Modern feminism and the renegotiation of partnership

The legal phase of the renegotiation—suffrage, property, divorce, employment, credit, reproductive rights—is the most successful part of the project and is sometimes taken for granted by people who never lived under the prior regime. Married women in most Anglophone jurisdictions could not own property in their own name until the late nineteenth century, could not get a credit card without a husband's signature until the 1970s, and could not be guaranteed protection from marital rape under criminal law in many states until the 1990s. The legal scaffolding had to be built before any other renegotiation was possible. It is built, in most developed countries, though it remains contested in some.

The second wave's cultural project—the recognition that women were full subjects with inner lives, that domestic labor was labor, that the personal was political—reset the terms of the conversation. The Feminine Mystique, Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Second Stage, and the consciousness-raising groups built the vocabulary that subsequent generations have inherited. The cultural project's effects are now so pervasive that they are nearly invisible: even the most reactive contemporary commentator on partnership operates inside a vocabulary that second-wave feminism constructed.

The single most striking unfinished piece of the renegotiation is the failure of domestic labor to equalize. Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift, published in 1989, documented that women in two-earner couples were doing the equivalent of an extra month of work per year compared to their husbands. The follow-up studies across the subsequent thirty-five years have shown narrowing but not closure of the gap. The narrowing has slowed since the early 2000s. The gap is largest for couples with young children, which is precisely where the burden is heaviest and where the partnership is under the most strain.

The explanations for the stall are contested. The institutionalist account, articulated by Slaughter and others, points to the absence of structural supports: paid leave, affordable childcare, workplace flexibility, public infrastructure that would allow both partners to combine paid work and caregiving. The cultural account points to the persistence of gender norms that mark domestic labor as feminine and that make male performance of it socially costly. The economic account points to the wage gap and to the household-level rationality of having the lower-earning partner specialize in domestic work. All three accounts are partly true. The interaction between them is what makes the stall hard to break.

For educated heterosexual women, the stall has produced a partnership-market problem. Women now outnumber men in higher education in most developed countries, often substantially. The traditional pattern of women marrying men with similar or higher educational attainment leaves a growing population of educated women without educated male peers willing to partner on egalitarian terms. The responses have been: delaying partnership, accepting non-egalitarian partnership, partnering down educationally, partnering with women, or not partnering at all. Each response carries costs that the previous generation did not face.

Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business makes the case that individual-level renegotiation cannot succeed without institutional supports, and that the institutional supports require political organization that the movement has not consistently produced. Her policy proposals—paid family leave, affordable childcare, workplace redesign—are widely supported in the abstract and rarely implemented at scale. The American case is the most striking failure: the United States is the only wealthy country without national paid family leave, and the absence shapes every individual-level partnership negotiation.

Jessa Crispin's Why I Am Not a Feminist is a polemic against what she sees as the assimilation of feminism into corporate and consumer logic. Her argument is that the renegotiation cannot succeed within capitalism because capitalism requires the unpaid domestic labor that the renegotiation is trying to eliminate. The argument has real force at the structural level and limited prescriptive content at the individual level, which is the standard limitation of radical critique.

Joanna Williams's Women vs Feminism argues that the contemporary movement has overreached, framing all heterosexual interaction as a site of power and producing a kind of generalized suspicion between the sexes that is bad for both. The argument is uncomfortable for movement insiders and is taken seriously mostly by people already skeptical of the movement, but it points to a real phenomenon: the renegotiation discourse has, in some forms, made ordinary heterosexual interaction more anxious without making it more equal.

Caitlin Flanagan's writing on marriage and motherhood, published mostly in The Atlantic over two decades, takes a position the movement has had difficulty incorporating: that the renegotiation has been costly to women in ways that have not been honestly counted, and that some of the costs are intrinsic to the renegotiation rather than incidental to it. Her argument is not anti-feminist but is anti-triumphalist. The movement has mostly preferred not to engage with it, which is one of its costs.

Kate Manne's distinction between sexism (the ideology of male superiority) and misogyny (the enforcement mechanism that punishes women who violate gender norms) gives a sharper account of why the renegotiation is so hard than earlier framings did. The enforcement mechanism operates on women who renegotiate too visibly—the professional woman who is "cold," the high-earning wife whose husband is "emasculated," the mother who works too much. The enforcement is mostly social and informal but is real, and it raises the cost of individual-level renegotiation in ways that policy alone cannot address.

Susan Faludi's analysis of the 1980s backlash, in retrospect, looks like a forecast of the recurring pattern. Each major renegotiation gain has produced a reactive cultural formation that frames the gain as injury. The 1980s backlash produced the "mommy track" discourse and the "infertility epidemic" framing. The 2010s and 2020s backlash has produced the manosphere and the tradwife revival. The pattern suggests that the renegotiation will not be linear and that each phase of progress will require absorbing a reactive phase.

The next phase of the renegotiation has to construct a positive framework for partnership that is honest about both sexes' experience under current conditions. This framework would have to acknowledge: that men's experience of the conditions has not been seriously engaged by the mainstream feminist literature; that the renegotiation has costs as well as gains, distributed unevenly; that the institutional supports required for egalitarian partnership do not exist in most countries and have to be politically constructed; that the demographic consequences of the stall are serious and require attention; and that the reactive formations on the other side are not going to be defeated by being ignored. The framework has not been written. The movement that could write it does not currently exist. The unfinished business of the unfinished business is the assembly of that movement, and it is the central romantic-political project of the coming decades.

1. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family (New York: Random House, 2015), 1–280. 2. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), 1–460. 3. Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017), 1–150. 4. Joanna Williams, Women vs Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2017), 1–210. 5. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 32–110. 6. Caitlin Flanagan, "The Wifely Duty," The Atlantic, January/February 2003. 7. Caitlin Flanagan, "The Problem with HR," The Atlantic, July 2018. 8. Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 116–60. 9. Rachel O'Neill, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 202–40. 10. Aja Romano, "How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men into White Supremacy," Vox, April 26, 2018. 11. Marcia Lasswell, "Egalitarian Marriage: Aspiration and Practice," Journal of Marriage and the Family 47, no. 4 (November 1985): 911–24. 12. Marie Calabretta, Marriage Encounter: A Rediscovery of Love (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1975), 162–80.