I think you might have gone inside of my head and literally xerox'd my thoughts.
I have journaled for over a year now about the guilt that I feel for attending graduate school and leaving my family, my boyfriend (ahem, I mean ex-boyfriend) behind to pursure my education. And heaven forbid I think about a PhD! That would defy all the social (unspoken) laws of getting married at 26ish and having kids at 28ish. No room for school, advancement, making sense of my life before having to committ to all THAT.
And it frightens me because I feel pulled in two directions: do I want a family and a marriage because eveyone says that's the thing to do? Or do I truly want to be married and have children one day, which then in turn would risk sacrificing my career aspirations and my future goals? Groan....
When I bring this up in classroom settings, I'm usually the only voice. And my comments are usually heard but not internalized--and nothing changes, and everyone continues. I've had one professor (young, progressive gay male professor) recognize the struggle I have in my heart with this...and you're absolutely right--he took his responsibility as a male and encouraged me to do more, push further and continue to challenge. I will be forever thankful for him.
I will continue to read your blog and look forward to more encouraging and affirming words! Thank you...
Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early.
This quote seems to denigrate my job as a mom. I look at what I do as an ability to "wield social power" in a way I never could have as an engineer. Is this telling me I'm less of a feminist if I want to stay home with my children and that I know I'm better at it than my husband? I had a career with children for a while and he was the stay-at-homer, but I could see it was not as good for our kids and the condition of our home made our marriage fragile.
And as for housework now, I tell my husband that what I do is a job and he accepts that, so discussions about household chores are impassionate and necessary, not battles over marital equality.
I saw this piece linked off of Matt Yglesias in the TPM Cafe, and while I agreed with many of the points Hirshman makes, I was squeamish with the idea that elite women were supposed to be the logical "heirs" of feminism. It's the same problem I had with the whole "opt-out" NYT debate. But I think it is largely the case that the glass ceiling is still at home.
That said, what happened to the ideas that feminism is supposed to change the nature of the worlplace itself? Interpreting young professional women as merely "opting-out" of work, rather than seeing the position into which they are put as a lack of parity in the workplace, as well as a lack of parity on the home front, does a disservice to the choices these women are facing.
As does merely shunting these problems off to the "hired help," much of which are poorer or immigrant women, those other supposed heirs of the benefits of feminism.
That said, your manisfesto is right on.
The main problem I have with this article is that Hirshman seems to accept the market valuation of labor as its true social value. For example, she writes:
"a common thread among the women I interviewed was a self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence."
There's absolutely nothing wrong with choosing meaningful work over a bigger paycheck. I think that the goal should not be to get fewer women to think like this, but rather to get more men to. Voluntary simplicity, or whatever you want to call it, is a more progressive choice than trying to get more stuff for women by contributing to the production of social ills.
I do take her point that both partners in a marriage should make comparable trade-offs, though. Life partners should have compatible values. If you think that being a kindergarten teacher is more important than being a corporate lawyer, that's great, but why would you marry a man who doesn't share your values?
Amen to just about everything you and she say.
But note the weirdness of her method. Picking "Times brides" as a sample does select for the very privileged -- so it selects for couples where one of the incomes will be so great that, in 10 years, they can have kids in Manhattan with a single income and still be rich. It also selects for people with a particular investment in old-fashioned markers of propriety and gender norms. (Why the hell else would they want their wedding announcement to be in the Times?) I'm guessing that's a pretty narrow of the Ivy-League-BA married-woman pie.
er, narrow slice.
as a single, educated woman of color without kids i can say that i read hirshman's piece (and blogged it) with a sigh of relief and that relief is in response to what she says about the language of 'choice'.
for me, the whole opt out/feminist backlash thing was infuriating because it just seemed to shrink feminist ambition into a teeny lifestyle ball. as if feminism was like shopping: i don't choose that, i choose this.
my sexual status, my relationship status, my identity as a working woman (god, i'm so inarticulate about this) - these aren't mere lifestyle choices. they're political choices. and, yes, they are meant to be value judgments.
I found myself nodding as I read your post. I mostly agree with the the author and you regarding the "decision" to stay at home.
It seems that we have created one of the most highly educated stay at home group of moms ever. What effect will this have on our children? I find it interesting to note that two of my sister-in-laws (both college educated) are counting down the days when they can hang up their briefcases and become stay at home moms. Will the money and time they put into their education and career wasted when they do so? I don't think so, but I also wonder WHY some of us feel such a need to go back home. In my own experience, I've had to let go of the question of "will he do it right". Maybe that's part of the problem. Do we as women feel that we are the only ones capable of raising our children "right"?
I also can't help but be stung by the implication that the women who do go back to the home are somehow selling their selves and society short. Does the author want all of us to stay in the work place, period?
I can't do it. I can't work full time and be happy in my marriage and be a good mother. I simply cannot do it. So, for now, I work part-time. What does that say about me? Am I somehow letting society down? I don't feel like I'm selling myself short by putting my career and further education on hold. I'm doing what I am good at. And 95% of the time I'm very happy with where I am.
I do whole heartedly agree with the suggestion that women consider having one child. My daughter is an only child and will remain an only child. I am unwilling to delay my education and career for another child. My husband has never wanted more children either.
I don't know at what point we will actually reach gender equality. I desperatly hope that it's before 2030 as the article's author suggests. But in the mean time, please don't treat me like I've let you down. And please don't treat me like I'm somehow chickening out on life. I'm doing what I want to do. That's a hell of lot more than my mother and mother-in--law could say when they were my age.
On a less serious note, I loved your suggestion the we "be willing to bitch about housework". Too funny and too true. 16 years ago, when my husband arrived to me from his mother's house he was useless. He's a gem most of the time now. I'd also like to add this suggestion. Clear, concise direction- "put those towels away""unload the dishwasher". Also sticky notes. The truth is, he couldn't care less if the towels are in the basket or the linen closet. Which harkens back to my question, do we need to let go of the idea of the "right" way to do something.
As a feminist stay-at-home mom, an "opt-out" mom who's gone part time, I must say the whole debate is a little hard for me to frame because I keep feeling like something is missing in the discussion, but I have a hard time articulating it.
When my husband and I first decided to have a kid, we decided the following: I'd stay home for 2 years, and he'd stay home for 2 years. Coming up to the two year point, and suddenly, our relationship was in trouble because we were having a hard time talking past our politics. The fact is, I didn't want to go back to work. And he didn't want to stay home. And we didn't know how to say it to each other without being misogynist assholes. We finally figured it out, but it was the hardest issue we'd dealt with. Admitting our enjoyment of our utterly stereotypical gender roles.
Doubtless, SAH motherhood is filled with shit work and drudgery. However, as someone who did lots of shitwork to get my ass through University, I don't think you can rate the job in terms of dollars and cents. My professional career feels more like shitwork than doing laundry in an environment I'm enjoying.
After all, at home I have only myself as a boss, I monitor and evaluate my own output, and I'm paid emotionally (as well as challenged) in my relationship with my children. I may be the biggest fish in a very teeny pool, but I am every day able to imagine my work environment in a way I was never able to in my career. I don't LIKE my career in the same way.
It may be that I merely chose the wrong career, and I'm hiding at home. But there's boredom in both places: where my sahm life has peas and whining, my career has office politics and boredom and scheduling. In both environments, I have to make the best of it, and at least I'm hanging with those I love at home. (Also, I have time for reading and writing and thinking/blogging endlessly about politics.)
Of course, if I were independently wealthy, I wouldn't work in the career field in which I'm trained (Comp. Sci), and my day to day life wouldn't look much different than it does now, at least until the kids are older. I can't justify (to myself) not contributing financially to the family after the kids are in school, but man, if I never had to work again that'd be fine. I'd write, and volunteer, and read, and blog, and go back to school, and go for long walks listening to music. I'd be involved in activism. I'd make commitments based on my own energy and whims, and not on my need for income. My husband, on the other hand, would work outside the home because he loves his work.
Do I work? Sure, like a dog. But there's more room for me in the work. More room on a daily basis for what I actually care about.
I'm not sufficiently motivated by money to choose the office over the kitchen when the rewards at home are more immediate and when I feel I can GET AWAY with staying at home. This is the part that I have a hard time framing: after seeing my mom work so goddamned hard, I feel like I've won the lifestyle lottery for a small period of time. That I've managed to get out of the rat race for a short time. Sure, when I get back into the race I'll be six years behind, but the point is, I don't like the race.
Other SAHMs that I talk to (and SAHDs, too!) feel similar things. If you don't value what society values - success in the monetary - and you're not feeling like your career is fulfilling, then SAH work feels great. Museums on weekdays! Afternoons in the park! Playing with cooking! It is true that in the domestic life, work is never done. I set boundries and routines for myself to cope with that.
