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Back to the Drawing Board

by Pia de Solenni 

Several weeks ago, Time magazine published an article based on a study on gender issues conducted with the Rockefeller Foundation. Notwithstanding the debate about equal salaries, just about every social indicator used to measure women’s achievements has been met. Almost 40 percent of all women are the primary breadwinners of their households. However, the study found that numerous surveys report that women are less happy, regardless of social, educational and economic gains.

I often hear from aid workers and missionaries that people in the developing countries who have much less than we do are in fact happier. Maybe happiness has more to do with who we are than the options we have.

In fact, I would argue that one of the greatest disadvantages to contemporary society is the lack of awareness of a context for our existence. We’ve come to believe whole-heartedly in our rights; in the power of our individual decisions; in the absolute ability to do whatever we want, when we want, regardless of the reality that certain decisions make other choices impossible – and yet we are still unhappy.

Caitlin Flanagan commented on this paradox with regard to women in her book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Her book jacket sums it up:

[Women]…dream of a modern marriage – but a “traditional” white wedding; … demand an active sex life before marriage – and access to celibacy afterward; … want the intense relationship with their children that only hands-on mothering can produce – but want the social cachet that only high-powered careers can engender; …regard housekeeping with suspicion – but pine for Martha Stewart’s world of gracious living.

It’s not simply women who have lost this context; it’s society as a whole.

Just recently, my husband and I attended a local production of Verdi’s opera La Traviata. The opera centers on the character of Violetta, a courtesan who runs off with her lover. After a few good months in the French countryside, her lover’s father comes to her with a request that she end the relationship because his daughter cannot marry so long as his son is engaged in such a notorious relationship. Despite the personal costs to her own health and happiness, Violetta acquiesces to the father’s request, acknowledging the daughter’s purity and her claim to happiness.

As evidenced by the laughter of the audience to this scene, it turns out that La Traviata is becoming increasingly difficult to produce for contemporary audiences, a problem duly noted in the performance program.

There is no shortage of publications pronouncing the decline of dating, the hook-up culture, the increase in births to single mothers (now at 39 percent), the decline of the family and – more recently – the challenges that men face in a post-feminist society.

However, all of these facts are based on the assumption that audiences share a common experience: namely an awareness, if not direct experience, of the concept of family.

Forty years ago, people were rebelling against something or someone, whether it was authority, tradition, religion or something else. Every civilization has had norms governing sexual behavior and the family. They weren’t all Christian or “conservative” norms, but they were norms. Now, many people don’t have the experience of the norm in their own lives. Their actions are no longer a rebellion against something but an attempt to define that something for themselves.

A society without a context looks something like a child without a parent to help it learn how to ride a bike. The child sees the bike and wants it, but it’s not sure how to stay on it without keeping both feet on the ground. So the child may find the bicycle to be some sort of a push toy or something stationary. Without help from someone, the child will probably never know how to ride the bicycle – or even that it’s meant to be ridden. In either scenario, there will be falls and bruises. But it’s only within the greater perspective of learning to ride that the injuries and hard work all make sense.

The women’s lib era of feminism had society focused on making sure that women could do everything just like men, whether it was building sky scrapers, getting an education or behaving badly. Unfortunately, what was unique to women was cast aside: their roles in marriage and motherhood. Yet still every women’s talk show, every women’s magazine, can’t stop talking about how to get what’s unique to us, despite the choices we’ve made.

Undoubtedly, there were real tensions that women experienced in their lives insofar as they were not fully able to participate in civil society, and the task of parenting fell disproportionately to them. We thought the problem was the institutions, the traditional roles. Having dismissed with them, we’re still not happy.

Maybe we need to rediscover the context. Theatergoers laughing at La Traviata aren’t rebelling. They simply don’t get it. They don’t get that there’s a context, that there’s a story that we’re each part of. When we don’t have a context, we lose perspective, and when we lose perspective, nothing human retains its value.

Pia de Solenni is a moral theologian; she writes from Seattle, Wash. She can be reached via Facebook and Twitter. (Her website is getting a makeover and is currently offline.)  

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)