The renegotiation of heterosexual partnership has been the great half-finished project of the past century. The first wave of feminism won the legal preconditions: property rights, the vote, the right to divorce. The second wave won the cultural preconditions: the recognition that women had inner lives, professional ambitions, and the right not to be defined by their partners. The third and fourth waves have inherited the part of the project that is hardest, which is the renegotiation of what partnership itself looks like once the legal and cultural preconditions are in place. This is the part the movement has not finished, and the failure to finish it has produced both a sustained backlash and a series of internal feminist fractures that the movement has not fully reckoned with.
The renegotiation problem has a specific structural shape. The old partnership model—breadwinner husband, homemaker wife, lifelong sacramental marriage—rested on a set of background conditions that have largely dissolved: a wage that could support a household on one income, extended family within walking distance, religious authority over marital dissolution, and a labor market that rewarded male specialization and female specialization differently but symmetrically. Modern feminism's project, after the legal-rights phase, was to construct a new partnership model adapted to new conditions. The new model has been articulated repeatedly: two earners, shared domestic labor, shared parenting, mutual support of each partner's professional and personal development, partnership as joint project rather than as gendered division. The articulation has run far ahead of the implementation.
The implementation gap is the central fact of the renegotiation. Women have entered the workforce in numbers that match or exceed men in most developed countries. Men have not entered domestic labor in proportional numbers. The time-use surveys are consistent across countries and decades: in heterosexual partnerships, even those that explicitly espouse egalitarianism, women still do substantially more of the unpaid work of running the household and raising children. The gap has narrowed since the 1970s but has not closed, and the rate of closure has slowed dramatically since about 2000. The renegotiation has succeeded on the labor-market side and stalled on the domestic side.
This stall has produced a set of secondary phenomena that the movement has had to address with mixed success. Educated heterosexual women in particular face a partnership market in which their professional success has not produced a proportional increase in the supply of male partners willing to share domestic labor equally. The result is a generation of women who can either marry down economically, accept the unequal domestic labor, or not partner at all. Birth rates have responded to this in the obvious way, falling below replacement across the entire developed world. Marriage rates have responded similarly. The renegotiation has not produced a stable new equilibrium; it has produced a partial retreat from the institution that was being renegotiated.
The movement's internal debate about how to respond to the stall has been one of the more interesting intellectual developments of the past two decades. Anne-Marie Slaughter's argument that the renegotiation requires structural changes—paid family leave, public childcare, a redefinition of professional success that does not punish caregiving—is the institutionalist position. Jessa Crispin's argument that the renegotiation requires a more thorough rejection of patriarchy than mainstream feminism has been willing to undertake is the radical position. Joanna Williams's argument that the renegotiation has gone too far and has produced its own pathologies, particularly in the framing of all heterosexual interaction as a power dynamic, is the conservative-feminist position. Caitlin Flanagan's more idiosyncratic position, that the renegotiation has been costly to women in ways the movement has not honestly accounted for, is a fourth voice. None of these positions has produced a synthesis that the movement as a whole has accepted.
What the renegotiation has accomplished, and what it has not, has to be stated honestly. It has accomplished the legal infrastructure for women to leave bad partnerships, which is an enormous gain. It has accomplished the cultural recognition that domestic labor is labor and has economic value, which is the precondition for everything else. It has not accomplished the actual equalization of domestic labor in practice, the construction of institutional supports that would make egalitarian partnership economically viable for average earners, or the development of a positive framework for heterosexual partnership that addresses both sexes' experience without treating one as the default and the other as the corrective. The third gap is the one that has produced the manosphere as its mirror image: a discourse that addresses male specificity at the cost of refusing to engage seriously with women, in response to a discourse that has often addressed women's specificity at the cost of refusing to engage seriously with men.
The collective phenomenon, viewed at the scale of a century, is the most ambitious renegotiation of a fundamental human institution that any society has attempted in modern history. The fact that it remains unfinished is not a verdict on the project; it is a measure of the difficulty of what is being attempted. Premodern partnership was organized by force, custom, and economic necessity. Modern partnership has to be organized by something else, and the something else has not been fully invented. Modern feminism has been the major site of the invention work. The work is not done. The conditions under which the work is being done—the manosphere as one backlash, the conservative-religious revival as another, the demographic collapse as a third constraint—have grown more difficult since the heyday of second-wave optimism. What the next phase of the project requires is the construction of a positive framework for heterosexual partnership that is honest about both sexes' experience, that does not depend on the restoration of conditions that no longer obtain, and that can compete for cultural authority against the reactive formations on both sides. This work has not been done at scale. It is the unfinished business of the unfinished business.