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we have made major strides in identifying the barriers to equal opportunity . . . . we have done far less well in developing solutions. On virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety, women still fare worse than men. Sexual violence remains common, and reproductive rights are by no means secure. Women assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a price in the world outside it. Yet these issues are not cultural priorities.

 

Rhode then takes a well-researched look at the lives of women today through their status at work, in the family, and in positions of leadership. In the last fifty years, she tells us:

Women’s labor force participation has nearly doubled; they now earn 60 percent of college degrees; their representation in elite professions has grown from under 5 percent to over 30; the wage gap has been cut almost in half; and the percentage of wives out-earning husbands has grown from 4 to nearly 40 percent. Yet . . . . the labor force remains gender-segregated and gender-stratified, with women still overrepresented at the bottom and underrepresented at the top.

It is the persistence of social bias, Rhode posits, that, more often than not, prevents or circumvents the enforcement of legal reform. “Four decades’ experience has taught that what the Constitution protects in principle, society can deny in practice.”

Vivian Gornick on Deborah Rhode’s What Women Want: An Agenda for the Women’s Movement