[(The XX Factor)] [by: Alison Wolf] - Hardcover

 
9780670064779: [(The XX Factor)] [by: Alison Wolf]
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0670064777 ISBN 13: 9780670064779

Inhaltsangabe

For most of history, being female defined the limits of a woman’s achievements. But now women can be successful careerists equal to men. In Norway, women legally must constitute a third of all boards; in the U.S.A., women have gone from being 3 percent of practising lawyers in 1970 to 40 percent today. Currently, more than seventy million educated women work alongside men.

Yet the “sisterhood” of working women is deeply divided. Young, educated, full-time professional women, who have put children on hold, are making enormous strides in the workplace. But for a second group of women, this is unattainable; instead, they work part-time, earn less, are concentrated in heavily feminized occupations such as cleaning, and gain income and self-worth from having children at a young age.

The new female elite, the top 10 percent, lead lives completely different from all previous women in history. Their working lives increasingly resemble those of the successful men they work with. A groundbreaking look at modern women, The XX Factor lifts the curtain on the social, cultural, and economic schisms behind the phenomenal rise of women in the workplace.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ALISON WOLF   is a British economist. She is currently  the Sir Roy Griffiths professor of public sector management  and has been a specialist adviser to the House of Commons  select committee on education and skills. In March 2011,  she completed the Wolf Review of Vocational Education for  the secretary of state for education. She writes widely for the  British press and is a presenter for analysis on BBC Radio 4.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Goodbye to All That: The Fracturing of Sisterhood

Nancy Astor became a political superstar at the twentieth century’s beginning. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, was the UK’s first female prime minister and an icon of the century’s later decades. And as a new century got under way, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic primaries and his party’s presidential nomination.

Three women. Three careers. They frame this book, and frame a century in which educated women’s lives were transformed. Astor, Thatcher and Clinton take us from an old world to a world that is still very new; and Clinton’s defeat is as central to the story as Astor’s or Thatcher’s victory.

Nancy Astor was an American, born in Virginia in 1879 and married to one of the world’s richest men, Waldorf Astor. She was famous as the first woman to enter Britain’s Parliament, a society hostess and an agitator for social reform. She became an MP in 1919, just twelve years after Finland elected the world’s first-ever female legislators, and held a tough urban seat for twenty-five years through the Great Depression and eight general elections. She died with the Vietnam War raging and Swinging London already a cliché. And yet none of this would have happened if her older sister had not been stunningly beautiful.

Nancy’s father, Chillie Langhorne, was a Southerner. He made his money after the Civil War, as a contractor providing labor for the railroads, and his beautiful second daughter, Irene, became a “Belle of the Ball.” For that reason, and that reason alone, his family were launched into first New York and then European society.

White Sulphur Springs is a hot-water spa in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and was a center of the Southern marriage market before and after the Civil War. “To get to the Springs, to lead a masked ball . . . to be a reigning Belle, was the only ideal in life worth pursuing for a southern debutante . . . Your life could be transformed by one appearance at a ball,” explains Irene’s great-nephew. Irene Langhorne’s beauty made her not only the Belle of Virginia balls, but one of America’s “top four Belles”; she was selected to lead the Grand March at New York’s Patriarchs’ Ball, the “great annual event of the Gilded Age.” That meant, in 1893, instant stardom. And it was that stardom, based entirely on Irene’s looks, that ushered her younger sisters, including Nancy, into New York and European top society, with a far larger and richer range of potential husbands.

Yet by 1964, the year that Nancy died, a very different Member of Parliament was just eleven years short of capturing the leadership of Britain’s Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher was a graduate research chemist turned lawyer. She had already been in Parliament for five years; she would become both the UK’s first female prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century. Her father owned a small shop in a nondescript provincial town. Her only sibling became a shy farmer’s wife. And her life changed not because of a ball but through an academic scholarship to the University of Oxford.

And why is Hillary Clinton a third key figure? Why were the 2008 Democratic primaries so important? Because of why a woman lost.

Hillary Clinton entered the primaries as the front-runner. She had strong support among the female working class and she and Obama were level-pegging among the non-college young. But what mattered was the college vote, where women are the clear majority. That vote turned out in force, unlike young non-college voters. As Elizabeth Cline, in The New Republic, noted, “girl-power momentum” told. But it wasn’t behind Clinton. It was behind Obama.

Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Barack Obama was a defining moment in the story of today’s successful women. Not because a woman could well have taken the US presidential nomination but, on the contrary, because what ultimately decided those primaries were the votes of a certain sort of woman. And those women didn’t think that the candidate’s gender mattered.

For many of today’s young women, being female is not the most important thing about their lives. It does not define their fate in the way it did for all females in previous human history, including women born as recently as Nancy Astor and her sisters. In those 2008 primaries, college-based voters, both women and men, signed up to Obama’s promise of change. Which is just another way of saying that contemporary college women do not think there is any strong reason to vote for a woman candidate just because she is a woman.

For today’s graduate women, education opens up the world, as it did for Mrs. Thatcher. These women are successful. They increasingly hold postgraduate as well as full bachelor’s degrees, they do professional and managerial jobs in a world where women can hold almost any position and they earn at levels that were inconceivable a short while ago.

These women are also a minority. At most, around a fifth of the adult female population falls clearly into this group, which combines higher education, good incomes and prestigious occupations. But then, highly educated, high-earning professional men also number only about 15 to 20 percent of males in the developed world, and far fewer in developing countries.

Feminists once talked of “the sisterhood,” but educated successful women today have fewer interests in common with other women than ever before. As we will see, they are increasingly distinctive in their patterns of dating, marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing. But above all, women have parted company from each other in their working lives. The highly educated professional minority now have careers that are increasingly like those of the successful men they work alongside. In this shared work environment, it is entirely normal that professional women should be ambitious, and that men can and do work for women, and not just the other way round. And this drives wholesale social change.

Surplus sisters

The workplace is newly central to women’s lives, but of course women have always worked. They worked in fields, gardens and homes; they looked after children, nursed the sick at home, prepared food from scratch, sewed and mended clothes. “They worked their fingers to the bone,” as the saying went. It was not only the poor who worked hard. Through most of history, middle-class and affluent women also worked long hours on domestic tasks and caring for their families.

Until recently, though, only poorer women worked for wages, and they, even after the Industrial Revolution, worked overwhelmingly in other people’s houses. They were paid, in other words, to do the domestic jobs they would also carry out in their own homes as daughters and, hopefully, as wives.

For all classes, marriage was women’s desired near-universal goal. There’s a moment in the first episode of the hit TV series Mad Men that encapsulates not just the 1950s but all of previous history. Joan Holloway, the office manager of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, features. She is “mid-twenties, incredibly put together,” says the script, and she has advice for a new secretary—female, of course—who is commuting into the city.

In a couple of years, with the right moves, you’ll be in the city with the rest of us.

Of course, if you really make the right moves, you’ll be out in the country and you won’t be going to work at all.

It is the 1950s version of...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0670064777
ISBN 13 
9780670064779
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781510718388: The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1510718389 ISBN 13:  9781510718388
Verlag: SKYHORSE PUB, 2017
Softcover