These 12 Women Don’t Want It All. They Want Better.
Feb.
22, 2022, 12:01 a.m. ET
Ms.
Wildman is a staff editor and writer in Opinion.
What
are the choices in life that shape our happiness,
our self-worth, our sense that we’ve grown up and evolved past the model
provided by our parents? What about the ways others treat us, and the ways we
treat ourselves, that leave us feeling uncertain, exhausted, lonely? What
success do we believe we can achieve — and what success do we believe we
deserve?
For our new focus group by Times
Opinion, we decided to explore some of these ideas in our pressure-filled era,
by listening to women about the shifts they’ve seen and felt in work life,
careers, relationships, parenting and gender roles in recent years.
The members of the group, ages 22 to
43, are married and unmarried, partnered and unpartnered, mothers and avowed
never-mothers. Eleven are cis-gendered and one identified as a woman and
nonbinary. They ran the gamut in work experience and politics (six Biden
supporters, four Trump supporters, and two who were for “someone else” in
2020). Those differences aside, all of them saw gender as a defining aspect of
their lives. Several had seen men leap ahead of them at work, yet were also
deeply skeptical of movements aiming to help women like #MeToo. Mothers, they
all agreed, bore the brunt of the practicalities regarding child care, as well
as the expectations of caregiving. That, in turn, had led more than one woman
to decide parenting was not in their future.
The conversation, moderated by focus
group veteran Kristen Soltis Anderson, was frank and personal. Younger
participants were, for the most part, opting to delay or forgo parenthood and
marriage, often seeing those choices more in the framework of constraint and
burden rather than as happy life-cycle events. Many of the women were making
different decisions — and seeing their options as more expansive — than those
of their mothers.
This is the fifth group in our
series, America in Focus, which seeks to hear and understand the opinions of
wider cross-sections of Americans. This transcript has been edited for length
and clarity; an audio recording and video clips of the session are also
included.
(Continues with interviews at link above)
I do believe that with the change in women's rights and the roles they play in today's work field; combined with their more naturally inherited position as caretakers; has through that evolvement, put an additional burden on them, in that success for them (in today's society) is measured at a higher standard. Although I will also say that I am a proponent of women's rights and I'm very proud of their advancements within the work field, and feel that those shifts in society, have also encouraged men to help more in those roles within their household, allowing their wife to also work, and providing for their family a better overall standard of living. Of course, each individual situation is different, such as that there are single mothers out there, you are trying to balance all of the roles on their own; and wear many hats, who might judge themselves too harshly for not being able to reach the same level of standards as a married woman, in the same line of work, with the same responsibilities to care for herself and her children.
ReplyDeleteAshley, Shira, Jennifer, meet Gary... An esteemed alum of last semester's Happiness class.
DeleteHello Gary; welcome to the course! :)
ReplyDelete