HOWEVER. I know this is me, this is now, this is my preferences and lifetime. I also know that it would *Piss Me Off* if anyone tried to tell me I couldn't be a Software Engineer due to my gender. I'm good at my job -although obviously it's not working for me long term.
Here's the reality, though: I won't ever put in a 60 hour week. Even if I got my bliss job and was making $80,000/year as a pundit, I wouldn't put in a 60 hour week. I wouldn't travel away from my family for weeks and weeks every year. So I feel like there's not a lot of room for me anywhere of importance in society because I'm not out there enough to be important.
I used to think *that* was the feminist problem: that 'life' was being reduced to an economic equation in which traditionally male gendered activities were valued above traditionally female gendered activities. (And also, that what was between our legs did not suggest what we as individuals enjoy doing.)
In my fantasy, I could have a fulfilling career that eventually makes good money on 20 hours of work per week - 20 hours a week from me and 20 from my partner, and society's material expectations are slighter... Ideal.
This seems just insensitive, ridiculous pipe dreaming, though: I'm sure that the other 98% of the planet that don't have my privilege would love only to have to work 40 hours a week in order to cover what I (as a Canadian) could get on 40 hours at minimum wage.
I'm afraid that workplace-feminism was eaten by capitalism. Two wage households? Where does the economy sign up? I believe that Martha Stewart was demonized for her gender, but I also suspect that, in the long run - several generations? my kids generation? - capitalism will 'sanitize' (middle and upper middle class) women who are willing to work the hours/play the game.
We do have to act on the housework. Why don't housework strikes work? Because women "biologically" like a cleaner house? I reject that except for in the last week of pregnancy.
My theory is it's the way we were raised and what our moms did vs. what our dads did and what we were asked to do. So, boy kids must clean floors, and their dads too...
My three year old son is expected to contribute to all the cleanup.(There's my societal contribution. I don't pick up his toys, and we're learning about seeing messes that need cleaning. I'm such a revolutionary.)
It's a complex issue. Although if any of your regular readers feels like paying me well for reading, writing, analyzing, and working a short week, I wouldn't turn them away. *g*.
I should also note that my dissatisfaction with my career is not due to poor treatment. I've been given lots of opportunities, lauded, pursued, courted, and came out of the University gate making quite a bit more than is standard. I've been golden. I've been "groomed". Even taking time off, I've made good money part-time. I just get so bored, and the rewards aren't sufficient. Bad career decision, definitely; but also, I'm a polymath.
Even further, I don't think it's a failure of feminism that 50% of women are staying at home with INFANTS under a year. Hirshman seems to think that's a loss. To me, it doesn't need to be the woman by any means if she's not interested: but to give a woman only 6 weeks off after creating and birthing a whole new life is pretty harsh and devaluing to my eyes. Also, I know I'm not the only Mom who spent the first six months really into my babies.
We're having an incomplete conversation based on misogyny, I think. Hirshman is devaluing "women's work" without truly parsing it. To begin, we need to seperate out infant-rearing, child-rearing, and house-keeping. They're utterly different types of work.
Freiden's right that vacuumming isn't all that fulfilling to the creation of self, but it's also faulty to equate *childbearing* with *vacumming*. One's creative. The other's mechanical. Careers can be mechanical. SAH work can be creative.
I think the point she makes is that feminism didn't/doesn't change men or the way women relate to men. Until there's something in it for them to change, why would they? And speaking as a single, childless woman who gave up a high pressured job to move to the country, the issue for me is about not falling into the same patterns as men. 60 to 70 hour weeks with no life. Why wouldn't women want to stay at home with their kids? Feminism and the left have not succeeded in transforming working life in a way that incorporates the private sphere. As a young woman my hopes were that feminism was not about making women equal to men, but about transforming work and the family in a fundamental way. That just hasn't happened for men. I don't know if it ever will.
Arwen--
I think that's a really good point, that housework and infant and child rearing are two different things. It's funny, now that you've pointed it out, it really seems like they are almost always conflated.
Feminism and the left have not succeeded in transforming working life in a way that incorporates the private sphere.
Don't it just make you want to run out to Blockbuster and rent '9 to 5'?
Sigh. . .
Now I'm feeling bad for having changed my name (which I did although my feminist husband didn't want me to; I think this came down almost entirely to what we were used to, as his mom kept her name and mine didn't); and also for not having separate bank accounts (this was because the bank refused to give us ONE savings account linked to TWO checking accounts, in which case we would fall under some minimum balance and get hit with all kinds of horrible fees).
However, thanks to said feminist name-keeping mother-in-law (not that my mom isn't a feminist), my husband never questioned that he would do his fair share around the house. In fact, one of our most frequent fights is about the laundry. He has strong opinions on how to do it. So do I. Doing our laundry separately is stupid and wastes water and energy. Hence, stupid fights about how to do the laundry. But at least the basic assumption is that neither of us is solely responsible.
Of course, now, unemployed in Germany (though somehow I manage to be busy anyway, go figure, even without a baby), I do the housework. We jokingly call me "die kleine gute Hausfrau".
Eventually, my job will be (God willing and the creek don't rise) as the barely-paid 3/4-time rector of a rural Episcopal parish and subsistence farmer. I have every intention of dragging my kids to church with me when they need to be looked after - that's how I was brought up, with a professional Christian educator for a mother. Brutal hours and you're never off duty, but at least the family responsibilities are a lot easier to work in than in office work.
There's a whole nother rant about farming and domesticity and gender roles and the medieval vs. Victorian ideals of housewifery that I could go into, but I don't have all morning ...
Very powerful post.
"And partly it's because the nature of domestic labor (like most labor) is that if it's done well, it looks effortless and therefore becomes invisible. Only if it's done badly does it get noticed, and then the response is likely to be irritation rather than squeamishness."
Wow. This is a very simple example, but I teach in an elementary school and the way our custodians are treated by teachers makes me feel very ashamed.
"To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, 'A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.'"
Happy Birtday to Mark Twain today. 
I really liked this piece, though I hardly agreed with all of her points, still, I think she has important things to say--I especially like her rejection of "Choice Feminism," the notion that organized feminism should support all women's choices equally and regard them all as equally feminist, valid, and good for women everywhere. If you are a woman who decides to take her husband's name and stay home with kids and do all the housework while he supports you, then that's your personal decision and that's completely fine. It isn't, however, a feminist decision.
What about the underpaid nanny in this scenario? Chances she is a woman? I thought feminism was for all women, not just privileged ones with higher degrees.
Arwen articulated a lot that's in my head and in my life. I keep my professional brain active by freelancing, but I keep my hours low—I value the free time for thinking, writing, and reading far too much. I also have a woman come in once a week to clean—laundry, dishes, and clutter are the only housework I'm responsible for. I recognize how tremendously fortunate I am to have the opportunity to raise my son, but still have time to both work and relax while he's in school.
I changed my name when I got married because I hated being misunderstood when I said (and spelled out) my maiden name. I don't think I have a speech impediment, but I really got tired of the shit of spelling my name out three times and still seeing people get it wrong. However, I've never gone by Mrs.—I am resolutely Ms. Husband's Surname.
My husband contributes to the family by working hard in his job to pay our expenses, and by doing the bulk of the child care evenings and weekends. Ideally, he'd do more of the dishes and laundry so our son would see that it's unisex work, but first and foremost I want him to focus his energy on nurturing our kid. He does a wonderful job at it and he's much more patient than I am.
Oh man... I just finally realized that I've been not only the breadwinner, but the housekeeper as well. I've uncompromisingly done all the house work for the 2.5 years we've been married, while he gives me those excuses like "I just didn't notice it". Well, dammit, things are going to change. I'm taking your suggestion and going to make sure he KNOWS how much housework there is to do. By insisting that we can't leave to go do something until I've finished it, insisting that I can't go to bed until I've sorted the dirty laundry for the day, insist that the living room floor be tidied before we can watch a movie instead of letting him push things around on the floor. *sigh* Lots of work ahead, but thanks for galvanizing me to do it.
I think the ire that name-changing inspires among some feminists is excessive. My partner and I are both in PhD programs, share the housework pretty evenly, and are staunch feminists. Still, when we married a few years ago, I changed my name. There were a number of reasons for doing this, among them that he didn't want to change his (adamantly!). The most important reason I changed my name, though, was to cut the ties with my parents. I would have wavered more if I had publications under my birth name, but ultimately I would have changed it anyway. It looks traditional that changed my name, but I did it mainly to dissociate myself psychologically from an abusive situation. And standing up for myself, healing myself seems like an awfully feminist thing to do. I am not Mrs. Husband's Name (especially not Mrs. Husband's Full Name. I am Ms. Who I Chose to Be.
I've spoken with others on this topic and we tend to agree that our names are an intensely personal decision. I have equal respect for women who change their names and don't. It's their other actions, especially in the workplace, that will show me whether they are advancing the cause of women.
I agree with a lot of the other points - sharing income equally and not regarding one's professional work as unnecessary if it's the lower-earning one. But dogmatism about name choices gets my ovaries in a twist.
The work environment is WAAAAAY not family friendly. The environment is dictated by men (and women) who value service above all. The dictators accept no compromises not of their own making.
IOW, you can't have it both ways, and gender doesn't have a damn thing to do with it.
Feminists talk as if there were options, that if work is good, and family is good, then work and family together must be even better.
Nope. Work and family in America are two different places and ne'er the twain shall meet. And it isn't the 60 hour weeks or the travel. It's much simpler than that. If you are not actively doing what your boss wants, then you have no value. So don't, for gawd's sake, take an afternoon off to go to the park, or DARE to go do a school lunch with your children once a week, or do any DAMN thing on a regular basis that is NOT on your bosses list.
And then lets talk about how much creative work there is to be had. How about, not much? It's not that creative work isn't NEEDED - but, hey, whose ideas are going to be followed, yours, or your bosses?
Of course, soon enough, you will be the boss, right? Not really. Not unless you are willing to put family completely second. Not just a little, but a LOT. Then, you get to be the boss and live for your work, and to the extent YOUR boss allows you freedom to find the best way to do your job, you can choose whether to use an electric pencil sharpener, or an old fashioned hand crank one.
I am being a little facetious - but only a little. The brass ring of a fulfilling family life AND a fulfilling work life is far less attainable the monetary wealth.
And gender STILL doesn't have a damn thing to do with it.
Jake
But let him know what you are doing every goddamn step of the way, and let him know that it pisses you off. "I've just gotten home from work, it's nice to see you're home earlier than I am. Before I take off my coat, I'll put your shoes away for you, shall I? Oh, and I'll pick up your coat from the floor and hang it up. Okay, now I can take off my own coat and hang it up right away, instead of dropping it on the floor for someone else to pick up later....
I am so doing that when I get home tonight.
Great post, Dr. B. Your advice regarding housework and money is spot on. And honestly, sometimes my wife has had to be a bitch about housewowrk to me.
BTW, a society which defines "good" jobs as those which require 60 hours a week is completely screwed up for both men and women.
Equality in marriage will be much greater if we insist on going back to the 40 hour week, even at the cost of less salary.
Hirshman raises some important issues. But her article contains a number of assumptions that can be questioned.
One central assumption is that employment in a capitalist economic is OBVIOUSLY more likely to lead to human flourishing that other things (such as staying at home). This is not obvious, however. Yes, cleaning a home can be mindless work. But a large number of jobs in our economy are mindless too.
For my own part, I see the activity of raising childen as potentially being a really good way to achieve human flourishing (as long as the sacrifices are not too large).
She also seems to presume that it is fine to look at people (women) as means rather than ends. First, she seems to believe that women--if they are to be truly feminist--must make certain choices (those she likes). That is, women should see their goals as offering themselves up to the alter of (one version) of feminism.
Second, she seems to believe that education should be looked at as something that transforms someone into a good worker and that employment (giving up your own agendas for that of the employer) is a good idea. She seems to believe that transforming yourself into a valuable commodity (worker) is a good thing to so.
Some might disagree. For instance, some might argue that--contra Hirshman--that the fact that highly educated women decide NOT to take a job is evidence of the SUCCESS of a good education (some things are more important than employment) rather than a failure.
Basically, Hirshman uncritically accepts the rules of the game of our (male) (capitalist) society. But this is exactly what many people think needs to be critically considered. Hirshman seems to see feminism as something that will permit women to achieve more success in a male capitalist economy.
My two cents.
I like my liberal arts education. I do not like the business world. I dropped out of law school because the striving, high-powered milieu was so foreign and stressful to me. I require lots of quiet time to relax and contemplate and read and write. So I should be an academic -- except we all know what that job market looks like right now.
My husband is good at math and science. I'm not. The fact that I am not good at math and science has nothing to do with gender; none of the men in my family have any aptitude for math or science, either. However, the market will reward his skills in a way it will not reward mine. He can have a fulfilling career as a scientist without having to abjure his inclinations every moment of every working day.
I can't. I find much more fulfillment when I can stay home -- reading, writing, and yes, even cooking and cleaning -- than I do in the business world. In a way, it amuses me that I am so inclined toward "traditionally" female tasks, as I am the only feminist in my family, but the other women in my family -- conservatives who would sooner die than confess to grudging admiration for the women's movement -- are the ones who pursue the high-powered careers that, according to Hirshman, I ought to strive for.
In the past ten years, I have gone from wanting a career to hoping beyond anything else that when my husband is finally done with grad school, he'll earn enough money that I don't have to work. I guess that makes me a "bad feminist" by Hirshman's standards. But I'd much rather be happy than sacrifice myself to the grueling grind of American capitalism in the name of feminism.
Like Arwen, I've opted for part-time work after becoming a parent. Also like her, I have difficulty in articulating my thoughts on this "debate," especially where I disagree with the conclusions being drawn.
There are so many factors at work here and ways this argument could be framed: Money as the definer of success, "career" vs. "job," maximizing income vs. maximizing personal life. Class issues - so much of what is discussed here are issues that can only be debated by the professional classes for whom these are choices at all.
Separate finances? When we were married, my husband and I pooled all our financial accounts. This wasn't out of any "we're one person now" crapola. This was because we could not come up with four separate minimum balances (two checking, two savings) and be assured of maintaining them. Retirement? Ha. We're just each lucky we have some kind of plan through work. A 30K nanny? How about an unlicensed, paid-under-the-table neighbor?
I get frustrated, I guess, when feminism gets framed as a series of decisions made by college-educated, upper-middle class women, and that makes me less and less coherent to discuss the issues.
I sent this over to my mother, and she just wrote back, "right fucking on." She's sending it to all her friends. Thanks for this, B!
I believe there's some truth to what you say, but seems like a pretty broad stroke. My wife, gasp, *wanted* to be a stay-at-home when we had our first child some 7+ years ago and while she still gets frustrated when I leave socks around or get lazy, it's me that is the one that about every 6 months inquires about her interest to go back and finish her education. She has no interest (today) in having a career outside the home and it's nothing I've done to her. I would support her equally whether she wanted to or not.
And the advice to have separate bank accounts, etc. seems like low confidence that the marriage is destined to work. I understand lots of women who have lived their lives as stay-at-home moms have been burned by divorce, but to say all women should do so and should have already established a career sounds pessimistic about the institution of marriage. Marriage is *supposed* to be a lifelong commitment between two individuals that love and who willing serve different roles to each other. What's unfair is for society to decide what these roles should be, but it's not *bad* that roles do exist. So, I'm the breadwinner and my wife is the CEO of the home, it might be tradional and boring, but it works for us and it's what we *both* want, not just what I want.
Moreover, what's really to blame and sad is when husbands/fathers use work as an excuse to not be involved with their family, which then does place undue burden on the wife/mother. Granted, once in a while I will catch myself doing this if my wife is harping on me to do some chores, but I quickly recognize it's a copout and tend to do the right thing.
Lastly, any working parent - whether it be a father or a mother - that is devoting more time and energy to their career than to their family really needs to stop and ask if it's truly worth it. You have your whole life to pursue a career or education, but only one shot at raising your small children! Which is more important?
So, to say women (or men) who *choose* to stay home are not doing so genuinely seems really pessimstic. And the working parent(s) not staying at home should really be doing much more at home with the kids, even if it means slowing or temporarily "sacrificing" their career for a while.
Amen Sara! I hear ya!
Whoa. Good article, Bitch. I need to parse it more (wish that I could still do that at work) before I come back with intellectual debate. Couple notes, though:
Arwen--thank you, those points clarified a lot of stuff that had been rattling in my brain.
Grace--we do separate laundry, it works brilliantly. Not folding someone else's underwear makes everything else bearable.
"Do you not realize that already, even before your marriage begins, you are conceding that making things "easy," making the two of you "a family," worrying about "the children" is your job, not his? If having the same last name makes such a big difference to the two of you, let him change his damn name."
Yes! Yessssssssss!!! Thank you, thank you for articulating this. Having my husband change his last name to mine when we got married was one of the best things we ever did as a couple. And much as I know it's a complicated decision and there can be lots of reasons for going either way, it still drives me crazy when friends and family members agree to change their names without thinking about its implications. It matters, dammit! And if you as a woman ARE going to agree to change your name, there should be overwhelming reasons to do so - it should absolutely not be the default position. OK. Getting off my soapbox now. This is a great post.
I think PanJack was right on when he said "Hirshman seems to see feminism as something that will permit women to achieve more success in a male capitalist economy." That, I think, is a big part of the problem. As long as the workplace runs on 60 hour work weeks and rigid timetables set by the boss, no one who wants to be active in his/her child's life and have a career will be able to do so. The workplace is still not family-friendly.
But that's only part of the problem. I think there is a glass ceiling at home. I have thought a lot about whether or not I want children, and I always come down on the side of no kids. If I'm honest with myself, I must admit that part of the reason for this is that I don't want to sacrifice the career I hope to have some day (I'm in grad school right now, as is my boyfriend). My boyfriend and I have had vague talks about *if* we ever have kids, *someone* should stay home, at least for the first few years. And though neither of us has said who that someone should be, in my head and heart, I know it would be me. I'm with a man who is as liberal as I could hope for, who shares my values and is admittedly glad that he is with a woman who has drive and ambition for a career. But try as we might, there is still that unspoken rule that the woman is expected to stay home and raise the children.
So this is were I stand, I suppose. Yes, women have a "choice" now. A woman can choose to have a career or she can choose to stay home and be a good mother to her children. And as long these choices are seen by society to be mutually exclusive, then feminism still has a long way to go.
There are a couple of themes here, express and omitted, that bear some examination.
First is the idea that all is split equally. Nice concept, but that is a lot of work. Gender roles often play out even in "progressive" couplings because they are easy defaults that take care of a lot of exhausting negotiation by imprint. That doesn't make them good or right, but it explains them in a modern context.
Separate bank accounts. Yeah. Right. And who gets the bank account with enough in it at the end of the month to pay the mortgage, pray tell? That might work if one person makes all the money (hence, has all the control), or if both partners have enough income to cover the big bills. Otherwise, it is elitist folly IMHO. Dream on.
What was omitted here? Survival, for one. My husband was laid off and couldn't find a job. I was already working for comp time and simply bumped up to full time work and took on consulting projects. I kept the family afloat (although husband got a seriously bruised ego on several fronts - couldn't play Mr. Provider any more and was piss poor at housekeeping, and couldn't bitch about it because the kids were out of diapers, not nursing, and he wasn't even taking classes part-time too). I know many couples like us where a crossover has taken place due to employment disruptions.
Women and men both must think about these issues, and not just in the feminist context. Family survival in the modern economy depends on flexibility of roles. The more "feminist" and equal partners can be from the start, the better off they will be in the long run. Falling back into ancient patterns of our parents is not going to serve us well here. But the "tools" for doing this, be they "free time banks" like my husband and I set up when I was at home full time, clearly negotiated chore boundaries, and so on need to be shared and demonstrated and promulgated because we simply have few role models for this sort of arrangement.
The original article states: "The family ...allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government."
I find this, and the subsequent arguments, a bit disconnected. On the one hand it is purely ahistorical, denying the changing nature and role of family and private life over time. It seems to take the very recent past an extrapolate it back to the dawn of time.
On the other hand, it simultaneously devalues traditions and values of large numbers of people, recognizing them as socially constructed but simultaneously denying their agency in making their own (albeit possibly constrained) choices.
On the gripping hand, this kind of sentiment elevates the male dominated and male centered public and market spheres as the sine qua non of human flourishing. Those spheres could not exist without the preindustrial and industrial division of labor. Really, it is the height of privilege to stand in the ivory tower and preach at the masses.
Must be the socks.
I agree 100% Carol!
I would just add that there is hope for the future to be more work and home compatible. As more and more of our economy becomes driven by service jobs and widespread broadband internet adoption rates increase, it's much more possible than ever to work from home. I've been doing so for 2+ years. But, it's not quite as glamarous as it sounds once the inititial honeymoon phase wears off. It poses new issues (feeling disconnected from work, cabin fever, no boundaries, etc.), but the chance to see my kids all day and also manage to get some work done is an optimal solution, even if it means I lose out on some other benefits of working at the office or some other benefits of being at home mentally 100%.
Of course the ultimate solution would be to pay employees full-time wages for only 20 hours of flexiible work per week, but that ain't ever gonna happen (not would it be fair)!
I agree that Hirshman's piece assumes modern capitalism as a given. So let me say right off the bat that yes; if one of the goals of feminism is to change our sense of what constitutes "work," and along with it what constitutes "status," then her analysis is incomplete. I'll concede that.
But otoh, the fact is that the society we live in now *does* value paid labor more than unpaid labor. And I think that the big unacknowledged truth behind decisions to leave the paid workforce to take care of kids is that the person doing so--usuallly a woman--is therefore making herself economically dependent on her husband, which reduces her power socially *and* domestically.
I have more thoughts on this, but I need to formulate them. A quick response to Ms. Kate on the separate bank accounts issue: the question of bill paying is easy. As I said, you do a budget taking the money for bills off the top and dividing what's left over equally--then you assign one person the role of bill payer, and they handle that money. If the bills go up one month, their personal money is a little short; if down, they're a little flush. We've done that for years, and we just trade off who's responsible for the bills every year or so. Although it is true that, if you have to pay for your accounts, it doesn't make sense to do it this way if your income is so small that there's virtually nothing left over, which is our current situation--hence we're closing the account and sharing, since I never spend money w/out checking it with Mr. B. (since he's the current bill-payer) anyway.
Shit, I know nothing about this glass ceiling in the home.
My Mom was pretty crazy when I was growing up and did no housework or did it poorly. My Dad came home from work, and he had to do the dishes and cook dinner--or save whatever disgusting thing my Mom had prepared.
I think that this was doubly hard, because it wasn't just that she didn't do housework, it's that she actively screwed things up, when she tried. We tried to get her to stop trying to help, but she wouldn't. Still, my Dad worked full time, and my mother messed up the house. My mother was completely oblivious.
My Mom did have some resources, i.e.., a small trust fund.
My Dad's mother was depressed for years, so, in retirement, my grandfather did most of the housework. That wasn't fair to him either.
Another response to Ms Kate and the checking accounts: we have three. Two individual accounts, and a joint account with both our names on it. We deposit an agreed-upon percentage of income each month, pay bills and taxes out of it, and whatever's left over is savings. (I am still thinking concretely and not abstractly. Need more coffee.)
usually a woman--is therefore making herself economically dependent on her husband, which reduces her power socially *and* domestically
Hah! I beg to differ. While it's a true, somebody leaving the workplace might become economically dependent on another, I don't see this equates to a reduction in power (unless you're a CEO or very influential leader, which most people are not!)
My wife is much more socially connected in our community than I am (or care to be)! She's a stay-at-home mom and brings home no income, but yet she's very active and involved and influential in community events. I, meanwhile, may bring home a paycheck but am very much not her equal in terms of social power.
Moreover, in terms of "domestic" power, forget it. She rules the house. I could never use my income as a way to say we're equal or that I'm more important even if I wanted to. That's laughable! 
TD, simple question: if something horrible were to happen and you were to divorce tomorrow, which of you would find it easier to walk away? Which of you would be better off? After all, it's "your" income.
Great discussion.
Couldn't help but think of the Unabomber Manifesto. The crazy guy covers most of these issues, though not from a "feminist" perspective.
The economics seems to be the central issue, because very few people would do the jobs they have except for the need for money and status. The "division of labor," workplace and domestic, is one societal solution. As is the hiring of a nanny to do the shit you don't find creative.
DrB, if we were to divorce tomorrow, neither of us would be better off (which is to say nothing of the devestation to our kids).
Yes, I'm employed outside the home, but I could not imagine life without her. Meanwhile, even though she has no income currently, she's very employable and has lots of ties locally. It's a mutual choice we made for me to work and her to stay home, not one so that I would be able to control her. I'm not that kind of person and neither is she! I would much rather be single that in a one-way relationship.
By the way, DrB, when I said "my income" it's because it comes from my job. I definitely believe it then belongs to both my wife and I; afterall, I'm one of the advocates for one checking account - not separate (see above)!
My input on the bank issue? I'm the breadwinner, he's a SAHD. We each have personal accounts that we use for our own spending, funded by "found money:" gifts, unexpected income from any sources, and a small transfer monthly from the shared general account, out of which all the bills are paid, where the salary goes. This is only possible of course if your bank offers no fee accounts with no minimum balance, at least in our case.
As for the work value/child rearing issue - well, honestly, I don't think about it a lot. Our circumstances are what they are and we do what we have to do. There are three major factors I've identified that keep peace in our house:
1. Low standards. Neither of us gets excited over a little dust. Our house does NOT look like House Beautiful. But it's reasonably clean, though not always neat.
2. If you do the chore, you get to decide the quality of the work, and the other can not complain. If it bugs you, you do it. (Goes well with point one!)
3. Everything, and I mean everything that is done by the other is appreciated, not taken for granted. I wake every morning at 4:40 am to a fresh pot of coffee because my husband cares enough for me to set it up the night before. Every morning, I think about it as a surprise, almost; wow, he did it again! Should he forget one day I never feel like "gee, he didn't do his job." And I feel the same way about his making dinner every night, and his sweeping the dining room, and everything. This may come from having been a single mom for 10 years, where I was responsible for EVERYTHING - I get a sense of wonder and gratitude for every job I don't have to do.
We've each identified the tasks that matter to us, and the jobs we hate, and divided our housework accordingly. He vacuums, because he cares, and I hate it. I do laundry because it's not his favorite thing. We both do miscellaneous stuff when it's underfoot or we decide to care.
I'm not sure that trying to add things up to see who does more is helpful. The worth isn't always in the same currency. The feminist part for me, at least, is in having choices at all. And in having a partner who respects our relationship enough that he pulls my weight when I'm not able at times, and I pull his when he's not up to it. For both of us, raising the children is priority one.
I know the issues are much larger outside my little sphere, and I need to think about that sometime. But this is my world and I'm happy in it... so I'll stick with my version of reality for now.
What about those of us who brought up our children alone? No glass ceiling at home for us, more like an iron curtain.
TD, that's not the point. The point is that the rhetoric of "choice" obscures the larger social structures that inform decisions, and that decisions--not individually, but collectively--inform.
And you're dodging the question. Her ties don't put money in her pocket *now*, and your current employment means that, emotionally devastated as you might be, you'd still be able to afford a hotel room, and she wouldn't.
Wow. Everything in that post is something I've worried about at some point. I'm not yet married, but am seriously considering it, and I do have fears of unintentional inequality. The man in question is certainly liberal, but as you say, no one likes to think about domestic chores if they don't have to. Heck, I know *I* don't. Then there's the name change issue. Hyphenation would create a monstrosity, and coming from very different backgrounds, neither of our first names match the other person's last name. Yet it is very hard not to internalize the idea that neither of us changing our names is somehow implying to others that we are less committed.
I am beginning to realize that, like it or not, if I want to live my life with this man, I will have to be vigilant of myself as much as of him. Is it reasonable to hold onto the hope that this extra work will become easier or less necessary over time? That is, even if I am willing to be vigilant about these problems for the rest of my life, is there any glimmer of hope that someday I will be better about not caving in, and he will be more likely to notice power imbalances on his own?
SO much to think about!
Great post and ensuing discussion, Dr. B
DrB, I appreciate what you're trying to generalize to here; namely, that in way too many cases it is the woman who "gives herself up" to make a family work and, too often, she later gets burned by it, whether it be "regret" from what might have been (career-wise) or left much worse off finanical-wise than the husband in case of divorce. Moreover, alot of times the "choice" she made to stay home in the first place is one influenced by societal norms, culture, and Disney movies.
But, I'm just saying, in my wife's case, she truly *relishes* the role of stay-at-home mother and has no current career ambitions outside the home. She definitely does have a choice and this is what she wants. Once our kids are older, she may (or may not) wish to pursue something else and I would support her unconditionally. Why is this so "weird"??
Finally, as per And you're dodging the question. Her ties don't put money in her pocket *now*, and your current employment means that, emotionally devastated as you might be, you'd still be able to afford a hotel room, and she wouldn't., my paycheck gets direct deposited into our joint checking account, to which she weilds most of the purchasing power. If we did get divorced, she has family around here she could stay with.
Perhaps, this last point is one unspoken in all of this discussion. The fact that our society values materialism and "me" and not enough generations of families helping each other. People are so sprawled out and busy, it places more weight of domestic chores on fewer individuals. But, I digress...
To answer you question, she has resources and family in an emergency. I understand alot of women today no longer have this saftey net of family around.
Regarding housework: everybody picks up their own shit. If you leave your stuff around, act like a slob and treat your partner like your maid, your crap goes in a garbage bag and into the trash, no discussion, no argument.
Simple! And it only takes one experience of "where is my favorite shirt?" to whip somebody into shape.
Dr. B said: "I agree that Hirshman's piece assumes modern capitalism as a given."
There's nothing wrong with this, except insofar as one of the goals
of feminism, at least as I understand it, is to elevate the status of work in the home. I think we'd agree on this.
"But otoh, the fact is that the society we live in now *does* value paid labor more than unpaid labor."
In some ways, yes, in other ways, no. I would counter that paid labor, in the modern sense, only became necessary and possible with the decline of agriculture, and that to this day the bulk of the workforce would rather be doing something else. There's no plumber emeritus. Hirshman's "flourishing" is a very rare condition, and is not intrinsically tied to feminism. In fact, I would argue that the way Hirshman sets up the ending of the article she's tied flourishing to a kind of neo-machismo. Machisma?
"a woman--is therefore making herself economically dependent on her husband, which reduces her power socially *and* domestically."
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing against this statement. I think people are disagreeing with Hirshman's valuation of that decision, particularly when it is deliberate.
To a certain extent, I think setting up the earlier NYT piece for attack is kind of a straw man. The idea that rich (and this means very rich) white girls ought to be assigned the job of role model, to act on behalf of the rest of femaledom (and this means the supermajority of women), strikes me as quite odd. This sets up the values of the former as the penultimate achievement (thereby devaluing the choices made or forced upon other women) and heaps scorn upon them when they don't fill their assigned role.
Really, I think the proper response to the NYT women is to simply laugh and then ignore them. They are irrelevant to feminism, except insofar as their blindness to their unparalleled privilege is humorous.
Just blogwhoring my response since live journal doesn't do trackbacks.
This is just my anecdote on the 2nd shift work.
-Nerdchik
Dude, TD, you're not getting out of this one. How fast and easily would your wife get hired if you got killed? Would her paycheck exceed the cost of daycare? If she were killed, would your paycheck exceed the cost of daycare? Opting out by using family as proxy daycare won't cut it: monetize the services she provides.
No Nym, I think you're skirting the issue. Yes, "flourishing" is a rare condition for women or men; but Hirshman says up front that she's talking about what we might as well call social elites, and there's good reason for that: we're dealing with the class of people who *do* truly have "choices" in that sense, and asking the question of whether those "choices," once they're no longer economically forced, are still forced by other things--the domestic glass ceiling, internalized sexism, whatever.
And I don't think her point is that "privileged white girls" (and why white?) should be high achievers just to provide role models--it certainly isn't mine. The point is that we have a class of people here who are highly (and expensively) educated and who have a great deal of potential power, and these people are "choosing" not to exercise that power--a decision that, multipled across a broad population, reinforces the dominance of men.
So many ways to make it work - or not. In the first years of our marriage each of us was the main wage-earner for several years while the other one pursued something that produced less or no income. When our kids were small we both worked at home and were able to share child-care and house-work. These days I work at home (I'm an artist and my studio is at home) and he works for a start-up with long hours and less flexibility but right now he also does most of the domestic stuff while I'm laid up with a broken ankle.
For us it has worked in a variety of ways over changing circumstances but the keys have been flexibility, communication and an egalitarian approach to who does what based on our own needs and our kids' needs. We are lucky though that we've been able to make choices based on our preferences not just on making ends meet. We've been quite broke on occasion since two non-traditional careers doesn't always equal anything like security.
We've caught the most flak from our families over the fact that our kids have my last name but eventually they all got used to it.
HEY! Lay off TD. I think you all miss his point - this is a decision they made in common. What would happen if SHE were to die? He tried to answer that divorce would hurt both of them. If he were to end up with the kids, do you think his lifestyle would be "the same"? BS.
I am not saying that things are equitable, only that choices are made, and those choices deserve respect.
Now lets talk about freedom from tryanny. Do you imagine TD's spouse has more freedom in her day, or TD? Let's "monetize" a life spent provididng for a family by committing intellectual slow suicide. How much is that worth? Do you all imagine men die sooner just becuase our telomeres wear out sooner?
BS.
We die because life eats us up. Monetize that, NoNym.
Jkae
Having separate bank accounts is not that difficult. It’s important for both partners to have economic power in a relationship and that means the ability to buy stuff without having to answer to anyone. Our household income comes in from various sources (my full-time job, my partner’s TA work (he’s a grad student), child support from a previous marriage (which isn’t being paid right now, but that’s because my ex-husband is an ass), government child bonus, partner’s scholarship money). All of the various kinds of income are automatically deposited into the “household chequing” account. Once a month, we sit down with the computer and move a portion of that money into the household savings account, take out some cash for household expenses, pay out the allowances to the kids, and we each transfer a portion into our own savings accounts.
This “personal money” is not an enormous amount – we want to buy a house and we’re putting away some of the joint money for that – but it’s an amount that we can count on, and it belongs to each of us alone, and it’s the SAME amount. If our income suddenly drops drastically, I can imagine sitting down and having a conversation about cutting back that amount (or conversely, talking about increasing it if we’re suddenly flooded with dough). But here’s what’s never going to happen: I am never going to be in the position (as I was in my early and ill-advised marriage) where I’m trying to scrounge savings out of the damn grocery budget by telling my toddler he can’t have broccoli this week because it’s $1.69 a pound and I’m pretty sure that next week it will go back down to $1.29, while my idiot husband is stopping on the way home from work to buy a new computer game.
(Because it was his money because he worked for it and if he wanted to spend it, he certainly had every right to.)
