One of the most promising strategies of the 20th Century Women’s Rights Movement (the Movement) was the liberation of women to pursue a broader range of careers.  The intended outcome of this freedom of choice was the fulfillment of personal life goals, including greater self-determination, professional accomplishment, and the empowerment of moving toward self-actualization.

However, over the past 50 years, the implementation of this strategy has led to an economic environment where many women, both single and married, are now ‘expected’ to produce an income.  In today’s economy, life partners often both work.  Single women now carry full responsibility for their financial needs, sometimes including those of their children.

I suggest that the ‘liberation-through-work’ strategy has not produced sustained financial security and increased empowerment for many women.  It has, in fact, resulted in diminished choice for women who don’t view careers outside the home as their path to fulfillment.  Some women feel trapped in the full-time work/life balance dilemma, unable to navigate the maze, and exhausted from this new form of economic reality.

Notably absent from this modern model is the freedom for women to stay at home with their children – without producing an income – as the ‘best choice’ for themselves, their families, and their communities.

What has become of the ‘single-income-household’ model of the 1950s and the freedom to be a stay-at-home mother?  What has happened to the hoped for financial security for women who are divorced with children?  Has the ‘go-to-work’ strategy produced better results for women?  Has it produced healthier, happier families and stronger communities?  It’s a lot to take in, but it’s time to be brutally honest with what we have or have not achieved after more than 50 years of hard work.

I am intentionally avoiding citing reams of statistics or research conclusions in my blogs (with the exception of my own studies and those I have personally scrutinized) because it may encourage an unproductive ‘he-said, she-said’ debate.  I would rather discuss strategies and my observed ‘realized’ (or unrealized) outcomes.  Feel free to be inspired to research your own points of interest.

So what is ‘The Financial Security Hoodwink’?  The preamble to the ‘story’ tracks something like this…

“In the 1950s women are unhappy, unfulfilled and lack financial security.  In a decade marked by recovery from World War II, emerging prosperity, the introduction of automation in manufacturing, the advent of home conveniences, and the start of the technological era, women feel left out and unsupported.  The female competence and independence seen during the war years when women were the mainstay of manufacturing industries now has no arena for self-expression.  Women who were once happy at work are not happy at home.  The difficult reintegration of returning servicemen has strained marriages and women are facing life emotionally unsupported and intellectually unfulfilled.  For those who decide to leave their marriages, financial support post-divorce is lacking.  Most women do not have the independent right to buy on credit or own homes.  Strategies to support women, especially those with children, are needed to ensure long-term, holistic well-being for women and their families. Women need to be liberated to be fulfilled.”

At a time when questions were rightfully being asked, solutions were being formulated under the umbrella of the American Women’s Rights Movement. The solutions discussed at the women’s rights meetings I attended were presented as unilateral and prescriptive:  The intended strategic solution to ensure future security for women is to send them into the workforce to create their own security. 

This strategy was easily implemented in the short-term, sustainable in the long-run, and misguided – by ignoring its far-reaching social and economic implications.  Individual bank accounts, credit, and freedom of choice?   All positive marks of the liberation of women.  However, the tactic of encouraging women out of their homes and communities into a lock-step march toward corporate careers under the guise of self-actualization is suspect.  Basic supply-and-demand realities weren’t thought through.  Here’s one thread of an example of the long-range impact of the strategy:

Pre-Movement Model:  A company has 100 employees (70 men and 30 women) with a staff turnover of 12 employees per year (8 men and 4 women).  The organization achieves reasonable financial and domestic growth goals.  New positions are filled each year from the existing workforce supply pool.  There is an average of 10 applicants for each replacement position.  Most of the non-retirement-age ‘leavers’ are doing so for better-paying career positions at another company.  The majority of the men are in management or manufacturing – married with children – and are the sole breadwinner.  Most of the women are single and living with female roommates or at their parents’ homes.  Their work positions are primarily in the area of administrative support and service, where their pay is half that of the male managers.

Movement-inspired strategies:  Single women are inspired to live independently and strive for career positions, including upper management.  Female enrolments in colleges increase.  College graduates go directly into the workforce before considering marriage and children.  Mothers take the option of using childcare services and working outside the home to achieve personal and professional fulfilment.  The Movement has inspired women throughout America to follow these strategies as the path to liberation from male-dominated societal patterns.

