In a recent essay on feminist hero and problem Shulamith Firestone, Vivian Gornick gives this familiar account of the economic effects of feminism:
When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness.
It's worth saying, as many black and third-world feminists pointed out for decades, that while many bourgeois white women were homemakers in the 1950s, other women were already in the workforce. Many black women would have preferred to be cooking in their own kitchens, and thought of homemaking as a symptom of privilege rather than of the oppression of women.
These profound transformations of the workforce were not, at least not simply, due to "the Second Wave of American feminism." Between 1950 and 1990, according to Google AI, female employment doubled, while male employment grew by less than 10 percent, largely because most of the men were already employed. The labor force was almost half women by 1990, and women's entry into it largely accounted for a 75 percent growth in the American labor force in that period.
The American Bar Association says that "the largest increase in lawyers [in any decade] occurred in the 1970s, when the number of lawyers jumped 76%—from 326,000 in 1970 to 574,000 in 1980." That's about the same growth the profession achieved in the first 50 years of the 20th century, during which the population as a whole doubled. In the 1970s, as the number of lawyers increased by 75 percent, the US population grew 11 percent. The new law students and lawyers (about 40 percent of law students overall by 1990) were female. Gornick and others would squarely attribute the entirety of the increase in lawyers to second wave feminism's advocacy of equality.
Gornick attributes the economic transformation to "a change in cultural consciousness." That’s implausible to me, as I think “consciousness” is causally inefficacious, and is itself largely produced by economic conditions.
That second-wave feminism doubled the number of American lawyers in 15 years or so would be a devastating indictment of the movement, though if it doubled the number of doctors, that would be good. But I don’t think the feminist movement can possibly account for the increase in lawyers. And that might make you wonder about the extent to which the feminist movement, as opposed to other sorts of factors, transformed the American economy, and even American gender relations, in the period of its ascendency.
Gornick, as she discussed compellingly in her book The Romance of American Communism, was raised during those same 1950s among Marxists. Those Marxists, I think, would tell her that an effect like doubling the number of lawyers can’t proceed from a cause such as a social movement for female equality. Even if everyone were to agree that half the lawyers ought to be women, that does nothing to create jobs for them. If the legal profession doubles in size in 15 years, that responds to structural transformations in the economy that created the demand for many more lawyers. Committing ourselves to equality and justice doesn’t itself double the quantity of corporate litigation or triple your staff to handle tax matters.
Effects like that follow from global economic transformations. For example, the transition from an economy oriented toward manufacturing to one toward services such as education and healthcare doesn’t happen because activists demand it, if they ever really do. It happens because of the transformation in myriad respects of global capitalism.
Even if women really, really wanted to be lawyers that wouldn't make them into lawyers without a strikingly increased demand for lawyers. I knew a bunch of female law students in the 1980s, and their enthusiasm for the profession was lukewarm, overall. But it was going to be a way to make a living.
That women were breaking glass ceilings and generating Hillary Clintons in the 1970s and 80s reflected structural changes to the legal workforce driven by factors like increases in corporate litigation and the complexity of tax law. Feminism had little to do with it, beyond constructing a narrative to rationalize the increase. Nor am I saying that many women didn't aspire to be lawyers and prosecutors and judges; I'm saying that sheer aspirations are causally powerless.
Women by the 1980s may have wanted to make a living. But more to the point, they needed to make a living. My parents bought a house in DC for $15,000 in 1958 and were able to live on my father's salary as a junior reporter. By 1970, my mother and most of the other women in the neighborhood had gone to work. Many of them, I'm sure, wanted to. But roughly all of them had to, if they were going to maintain their middle-class lifestyle. That it now took two salaries to support a family in the suburbs, like the fact that the workforce has doubled: these are structural economic features that have little or nothing to do with bra burnings, Ms. magazine, or for that matter Shulamith Firestone.
The "liberal feminism" advocated by people like Gornick often takes credit for the kinds of economic transformations for which it can’t possibly account. And I hate to say it, but perhaps a lot of second-wave feminism is a political rationalization for inevitable structural economic changes.
I’m in favor of the equality of the sexes, though less enthusiastic about the legal profession overall. But our abstract commitments to justice, as Marx or girlish Gornick might’ve pointed out, don’t themselves transform economies. Meanwhile, we've got a long way to go. But if eventually “leaning in” produces lots of female billionaires and presidents, that’ll also be a matter of structural economic transformations as well as female “empowerment.” Or rather, the empowerment will follow rather than drive the economic changes.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell