has the sexual revolution been good for women

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3/24/12 12:31 PMHas the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? Mary Eberstadt: No - WSJ.com

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THE SATURDAY ESSAY Updated March 24, 2012, 10:15 a.m. ET

Related

Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? Ann Patchett: Yes

Between 'Jersey Shore' and Rick Santorum

By MARY EBERSTADT

Spring came early to most of the 50 states this year—and with it, at least in the political fields, the usual crop of

mixed truths, untruths, and wildly growing falsehoods. Let's yank up one of those weeds for a little inspection:

the idea that a national "war on women" is afoot.

It's an ideological whopper that demands more scrutiny than it

has so far gotten, because underneath it are solid rocks of myth

concerning what are called the "social issues." Let's turn over a

few of these to see what facts they hide.

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Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? No

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Sexual Freedom and Women's Success Myth No. 1: The "war on women" consists of tyrannical men

arrayed against oppressed but pluckily united women.

In the first place, womankind, bless her fickle heart, is not exactly united on…anything.

Public opinion polls show women to be roughly evenly divided on the question of abortion. This same diversity of opinion was also manifest in the arguments over the proposed new federal mandate forcing employers to pay

for birth control, including abortifacients.

Over 20,000 women, from all walks of life, signed an open

letter to President Barack Obama and Secretary of Health and

Human Services Kathleen Sebelius objecting to the federal

mandate. Co-written by lawyers Helen Alvare and Kim Daniels,

that letter alone answered the taunting question of supporters

of the measure, "Where are the women?" The answer: in

impressive numbers on the opposite side of the dispute.

Other leaders hailing from the XX side of the chromosome gap

also took public stands against the mandate, including

politicians, pundits, professors, editors and authors who don't

seem to have gotten the message that they are victims in allthis. They considered the unexpected federal fiat a violation of

religious liberty and individual conscience, but they didn't

think these wrongs had anything to do with themselves qua

women. Many men shared their view.

3/24/12 12 31 PMH h S l R l i B G d f W ? M Eb d N WSJ





© Charles Gatewood/The Image Works

It seems difficult to argue that the results of therevolution have been a slam-dunk for happiness.

Myth No. 2: If it weren't for the Catholic Church, no one would

be talking about contraception anyway.

It is not only a series of popes but also a number of prominent

secular thinkers who believe that the birth-control pill has been

one of the major milestones in human history—a diverse groupthat runs from public intellectuals of a previous generation like

Walter Lippmann to such contemporary scholars as Francis

Fukuyama and Robert Putnam. As many pundits had occasion

to observe in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the pill, it is hard to

think of anything else that has changed life so quickly and

dramatically for so many.

In other words, this isn't just a Catholic thing. In severing sex

from procreation, humankind set into motion forces that have

by now shaped and reshaped almost every aspect of life in the

Western world. Families are smaller, birthrates have dropped,

divorce and out-of-wedlock births have soared. Demography

has now even started to work against the modern welfare state,

which has become harder to sustain as fewer children have been produced to replace aging parents.

The sexual revolution has transformed economics, culture and

law. Witness this week's Supreme Court case, in which the

question at hand is whether an individual's Social Security

3/24/12 12 31 PMH th S l R l ti B G d f W ? M Eb t dt N WSJ





survivor benefits belong to children conceived with his sperm months after he died.

Even on the religious playing field, this isn't just a Catholic thing. Christian teaching against artificial

contraception dates back to the earliest Church fathers confronting pagan Rome. Christians remained united on

that teaching until relatively recently—1930, to be exact, which is the year that the Anglican Communion made

its first, carefully circumscribed exceptions to the rule. Orthodox Jews, Mormons and some traditionalistProtestants have also pondered the issue and ended up proscribing or limiting contraception in different

circumstances.

Which brings us to Myth No. 3: The "social issues" are unwanted artifacts of a primitive religious past that

will eventually just fade away.

To the contrary. What we know as the "social issues"—abortion, gay marriage and the rest—are here to stay, and

we'll be dealing with them for generations to come. In fact, one might even predict that these vexing issues will

outlast almost every other controversy burning today.

That's because they cannot be resolved until the legacy of the sexual revolution has been settled in the Western

mind—and this certainly includes the question of whether it has been a good thing or a bad thing. Judging by

the state of much current commentary, we've only just begun down that road.

This brings us to Myth No. 4, which is perhaps the most interesting one of all: The sexual revolution has madewomen happier.

Granted, happiness is a personal, imponderable thing. But if the sexual revolution has really made women as

happy as feminists say, a few elementary questions beg to be answered.

3/24/12 12:31 PMHas the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? Mary Eberstadt: No WSJ com





Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like "The Case for Settling" and "The End

of Men"? Why do websites run by and for women focus so much on men who won't grow up, and ooze such

despair about relations between the sexes?

Why do so many accomplished women simply give up these days and decide to have children on their own,

sometimes using anonymous sperm donors, thus creating the world's first purposely fatherless children? Whatof the fact, widely reported earlier this week, that 26% of American women are on some kind of mental-health

medication for anxiety and depression and related problems?

Or how about what is known in sociology as "the paradox of declining female happiness"? Using 35 years of

data from the General Social Survey, two Wharton School economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers,

made the case in 2009 that women's happiness appeared to be declining over time despite their advances in the

work force and education.

The authors noted that women (and men) showed declining happiness during the years studied. Though they

were careful not to draw conclusions from their data, is it not reasonable to think that at least some of that

discontent comes from the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere—a feeling made plausible by the sexual

revolution?

However one looks at the situation, it seems difficult to argue that the results of the revolution have been a

slam-dunk for happiness.

It is always hard to disentangle the weeds from the plants in such a large field. But if the sexual revolution has

made women so happy, we can at least ask what it would look like for them to be unhappy. A broader inquiry

might yield some results worth thinking about, in contrast to the shortsighted political theatrics over a

supposed "war on women."

3/24/12 12:31 PMHas the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? Mary Eberstadt: No WSJ com





Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights ReservedThis copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and

by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visitwww.djreprints.com

—Mrs. Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a consulting editor to Policy Review, is the author of anew book, "Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution."

A version of this article appeared Mar. 24, 2012, on page C1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal,

with the headline: Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? No.

3/24/12 12:31 PMHas the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? Mary Eberstadt: No - WSJ com




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