In the novel Marjorie Morningstar, the heroine’s father attempts to impress upon his daughter how of everything he’s done in his life, nothing has brought him greater pleasure than having children. His daughter, aged twenty, describes to her father how she sees her future:
So far as I’m concerned, children would be a nuisance before I’m thirty. By then I ought to be about ready to retire from the human race and become a breeding machine.
When her father asks what it is she plans to do in the intervening years that is so important, she replies:
The finest foods are worth having, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art. Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities, instead of becoming just one more of the millions of human cows! Children, sure, when I’ve had my life and I’m not fit for anything else anymore.
Although this view is more or less universally accepted today, it has seldom been summarized as succinctly as it is here in this 1955 novel when it must have seemed controversial. Yet what is it that can only be enjoyed before the age of thirty? Fine food, great art, social prominence, etc. are all things that can be enjoyed perhaps even more past thirty than before. The tell-tale giveaway here is the timeframe. The one thing Marjorie knows damn well will not be available to her much past the age of thirty is the sexual opportunity she currently enjoys with just about any man she chooses. She pretends she’s postponing reproductive imperatives for the sake of everything modern life has to offer, but in fact, she’s doing the exact opposite. While insisting to her parents that she doesn’t want to marry or have children, she in fact does want these things very much, she just doesn’t want them with any of the men who are available to her for marriage.
Marjorie’s ideas of sexuality are very much bound up with her ideas of glamour. The many men who propose to her are all boring because marriage would mean the end of glamour for her. She becomes infatuated with the one man who tells her in no uncertain terms that he will never marry her. However, once so enamored, she begins to behave as if he will marry her, investing herself in promoting his career, taking everything he says seriously, brushing off other men, even inexplicably expecting him to refuse other women. For the longest time she denies that she is attempting to maneuver him into marriage. She says she is using this time to gain experience in the theatre. She also knows other men are desperate and will marry her anyway even after she has spent her youth with someone else. The later part of her life doesn’t really matter because from her own point of view, it will all be over then. The only question is, will she have fulfilled herself in her youth (“using all my abilities,” etc.) or not? Like Marjorie, women today too seem to sour on their exciting careers precisely at the time they despair of being able to continue to attract exciting men.
The five year period described in the novel is anchored by two of Marjorie’s dates. Both dates are with men she does not like, but whom she believes can help introduce her to more glamorous men. The first date is a success. It is effectively Marjorie’s debut in Manhattan society. It is on the morning after this date that she decides to become an actress and invents the name “Morningstar” for herself. Five years later, both her love life and her theatre career are proving less rewarding than she had hoped. She sets up a date with one of the many men she has rejected, who is now enjoying success as a writer of comedy. She still does not like him, but hopes to leverage his recent success to get herself introduced to other successful men. When he doesn’t show for the date, she is overcome by despair and self-disgust. She assumes that he has lost interest in her. She feels guilty over how she had planned to use him and no longer feels enthusiastic about embarking on a new quest for more men. Instead, she retreats to one of her early suitors who is less glamorous but a stable earner and attempts to solicit from him a proposal of marriage.
Noel Airman, for all his other faults, was always completely honest with Marjorie. He said he would never marry her. And he told her from the beginning that she would never make it in show business and would eventually marry an unglamorous stable earner. He calls her confidence in her acting career a “tropism,” a reflex girls experience when they discover they have sexual power:
I’m not talking about you, you understand. Being an actress (or a model, same damn nonsense) has become to the average American girl what being a knight in armor was to Don Quixote. It’s a process that’s going on all over the country, this addling of girls’ brains. That’s why I call it a tropism. Nothing can stop it, until our civilization changes. Year after year troops of Marjorie Morningstars will converge on Hollywood and Broadway to be seduced, raped, perverted, prostituted, or—if they’re lucky like you—to merely tangle up in fornication for a couple of years and then go home to marry the druggist’s son or the doctor or the real estate man.
With Noel Airman, Marjorie does what Marianne Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility did not dare do with John Willoughby. Times had changed during the intervening 120 years. Marianne knew that if she slept with Willoughby she would be disowned, would never marry, and would die in poverty and shame. But Marjorie knew she could get away with it and still get married to someone reliable as long as she didn’t take too long. As long as you’re being courted by men who are actually planning to marry you, you can still live with your parents or work a humdrum job while you wait to get married. But if you’re going to spend years of your life chasing exciting men in exotic locations, you need a better cover story. A career as an actress is glamorous, even if it never really materializes.
The book Marjorie Morningstar is set in the 1930s, in the world Herman Wouk knew before WWII, thirty years before the Sexual Revolution. But for all women’s professional achievements in the intervening 90 years or more, two strikingly mysterious atavisms persist into the present time.
The first is the familiar time frame: thirty, as described by Marjorie in the early conversation with her father. This can also be described as late twenties to early thirties, but it clearly refers always precisely to the first visible signs of the downward trajectory of a woman’s youth and fertility. After all this time and social change, this biologically determined point remains more or less constant as the moment when women suddenly admit they do want husbands after all, as well as the point when they suddenly lose interest in their fabulous careers. The coincidence of these two inflection points has been noted. Writing in 2019, Suzanne Venkner says: “Careers aren’t fulfilling at all, it turns out, if you wind up in bed at night alone.” But surely there’s more to it than just not being alone in bed. After all, women well over thirty can still easily find a man who will gladly spend the night. And if it’s about being married, then why does this not seem to bother women before they are thirty?
