The New Eve (3 page)

Bachelor's Degrees.
In fields of study ranging from biology to business, history to social science, and psychology to education, women are earning the majority of bachelor's degrees.
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How many more? At least 200,000 more bachelor's degrees are awarded to women than men, according to the National Center of Education Statistics.
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Master's Degrees.
Women now earn more than 50 percent of all master's degrees.
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MBA Enrollment.
Women now compose 35 percent of all students in MBA programs.
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In some business schools that percentage is much higher. For instance, at the Whittemore School of Business, one of the top one hundred graduate business schools in the nation, 61 percent of its full-time students are now women. That's up from 29 percent in 2004.
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Medical School.
By 2003–2004 females composed 48 percent of all medical students, up from only 6 percent in 1960.
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This percentage is expected to grow.

Law School.
Women make up 50 percent of all new law students.
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All of these statistics are revealing, but the ones concerning education are especially telling because education is the best predictor of future demographics. As U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says, the predominance of women on college campuses “has profound implications for the economy, society, families, and democracy.”
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All indications are that women will gain a clear majority in most professional fields as the twenty-first century progresses. As this enormous social realignment continues to play out, men will increasingly find themselves working for and tailoring their lives to women rather than vice versa. Whether men and women will adapt well to this new
arrangement remains to be seen, but it is coming. The spotlight is clearly on the rising power of women.

While it's true that freedom, power, and opportunity are wonderful assets to a woman's portfolio, there is a dark side. History illustrates this by pointing us back to other occasions when women had far-reaching rights and freedoms at their fingertips. In his book
Caesar and Christ
, Will Durant detailed one prime example of this from the first two centuries AD, when women in the major urban centers of the Roman Empire experienced their own season of liberation. Indeed, the parallels to our present day make Rome feel like America's historical twin.

That's because Roman women of this era had also acquired new and expanded freedoms that went well beyond the traditional boundaries. Long held back by law and custom, they won unprecedented rights for themselves and a level playing field with men. With this new power, they became doctors and lawyers, owned property, and traded goods. They enjoyed the liberty of conducting business with men in private quarters. This new tang of freedom was exhilarating, dizzying, and seductive.

Wisdom and restraint soon became the enemies of this newfound freedom rather than guardrails for it. Excess and foolishness disguised as chic became the new virtues. Women threw off modesty and walked the streets wearing however little they liked. Adulteries increased so much as to deaden the sense of scandal. Divorce was common; open marriage more so. Men preferred concubines to wives, and wives sought lovers in full view of their husbands. Abortion became a mundane means of birth control. Women lobbied for and eventually won the right to fight alongside men in military combat roles.
Classic femininity became decidedly out of vogue in the new Rome. With this new femininity and the shift from an agrarian to a cosmopolitan social structure, women pursued new, more aggressive roles in society and, along with their husbands, gave less and less attention to their homes.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Predictably, family problems exploded and birthrates fell sharply. Childbearing interrupted opportunity and the pursuit of beauty, so women avoided it like the plague. Caesar Augustus was so alarmed at these developments that he moved to bolster the image of motherhood in Rome by according mothers special honor in public. He dressed them in fine robes, exempted them from taxes, seated them in the luxury boxes at the Colosseum, and in earnest bid the nation do homage to the institute of motherhood. But his bid failed. The new Roman woman simply wasn't interested.
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In a final reflection on Rome's gender revolution, Durant noted that these women in their liberty chose more often than not to emulate men's vices rather than their virtues. Perhaps more to the point, Roman women took their new equality with men as an opportunity to become virtually indistinguishable from the men they once chafed under and disdained.
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Some feminists of our own era have noted this same tendency among modern women. French activist Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, concluded, “It's quite obvious that once they are in power, women are exactly like men.”
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I believe the freedoms and opportunities women like yourself have gained in this past century are wonderful assets. Everything is in place for you to excel. However, history shows that the freedom to excel also brings with it the freedom to bind yourself to greater evils and new sorrows.

Freedom always comes with forbidden fruit.

Many modern women already know this reality firsthand. Many others—maybe you—are starting to feel the tension that comes with unlimited freedom and opportunity. Gone are the days where there was one prescribed path for women to follow. Now there are endless options and lifestyles from which to choose—some good, some bad, some disastrous, but each promising the same thing on the front end:
life.

So how do you discover what's best for you? Where is the help that can cut through the fog (especially for young women) to help you decide how to live smart and well? Unfortunately today there is a lack of “life coaching” (the kind mentioned in Titus 2) that offers trustworthy navigational guidelines to assist women in discerning which choices are best and which, however alluring, might be empty promises or tragic dead ends. All of this leaves women asking, “How do I know on the front end which choices deliver the most out of life? And how do I avoid major mistakes and lifelong disappointments?” Such are the questions constantly circling around today's woman.

What adds additional anxiety is knowing that any choice you make
for
something is also a choice to
miss out
on something else. As Caitlin Flanagan said, “The unpleasant truth [is] that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities.”
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Without some kind of assurance, the haunting questions within each life choice are these: “Did I do the right thing? Was this the best for me, or did I miss the best?”

