November 7, 2005

It was cringe-inducing to see Maureen Dowd's picture in The New York Times Sunday magazine last week, posing in fishnets and red shoes, vamping for the camera in a photo that illustrated her first-person piece on being successful, single, and still looking for a man. Why does she do it? Dowd is so talented, so funny, sharp, and entertaining--and yet so embarrassingly catty and, well, girlie at times. I don't mean that as an insult to girls. A woman in her mid-fifties who flaunts a kind of teenaged narcissism is not a graceful sight.

Still, Dowd is onto something in her piece on the postfeminist world. (Though she borrows much of her critique of the backlash straight from a far less conflicted feminist, fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Susan Faludi). I shared her exasperation at The New York Times report on female Ivy League students who plan to marry and stay home after their overachieving college days are done. There's nothing wrong with the sentiment expressed by one Yale student that it's hard to do a great job simultaneously as a mother and in a high-powered career. But the solution, as Dowd rightly points out, is not dependency on a wealthy husband. Though Dowd doesn't say so, it's clear the only fix is social change.

Dowd's big beef is that the older and more successful women are, the less likely they are to find mates, while the exact reverse situation holds for men. Her solution, apparently, is to take out the world's biggest personal ad. I wish her luck. Maybe it will work.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us--including the college students who are thinking of hanging it all up to have a family, the unsatisfied stay-at-home moms whom Dowd derides, and the majority of overburdened working women who are taking on too much for too little reward in the office and at home—there has to be a better plan. Going it alone is not going to do it for us. We're going to have to work together as a community to make life more livable in the United States.

The more I read about women's dissatisfaction, the more I think that help must be on the way. There is so much chatter about the work/family balance problem that surely a movement will begin to gather steam behind the obvious solutions to this bind. Women and men who want both professional fulfillment and family time should push for sane working hours, equal parental leave, health care for all, and universal, high-quality preschool. We've got to make it possible for two people to support a family and still have time to see their kids.

As for Maureen Dowd's man problem--maybe the photo will work. Otherwise, I'd recommend less cattiness toward other women, and perhaps even toward men. As much as she turned up her nose at the feminists of the 1970s, Dowd might find herself less isolated if she could bring herself to join with other people to pursue a common goal. The worst that could happen is she'd be in a position to make a difference for a lot of people like her.