Return of the housewife

-- ERICA IS 23, an investment banker on the fast track of ambition. Lately she was struck by a retrograde idea. She no longer wants to climb the ladder of career ambition. She wants to marry that cute guy in a cubicle down the hall.

Shades of Bridget Jones. But Erica is real. Let him stay on the fast track, she muses, I'll take care of the house.

Surely only Phyllis Schlafly could uncover such heresy. Erica is no doubt featured in one of those stodgy conservative family-value magazines. Right? Wrong. Erica is nestled in the pages of the June issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. She's featured with other Cosmo readers with similar dreams. They're called "the new housewife wannabes.''

You've got to give the Cosmo editors credit for courage in recognizing the enemy and then writing about her. Erica does not want to follow the career path of Helen Gurley Brown, founding femme of the single sexy Cosmo ideal. She wants what most 1950s women wanted, a husband who comes home at the end of the day to a dinner she has prepared herself.

She may serve sauteed scallops in olive oil, a radicchio salad followed by an espresso mousse, instead of macaroni and cheese, iceberg lettuce with Russian dressing and raspberry Jello topped with Cool Whip, but she's eager to hear the mantra: "Hon, I'm home.''

These housewife wannabes have been discovered by market researchers who track such trends. Youth Intelligence, for example, a tracking firm in New York City, finds that 68 percent of 3,000 married and single women between the ages of 18 and 34 prefer the domestic life if only they could afford it. A Cosmo poll of 800 women found the same trend: Two-thirds would prefer the quality of full-time home life to moving up the hierarchy of ambition in a corporate office.

"It's no fleeting fantasy -- these women honestly aspire to the domestic life, and many will follow through with it,'' says Jane Buckingham, president of Youth Intelligence. Being a housewife is hip. The stresses aren't synthetic. Mom can take Johnny to the playground or the doctor, which is a lot more gratifying than dealing with a jerk about a late delivery of widgets in Tuscaloosa.

We're talking about women who want to cater to their nesting instinct -- enjoying family life and friendship with other young mothers.

How did this turnabout come about? Several ideas suggest themselves. The work mystique, as any working stiff knows, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Getting to the top is difficult. Once she arrives, the treadmill accelerates. The higher up she goes, the less personal power a woman has for enjoying her life. Experience, competition, high-intensity drive in the cold, cold world makes housewifery look cool by comparison.

A growing number of women want a different kind of power in their lives, says Ms. Buckingham -- power to control their time, to feel safe and to reduce tension. They want to enjoy the civilized aesthetic, not the windowless rooms in a high-rise office tower that aspiring bankers, lawyers, editors live in on the way up.

Women understand well the difficulty of finding a good man. There's always a new generation of nubile young women coming on. They listen closely to the ticking of their biological clocks as they watch their older sisters struggling to get pregnant. They dread confronting the deadline of fertility.

These wistful women believe there will be an expanding job market when they choose to return to the working world later. The baby boomers will retire, probably about the time women of Generation X and Y women return to the job market. High-tech computer systems already make it easier to stay in touch with career information without being a professional.

Some men, spoiled and soft, will resent taking on a full-time breadwinner role. Of the 500 men Cosmo polled, 70 percent said they'd be proud to support a wife and children. Thirty percent had reservations. New houses are built with kitchens, rather than living rooms, as the center of the hearth for mom, dad and the kids.

You can hear a woman's yearning expressed plaintively by Gwen Stefani, the pink-haired sultry songbird of the punk-pop group No Doubt. "I always thought I'd be a mom,'' she laments with piercing lyricism on her newest album:

"How'd I get so faithful to my freedom? A selfish kind of life When all I ever wanted was the simple things

A simple kind of life.''

 My daughter, one of the vanishing full-time mothers, lives two blocks away from the house where she grew up. She takes her young sons to the same park she played in as a child, but rarely does she chat with a parent. The other grown-ups are mostly nannies. When the neighborhood park fell into disrepair, she joined a community volunteer group to lobby the city government to match neighborhood contributions to get playground equipment "like they have in the suburbs.''

She was trained as a chef, but prefers to cook for her family rather than strangers (and at considerable financial sacrifice). She didn't choose to be a full-time mother for the children, though that was part of her decision, but she didn't want to miss the delicious delight of watching them grow up.

