New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Ivy housewives exercise true right to choose

New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Ivy housewives exercise true right to chooseIvy housewives exercise true right to choose

A spate of studies and news articles now tells us that a good number of women in Ivy League colleges do not intend to set aside motherhood, or being wives, in the interest of careers that might not be as fulfilling as the feminist warhorses of the '70s once guaranteed.

Modern women have long been in a struggle to adjust themselves to society and to get society to adjust itself to them. In the process, they have brought about many changes - some of them good, some silly, others stupid.

It is not now hard to imagine that, in the wake of female mayors and governors, we will someday have a woman in the Oval Office. Though I doubt that first woman will be Hillary Clinton, I would love to see Clinton and Condoleezza Rice square off against one another, though the ongoing confusion of the Democratic Party and the sustained Republican insensitivity that borders on racism makes such a race a shot too long to even consider.

But the fact that it can be a conversation topic is a measure of how far we have come.

This moment is very different from what feminist ideologues thought it would be when they were expressing all kinds of rage and frustration 35 years ago. Most of their thinking was based in self-fulfillment of the narrowest sort - I, me, my, mine - which was considered an honorable rejoinder to the supposed imprisonment of the self-effacing, all-suffering, stereotypical woman who was loved only as a doormat.

Women began to pride themselves on selfishness and disregard for the wishes of others - especially men, who surely deserved a few buckets of ice water on the conventional fires before which they rubbed their hand-me-down thoughts about the opposite sex.

Then came the expected narcissism that we have seen in ethnic nationalism, where one's group becomes more important than anything else and the vision of its essence turns into sentimental balderdash. Just as one became accustomed to (and bored by) sentences that began with one's ethnicity being stated in almost all situations, one got the same feeling when females began prefacing their opinion by saying, "I, as a woman, feel...."

But women proved themselves capable of doing many, many jobs that we had not expected from them in the past, and doing them damn well. So it is now largely an open sky for women in the worlds of business, technology, entrepreneurship, and so on.

But now that women have begun to lose the difference in life expectancy, having more heart attacks and all of the other health problems that come with the stress of careers, we see more of them deciding that, perhaps, the career path is not for them. These women are turning their backs on somebody else's conception of a more complete life.

They are doing what Americans always have done when they have the choice: making decisions based less on ideological doctrine than on their own sense of what is happening.

The television mom of the 1950s is gone for good, but the spark-filled women who have done so much to better our society, our educational system, and our arts are here to stay. They have been here since Abigail Adams, and only a serious fool would count them out.

Originally published on September 26, 2005