What Women Want Next
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Columnist, acclaimed author and social commentator Susan Maushart unsheathes her notorious wit and unerring sense of style on the knotty question of feminine fulfilment in a postfeminist world.
What do women want from love and sex, marriage and motherhood, friends, family and career? And how much of it can we get?
When I was a teenager, she writes, I thought love would solve everything. In my early twenties I thought sex would solve everything. By my late twenties, I thought a career would solve everything.
At age thirty I thought marriage would solve everything, and then-when it didn't-I was sure that motherhood would. By my late thirties, following a brief period of certainty that therapy would solve everything, I became convinced that divorce would solve everything.
At forty I saw how absurd this all was, and decided to renovate.
So what do women want next? Find out in this blackly funny, sharply intelligent exploration of where we were, where we are, and where we're trying to get to.
'Witty, sharp and original, a woman men should listen to...Maushart extends a stylish invitation to listen.' Australian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an attempt to figure out how women can achieve happiness vis- -vis sex, marriage, motherhood and work, Australia-based author Maushart (Wifework) surveys the writings of feminists, conservative gurus, psychiatrists and spiritual leaders, including bestsellers like Germaine Greer, Laura Schlessinger, the Dalai Lama, Freud and Arlie Hochschild. Women must stop blaming others men, doctors, the patriarchy, their mothers, their own hormones for the way their lives are turning out, self-described feminist Maushart concludes, because freedom has its price. And if what women want next are marriages that are mathematically equal, that won't be easily achieved if women seek taller, wealthier, older men of higher social status. Women want to reintegrate motherhood into the rest of their lives, and those who choose to be stay-at-home moms are "no less a feminist success story than their career-oriented sisters." Furthermore, women's ambivalence about gender roles is responsible for such failed feminist agendas as equal pay for equal work. This Australian import by a long-time American expat is an unfocused, pedestrian retread of very familiar territory that's saddled with Aussie expressions and examples that don't always apply in the U.S., and with blanket assumptions (e.g., referring to women who change their names after marriage: "I've got news for you, girls. If you let him stamp his name on you, he is boss").