I’m no longer willing to live my life in such a way that the sacrifices always land on my head. And no one should have to do that. I don’t argue with the fact that relationships take work and compromise, but the work and compromise should be shared equally – if we both decided to get into this relationship, then we’re both in it. If you don’t want to be in it, let me know right now. If you can’t deal with equal work, that’s okay. I won’t be able to do it for you, but I’m perfectly willing to tell you that right upfront so that you don’t waste the time you might have spent hunting up somebody happy to wash your dishes.
I remember being in marriage counselling before the expiration of my marriage (actually, it didn’t so much expire as get strangled to death by me). Very nice, tan-panted, ‘sensitive’ male counsellor, asking me to think about what might be “underneath this complaint about sharing housework”. It was like this guy couldn’t believe that not willing to share housework was, in itself, a huge issue. Absolutely, this tendency might have said other things about my ex-husband – disrespectful of other people, lack of empathy, selfish, blah, blah, blah. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I didn’t think we needed to do a lot of further digging here. If he had slapped me in the face, there might be underlying reasons why he would think that was appropriate, but the crime’s been committed – I wouldn’t have to justify to a therapist why I was unwilling to put up with that, wouldn’t have to tell him the “real” reason it bothered me.
Oh, B, I loved this post.
I just went and read the article, and the one quibble I would have with it is that I think it's much more effective to talk about women needing to be in the labor market as a matter of self-sufficiency rather than abstract, airy notions of being "fully engaged" or status or "honor." I mean, I believe that everyone, simply by virtue of being an adult human, has an obligation to be able to take care of themselves. (I do agree with one of the above posters above about de-coupling the ideas of infant rearing, child rearing, and housework. Taking a couple of years off when you have an infant is a completely different ball of wax to me than bowing out of the labor force when your children are 8 or 12 or 15.)
Re-framing it as the necessity for all adults to be self-sufficient removes a lot of the validity for me of the arguments about "well, it's her choice!" I mean, my 21-year-old stepbrother would "choose" to stay at home and not work to support himself in a heartbeat, but most people would say that for able-bodied adults, that's not an acceptable decision. And the re-framing would also emphasize that it's not a matter of having to work a 60-hour-a-week corporate job. Hell, if freelancing part-time is enough to keep your skills up-to-date and enough money rolling in to provide for yourself and your dependents in a manner *acceptable to you* should that become necessary, I think that's awesome (and an option that more women should consider for a good work-life balance).
It's a really, really contentious issue and I think it's awesome to see one of my favorite bloggers take it on without becoming mealy-mouthed or apologetic. More power to you.
The reason we're arguing with TD is that his responses are trying to wrest the discussion away from questions of power and politics to individual "choice"--which is precisely the problem.
Jake - but not that one said: "Let's "monetize" a life spent provididng for a family by committing intellectual slow suicide."
Um, huh? If men had to buy the goods and services provided by their SAH spouses, the bill would run to tens of thousands a year. This is on top of the opportunity cost of the SAH spouse's decision to stay at home.
People are trading this, willingly, to raise their kids as they see fit. I'm not sure any tyranny is involved.
Saying that you'd never ever get unmarried, or that the SAH spouse can fall back on family, denies that there is either an opportunity cost or value for labor.
(Sorry if the second paragraph of the above post comes off as unduly harsh... I'm just trying to point out that there are many times that we don't let people off the hook just because they say, "Well, this is my choice, this is what I like to do better." Simply consciously choosing to do something does not remove it to a magical place where it can't be wrong, just because you thought about it. In any other area of life, most people would find that argument unconvincing. I find it unconvincing here, too.)
No Nym, I'm not sure what you're asking me? I've already said in not so many words that my wife's career as stay-at-home mom (by choice) is as important and as valuable, if not more so, than my outside-the-home career that happens to bring us in income. This is precisely the reason why I politely disagree with DrB's assertation that people like my wife have given up "domestic power". Quite the contrary, my wife is queen bee around here. Granted, I'm not some puppet that asks how high every time she says jump, but I do consider us very much equal overall even if we're primarily responsible for different things - things that we've settled upon after years of marriage. So, alot of them tend to be traditional, what's wrong with that?
If I got killed, no she wouldn't be able to find a job that pays what I earn and so wouldn't be able to live exactly the same way as she does now, but guess what? Either could I if something happened to her. Just because my salary would stay the same, I don't see how that equates to "quality of life" - if I don't have my wife and seeing all her talents and unique gifts working in action everyday!
queen, with respect to have economic power in a relationship that means the ability to buy stuff without having to answer to anyone, we're a single income family with one bank account, but believe me when I say we have EQUAL economic power. My wife does NOT have to answer to me when buying anything. If anything, it's the other way around!!!
DrB, please define what you mean by "economic and domestic power" if you think I'm off the point.
Dr. B said: "No Nym, I think you're skirting the issue. ... asking the question of whether those "choices," once they're no longer economically forced, are still forced by other things--the domestic glass ceiling, internalized sexism, whatever."
Hirshman, among others, wants very much to blame the system, since it would absolve individual women of guilt for running out on the roles she has assigned them. The title itself betrays this point.
There are two assumptions embedded in this style of argument. The first is that individuals are blown haplessly by the winds of society and cannot really perceive their own interests. This is the feminist version of "What's wrong with Kansas, anyway?"
The second, which subsumes the first, is that self-annointed elites get to assign roles and make these judgments in the first place. Deep down, these elites know that their values are in fact superior, if only they could somehow communicate it to those beknighted, traitorous Kansans.
"The point is that we have a class of people here who are highly (and expensively) educated and who have a great deal of potential power, and these people are "choosing" not to exercise that power"
Getting more women into the public sphere by lowering barriers to entry is a great idea. However, Hirshman is not about barriers. She wants the socks.
This talk of separate vs. joint bank accounts amuses me. My husband and I have had joint accounts all along. Except for when I was in the hospital, paying the bills has always been my job. And even though his income is currently 10 to 15 times mine (I work limited freelance hours), I buy things much more freely than he does. After 15 years, he's finally comfortable buying himself shoes or clothes without my sending him out to do so, but he still doesn't buy anything pricey without getting my approval. He'd love a video game console and a flat-screen TV, but I really don't want video games in the house, and I'm waiting for flat-screen prices and technologies to even out before we buy. If income = power and financial dependence = no household power, how come there's no Xbox in my house?
If I got killed, no she wouldn't be able to find a job that pays what I earn and so wouldn't be able to live exactly the same way as she does now,
TD--You really ought to have term life insurance with a large enough policy to make sure that she can maintain the same standard of living, if you die.
TD: I'm not saying anything about the choices you made. Mrs. Nym and I have similar arrangements. However, the decision to have one spouse be the dependent, even when deliberate, does reduce their economic independence.
I think much of this debate suffers from the idea that the public and private (home) spheres are really alternative. I would argue that they are orthogonal (albeit not independent). The fact that you and I have made certain arrangements doesn't make them easy or ideal, even for us.
No one's dissing your relationship (at least, not me). But if I had to actually pay Mrs. Nym a salary I would be in Chapter 11. There is no real way for her to to recoup costs should things go south. So we structure finances accordingly.
I guess I'd be interested in what DrB means by "power" because maybe I'm miscontruing it's meaning. I make a decent salary as a database programmer and believe I'm well respected within my department and somewhat influential, but I'm much more interested in "achievement" than I am "power". Just because I'm highly educated and work full-time, I should be interested in wielding power over other people? Why? I love what I do and I'm good at it. Is my wife not reaching her "full potential" just because she's educated but chooses not to rule over people in the outside world in a workplace environment? I'm confused.
thank you for blogging about this. I read the article yesterday via Atrios and wondered what you thought.
When i got married, we both took on hyphenated names. If we have kids, my husband is insistent that we give them my 'maiden' name because his last name is unwieldy and what happens to our kids when they get married and want to hyphenate? But since we don't have kids and aren't sure we will, that's really not a big deal.
We work to divide things equitably -- which is hard. I cook during the week and do laundry, because I'm in school and have a more flexible schedule while my husband commutes one hour each way. Next year, when I start working and having the longer commute, we'll shift the responsibilities. It's really not easy to decide what's fair -- he certainly cleans the house more than I do, but I feel that my daily chores make up for that.
I found it odd that no one has mentioned the choice not to have kids. that's where I'm at right now. I want to be a litigator. I want to go to court and fight it out. I don't see how to fit kids into that, short of hiring someone to care of any kids I might have. So if I can only spend minimal hours a week with any potential kid, why would I do it? My husband says I shouldn't so much about it -- he was raised by a single mom doctor. But he had nightmares about her leaving on a rocket often during his childhood.
