“Many women tell me they want to have a man in their life, but they are no longer willing to be the only person giving in the relationship. They don’t want to be with a man who needs to be taken care of. In that case, it’s easier and more pleasant to be without a man.”
These words speak eerily to the current moment. Yet their date of publication? 1984.
You’ll find them in psychotherapist and acclaimed author Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz’s The Superwoman Syndrome, one of the earliest books to grapple with the superwoman myth — the idea that women can effortlessly balance work and family responsibilities in workplaces not designed to support them. And that any evidence of struggle is interpreted as a personal failing rather than a systemic one.
