Now let me elaborate these paradigm shifts in husband-wife relations. It is clear that women were dominated by men for thousands of years. Women were generally viewed as somewhat defective and inferior to men; Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas's description of women as "misbegotten males" is notorious among feminists and indicative of this view.3 Wives were treated as if they were the husbands' property throughout most of human history, not only in the Old Testament but also in many societies' civil laws. Furthermore, there have been many societies whose laws legitimated polygamy, a man's having multiple wives. In short, throughout history women were generally dependent on men.

Consequently, many feminists describe the typical pattern of the husband-wife relations in the United States in the 1950s as the wife's dependence upon her husband. In particular, wives were not financially free. Lacking special skills and education, few women had their own careers.4 In many cases, women could not borrow money from banks without a man's (i.e., their husband's or father's) permission, even if they wanted to start a small business of their own. As a result, many wives financially dependent on their husbands in the 1950s.

The latter part of the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the radical feminist movement in the United States. As the rise of the nineteenth century American feminist movement was closely related with the antislavery movement, so the rise of the 1960s' feminist movement was considerably inspired by the success of the civil-rights movement, which struggled to eliminate the racial injustice and discrimination. The leaders of the feminist movement expanded the interpretation of the civil rights and struggled to eliminate what they regarded as the sexual injustice and discrimination. They attempted to abolish "sexism" in a very similar way as the civil-rights movement struggled to abolish racism. As the idea of the innate racial differences (e.g., the innate inferiority of the black race) was severely criticized in the civil-rights movement, so too was the idea of the innate sexual differences (e.g., the innate inferiority of the females) severely criticized in the feminist movement, especially in the 1960s.

Many leaders of the feminist movement in those years promoted equal opportunities between men and women; they spoke up criticizing the discrimination against women in education, employment, job promotions and so forth. By emphasizing the innate equality between men and women, feminist leaders in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to bring about external equality-or equality of results-by eliminating the discrimination against women in society. In other words, they emphasized the exact sameness between males and females and de-emphasized the difference, which the Unification Thought perspective regards as complementarity, between them. Consequently, outstanding leaders of the feminist movement who spoke up for women with a strident voice in the 1960s and 1970s promoted women's striving for independence and self-realization and without any sense of appreciation for men.4 In many cases, they regarded men as women's enemy and the obstacle to their own self-realization, who stood blocking the gate of the equal opportunity for women.

We may well describe the main goal of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s as the strong independent woman or the self-realized woman. As a result of the feminist movement in those years, more women gained opportunities to study at distinguished colleges, to work for big business corporations in leadership roles, and to earn as much money as men.

Second Stage

Were American women enjoying the fruits of feminism in the 1980s happier than women in the 1950s? It is difficult to compare the subjective feelings of people from two different generations. It turned out, however, that many American feminist women were not really happy, even though the social environment gave them equal opportunities to work just like men, to earn as much money as men, and to wield power just like men. Women could not become happy by becoming just like men and behaving just like men -- without their own men (i.e., husbands) and family (i.e., children). This was the honest assessment by none other than Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, the founder and the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the so-called mother of the modern feminist movement. Although in the 1960s, she had championed the goal of the self-realization of women totally independent of men, Friedan presented the above sober assessment as in her book The Second Stage.5 She came to have second thoughts about the goals of the feminist movement.

Friedan in The Second Stage advocated a new feminist movement that should transcend the radical feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She referred to the new challenge that the feminist movement must undertake after winning the equal opportunities in many fields as the "second stage" of the movement. She proclaimed the important characteristics of the second stage as follows:

The second stage cannot be seen in terms of women alone, our separate personhood or equality with men.

The second stage involves coming to new terms with the family -- new terms with love and with work.

The second stage may not even be a women's movement. Men may be at the cutting edge of the second stage.

The second stage has to transcend the battle for equal power in institutions. The second stage will restructure institutions and transform the nature of power itself.

The second stage may even now be evolving, out of or even aside from what we have thought of as our battle.6

After the Friedan's bold reassessment of the feminist movement's goals, similar critiques of the feminist movement appeared one after another in the 1980s and gained increasing popularity among contemporary American women. Connel Cowan and Melvyn Kinder in their book Smart Women/Foolish Choices blamed the radical feminist movement for the current women's malaise, because in their view "it created a myth among women that the apex of self-realization could be achieved only through autonomy, independence and career."7 Soon there appeared a flood of critiques of radical feminism in the American mass media as documented by Susan Faludi in Backlash. Here, for example, is her summary of the confessional account of Megan Marshall, a "recovering Superwoman":

"In The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy, Megan Marshall, a Harvard-pedigreed writer, asserts that the feminist 'Myth of Independence' has turned her generation into unloved and unhappy fast trackers, 'dehumanized' by careers and 'uncertain of their gender identity.'"8

Faludi went on to summarize the backlash against the radical feminism as follows:

"Other diaries of mad Superwomen charge that 'the hard-core feminist viewpoint," as one of them puts it, has relegated educated executive achievers to solitary nights of frozen dinners and closet drinking. The triumph of equality, they report, has merely given women hives, stomach cramps, eye-twitching disorders, even comas."9

Although Faludi apparently disliked and criticized the anti-feminists' claim that "they can chart a path from rising female independence to rising female pathology," it is noteworthy that Friedan in large part agreed with such a claim. The fact that unmarried single men over thirty who may well be described as independent men have more severe psychological and social problems than do independent women does not nullify the anti-feminists' description of the distress of the independent women who remain single into their thirties and beyond.

Carol Gilligan's book In a Different Voice also contributed significantly to debunking the cause of the radical feminists who struggled for equality of opportunity and results for women on the postulate that men and women have equal innate ability.10 These radical feminists of the '60s and '70s are sometimes referred to as "equal opportunity feminists" by the new generation of feminists who are sometimes called "relational feminists." Pointing out the differences between men and women in terms of their moral reasoning and behavior, Gilligan illuminated women's caring and relational way of moral thinking and behavior in contrast to men's rational and subjective way of thinking and behavior. Gilligan's book reminded many women of the presence of women's special nature that can be regarded as in many ways superior to men's. At the same time, it reminded many women of the physiological and psychological differences between the sexes. Gilligan's book was all the more influential because she was a professor at prestigious Harvard University. Her credentials as an intelligent feminist also contributed to the acceptance of her views by many of her fellow feminists.

What is the new paradigm of the male-female relationship emerging in the 1980s and 1990s? It is being promoted both by many critics of radical feminism and by the new generation of feminists.11 I call this paradigm interdependence. Many women have come to disagree with the paradigm of independence promoted by radical feminism, and at the same time they are dissatisfied with the old paradigm of one-sided dependence. Thus, according to my observation, we can discern two paradigm shifts in male-female relations in the United States during the last forty years: from dependence to independence and from independence to interdependence. In my view, the age of interdependence is now dawning throughout the world, not only between men and women but also in many other fields. Finally, I would like to make it clear that our mentioning of the three paradigms of dependence, independence and interdependence does not completely correspond with the empirical situation of male-female relations in the United States. For example, the paradigm of independence was fashionable and influential especially among highly educated women in the radical 1960s and 1970s, but it never prevailed in the relations between ordinary American husbands and wives of that era. Nevertheless, the main goal of feminist thought about husband-wife relations was firmly in that direction. Similarly, since the 1980s the paradigm among the most influential women has moved from pursuing the goal of the self-realized independent woman towards the realization of genuine interdependent relations between men and women.