Boomer Backlash : Women Say They’ll Put Family First

Kathy Stephens cannot remember a time when she didn’t want to be a nurse. Now 25, she lives in Costa Mesa and works for a hospital in Newport Beach. She says she is dedicated to her profession and has no plans to give it up.

But last year Stephens married her high school sweetheart, and they hope to begin a family in two years. When that happens, she plans on cutting back her workload to two weekends a month. Her husband will watch the kids when she is at work, allowing him to enjoy a closer relationship with them. As her children reach school age, Stephens plans to gradually resume her career.

“I always wanted to get married,” she says. “I always thought that a perfect life was a nice house, dog and a family.”

The post-feminist generation has come of age. Like Stephens, the nearly 13 million American women between the ages of 22 and 29 are making decisions about how they want to live their lives, whether they want to have children and the importance of their careers.

Toddlers at the dawn of modern feminism, these women seem to embody a different value system than the movement’s first wave. While the statistical evidence remains somewhat spotty, experts cite growing indications that America’s twentysomethings are proceeding to a slightly softer drumbeat.

Many are choosing to marry sooner and have children younger--or at least they plan to do so. They say they are committed to their careers, but they are unwilling to sacrifice family plans for career goals. And they acknowledge that their heightened commitment to home and family involves trade-offs: job advances may have to be postponed, and husbands’ careers sometimes may take precedence over their own.

“These are the children of mothers who went through women’s lib,” says Betsy Carter, editor-in-chief of New York Woman. “As in any cyclical thing in history, there is a backlash. These kids want security and a home, and they want to be married. They want all the things their parents railed against.”

Women in their 20s seem to value the gains achieved by women in the 1960s and 1970s, and most express no desire to roll back the clock to the pre-feminist era. Yet after observing the sacrifices made by many women now in their 30s and 40s, they seem determined to find a middle ground between militant feminism and traditionalism.

Many younger women who discussed their goals and values in recent interviews say they are trying to establish a sense of balance between career and family, without neglecting either.

Kate Chester, 24, a Los Angeles media relations consultant, says that older women were not altogether realistic about what they could accomplish with their lives.

“There was a period between the feminist revolution and my era where women were trying to do everything, professionally and personally, supermoms and having it all, and sometimes I’ve seen women in their 30s just burn out and realize they spread themselves too thin,” Chester says. “I try and sit back and reflect on my goals. It might be slower, but it is a more balanced approach.”

Some women in their 20s acknowledge that they owe a debt to the previous generation for breaking down many barriers that women once faced.

“I think women of my age group feel comfortable taking feminist accomplishments for granted,” says Angela Stephens, 27, a USC graduate student who worked on Gov. Pete Wilson’s recent campaign. “I think women take for granted that they can get into law or medical school or do any job they want to do, and I think women in the early years of the feminist movement had to fight for that.”

Says Mary Butler, 28, a museum curator in Baltimore: “I think they had a little more to prove than women my age had to prove--a lot of them jeopardized family life for an important career. But on the other hand, they certainly made it easier for women my age.

“I admire them,” she adds.

Other women are harsher in their judgments. “I don’t approach my marriage and work as if I’m handicapped because my husband and boss are sexist pigs,” says Melissa Brooks, 26, a collections manager at a bank in Pasadena. “I feel I don’t have anything to prove.”

Eileen Chang, a 25-year-old executive secretary in New York City, says flatly that she has no desire to pattern her life after many of the women in the previous generation.

“I don’t want to be like those women,” Chang says. “Their work became their lives, because they were so dedicated to being on the top of the heap, like men. But men are still on the top of the heap.

“Now they are 40, they can’t have kids and they do want to get married,” Chang says. “I think they must think about whether it was all worth it or not.”

Emerging statistical data suggests that many twentysomethings yearn for more traditional family values. In a 1990 Yankelovich Clancy Shulman poll, 64% of men and women aged 18-29 said they wanted to spend more time with their own children than their parents had spent with them.

Another 1990 Yankelovich study found that 43% of women aged 21-29 would give up work indefinitely if they could afford the income loss, an increase of nine percentage points from 1989. Yankelovich also found that more than 60% of women aged 18-34 believe “having a child is an experience every women should have,” as opposed to 53% of the women aged 35-49.

Susan Estrich, a USC law professor, says she has seen enormous changes in young women over the decade she has been teaching. In contrast with previous years, Estrich says she now sees a “significant minority” of her students simultaneously balance the demands of law school with those of husbands and children.

“We had this vague notion that if we devoted ourselves to our careers, we could have children and have it all later,” Estrich says of her own law school classmates. “I think many of us discovered in our 30s that that there are complications, physical and otherwise, to having children.

“I think my students may be more realistic. I think they realize they will have to do some juggling, but I don’t think they realize how much they will have to do.”

Anne Peralta, 25, already is considering the complications that children will bring. Now living with her boyfriend in Sherman Oaks, she says she would like to have children by the time she is 30 because she wants “to be young enough to relate to them.”

Peralta, a bank collections manager, hopes to run a part-time business while her children are growing up so she can spend time with her family. Peralta’s parents separated when she was 11, and her mother worked full time.

“I want to have time to drive my kids to ballet class, or swimming meets, or horseback riding class. That’s not what I had. I had a mom who worked to make ends meet, packed my lunch and did the best she could,” Peralta says.

Some women in their 20s already have left the labor force to raise families.

Alexis Martin, 25, the daughter of Greek immigrants, says she dropped out of Smith College and married a career Army officer at the age of 20 because “I felt as if I needed to get ahold of my own identity, and I didn’t feel as if I were really doing it by staying in school.”

Martin now stays at home in Lawton, Okla., with her two toddlers. She says she doesn’t regret her choice, although she would like to finish college when her children are a little older. “I always measured a woman’s success, not by her career or money, but how her family turns out,” she says.

Some social observers are convinced that women like Peralta and Martin are becoming the rule, rather than the exception, for their generation.

“People are looking at having a family in a positive light right now,” says Barbara Tober, editor-in-chief of Bride’s magazine. “Ten years ago it was out of fashion. I’ve watched the entire nation change its mind about marriage.”

One result of this new attitude has been that women in their 20s seem to be less embarrassed than women 10 years ago to acknowledge a willingness to place the husband’s career first, at least temporarily.

Jennie Nash, 27, gave up a job with a New York magazine that she “loved” for the risky career of a free-lance writer when her husband decided to attend business school in Los Angeles. “I found myself defending (the move) to a lot of people,” she says. “But I wanted to try free-lancing, and I might not have left my job if he hadn’t wanted to move.”

Some analysts caution, however, that twentysomethings who jump off the career track may find that getting back on board is not as easy as they had hoped.

“Some of the hard trade-offs are not present in women’s lives when they are in their 20s,” says Sylvia Hewlett, author of “When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children.”

“There is a tremendous (income) slippage that occurs with women (who have) children,” Hewlett says. “Women continue to pay a very high price for their children. If you present this data to women in their 20s, they don’t hear it.”

Audrey Freedman, a labor economist with the Conference Board in New York City, says it is unlikely that these women will maintain financial parity with their male colleagues if they plan on less traditional ways of working. “They may be expressing a great deal of confidence, but they won’t do as well (as men),” she says.

Many of the women themselves remain optimistic, however. “There are good, traditional things evolving with the ‘90s,” says Robin Baur, 26, of Washington. She says that within 10 years she expects to be married, a mother and “working in some way.”

“Rather than narrowing, I would like to think we are expanding our lives,” Baur says.