Everything Old Is New Again

Writing at Slate, Jack Shafer continues his assault on the trend stories about highly educated women eschewing careers to stay home and raise kids. The story, he points out, seems to pop up every few years in cycles—and often doesn't pan out.

It's actually older than he knows. In Stephanie Coontz's phenomenal Marriage, a History (which I wrote about yesterday) she notes that the 1920s saw a spate of articles about the "postfeminist backlash," with such headlines as "You May Have My Job, a Feminist Discovers Her Home" and "I Gave Up My Law Books for a Cook Book." There's a danger in extrapolating long-term shifts from short-term fluctuations, and journalism's "three-anecdotes-make-a-trend" rule of thumb doesn't help. (Well, it helps me, Julian Sanchez, when I need to turn out a "Whither America" thumbsucker on short notice, but not much of anyone else.)