The Time Has Come to Change the Rules

With women’s magazines of every stripe already elbowing Field and Stream and Cooking Light for space on the newsstands, a news weekly’s special issue devoted to females might seem about as necessary as another People cover devoted to a member of some royal family.

But “Women: The Road Ahead,” is more than another remix of generic features from Working Woman or McCall’s.

Not that much in this Time magazine special issue is news. But by breaking from the media pack to ruminate on topics that otherwise rush by in a torrent of poll stats and news briefs, it may prove a minor benchmark of cultural history.

What the magazine finds is that women and the women’s movement have changed radically in 20 years.

In the lead article of this diverse package, Nancy Gibbs puts the movement in the perspective of a new vanguard, the women who came after the major battles of the revolution.

“Over the past 30 years,” Gibbs writes, “ all that was orthodox has become negotiable . . . .Disheartened by their mothers’s guilt during the ‘70s and their olders sister’s exhaustion hauling baby and briefcase through the career traffic of the ‘80s, today’s young women have their own ideas about redefining the feminine mystique. When asked to sketch their futures, college students say they want good careers, good marriages and two or three kids, and they don’t want their children to be raised by strangers.”

Young women fear the fast lane, pity the thirtysomething and fortysomething crowd as a “lost generation,” and, according to a Time poll, put family well ahead of career.

But they also say: “I don’t want to work 70 hours a week, but I want to be vice president, and you have to change.”

Such thinking may leave some mothers and older sisters shaking their heads in irritation and disbelief.

But others see this as the second step toward fulfilling the real agenda of the feminist revolution. As a 46-year-old director for the Center for Women Policy Studies says: “We kept our mouths shut and followed the rules. They want different rules.”

Barbara Ehrenreich, long one of the most cogent feminist voices, writes that “American feminism, late 1980s style, could be defined, cynically, as women’s rush to do the same foolish and benighted things that have traditionally occupied men.”

One retired woman executive put it bluntly: “There’s not a woman anywhere who made it in business who is not tough, self-centered and enormously aggressive.”

But that view may be outdated.

As Randolf explains, many women executives are already embracing a management style that is “less rigid and hierarchical, and more open and inclusive,” than the way male bosses do things.

Besides, as the American work force shrinks, employers may have no choice but to hire increasing numbers of women and minorities, Time asserts.

Younger generations of women look ahead to easier times, but some older feminists resent what they see as a lack of appreciation for the earlier battles.

These would be the same women, presumably, for whom Ms. Magazine was a rallying point. Peggy Orenstein was in sixth grade when she first picked up Ms. Its feminist perspectives convinced her she could fly like Wonder Woman. Later, she did an internship at the magazine.

Now, Orenstein is managing editor of Mother Jones magazine, and in the November issue, she profiles Ms. as it struggles in its latest incarnation as an advertiser-free feminist journal.

The article offers insight into not only the women’s movement but the world of magazine publishing, where the walls between advertisers and editorial decisions are sometimes flimsy.

In places, though, readers will question Mother Jones’ wisdom in letting its managing editor write about a subject to which she is so close. The story is long, and there is a sense that Orenstein pulls her punches here and there. For instance, she lets Gloria Steinem rail against a world in which Vanity Fair thrives while Ms. flounders without directly confronting Steinem with what appears to be Orenstein’s own conclusion: that Ms. owes its troubles to its own failure to address the concerns of younger women--some of the of the same women discussed in Time’s special issue, perhaps.

All of which makes Orenstein worry: “Without Ms. or something like it, what is going to persuade today’s 11-year-old girls that they can fly?”

REQUIRED READING

* Remember that classic scene in “The Magic Christian” when the wealthy but eccentric hunter one-ups his fellow gentleman by blasting a duck out of the sky with anti-aircraft guns and artillery? Today’s state-of-the-art hunter is even better prepared. The November-December Harrowsmith Country Life features an article that should disgust traditional hunters and animal rights activists alike.

Titled “Death for the Bear,” it is an account, by Dan Dagget, of a guide-led hunting trip for an increasingly common breed of hunter, the kind who has “plenty of money but not a lot of time.”

These techno-hunters have pretty good odds, it would seem, given their arsenal of relatively old tricks (baited traps, dogs, four-wheel drive trucks, CB radios) and new technology (electronic surveillance devices, radio transmitters with telemetric tracking antenna, laser sights, .50-caliber guns mounted in pickups, and infared and starlight scopes). The climax of this particular manly ritual comes when the young hunter kills a treed mother bear with a complex compound bow and razor-tipped arrows while the guide records the moment on videotape.

* What with AIDS and all, today’s teen-agers are just saying no to sex, right? Ha! According to one survey, 50% of girls younger than age 15 are sexually experienced, as opposed to 19% only eight years ago. The Nov. 5th People Weekly chronicles a day in the sex lives of teen-agers across America. Eschewing the easy sensationalism, the article offers a relatively nonjudgmental look at the changing cultural mores. If it can be faulted, it is only for putting a slightly romantic spin on the end of an otherwise painful look at premature motherhood.