The Movement in practice – Phase I:  The same company has 100 employees (70 men and 30 women) with a staff turnover of 12 employees per year (8 men and 4 women).  As a result of two demographic changes – male ‘baby boomers’ entering the workforce and women inspired by the Movement – the pool of potential new employees increases by 60 per cent.  For each position, the number of applications increases from 10 to 16.

Pre-Movement, the company had 8 jobs to fill with 80 applicants considered for manufacturing and management.  Post-Movement, the company now has 128 applicants for the same 8 jobs.  For the 4 administrative support jobs, the applicant pool increases from 40 to 64 applicants.  (Note:  These are very conservative figures.  In 1992, after graduating at the top of my MBA class, I was hired into a $40,000-a-year consulting position – from more than 150 applicants).

Simple supply-and-demand reality tells us that an influx of competition for the same number of jobs inevitably affects salaries, often keeping them from rising.  In the new company model, positions available for male heads of households become more competitive and are no longer based on loyalty and merit; a new trend emerges to hire executives from outside the company.  New corporate strategies like mergers and downsizing create a climate of fear and reluctance to risk a job change to another corporation to achieve higher-order career goals.  Demoralizing career stagnation becomes more prevalent.  The possibility of layoffs without notice leads to a new family strategy where both partners work in case one becomes suddenly unemployed.

The Movement in practice – Phase II:  The ‘Hoodwink’ continues as companies see the opportunity to grow their businesses into public corporations by using cheaper labor, particularly from a growing pool of female college graduates who will work for less just to ‘get their foot in the door.’  This inevitably ushers in the advent of globalization strategies for emerging corporations.  During the bureaucratic expansion, new layers of entry- and middle-level management positions are created, but without decision-making power.  Upper-level management approval becomes the norm.

The hoped for empowerment and self-determination is diminished.  There is increased competition among men and women for upper-management positions, and the reality is a culture of ‘lateral management moves’ rather than upward mobility toward self-actualization.

More is produced; more is sold.  Most of the newly-created power for women is the power to buy whatever they choose with their earnings.  As a precursor to globalization, growth in domestic markets is significantly fueled by the buying power of women.  We buy cars, clothes, cosmetics, home furnishings, vacations, beauty services, dinners out, entertainment and more.

Consumerism is in full bloom.  Without women in the workforce and the resulting increases in sales growth and profitability, corporations could not have leveraged expansion outside the U.S.  Without the spending power of women, consumerism would not have grown at the rate and range that it has since the 1980s.

The Hoodwink:  Why do I call this a ‘Hoodwink’?

In the early 1990s, a professional colleague of mine did his Masters degree in Cost-Accounting.  He analyzed the spending habits and salaries of women who were second-earners in their households to determine the salary ‘break-even’ for a married mother of two who elects to work outside the home.  He tracked every expenditure, right down to birthday cards for co-workers, the cost difference between take-out dinners and home-cooked meals, and the revealing fact that working mothers who used childcare services bought more clothes for their children than if they cared for them at home.

His results:  Breakeven was $40,000 a year at a time when the average female wage was $27,000.  The ‘unintended outcome’ of the ‘go-to-work’ platform advocated by the Movement was that the average second-earner working mother paid $13,000 a year to do so.  Is it any wonder that families uncannily found themselves in financial strife?  Husbands could no longer support their families on a single salary due to depressed wages and lack of opportunities for career-track promotions to upper-management positions.  Both spouses were working, but found themselves unable to meet their family budgets.

Consequently, other ‘corrective’ strategies were required to ensure the financial stability of the family unit.  Unfortunately most of those strategies coincided with the rise of credit cards and other forms of debt.  Get the picture?  There was an immediate ‘sub-optimal’ solution available to cure the family financial security dilemma – Get a credit card!

Again, I am not advocating that women did not need financial security, self-determination and self-actualization, including their own bank accounts, credit cards, homes, cars and careers.  This blog simply points to the stark reality that sending women into the workforce did not necessarily benefit women and their families, as initially intended.