This point of view has almost disappeared from the public debate over "women's issues.'' Now that the suburbs have public transportation and shopping malls, women don't have to do as much chauffeuring. But when they go off to the shop or office they're missing a lot of the satisfactions of full-time life with their children. Today in most neighborhoods in the city as well as the suburbs both parents are gone during the day.

The plaint of teenagers, repeated almost as a mantra, the experts told a recent White House conference on teenagers, is "we don't get to spend enough time with our parents.'' Mom and Dad are too tired, too stressed.

Policy wonks and feminists prescribe ever more day care for young children, but parental care shouldn't end with kindergarten. Some of the happiest childhood memories of earlier generations was the walk home for lunch. Kids sat at the kitchen table with their mothers, talking about the Big Issues of the Day -- an impending math test, the girl who teases, the boy who pinches -- over a bowl of soup or a bologna sandwich and sweet pickles. The scene reeks of nostalgia, but also of security. My mother, like a lot of others (and now including my daughter), didn't see her life as a sacrifice but as one of life's pleasures (and pains). Now all that is gone with the winsome.

There's nothing like a (military) dame

WILLIE AND JOE, cartoonist Bill Mauldin's famous World War II grunts, were sitting in a foxhole with water up to their waists. Willie, chewing on a day-old cigar, looks at Joe's three-day-old beard encrusted in grime and mud, and asks plaintively: "Why couldn't you have been born a dame?'' (Or was it a broad?)

That was only satire in World War II, but time has transmuted satire into reality. Soldiers today know better than to call a woman a dame (or a broad). Willie and Jo(sephine) share barracks, berths, tents and tarps, through thick, thin, wind, rain, sea sickness and morning sickness. If Willie makes passes, even at grunts who wear glasses, he can expect a court-martial.

This is not news. But when it's documented meticulously, satire becomes farce and military readiness turns into a terrible joke -- on us.

Stephanie Gutmann offers abundant documentation of the absurdities and difficulties of the Willies and Josephines in uniform in the thoroughly modern military in her new book, "A Kinder, Gentler Military." The subtitle asks the question almost nobody in Washington wants asked: "Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?''

The chilling answer is "no,'' if we're depending on keeping quality leaders serving up to their retirement age, leaders being the most important ingredient in any military. Mid-level career officers are leaving the army in regimental and battalion numbers, dissatisfied with a military mystique that has been trivialized, downsized and worst of all, feminized. Day care has become a commander's concern, pregnancy counseling more important than battlefield tactics and warriors are encouraged to become wimps, oh-so-sensitive but worthless in warfare.

This may warm the hearts of women who prefer to "make love, not war,'' but it's a strange way to make soldiers whose ultimate task has to be killing people and breaking things. Without irony, feminist Carol Gilligan, who celebrates women as the more nurturing, caring sex, reviewed "The Kinder Gentler Military'' for the New York Times. She suggests that women in uniform can help men combine sensitivity with aggression, creating a more efficient fighting force. Sensitive soldiering?

It's a sign of the times, if not progress, that safe sex in the military aims to prevent babies, not venereal disease, but this presents another set of problems. Instead of scaring recruits with terrifying footage of genitals withering from gonorrhea, as the "old Army'' did, a voice-over in a "new Navy'' film describes the unwanted pregnancy as merely letting the team down. "Pregnancy and parenthood are compatible with your Navy or Marine Corps career,'' the voice-over says, "but only when you're ready to make the personal choices and sacrifices necessary to raise a child.''

The USS Acadia and the USS Yellowstone, the "love boats'' of the Gulf War, became joke mills for stand-up comics everywhere when 31 percent of the sailors on them came home expecting more than a shore leave. Shore leave has always been preceded by stern warnings about hanging out in bawdyhouses, but the new emphasis is less on what a guy might get there than what he might leave on shore (or worse, what a gal might bring back to the ship). And boastful men, the Navy says, are likely to create "a hostile environment'' for the women aboard, and that could mean trouble.

Harassment issues for the military are similar to those of civilian employers, but they're not identical. The military life not only stirs up sexual attractions between men and women thrown together for days and nights, but a barracks or a ship becomes a hothouse of sexual competition and rivalry. Soldiers fighting each other can't fight anyone else.