Looking back on their lives, many women wonder,
What was I thinking?
For instance, choosing to participate in the sexual revolution seemed liberating to many women years ago. But
now that the kids have come and many dads have gone (nearly 40 percent of all children growing up today are fatherless; 50 percent of children born to mothers ages eighteen to twenty-four are without dads) and now that STDs and AIDS have come and stayed, how liberating was it? What about the hidden abortion or the sexual flashbacks? Liberating or enslaving? Is this the direction you want to offer your daughter or a younger woman as the way to a fulfilling life? Surely not. And yet everywhere—in movies, in music, and public role models—this forbidden fruit is still being advocated and glamorized as part of a new and improved womanhood. Many of today's young women are quick to take the bite.

Recently, a major advertising agency polled five hundred men and five hundred women, asking them at what point in a relationship they thought it was OK to have sex. The majority of men said on the fourth or fifth date. The women said between the first and second.
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Many women also continue to buy into one of the oldest pickup lines in the book: “You can have it all!” Like their great-ancestor Eve, they embrace this forbidden idea (Gen. 3:3–4) with passion, believing they can have everything without missing anything. They soon discover that this seductive promise is nothing more than the big, painful lie it has always been. This is especially true in the very sensitive subject of children and career. Can you have both? Of course. Can you do both well? That depends on a host of factors—your use of wisdom and an honest accounting of your limitations being chief among them. But you can't have it all in the absolute sense. Something or someone always gets left out or deeply hurt when you try.

Maria Shriver, a celebrated TV commentator and the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has learned this hard truth. In her book
Ten Things I Wish I'd Known
—
Before I
Went Out into the Real World
, she offers the following advice: “You can't have an exciting, successful, powerful career and at the same time win the mother-of-the-year award and be wife and lover extraordinaire. No one can. If you see successful, glamorous women on magazine covers proclaiming they do it all, believe me, you're not getting the whole story.” She then admitted, “Once you have children, you not only can't do it all, you can't do it the same way you were doing it before. In other words, once you start a family, don't expect to be the same hard-driving, workaholic, do-anything, go-anywhere worker you were. Because if you are, your children will suffer.”
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Meredith Vieira, a former host of
The View
and now a coanchor of NBC's
Today
show, gave an insightful interview to
Time
magazine's Jeff Chu. Chu asked, “You quit
60 Minutes
to focus on your family, but you now seem to juggle motherhood and work well. What do you say to women who want to have it all?” Vieira replied, “I hate that expression. When I left
60 Minutes
, I had women who came up to me very angry and said, ‘You know, you were proof you could have it all. How dare you leave?’ I thought that was ridiculous—I would lie to myself to create a lie for everybody else? You have to prioritize. If you can fit in job and kids and be comfortable with it, great. At that point, I realized I couldn't do it and give my kids and husband what they needed.”
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My question is, Who's teaching young women that they can't have it all? The truth is, virtually no one. And when someone like Shriver or Vieira ventures out to admit that having it all is a myth, she is usually skewered and quickly dispensed with by so-called progressives who hold that “having it all” is the Holy Grail for women.

Of course, you can escape this difficult balancing act by simply eliminating children from the equation altogether. Young women are increasingly choosing this option as they see female
icons like Oprah and Rachael Ray lead by example. In an interview with
Good Housekeeping
magazine, Ray, the megastar of Food Network, admitted that the demands on her time meant that motherhood would not likely find a spot on her calendar anytime soon. Said Ray, “Now I'm in my late 30's, and I've committed to so much work in the next three years that I think it would be really selfish to attempt to have a child.”
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Selfish to have a child? Or could it be that this new womanhood is so “into self” that there is no room for loving children? This me-first attitude is part of the new fruit offered to young, modern Eves. It is glamorous and appealing. But before reaching for this fruit, you would do well to heed the words of Sylvia Ann Hewlett. When she set out to interview scores of highly successful women who were well into their careers, she assumed she would hear stories of celebrity status, power, and money that made children an easy trade-off. But “this is
not
what these women said. Rather, they told haunting stories of children being crowded out of their lives by high-maintenance careers and needy partners… . I was taken aback by what I heard. Going into these interviews I had assumed that if these accomplished, powerful women were childless, surely they had chosen to be. I was absolutely prepared to understand that the exhilaration and challenge of a megawatt career made it easy to decide not to be a mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I talked to these women about children, their sense of loss was palpable. I could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and sense it in their words.”
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There you have it. Some of America's most successful women confess that the thrill of climbing to the top is not so fulfilling when they leave behind some of their greatest feminine callings to get there. But it will take much more than an occasional confessional from successful businesswomen to correct the
course many women are on today. What is needed is a multitude of wise mentors. Some women are already doing this, but we need more.

I believe younger women would love for older, life-smart women to step forward and courageously speak into the confusion and empty rhetoric of much of today's modern femininity and offer rock-solid ways to build a life. They yearn for the life coaches I mentioned earlier—women who can point them to a life that is not only sensible and satisfying (Titus 2:5) but one that can go the distance without pulling up somewhere lame with regret. So where are the voices of this wisdom?

The truth is, when younger women look to their older contemporaries, they get more questions than answers. News anchor Alison Stewart illustrates the surprise and even disappointment many young women feel when they see deep tensions in older career women who look backward on their choices. She said, “When my friends and I talk about older women … part of the conversation always is, ‘Gosh, those women have had to give up so much to make those things happen. Should we give up those things?’” That's a good question. Perhaps it's answered by what Stewart sees in these older women. “I see so many women in their 40's and 50's who are struggling with [the question:] did they make the right decisions about their career.”
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