Gender segregation in the USA: Are women’s movements victims of their own success?

In addition to the fight, Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women, was found responsible for the sexual misconduct of E. Jean Carroll in a New York court in May 2023.

Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance then accused Democratic nominee Kamala Harris of being a “childless cat lady,” sparking protests and outrage not just among Swifties but across America.

Additionally, there is a large gender gap in support for Harris: 52% of female voters support her, compared to only 43% of men. According to recent New York Times/Siena polls, only 70% of African-American men support Harris.

Compare that to the 83% of African-American women who supported Harris in 2020 and the 85% of African-American men who supported Biden. Barack Obama publicly called out African-American men and suggested they were not comfortable voting for a female president. . One has to wonder: What is causing this gender dysfunction in the United States?

While the gender gap between men and women in America has narrowed on most measures since the 1950s, those gains have slowed noticeably over the past two decades, according to the Pew Research Center.

While women made up only 30% of the U.S. workforce in 1950, today they make up nearly half. And there are now more college-educated women in the workforce than men.

But at the same time, the wage gap has not changed in the last 20 years; Women earn on average 82% of what men earn. And in reality women still lag behind men; Only one-third of political offices and one-tenth of Fortune 500 CEO positions are held by women.

To understand this stagnation, it is critical to examine feminist discourse in America. Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal text The Second Sex was translated into English in 1953.

Challenging male patriarchy, De Beauvoir explored how society has subordinated the female gender throughout history, and the book received critical acclaim in America.

But modern American feminism really burst onto the scene with Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan shattered the 1950s image of the idyllic American suburban housewife waiting for her husband to return from work with her perfect heels, perfect hair, and perfect nails. A meatloaf in the oven, a cleanly swept house with a white picket fence, and a few obedient children.

Friedan wrote that the social pressure to conform to this stereotype is so strong that women cannot even identify what the cause of their anxiety is. She awakened the voices of women in America who said, in her own words, “I want more from my husband, my children and my home.”

Friedan, along with Gloria Steinem and other activists, galvanized the women’s liberation movement. That same year, John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act. The following year, she passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included protections for women against job discrimination. Its title was signed by Lyndon Johnson.

By 1970, Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch was published. In a call to action, Greer invited women to demand equality and question their marriages, their bodies, and their agency.

This was a landmark legislative period that culminated in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade, which guaranteed American women the constitutional right to abortion.

But by the 1980s, the hard-won rights of the women’s liberation movement (admittedly narrowly targeted at heterosexual Caucasian women) were threatened by conservative Republican administrations under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who sought to repeal Roe vs. Wade.

Susan Faludi addressed the reasons for the changing sentiments in her 1991 novel Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. In his view, significant victories in women’s equality were met with a growing wave of hostility towards feminism and feminists.

Commentators today have observed that a conservative backlash in the wake of Faludi’s documented cycle of progressive women’s rights seems prophetically accurate.

The #MeToo movement agitating against sexual assault, which spread rapidly in the wake of the 2017 lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein, undoubtedly represented the next great revolution in American feminism.

But this was followed in 2022 by a backlash against women with the elimination of the right to abortion, which had been a cornerstone of the women’s reproductive rights movement for 50 years.

Could it be that the 2024 US elections are unfortunately taking place during a cycle in American social history where there is increasing backlash against equality?

Certainly, the rise of the ‘manosphere’, a loose term for a virtual community of virulently misogynist and anti-feminist men, is another manifestation of this wave of backlash and offers support for such a view.

Worse, the manosphere, which counts young men among its fastest-growing membership, appears to align with the far right, reinforcing Trump’s toxic masculinity. Time will tell whether Harris (and the American people) can stand up to these forces in the upcoming elections.