The second atavism is the choice of careers. Women’s careers have expanded far beyond the realms of acting and modeling, but they are still overwhelmingly focused on the glamorous: doctors, lawyers, politicians. Even in science and technology, there is a noticeable avoidance of programming and of math, which are seen as dreary. Of course it can be claimed that this is because programmers and mathematicians are sexist and discriminatory, but surely no more so than biologists or journalists? And there remains a noticeable dearth of women craftsmen, mechanics, seafarers, and roustabouts, or indeed of any public outcry for more female representation in the trades. It’s not about the money, either. Some of the careers women avoid are actually quite in demand and lucrative, while some of the careers women pursue are often not. Women often toil for years as artists, editors, docents, political staffers, and in various non-profit positions, living beyond their means in the big city on credit and handouts from relatives, much as Marjorie Morningstar did while waiting to be discovered on Broadway.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, women have by far outperformed men in educational attainment. Childless unmarried women now outearn men, even in the same professions and with the same experience. But once they marry or have children, the pattern reverses again. And this all happens at that same magic age. Can it really be that the same Patriarchy that is so eager to hire and pay and promote so many young unmarried women is then suddenly so harsh in its suppression of older and married women?
What motivates women past thirty to have careers? To answer that we must first ask: What motivates women under thirty to have careers? And to answer that we must first ask: What motivates men of any age to have careers? Men have careers in order to improve their access to women. In fact, one of the reasons women now surpass men in education and work is not just that women go to college and enter the workforce in increasing numbers, but that men are doing these things less than they used to. And one reason for that is that a career is no longer the chick-magnet it used to be. Women will now both gladly have sex with some men who don’t have careers, while also completely ignoring many men who do. So there is now less of an incentive for men to have careers.
Women are entering school and the job market today with the ferocity of sex-starved men who believe a career will get them some action. But the strange thing is: a career has no effect at all on a woman’s sex appeal. Never did. Never will. Women can get all the sex they want without a career, and having a career will not get them any better results in that department. In terms of marriage prospects, too, a woman’s career has little effect. So what is a woman’s incentive to have a career?
Consider the tendency towards glamorous professions and the loss of interest in said professions around age thirty. Women feel glamorous in their twenties. They do not feel glamorous in their thirties. The careers they seek are glamorous. Marriage and motherhood are not glamorous. The men they have sex with in their twenties are glamorous. The men they marry in their thirties are not. They are choosing careers to fit the way they feel, and losing interest when they no longer feel that way. Still, why go to all that trouble to have a career, especially when you know you’re just as glamorous without it?
As Noel Airman noted, glamorous young women like to believe that the sexual attention they are getting is due to their own talents and efforts. A glamorous career helps maintain this fiction. It lets women pretend they are like men, using their success and social prominence to attract members of the opposite sex. Of course, men would like careerless women just as much, but it’s somehow not as fun for women to admit that. It is likely that many women also enjoy imagining they are “studs” indiscriminately enjoying sex with a numerous succession of men. In fact they are being highly selective, sleeping with only the most impressive men, but it is possible that while they are young they can get enough attention from the best men to pretend they are being indiscriminate and it’s apparently more fun this way. They can say: look at us, we’re using our careers to enhance our promiscuity, just like men. There is almost certainly deception in the claims of women at this stage of life that they are just having “fun” and are not interested in marriage or children. In fact, what is fun about what they are doing is precisely that they are able to secure sex with the most desirable men, the men they would most like to be married to and would bear children for if they could secure such a marriage.
All of these fictions can shine on brightly until that moment when sexual attention from the very best men is no longer forthcoming. At this point women can no longer pretend they’re not interested in marriage and children, can no longer pretend they were being indiscriminate, and can no longer pretend that their career is what was attracting all the attention. And then none of it is “fun” anymore.
Women think that “men” rule the world, win awards and fame and excel in their fields and become presidents and CEOs and seem so happy and satisfied. In fact, most men are broke losers who toil in dead-end jobs in total obscurity and most of the happiness and satisfaction they obtain comes from playing video games or going fishing.
Even when women succeed in emulating the behavior they covet in “men,” it doesn’t bring them the expected satisfaction. Women who attain awards and high positions surely experience some satisfaction, but they also realize they still aren’t as happy as men in similar positions. Men are motivated to excel primarily by a desire to enhance their popularity with women. Fame and prominence always get them at least some extra female attention that their physical and social talents alone could not. This is why men are extra super duper happy when they succeed professionally while women with similar professional achievements are only kinda sorta average happy. It’s not that high-achieving women necessarily want any extra male attention. They just want to be happy. But the amount of happiness available to them from high achievement absent the sexual aspect is far less than they figure on. And high achievement will never bring any woman enhanced sexual attention from men because fame and prominence do not enhance a woman’s attractiveness to men, youth and fertility do.
Feminism cannot bring women happiness because it promises to women only what makes men happy. But such things make men happy only because they bring men access to women. Sex drives civilization more than do money, power, war, or prestige. Men only seek those other things as a means so they can get the women. Women need sex, too, but they need it from very particular men and then they need those same men to not abandon them and their children. When women do for themselves the things that would make them happy if they were men, it does not get the women any additional access to the men they desire, let alone commitment from such men.
And Feminism can never close the gender gap by providing more affirmative action for women, more flex-time, maternity leave, a more inclusive workspace, etc. It should be clear that we have long passed the point of diminishing returns on all of these things. We can legislate that employers hire more women, that they pay women for longer extended leave while they raise their children, that employers keep career paths open for women until they return from raising children, etc. But we cannot legislate that women should maintain their own active interest in such careers beyond the point where it no longer seems glamorous to them.