

The Feminine Mystique Made Unfemininity Seem Too Weird

A woman in my theory class had this excellent insight on reading The Feminine Mystique:

I had always thought that women, in this time period, were just being oppressed by men, but it turns out they had opportunities to rise above and stand out. But it is the idea of standing out that scared them away. They did not want to be seen as weird or unfeminine.

It has been helpful to us, as I noted yesterday, to see the feminine mystique as a brief interlude, not the eternal condition of women prior to 1970.

What today's insight adds is a psychological mechanism that makes sense to me. Women are more likely than men to place a high value on equal social relations, on doing what other women are doing. If the feminine mystique became the established norm for a time among critical female opinion leaders, I can see how it would spread powerfully among other women - especially if there were other structural forces backing it up.

Feminine Mystique as Summer Vacation

We are reading The Feminine Mystique in my social theory class. We were considering Friedan's point that the feminine mystique was an abrupt shift from the more public role that educated women had had during the Second World War. Knowing that the mystique period was brief, followed by the second wave of feminism, one imaginative student suggested that the feminine mystique was like summer vacation. She said that as summer vacation approaches, students look forward to no more books, seeing their friends, staying home, sleeping late. After a few months, though, they can't wait to get back to their studies.

I think this is a nifty analogy.

Social Networks Are Like Coffee Houses

Social networks are shot through with coffee house metaphors. The connection is natural. I am a big fan of both. But we should understand what they are good for, and not good for.

In my coffee house class, my summary idea is that coffee houses are places where strangers can become acquaintances. Coffee houses are not places for building strong friendships. Some friendships may, of course, grow out of coffee house connections. Indeed, I know marriages that began in coffee houses. But a relationship that is born in the coffee house, and stays there, will not grow beyond a weak tie.

Weak ties are very important in real life. Many good things come from weak ties. It is your weak ties that are likely to lead you to a next job, not your strong ties. Weak ties are best for spreading and bringing you new information.

Malcolm Gladwell has a fine article in the New Yorker on the difference between social networks and hierarchies. Gladwell's core point: "Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances." It is not made of the strong ties that can make a revolution.

Some Group Differences are Due to Privilege. Some Are Not.

If diversity means anything, it means that different groups differ at least a little in what they want and in what talents they bring, as well as in how they are treated by others.

Privilege is real - some groups have unearned advantages over others, which does increase the chance that people like that will be disproportionately represented among those in power.

But it is also the case that different groups want different things, or more exactly, the proportions of people who want some outcome will not be identical in each group.

It is also true, but harder to pin down, that different groups bring a different mix of skills and talents to life. This difference has to have some effect on the proportion of people from each group who end up doing one thing or another.

It is certainly the case that the group of people in positions of power are disproportionately from privileged groups. But privilege is only part of the reason. To say otherwise, to say that all groups have an exactly equal desire and exactly equal ability to achieve all outcomes is simply false. Worse, it is condescending and imperialist to assume that all groups - all cultures and subcultures - desire exactly the same things equally.

In the discourse about privilege, to assume that the privileged are disproportionately powerful solely because we are privileged is itself an act of unwarranted privilege.