Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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had been to earlier generations, abstinence-only sex education curricula in schools made using birth control increasingly confusing for girls whose parents didn’t speak openly and frankly with them about sex.17 And even as services increased for survivors of sexual assault, and some legislation was passed to protect survivors’ rights and safety, sexual violence against women remained persistent, widespread, and, at least tacitly, socially acceptable. Women born after 1972, then, had formal freedom to be and do as they wished, but constraints regarding sex and gender persisted.
In their family lives, women born after 1972 grew up very differently than had previous generations of women, as a consequence of the freedoms their mothers enjoyed. Their mothers were more likely to work outside the home than were mothers of earlier generations, and their fathers were more likely to be involved in their care than were fathers of earlier generations.18 At the same time, they were among the first generation of children widely affected by divorce, and were less likely to grow up in a “traditional” nuclear family, composed of a married biological father and mother and biological children living together, than were girls of earlier generations.19 During the 1970s and 1980s, “nontraditional” families including stepparents, stepsiblings, gay and lesbian parents, grandparents, and extended family members became increasingly common.20
These changes in family life have had both positive and negative effects. Possibilities for community and connection increase as family forms change dramatically to include stepfamilies, gay and lesbian families, and families that include multiple members not related by blood.21 At the same time, as two wages have become essential for many families’ economic survival, men have been hesitant to share the labor at home, and employers have been slow to respond to the needs of families in which both parents work.22 These changes in family formation and roles within families have been important in establishing young women’s new expectations for relationships and family life.23
Alongside the feminist movement, movements for gay and lesbian liberation in the same period challenged and expanded social understandings of “normal” sexuality to include gay and lesbian sexual orientations and relationships. The Stonewall riots of 1969, in which a group of gay male, lesbian, and transvestite patrons of a bar in New York City resisted a police raid, provided a rallying point for the movement. The movement succeeded in helping lesbians and gay men to begin to counter shame over their sexual orientation with gay pride. An important achievement was the removal, in 1973, of homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Later iterations of social movements for gay and lesbian rights have fought for legal same-sex sexual activity (effective nationally as of 2003 due to the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas), protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace (in place in twenty states but not at the federal level as of this writing in 2012), same-sex civil unions (legal in thirteen states) and marriage (legal in six states and the District of Columbia), and the right to serve as openly gay or lesbian in the military (in effect since 2011). These expanded rights and acceptance of gay and lesbian people have dramatically affected young women’s hopes for and expectations of diverse sexual lives.
As schools, families, and workplaces have absorbed and responded to these profound social and economic changes, the goals of the feminist movement have become less unifying, and the notion of freedom less clear.24 In the 1990s and 2000s, various feminists bristled at the notion that there was only one way to be a feminist, a modern woman, or a liberated woman. Many argued that the early feminist movement confined women to being androgynous, rather than diversely gendered. During this same period, queer theorists emerged and critiqued the feminist movement for depicting women in an essentialist way, equating female bodies with only particular versions of femininity and not seeing possibilities for more fluid versions of gender.25 Arguing that the movement had neglected poor women and women of color, whose experiences of gender have been complicated by their particular class and race oppression throughout history, writers of color critiqued the movement’s goals for assuming the privileges of white middle-class women: not having to work or face racial discrimination.26 Sex-positive writers argued that earlier theorists’ focus on the oppressive nature of sex for women deprived women (including sex workers and women involved in pornography) of an important arena of potential empowerment and pleasure.27
In recent years, then, it has become unclear what it means to be a woman, especially a liberated woman. Freedom and liberation have been marked by gaps and contradictions. Is work a liberating experience? Or does it constitute participation in patriarchal institutions? Is sex an empowering experience? If so, under which conditions? With whom? Is it restrictive to dress and act in traditionally feminine ways? Or are such women merely playing with one of many versions of gender? Is a relationship an important part of a woman’s life? Or should relationships take a backseat to work? This confusion about both freedom and what it is to be a woman lays the feminist groundwork for the in-between period I discuss in this book.
In addition to uncertainty about the meaning and consequences of freedom, new economic pressures have come to play a role in women’s decision making about the timing of marriage and childbearing. Young families today often require greater income than did previous generations in order to afford to buy a home and pay for child care. From 1970 to 2008, housing costs rose disproportionately to income growth.28 Child care costs in major metropolitan areas can approach twenty-five hundred dollars per month for full-time care for one child. The return on a college degree continues to be significant, but a graduate degree is often considered necessary to earn a sustainable salary in an urban area. High-powered and high-paying jobs often require well over forty-hour work weeks.29 And with very few social supports for working women, the ideal of being a working parent often clashes with the overwhelming financial and logistical realities of doing so.
As a result of these freedoms and economic realities, women are developing relationships and families more slowly than did previous generations of women. College-educated women now marry, on average, at twenty-seven, and women in general have their first child at age twenty-five, in contrast to 1970, when they did both, on average, at twenty-one.30 Particularly striking are the findings that, from 1970 to 2009, the proportion of women ages twenty-five to twenty-nine who had never married quadrupled, from 11 percent to 47 percent,31 and between 2000 and 2006, 69 percent of college-educated women ages twenty-five to twenty-nine had never borne a child. These trends have only accelerated over the past few years. In 2009, an astounding 23 percent of adult women had never been married, the largest percentage in the past sixty years.32 These demographic shifts, the result of the many social and economic forces outlined above, have profound implications for women’s lives.
SPLITTING
In seeking to understand how women respond to the freedoms, opportunities, and accompanying confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety of their twenties, I turned to psychoanalytic theory. From my viewpoint as a psychotherapist, I found that psychoanalytic insights could help us to understand how people respond to anxiety, and how and why people may report wanting something and yet seem to thwart themselves in their efforts to get that thing. Freud and other early psychoanalytic theorists have been rightly critiqued for focusing on men, assuming heterosexuality, depriving mothers of subjectivity, and having a biological determinist bent. At the same time, I (and many other feminists) have found psychoanalytic theory to be one of the most effective tools we possess to account for how women and men, sometimes unwittingly, perpetuate gender inequality. Psychoanalytic theories help us to understand why women, with the best and clearest of intentions, may unconsciously undermine their ability to reach their goals.33
The contradictions and uncertainties that characterize today’s young women’s lives lead many of them to systematically employ certain unconscious defenses to resolve their internal conflicts and anxiety, often to their detriment. I contend that splitting—a tendency to think in either/or patterns and to insist that one cannot feel two seemingly contradictory desires at once—has become a widespread sociological phenomenon among young women. This process has become a means for women to reconcile the disconcertingly uneven progress of their psychological, economic, and emotional lives in the twenty-first century.