Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down

1968, first edition, from David McKay Company
Caroline Bird
Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down
Original price unknown, purchase price $7.50
OK condition hardcover, with notes in pencil
B-

We've reached my birthyear, and since I was born in February, just about every book from here on out is going to be younger than I am.  So it's interesting to kick off the year with a second-wave feminist work, offering 44-year-old statistics and observations on the status of American women.  So much has changed, so much hasn't.  What strikes me most on this reading is the use of the word "girls" for women in their 20s, even by Bird and those she quotes sympathetically.  It's worth noting that on That Girl, Anne Marie would not only refer to herself as a girl, but call her boyfriend (in his later 20s) a boy.  And so did everyone else on the show.  Therefore, this is more a matter of changes in how younger adults are perceived than how women are perceived.  (I myself use "boy" and "girl" for adults jocularly.  I am both a woman and a girl, and have been for almost 30 years.)

Another striking change is that while Bird makes optimistic predictions, she falls into some of the same traps that the statisticians she quotes fall into.  They didn't predict that the '50s moms would go back to work and so soon, even when their children were small, a trend that expanded in the '60s.  Bird speaks of the population gap between Baby Boom women and the slightly older men.  She saw this as leading to more women getting higher education, and many of them marrying divorced or widowed men down the road.  Of course, almost 20 years after her prediction, Newsweek infamously took this gap to mean that a woman over 40 had as much chance of getting killed by a terrorist as getting married (not to a terrorist).  As Katha Pollitt and Susan Faludi sensibly pointed out, not every woman wants to get married, while others will marry younger men.  (Or women.)

Bird's hopes for "androgynous" marriages between equals, who'd both work outside the home, and split housework in whatever ways made most sense for them, including possibly hiring well-paid cleaning services, seem both utopian and closer to reality than she would've guessed.  That is, many "traditional marriages" still exist (some of them by choice, some by societal pressure), but "modern marriages" are much more common, less remarkable, than at the time this book was published. 

Similarly, while there is still a gender pay gap of roughly 81 cents for women to men's dollar, this is a great advance over the past.  However, this is based on full-time work and, just as in Bird's day, women continue to do more part-time work than men, for some of the same reasons as in the '60s.

The first chapter of the book tells of how "sex" got included in Title VII, as a way to kill the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, but then it passed.  Government and business weren't prepared for all the changes this would bring, in some ways much more than extending rights to Negro men, for sheer numbers alone.  The jokes about male Playboy bunnies and surprise at how many women had complaints for the EEOC show how much had changed in the four years between that vote and this publication, in some ways as much as has changed in the forty-four years since.

And those notes?  I think they must've been written by some young woman, probably in the early '70s.  Mostly, she underlined passages and put exclamation points, but sometimes she couldn't help writing words.  The most vivid is her rebuttal to the Harry Reasoner quote, "Love and dependence often thrive together."  She wrote, "Big BULLSHIT."