Blaming Rosie…

I recently read an intriguing article called “The War on Men” published on a popular news website. The author revealed statistics from the Pew Research Center which states that the percentage of young women ages 18 to 34 that desperately desire a successful marriage has risen since 1997; whereas, the percentage of men that share this desire has dropped 6 points over the same time period. From these statistics, the author draws the conclusion that modern women want to get married but modern men don’t.  Why? Because ‘women aren’t women anymore’. She then goes on to chastise modern media for unfairly persecuting men for being “un-marriageable” as they compete unsuccessfully with women in the workforce (since women now slightly outnumber men in the American labor force). Next, she says that the rise of women has pissed men off and ‘has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family’. She closes out her article by offering up the exciting news that, luckily, women have the power to turn things around! They can simply ‘surrendering to their femininity’ which will result in an abundance of ‘marriageable’ men who will be theirs for the taking!

I just threw up in my mouth….

Initially, after reading the article, I became incensed because the tone of it seems to throw women, as a collective, under the bus…myself included. I was the primary breadwinner in my marriage and I still managed to stay very feminine. I like to wear dresses, I like to twirl, and I even cook dinners for my family, after which I wash the dishes and put my son to sleep. So I am not sure what is so ‘unfeminine’ about me…. But despite these traditional wifely traits and the feminine way in which I take care of my family, I am still very educated and surely must have stolen a spot from some young man who coveted a seat in my medical school class.

The article’s author fails to place the blame where it belongs….on Rosie! The 1940’s propaganda success, Rosie the Riveter,  is responsible for starting all of this hullabaloo in the first place.  Rosie’s big muscles, red polka-dot scarf, and ‘can-do’ attitude enticed young women of that era out of the cocoon of domesticity.  Rosie lured several categories of women (lower class, minorities, young high school graduates, and married women) into U.S. factories to build planes, and other necessities of national security, during the factory labor shortage of World War II. Rosie taught us women how to use rivet guns and other ‘un-feminine’ things while igniting inside of us the fires of independence and ambition. Thanks to Rosie, women began to discover the non-material benefits of working outside of the home for the first time in many of their lives.

But wait! Rosie is just a fictional character, created as a part of a propaganda campaign to entice 1940’s women into the labor force. She was created by men to achieve a goal- to entice women to work. My imagination conjures up a room full of men in dark blue suits who created a brilliant marketing strategy and presented it to a smoke-filled room of more men somewhere on Capitol Hill for approval. If modern men see the successful, working woman as threat, they must admit that their male predecessors have created her. Men created this monster, now they must deal with her….