Read the Review. Not long ago I found myself sitting at a restaurant table with the editors of a glossy women's magazine. They were three ladies in their early to mid-forties wearing power suits and slightly scuffed pumps. They'd brought along blank notepads and slender pencils and were waiting, flatteringly, to jot down my thoughts on the state of modern womanhood.
Their interest had been piqued by a story I'd written for The Wall Street Journal about magazines like theirs. Women today enjoy unprecedented freedom and opportunity. So why, I'd wondered, were the articles in women's magazines so relentlessly pessimistic? It was partly from reading magazines like these that Betty Friedan had concluded in that the women of her generation felt unhappy and stifled. A huge social transformation had taken place between Friedan's day and mine. Had it made women any happier?
If the truth about women can be found in the magazines they buy, then the answer was, resoundingly, no. In fact, these magazines portrayed my contemporaries as even more miserable and insecure, more thwarted and obsessed with men, than the most depressed, Lithium-popping, suburban reader of the s. This wasn't altogether surprising. The longings and passions of human beings don't change much from generation to generation. Women's preoccupation with love and their looks is part of the eternal female condition that no political movement could ever change.
But what was surprising was the sudden and dramatic change of mood of these magazines. It's a stark descent from the ebullience and optimism of the dawning of the modern women's movement in the early s to the disappointment and bitterness you see in these publications today. In -- the year of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision and the Senate's vote to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution -- once-demure publications like McCall's and Mademoiselle were ripping off their pearl necklaces to don the neck scarves of revolutionaries.
Men, the magazines trumpeted, would soon be rendered irrelevant. Male reproductive functions would be replaced by artificial insemination. Husbands and lovers would no longer be needed for economic support or companionship female friends were better, it was agreed or even sexual pleasure Mademoiselle went so far as to equate dating and marriage with prostitution; in another article it asked, "Is Everybody Basically Bisexual?