No Nym, I think what you're saying is kinda similar to my reaction to the author's argument at the end about why we should care about the "elite women." Me, I think the entire article would be much more effective if she up and said, just because this small, privileged subset of women *can* choose to opt-out of being self-sufficient, doesn't make it a feminist choice or unproblematic or one that we shouldn't discourage. ("What's wrong with Kansas? They have some structural disadvantages--my god! what to do with all that flat land!--but that does not relieve the responsibility of people in the state to think about how they vote." Better?)
11D presaged many of my sentiments:
"The barista at Starbucks today wasn't moved to great joy by pouring me a grande regular."
http://11d.typepad.com/blog/
2005...te_mommies.html
I second what Orange says! Where's my Xbox360 if I supposedly have some much economic and domestic power because I'm the "breadwinner"!?
Bostoniangirl, got it! (big life insurance policy)
No Nym, I don't dispute the "economic dependence" part is a risky consequence, I just don't buy the assertation that it automatically equates to a "power" imbalance (see Orange's comments, DrB!)
I don't know how useful this is as a parallel, but the point of the article reminded me of the issue of women and politics in Russia. I don't have any helpful statistics and links, and I did this reading several years ago, but the gist is this: Many Russian women seem to be completely uninterested in politics because the viewed it as too sordid, rough-and-tumble and "dirty." They find it unappealing and uninteresting. Unfortunately, I can't find statistics on percentages of Russian women voting as opposed to men (perhaps they vote in equal numbers even though many are 'uninterested', I'm not sure). Women make up only around 8% of the Duma, down from around 13% in 1993.
One could argue that Russian women's choices not to be involved in or to follow politics is not an equally valid feminist choice since it does nothing to lessen the male heirarchy in Russia today. Or is it all part of their freedom to choose to not be a part of the system? Or is all my Russia info outdated and useless as an analogy?
I don't mean this as a direct criticism of mothers who choose to stay home, I'm just wondering if this analogy is apt, and what other people have to say about it.
P.S., Sorry the scholarship here is so sloppy...If I had more time, I'd try to find some nice quotes and statistics.
AB said: ""What's wrong with Kansas? They have some structural disadvantages--my god! what to do with all that flat land!--but that does not relieve the responsibility of people in the state to think about how they vote.""
Hehe. I have gone on and on about this subject in these threads for a while now. Your statement about Kansans implies that they really didn't think too hard about how they ought to vote.
I would argue that they did. Except they did it in church and at the waffle house instead of the nurse in at Borders. It's easy to assume that your ideological foes are stupid or ignorant. Some are, some aren't.
TD, I think "power" here is more the power to negotiate, to stand firm, and to leave if things are unacceptable. It's the same way that you can think about "power" in the workplace as having saved up a nice little emergency fund, so that if your boss wants to demote you, or make you take on undesirable or unethical tasks, or whatever, you have the power negotiate about that from a position of strength. (Which comes from your ability to walk off the job and be OK for a couple of months until you find another one.)
Just because you really like your job, and get a lot of pleasure out of it, and you think your boss would never ask you to do something that you really, really didn't want to do, doesn't mean it's not still a good idea to have that e-fund.
TD asks: "Where's my Xbox360"
Dude, don't bother. Them things are having major power supply issues, and the hardware is due to change in about 6 months. Not that you should go Sony at this point, either.
DrB, I don't get it. The question is about power and politics, but we are talking about relationships? Relationships ARE personal choice. You spoke of enforcing equality in a relationship, about two checking accounts, about taking responsibility to ensure that "power" is equal within the relationship. I agree with all those things. So, apprentley, does TD. Yet, and inevitably, compromises must be made. One partner will ALWAYS have economic power, as long as one works outside the home an the other within. Let's turn this question around, and ask when the day will come when MEN can have a job AND a family?
NoNym, what is slow suicide worth? How much is 4 years (if you reach 55), of life worth? I maintain that once you get past teenage years and reach retirement years, the difference in life expetancy can be at least partly attributed to what men (and now more than ever, women) put up wiht in the work place.
I wonder what life expectancy is for women whose husbands are in their hourly spere of activity. At least in a traditional relationship where the man is the boss. It wouldn't surprise me if women did not experience eual or shorter life spans. There is some truth to the old saw about retirement being bad for marriages.
Jake
TD said: "I just don't buy the assertation that it automatically equates to a "power" imbalance"
Hehe. This may be a legit feminist argument, in an ideal world. Here on earth, though, power = money. I don't think Dr. B was talking about power within the relationship so much as how easily dependent spouses can move on to other things.
No Nym, I don't actually agree with the whole "What's wrong with Kansas" thing. It seems absurd to me that someone can argue that Midwesterner Republicans are acting irrationally by voting their social beliefs rather than economic self-interest, but when a liberal does it (like this girl right here, whose support for abortion rights supercedes the fact that Republicans would be kinder to my pocketbook) it's somehow completely different.
I was just using your analogy, that's all.
A real thought-provoking post, but I think this is the most important part, and nobody is discussing it:
all of this is, in the end, easier said than done. It's really very difficult not to internalize the fear of pursuing power and status and convince oneself that one wants neither and it's also very difficult not to internalize the fucked-up priorities of a fucked-up society and convince oneself that power and status are more important than a balanced life.
Let's be honest for a minute. Is this realistic? Why do people get PhDs and try to secure employment in Universities? For the same reason auto workers go to the assembly line, or stock clerks show up at Wal Mart? This gets to core questions of identity, and I know Dr. B. wants to keep this discussion on the societal level, but I think a major reason one pursues academic work, or professional work that allows for any kind of creativity and intelligent expression (to be clear: I'm not saying assembly-line labor or working in the service industries automatically denies this, but its generally a perk for white-collar employment) is because our identities are so intertwined with our mental capabilities. Unlike most people, we have been rewarded with grades and opportunities that - in many cases - are not necessarily deserved. Many of us believe our capacity for deep thought/reflection and complex communication, and the opportunity to be paid for these skills, is a natural outcome of a meritocratic system. Thus, I would argue, the pursuit of status is more organically intertwined with our identities and subconscious than we know. And I'm not talking simple shit like "biology is destiny" here. I mean, this whole post and discussion points to very obvious questions *everyone* needs to ask themselves about their life and work. Questions like: who are you? and why do you do the work you do?
*Sorry for length, and the psychobabble turn at the end there.
Re: banking
Separate accounts seemed like a hassle to me and my husband (although if our bank wasn't a pain, we might feel differently). Instead, we've got one joint checking account. Within that, though, I keep track of how much personal money each of us has - kind of like a virtual account. 'His Personal Money' and 'Her Personal Money' are just two more monthly budget items. Any money unspent (or overspent) carries over to the next month. It isn't actually any extra work for me (but only because I'm so compulsive about finances to begin with - I'm a spreadsheet maniac).
Jake - but not that one said: "what is slow suicide worth?"
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that being a SAH parent is slow suicide, or that joining the workforce is slow suicide?
"I maintain that ... the difference in life expetancy can be at least partly attributed to what men ...put up wiht in the work place."
Well, that may be true. But thanks to the death of agriculture as a way of life the expectancy has climbed much higher, warts and all.
Hurrah, Bitch! Fantastic manifesto.
Anecdata: My parents raised us five kids (3 girls, 2 boys) with the idea that you always, always had to be able to making a living. Idealism was nice, but strictly secondary to survival. My mom stopped her paid work outside of the home when the third kid came along, but she maintained her volunteer connections throughout our entire childhood and went back to work as soon as she could. Even so, my mom would be in real trouble if my parents divorced due to her comparatively low lack of income. At least, however, she is working. I know she's relieved by that.
The reason they pushed this so hard is that they both experienced early on what it was to be reliant on somebody else for money and then have that rug pulled out from under them: my father was orphaned by age 19, leaving him with three younger sisters to support. My mother had her parents decide that only the boys in the family were worth educating, and unexpectedly refused to support her if she went to college. The experience left them determined that their kids would never be financially vulnerable if they had any say in it.
And things do happen. We've had two family friends in their thirties die of cancer, leaving behind families. One a mom who was SAH, one a dad with a SAH wife. There is absolutely no question that the family where the SAH wife died is doing better, and the reason is financial. The father had enough economic clout to take a leave of absence to care for his young, motherless kids for awhile, but when the time came, he returned immediately to a high salary. His years in the workplace guaranteed him a spot. His kids got counseling, private schools where they were accomodated, etc., because he could afford it. They are obviously still grieving terribly, but they are managing.
The surviving SAH mom and her family, on the other hand, are struggling terribly. Yes, they had life insurance, but that disappeared very quickly in medical bills, childcare, job retraining for her. The kids didn't get the counseling, the private schools, etc. She didn't have the luxury of taking extensive time to care for her kids after her husband died, because she had to get herself ready for the the work place quickly. And it's been really, really hard. She was able to land a job, after a long time searching, making less than half what her husband had made before he died. She has a lot of community and family support, but it does not make up for the lack of income. Yes, the structure of our society is wrong, etc. etc. but that is not consolation to a struggling widow trying to raise her kids.