That's particularly true on submarines. Until now, the ban on women down below has been secure. Now that's in doubt, despite a preemptive strike last week by the House Armed Services Committee to block a recommendation by the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, a civilian panel stacked with feminists. The panel wants to assign female officers to subs now, with female sailors to follow as soon as the subs can be fitted with proper female quarters. "Hot bunking,'' submariner slang for guys sharing a bunk in shifts, takes on new meaning.

Women are evacuated from ships for medical reasons (usually pregnancy) two and half times more often than men. Proportional losses on submarines would ruin combat missions and make rescues at sea far more hazardous. But, hey, maybe losing a war and getting a lot of men killed is a small price to pay for "equality'' on submarines.

But the campus contempt for conservatives, or for anyone who questions the feminist dogma, goes beyond abortion. When, for example, I explain that as a cultural conservative I want to preserve the roots of a successful society, which requires that we acknowledge the differences between men and women, the fierce defenders of dogma usually drag out the college catalog, with its list of courses in women's studies, and demand to know how on earth any sane, good and worthy person could object to any of them.

 Same-Sex Marriages Becoming More Accepted

 By Carole Simpson

W A S H I N G T O N, June 4 — Marriage is very much on my mind these days. My husband and I are in the midst of final preparations for our only daughter’s wedding. More than 350 relatives and friends will gather in Washington for the grand and blessed event on July 1.

I was reminded this week that July 1 is the same day that Vermont’s new legislation governing “civil unions” goes into effect, the first law of its kind in the nation. While it does not legalize same-sex marriages, it will grant gay couples the same rights as heterosexual married couples: rights to inheritance, adoption, insurance benefits and health care.

How Open-Minded?

How would I feel, I began to wonder, if my daughter were entering into a “civil union” with another woman, instead of marrying the fine young man she has chosen? Hmmmmm?

I like to think of myself as open-minded, informed and progressive. I don’t believe that people choose to be gay. I support scientific evidence that suggests that most people are born — for whatever reason — with their sexual orientation predetermined. I know many gay and lesbian couples who have entered committed and loving monogamous relationships. One of those couples was in my family. I have no problem with their lifestyle and I respect their partners. Many of them have remained together for decades despite discrimination and recrimination. They probably last as well or better than those in heterosexual relationships.

America’s Changing Perceptions

But my daughter with another woman? I must admit I would have trouble with that. OK, so I’m a hypocrite. It’s OK for other people, but not my own family. I hate to admit it, but I am selfish. I want grandchildren and I want them raised by their mother and their father. I don’t want them to be objects of derision. However, as a loving and supportive parent, I would embrace into the family whomever my daughter chose as a life partner.

But if it were a woman, I confess I would not be as happy as I am now about her upcoming nuptials. It’s not because I am homophobic. It’s because I don’t want her and her partner to face the problems of discrimination that still exist for gays and lesbians.

The American people are just slightly opposed to same-sex marriage. But there is a vocal minority that is fighting every legislative attempt to move in that direction. To them, homosexual unions are “immoral,” “unnatural,” “an abomination.” These anti-gay activists have been very successful at the state level.

Last week Colorado became the 33rd state to ban same-sex marriage. Gov. Bill Owens signed into law a bill that recognizes marriage only as a “union between one man and one woman.” Earlier, South Dakota, California and West Virginia outlawed homosexual marriages. Similar bans are now pending in Nebraska, Nevada, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Ohio.

More Accepted With Time

Yet there are signs of the American public’s growing acceptance of gay and lesbian domestic partnerships. The Associated Press released results of a poll last week showing that while 51 percent of Americans don’t think gay couples should be allowed to marry, 53 percent believe gay partners should have some of the legal rights of married couples. That’s a major advancement in tolerance.

The good news for gays is the generation gap. While only 14 percent of those over age 65 think gays should be allowed to marry, 54 percent of those between 18 and 34 think they should. Opposition may be literally dying out over the next 20 years or so.

When I was a child, I remember hearing derogatory terms about “sissies,” “faggots” and “dykes.” How did we progress to the point where society seems to agree that same-sex relationships have validity?

I think it’s because most Americans have had contact with gay people in the workplace or have encountered them in certain fields of endeavor. They have discovered that gays and lesbians are for the most part, fine decent, hard-working citizens who deserve love, life, liberty and happiness, like everyone else.

I don’t know if I’ll live to see it, but I bet my daughter will someday be invited to a church wedding where one woman will say to another woman, “I do.” And for a family like mine, it won’t be a big deal.