A Perplexing Result of the Feminist Movement: Mona Lisa Smile, Gray's Anatomy, and the Pregnant Man

I’m going to throw out something controversial, something most of us take for granted these days. Have you ever seen a movie set in the 50s? Or better yet, a movie (or TV show: I Love Lucy, for instance) from the 50s? Take Mona Lisa Smile starring Julia Roberts as the radical professor of a very conservative ladies college. She’s our hero: a spunky feminist fighting overbearing cultural norms in order to enlighten her small following. Her argument: why settle for having dinner ready for hubby every day when you could assert your independence from both men and children by going to law school! Julia Roberts’s character counts it as defeat when her prize student elopes with her fiancé. The viewing audience is supposed to see this moment as a terrible tragedy.

Nowadays women have a choice: career or family. This is a good thing, right? Well…let’s see.

The majority of women (I recognize that there are exceptions) want to be nurturers, Why else would Addison from Gray’s Anatomy decide to have a baby after many years as a successful surgeon? There was even a story in the news recently about a transsexual who is genetically woman, but legally male and pregnant! Though this person identified more with the male sex, he still wanted the experience of carrying a child. I realize I’ve opened up the gender role can of worms, but please hold back your impassioned comments until you’ve read to the end of this piece!

On the other hand, and at war with a woman’s instinct to nurture, I suspect many women of my generation grew up into the expectation that they would have careers, that, in fact, they had to have a career plan, or else be subject to poverty or the mercy of men. Even an artist needs “a backup plan.” This is, and not the budding lawyer turned homemaker, is the real tragedy. Many women, in spite of their recent liberation from servitude still get married and/or have children. As I’ve demonstrated from my pop culture and sensations news references, many still want to have a family; however they also want their careers. So, we women have the unfortunate task now of trying to fulfill two roles at once: that of breadwinner, and that of nurturer. Instead of the liberated woman free to come and go as she pleases, we have soccer moms who cart their kids from daycare and school to numerous after-school activities, while trying to hold down a full or part-time job, getting little to know rest and all the while becoming more bitter and cynical toward life in general that they can’t help but scream at the coach who won’t put her kid in the game. This is feminism, backfired.

This whole issue is something bigger than I can tackle in a single blog posting, with a whole host of consequences for our culture. Here I was going to segue into how this affects what we eat and have available to eat, but I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that to another day. In the meantime, I leave all women out there with this question: can one have both a career and a family and lead a fulfilled, unharried life? I don’t think so.