Women to Blame
Correct me if I am wrong but three of the biggest problems in our country today--
traffic, obesity and disaffected youth-- can be blamed on women working. Middle class,
white males like myself have spent the last 20 years bearing the guilt for pretty
much everything, so now it's time to return the favor and lay some blame somewhere else.
So ladies, drop your makeup, put both hands on the wheel and let's drive.
Take fifty percent of the vehicles off our roads today and traffic would be a non-issue.
Replace the happy meals and buckets of fried chicken with some stay-at-home-cooked
vegetables and obesity could be a thing of the past. Have someone waiting at after
school with open arms for our children and they wouldn't be more connected to Barney
and Ninetendo than they are to their own family. The fact is, if you move one-half
of each parental group out of the workplace and back into the home, quicker than
the Braves can lose a Worlds Series, these problems are solved.
Sometime after the 1960's something changed. Women became empowered and started exchanging
their aprons for timecards. It could have been an evolutionary process. It could
have been they were sick and tired of avocado-hued appliances. I mostly suspect women realized that their husbands were as dorky as Sonny and they were as cool as Cher
and it was time to get appreciated. Ward Cleaver would soon be spinning in his grave,
or at least in his cardigan.
Thirty years ago when houses were built like the one I live in, there were only one-car
garages. Two, (or more!!) family vehicles were as inconceivable as phones without
chords, or rotary dials. Mom was as much a fixture in the home as a set of bunk beds
or Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night. But alas, things change.
And boy do they change. I was stuck in the airport in Phoenix recently and watching
two businesswomen in the restaurant where I was dining. I was sincerely impressed.
Prada, Gucci, and Jones New York look incredible with a Prosignia Laptop. These
woman were the eptiomy of professionalism; engraved business cards, Bally briefcases and of
course the retained, hyphened maiden name. Hugh Hefner would be spinning in his grave,
or at least in his silk pajamas.
But before anyone thinks this column is simply a diatribe against women working, let
me clarify. Though things HAVE changed in the last decades as a result of women going
to work, women are surely not to blame. Men could stay home. Besides, every woman
quitting her job and going back to daytime housework would probably not fix everything
either, maybe not anything. But, what has changed in the last thirty-some-odd years
(some very odd) is shifting family values.
It's not that women are some evil Darth Maul trying to wreck the Federation, but simply
put, husbands and wives have made the home money-centric rather than family-centric
and this is what forces the woman to work (obviously single mothers and lower income families are a part of a completely different dynamic).
Two people need to work today, not to make ends meet, but to stay at the levels we
have set for ourselves in our society. It's not about bread on the table, it's about
2 cell phones, a bedroom for each child--one to spare, bigscreen TVs and the newest
model of a sports sedan and an SUV--one of each. Really, how far will we go? We're not
just trying to keep up with the Joneses we are the Joneses.
We've trapped ourselves. The greatest shift in American civilization in the last half
of our century could have been the freedom for women to work. It's too bad we've
turned it into slavery. And though some quick-fix, chauvenistic, tongue-in-cheek
solution can be offered by a hack like me, it's still as complex and as challenging a problem
as families have ever faced. Billy Murphy - 11/8/99