Crittenden to the Rescue: Saving Our Sexuality, Youth, and Traditional Gender Roles

I have been working on my book review for What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us/Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. While doing so, I lost track of time and was unable to post my thoughts on each chapter. Below you will find my completed review.

Danielle Crittenden explores the dilemma faced by modern women in, What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us/Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. In the epilogue the reader is bluntly told that what our mothers didn’t tell us and the only way to achieve happiness is to realize that, “It’s time to settle,” (182). It’s time to settle our sexual desires; it’s time to settle our professional desires and succumb to our innate duties as wife and mother; and for twentysomethings, it’s time to wrangle in a man and settle. Women are cautioned against pursuing their careers, postponing marriage and children.

Crittenden cites MTV, perfume ads, television shows like 90210, Ally McBeal and Jerry Seinfeld, women’s magazines, various books, an engagement announcement from the NY times, and the Gallop poll. Maybe she did this out of consideration for the uneducated reader who can easily refer to popular media and gain agreement. Maybe she just didn’t have the time to do some real research.

The first chapter , About Sex is when the reader receives their first warning against pursuing career interests instead of marital ones. Professionally successful women eventually have to take a hard look at their “thirty-five-year-old” reflection (because, according to Crittenden, thirty-five is old) and admit to themselves that they no longer “have the sexual power over men that they had at twenty-five,” (37-38).

As a final warning against sexual freedom, Crittenden even calls sexually active single women “cheap”, warning against the consequences of sexual freedom: “We might now be more free. But we enjoy less happiness, less fulfillment, less dignity, and, of all things, less romance,” (italics mine, 57). I suppose the women who were interviewed and wrote to Betty Friedan were lying and in fact found domesticity to bring them a wealth of happiness and fulfillment, felt dignified every time they had to change another dirty diaper, and found their lives overly romantic.

In About Love the reader learns that what our mother’s didn’t tell us is that our identity is truly formed once we have become a doting wife and a dutiful mother. Crittenden warns against the “price to be paid for postponing [marital] commitment” (62). The price is the possibility of never finding a man who will accept your professional ambitions. Crittenden summarizes an engagement story where a “lucky” twenty-eight year old woman who is “self-centered” in her decisions to put her career before love is fortunate to have found a “complacent” man who relocates to be with her.

The reader is reminded that if she hasn’t married by thirty, she will discover that “independence is not all it’s cracked up to be,” (64). Even worse, after thirty the lonely – but independent – woman will find herself “staring down the now mysterious tunnel,” and you can bet this is not the tunnel of love (65). By the end of the chapter Crittenden wants women to hurry up and experience the liberation of marriage, so that we may finally feel “relief” (75). Now that we will “know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children,” we can rest our heads on our down feather mattress and rest peacefully. There is no such thing as divorce or infertility in Crittenden’s world. True love, romance, and equality between partners doesn’t fit in, and won’t matter once you are off the market – so long as it is before that dreadful age of thirty.

While in our twenties, according to Crittenden, we are not mature enough, “old
enough nor experienced enough” to pursue our professional lives (187). However we are just the right age, despite our immaturity and youthful naivety, to assume the demanding and responsible role of a mother. I personally believe that experience as a college student and in the workplace builds skills necessary to raise children: time management, organization, interpersonal communication, an ability to prioritize and so forth. The chapter concludes with the idea that the working mother is in fact “neglecting” her children (143).

By the end of this cautionary tale, Crittenden closes her argument by asserting that men and children for women are as important and life-sustaining as air and water (191). Crittenden spends 191 pages casting a life preserver out to the drowning and breathless modern woman, pulling them back onto her lifeboat. For it is only on Crittenden’s ship that the modern woman can truly sail into a life full of happiness and fulfillment.