A parallel option to develop strong, optimizing female power structures within families was not widely advocated or even supported by other women.  The ‘stay-at-home mom’ of the 1970s was not necessarily championed as the backbone of the Movement.  And She should have been included as an integral part of family and community holistic health and well-being.  The pursuit of the modern ‘working wife/mother’ strategy can be exhausting and disempowering for women.  And that’s not good for individual and family health.  Isn’t that what women were trying to escape from in the 1950s model?

In the late 1990s, I worked at a desert camp for incarcerated, adolescent female gang members from the California Youth Authority system.  I taught empowerment and self-reliance via wilderness backpacking excursions.  I remember speaking out at a Clinton forum shortly after that experience – stating that young girls need strong mothers to be at home with them – to guide them in the process of becoming young women of power.  The alternative can be identification with negative influences, such as gangs or abusive partners as substitute families.  I was told that this kind of thinking would set the Movement back decades.

I am passionate about resurrecting the discussion of broad societal support and respect for full-time, stay-at-home mothers as an intelligent, progressive path toward self-actualization.  And also for stay-at-home partners without children.  I don’t recall discussion of the role of ‘unemployed spouse without children’ as a path toward freedom and empowerment.  Why not?  Who has determined that ‘paid employment’ is valuable and non-paid is not.  I am not being paid to post these blogs.  But, for me, writing them is highly empowering – moving me toward a richer, more self-actualized personal and professional life.

It may take a prolonged contraction of the economy and additional hardships for families to get back to a condition where ‘one’ breadwinner (male or female) can support a family of four.  It won’t happen unless it’s perceived as ‘good for the country,’ and unfortunately our economy relies heavily on the selling of goods and services to working women and their families.

I contend we are smart enough to find our way back to more optimizing structures for women and men who want more choice in how they manage their individual and family decisions toward secure and healthy outcomes.

In my next weekly post, I will discuss my PhD research into alternative career paths for women within the area of family business entrepreneurship.  Stay tuned.  As always, I welcome your comments.

This blog is about the social, political and economic conditions facing women in the 21st Century.  Although it may be of interest to younger generations of men and women, I am writing this blog for American women like me who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.  Now that we have power, experience, independence, and the wisdom of 40 years of work life, I suggest it is time to examine and correct a number of ‘unintended outcomes’ of the Women’s Rights Movement.  The purpose of this discussion is toward a richer personal and professional life for women today and for our future generations.

My transition from a teenage girl to a young adult woman during the late ’60s and early ’70s was significantly impacted by the social unrest of the Civil Rights Movement, the desperate years of the Vietnam War, and the growing freedom of the counter-culture of the 1960s.  However, it was my radical collision with the institutionalization phase of the Women’s Rights Movement (‘the Movement’) in the early 1970s that took my life in a different direction from my long-held adolescent dream of having a family and a career as a high school teacher.  For me, the alternate life path I chose – with much encouragement and support from my female friends – didn’t produce the optimal outcome in my 40s and 50s predicted by the Movement at the outset.  I’ve thought long and hard about writing a blog that discusses the sub-optimal ‘unintended outcomes’ of the Movement.  And, here we go.

Today, I am 62, hold three degrees (BS, MBA, PhD) and am an activist for disability rights.  I am creative and happy.  However, over the years I have noticed an emerging discontent with a number of social, political and economic conditions that arose out of the Movement and may be in need of correction.  Among the social issues are relationships between men and women, and the current view of working women vs stay-at-home mothers. Political issues include equality and well-being in the workplace, the role of women in globalization, and the current perception of feminist power.  On an economic level, the foundations and future of the two-income household and our relationship to consumerism and debt are significant issues that have arisen out of women entering the workforce in greater numbers.

I’m not going to pull any punches here.  I want this blog to be honest, provocative and inciting.  I want polarized discussion.  From the time of my first women’s movement meeting in 1972, I have been speaking out about the radical strategies implemented by the Movement as non-sustainable.  I have offered that the social, political and economic structures advocated at the beginning of the Movement did not include broad enough freedoms for a woman to make personal decisions about her life and the long-term health and well-being of the men and children in it.  I challenged that it would not lead to the economic security for women that the Movement promised.

I spoke out during the Clinton presidency at women’s forums sponsored by the Treasury Department regarding the continued lack of broad support for women’s personal lifestyle decisions – in the 90s!  And, I’m speaking out now, 20 years later, because not that much has changed.  I contend that the radical Movement of the 1960s and 1970s achieved notable and necessary gains, but requires ongoing analysis and ‘correction’ to ensure the structures it advocates optimize long-term sustainable well-being for individuals, families, and communities.  And those corrections are overdue.  My PhD research in Family Enterprise Management examined cases of women who made the decision 30 years ago to start full-time businesses with their husbands – as equals – rather than to enter the workforce outside the home. I will discuss those findings in later postings.

My next blog will get into the thick of the economic issues I consider to be ‘unintended outcomes’ and counter-productive to ensuring women achieve financial security in life.  But first, let me tell you why I called this blog ‘Queens of Earth’ and my perspective on why we need a powerful but gentle correction to the platform originally formulated to guide the path to greater rights for women.

One afternoon in 1972 at the age of 19, I was sitting at a table at the student union at the University of Kansas with my boyfriend.  His two male roommates were there, along with two women who had invited me to attend several women’s rights meetings during the previous month.  We had all been social friends for several years and were part of a large community of men and women we considered ‘extended family.’  We lived in communal homes and had built a close group of men and women who respected each other.  I never felt discriminated against.  I had two male ‘best friends’ who loved me.  I had women friends who were as close as sisters.

One of the men paid me a compliment that went something like this… “You are one interesting babe!”  In case you’re wondering, I was a ‘babe.’  I was often told I looked like Ali McGraw.  I had waist-length hair and dressed in embroidered jeans, flowing skirts and silver jewelry.  I loved to dance and laugh and hug my friends.  I was also the ‘Queen of My World.’  I felt empowered and on the road to becoming a loving, strong young adult.

That was the last day I remember feeling truly free to be myself in front of my female friends.  The two women – who I knew and respected – launched into a lecture about how the word ‘babe’ was no longer acceptable.  They pontificated that we were WOMEN and nothing less.  I remember protesting that I wasn’t offended at all.  Their response was that if I were educated, I would understand how offended I should be by this.  I didn’t share their opinion, but it was clear I wasn’t going to change their minds.  I felt at the time a sense of the damage that could occur in our relationships with men if we handled these social issues with anger, dogmatic sermons and an institutionalized Movement that encouraged women to exercise their power to decide, but only along party lines.  I was concerned this tactic would shut down our social communication with responsible men and close doors we didn’t really want – or need – to close.  And, I really didn’t want to be known as just a “woman.”  I wanted to be a Queen (the most powerful piece on the chess board; the most beautiful card in the deck; the most compassionate ruler; the most noble voice of reason).  And on that day, my perception of myself started to change in subtle ways that have had unintended negative outcomes along the way.  I feel a strong need at this point in my life to rigorously and passionately discuss these outcomes.  I didn’t want to lead the world with a group of women trying to institutionalize feminist power.  I wanted to rule the Earth with my Sister Queens.

So, I am taking back the word I associated with the beautiful, free-spirited, powerful, creative, smart, and desirable woman I was becoming before I was no longer allowed to hear men use it to describe me.  I choose to be a babe with a PhD, a Queen of the Earth.  It’s where my power lies and I want to reclaim it.  I want to own it again.

I am certainly not advocating that the Women’s Rights Movement wasn’t necessary and beneficial or that language isn’t discriminatory when it is used to offend.  But I took issue, then and now, with preempting the natural communication that arises between men and women by stripping it of fun and romance.  Was this an intended outcome?  Or has it now put a distance between us that is sub-optimal in the natural process of male-female relationships?  And has it restricted our joint right to meet and fall in love in the workplace, where we spend most of our waking hours and where an intelligent woman can be seen and heard? Do we really want men to approach us with all these rules in their heads — or do we want them to come with truth in their hearts and the politically incorrect awkwardness that sometimes is the thing that endears them to us at the outset? Isn’t it better to empower women to speak up if they are offended, and to be supported by other women if they aren’t.  Isn’t that what choice is all about?

I’m glad I have the right to say it’s OK for men to call me a ‘babe,’ just as it’s OK for other women to say it isn’t.  I have the Movement to thank for that and for the freedom to start this conversation with you.  You’re welcome to weigh in on other terms of reference, including ‘honey, sweetie, darling, sugar, doll’ or any other names, past or present.  I personally liked being called ‘the most intelligent chick in the room’ – but that’s just me.

I welcome your comments and discussion.