Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
The War Between Men and Women (Cont'd)
By Diane Johnson
Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women
by Andrew Hacker
Scribner, 228 pp., $25.00
Andrew Hacker's Mismatch is a compendium of statistics from a variety of official sources like the US Bureau of the Census, the National Center for Health Statistics, even the FBI, that support his observation that the ancient gap between men and women is growing ever wider. Although many novels or poems could serve in one way or another to illustrate such a gap, and most of us have a sense of it, Mismatch provides documentation with statistics of increasing divorces, salary differences, workplace changes, decreasing rates of childbearing, rising numbers of homosexual households, etc., which taken together find more divorce, more single parenting, and many other measures of the decline of the family, arising because of diverging male and female expectations. Our grandparents stayed together because they had fewer choices and had to be realistic about what these were. 'Wives and husbands grew accustomed to each other, largely by developing domestic routines. Romance, conversation, and mutually satisfying sex were seldom expected or experienced for long, if at all.' Marriages centered on the family, and anyway people were likely to be too tired to worry about delicate questions of psychic and sexual harmony.
Review, 3638 words
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