This paper examines the women's movement through the lens of Sara Evans's scholarship, arguing that while feminism has achieved remarkable progress, the movement risks overreach by defining "success" for individual women rather than empowering personal choice. The paper addresses gender segregation in the workforce, women's growing dominance on college campuses, shifting labor force participation rates, and debates around sexual liberation and out-of-wedlock births. The central argument is that true equality means equality of choice and opportunity — whether a woman chooses a career, homemaking, or both — rather than prescribing outcomes or shaming those who embrace traditional roles. Men's roles in parenting and domestic life are also considered.
The women's movement was spurred on by genuinely harmful conditions, and it has made an immeasurable amount of progress over the decades and generations. While most of that progress could not and should not be rolled back, there is perhaps a point at which the movement has become somewhat over-zealous in its aims, and a degree of recalibration may be warranted. This idea can be gleaned from the work of Sara Evans, in which she discusses the progress and force that the women's movement has had and continues to have. While feminism is still a work in progress and some work remains necessary, the definition of success and the movement's priorities need to be refined, along with a broader and more flexible view of how the world must be perceived and addressed.
No serious observer would argue that the women's movement over the last half-century was anything other than wildly successful, and its achievements deserve genuine admiration. However, the definition of equality and what constitutes a successful women's movement needs to be examined more carefully. For example, saying that a woman's proper place is not automatically in the home is a true statement — except when one is speaking of a situation in which the woman in question genuinely wants to be a homemaker. As Evans puts it, "the assumption that the woman's proper place was in the home undergirded the legal reality that women had few protections in public." However, there is a meaningful difference between saying that one is doomed to being a homemaker and simply saying that one has options. Quite a few women would prefer not to work outside the home and would rather be the one raising their children, yet there is an almost palpable guilt imposed on those who make this choice of their own volition — even when they genuinely have other viable options available.
Evans also makes mention of the prior tactic whereby employers who needed workers treated men and women entirely separately, and that many industries and job types were segregated by gender. This pattern still exists in industries such as engineering (predominantly male), computing (predominantly male), nursing (predominantly female), and human resources and payroll (predominantly female). However, these patterns are more a function of individual preference and professional tendencies than of formal exclusion, and the gender composition of these industries is slowly shifting and becoming less gender-specific.
While men may have historically dominated higher education and advanced degrees, there has been a massive and well-documented shift. Women now frequently dominate college campuses and actually outnumber men in enrollment. According to CBS News, women have surpassed men in earning college degrees — a milestone that would have seemed unlikely just a generation ago. Much the same trend is occurring with workforce participation rates, albeit more gradually. In the early 1990s, women in the workforce were outnumbered by men at a ratio of approximately 0.78:1 — meaning there were roughly 25 percent more male workers than female workers. That ratio has since climbed above 0.80 and continues to rise, with recent figures approaching 0.82 or 0.83. As women continue to outpace men on college campuses, that figure will continue to increase.
"Success should be self-defined, not movement-prescribed"
"Sexual freedom has produced troubling demographic consequences"
The adversarial nature that feminism and other equality movements sometimes — though not always — take on is not helpful and needs to be tempered more carefully. It is not the place of the leaders and followers of these movements to impose their preferred outcomes on individuals who are fully capable of making their own choices, choices made possible in large part by the hard work and sacrifice of the women's movement and other civil rights movements before them. Pressuring people into specific life choices — or characterizing them as bad parents or bad people for embracing traditional social norms — is counterproductive and needs to stop. True equality is equality of choice, and the movement would do well to keep that principle at its center.
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