On my husband's side, he had to watch his mother struggle terribly after being left by her husband when the kids were teenagers and she'd been out of the job market for years.
We're probably more paranoid than some because of this history, but my husband and I feel strongly that it is our duty as parents to not leave either ourselves or our son financially exposed. We have no safety net in this country, and our "choices" are driven by that truth. I stayed home with our son for a year after he was born, but set up the circumstances such that I was guaranteed a return slot in the working world: I took a year off from law school. My husband may scale back his career at some point, but will always work.
And yes, it bugs the hell out of me. I wish that our society recognized the value in child-raising, so that families can make a true choice to have a SAH parent without worrying about catastrophe.
It grinds me that women choose to stay home and retreat from the big stage of life in their most vital years. I did that and paid a big price for it. It was a stupid waste of time, for the most part. Luckily, I was able to recoup some of what I lost later on, but I never got as far in my career as I would have liked to.
I agree with the poster who said way up the thread somewhere that we need to stop treating women's issues as "lifestyle choices." Look at all the ground we're losing now, with Roe v.Wade possibly on the way out. Who would ever have thought that could happen? What rights will women lose next? This is the most obvious manifestation of a crisis that should put all women on deck.
Everywhere I look, pioneering women in education, law,and politics are losing out to male colleagues, because they don't have enough support from female peers.I think it's because too many privileged women have retreated into private life, leaving their working sisters to struggle on outnumbered.
I'm glad my daughters have not done this. They figure out how to do what they need to do, and do it!They support other women and are supported themselves. They are young, strong, vital people. They know they are supposed to work very hard and accomplish things, for god's sake! They can rest up when they get old.
PorJ said: "Many of us believe our capacity for deep thought/reflection and complex communication, and the opportunity to be paid for these skills, is a natural outcome of a meritocratic system. Thus, I would argue, the pursuit of status is more organically intertwined with our identities and subconscious than we know."
Jonathan Haidt, and to a lesser extent Judith Rich Harris, argue that morality and personality emerge from social interactions. Haidt in particular argues that we obtain our sense of morality first, and then we paste our "reasoning" over the top of it as a simple rationalization. Both theorists have some evidence in their favor.
From this orientation attacks on privileged white girls isn't so much a problem of the system or the individual agent, but their interaction (and their unique history of interactions).
The only person I know of who has examined this in depth in any kind of social justice context is Susan Oyama.
http://www.metanexus.net/metanex...iendly.asp?
9344
Her work is the reason I keep arguing that too much of modern liberalism actively denies individual agency. To wit, the problem with Kansas is the person asking the question.
Oops: to clarify. I believe there is NO meritocracy at work here, and those who believe it are sadly mistaken. Its conforting to think so, but that's not how life works.
What I meant above was I don't believe we're all just Pavlov's dogs, hunting down the next reward because society conditions us to do so. I believe the kind of radical reconceptualization of the self (in terms of re-orienting the meaning of work to the ego) that Dr. B. proposes is far more difficult than, say, teaching children that racism is evil, or that women and men deserve equal pay for equal work. I mean, shit, we haven't even done a very good job on that yet...
transmogriflaw said: "anecdata"
OOOOOOOH. That's cool. Tell you what, I'll use that if you'll spread around "pernicious bollocks."
http://www.bookslut.com/blog/
arc...5_06.php#005866
NoNym, most work for someone else is slow suicide. Women, and men, who work at home managing a family are healthier than than their spouses. Or so I believe.
Maybe I just work in a weird part of American business. But I know of no-one who doesn't find their work life stressful in all the negative ways, and for those with sah spouses, whose spouses are not happier and healthier, regardless of sex. Maybe it's just where I work.
It's all about choice. When you choose to give 60 hours a week to someone else so you can provide for a family, you give up a lot - and some of it you don't even know about until it's waaaay too late.
Jake
No Nym: I think I understand your point, but I know of no (serious, secular) theorist who would dispute that: morality and personality emerge from social interactions. Of course. That's what I mean about just how intertwined the meaning of work is with our conception of self. We don't know where the egg ends and the chicken begins. And a lot of people would rather not know, because it could really upset the balance of the universe....
[Correction: Studies like these do, in fact, offer evidence of a genetic basis for some personality traits. And anyone with a child knows that personality is a tricky thing. But obviously I agree with No Nym that the overriding factor is societal, not genetic. But again, its really tremendously difficult to draw these lines, isn't it?
transmogriflow--Life insurance isn't subject to estate taxes. A middle-aged man with a SAHW ought to have a policy worth at least a million dollars, preferabbly 2 or 3.
PorJ said: "We don't know where the egg ends and the chicken begins."
Well, one interpretation of Haidt is that there's no such thing as an honest political position. We assemble them out of what we're given and then paste on our rationalization later. This makes elitism doubly problematic: first because they claim to know better, second because there's no basis for that claim. The standard liberal trope is that they know better.
"I agree with No Nym that the overriding factor is societal, not genetic."
Well, I'm not arguing this. In fact I'm arguing that dividing blame reduces humans to puppets. Then we get to fight about who will be puppeteer. yay!
See the Oyama link I provided upthread for a serious treatment of this.
Another thought: I see above some recommendations for life insurance as a safety net. I agree life insurance is absolutely critical to survive the death of the earning partner, but from the observation of our friend, it is NOT enough. They had excellent life insurance, and she is still struggling financially.
It is not sufficient to have life insurance that brings in enough money to maintain the family income at X level for Y years, even where Y is a long period of time. That presumes that at the end of Y years, the remaining spouse will have the income to pick up at X level. This is not an accurate assumption. First of all, job retraining (grad school, what have you) is extremely pricy and elevates yearly output substantially. If there is a lot of money in the bank, you cannot qualify for good financial aid. Second of all, if the working spouse dies of a long, debilitating illness, there will be tremendously expensive bills to pay even with good health insurance. Third, employers are ageist and so even if you manage to get retrained, there will be market bias against somebody who has been out of the workforce for years, so the odds of earning X salary are low. Fourth, as kids grow, costs go up, not down, and that has to be accounted for. Fifth, with the SAH partner suddenly forced to work, childcare costs will jump tremendously, so X salary may not be enough even if it can be earned.
Life insurance provides a cushion, but the fundamental problem of financial exposure remains.
Pernicious bollocks!
Jake - but not that one said: "NoNym, most work for someone else is slow suicide."
Gotcha. See my comments upthread about plumbers emeritus. Life used to be nasty, brutish, and short. Now it's nasty, less brutish, and about 4x longer.
I think lots of folk would envy rich people who can sit at home. Hirshman wants us to be hatin on them.
Look, economic dependence is dependence. TD, it really bothers me that you continue to assert you are not in a position of control in your own home. You are. You are the sole income earner. If you and your wife are not getting along, it’s easy for you to leave. Not only is it harder for her to leave, it’s harder for her to let you leave. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for you to acknowledge that she’s making that calculation all of the time, every day. You don’t have to think about it in those terms because the choice is on your side.
Not exercising power is not the same as not having power. You may not threaten your wife with the withdrawal of your financial support, but she knows you could make that threat.
And he will have to decide if he is willing to listen to you bitch at him about it for the rest of his life, or if it would be easier to get up off his ass and do his fair share, or if he is so unwilling to get up off his ass that he would rather divorce you than be forced to notice how unfair he's being.
Speaking as the male who happens to be much more domestic (no, not Martha Stewartish, just more so) then the girlfriend, I think devaluing the scutwork is part of the nature of things. She doesn't want to do it (face it, she's pretty seriously slobby), so she doesn't think it's important, so she doesn't think it's important when I come in and clean (which I tend to do at random intervals based on the 'nobody should live like this' theory).
If anything is 'socially constructed' housework responsibilities and not getting paid for them is. On the other hand:
No Nym: Hirshman, among others, wants very much to blame the system, since it would absolve individual women of guilt for running out on the roles she has assigned them. The title itself betrays this point. There are two assumptions embedded in this style of argument. The first is that individuals are blown haplessly by the winds of society and cannot really perceive their own interests. This is the feminist version of "What's wrong with Kansas, anyway?"
Ja. If you won't get the science degree, you won't get into the science department. If you won't use the degree you have you won't make any money. If you use the degree you have, but won't work the hours, you won't get the promotions. If you don't do the work, you don't get the cookie.
Hirschmann seemed to be dancing around, over and under that point without making it.
Why the young ladies LH polled react as they do is another matter.
ash
['Hrmm.']
I am yet another woman who decided to stay home once her child was born. Correction, I didn't really decide to do this, I just found myself wanting to stay home, particularly during my child's first two years. I am late-thirties and am ABD. I do not anticipate finishing the dissertation, but that is a whole other topic.
My question after reading Hirshman's piece is who WILL care for my child, then? Some here have raised the issue that nannies and day care employees are not very well remunerated for their work. Many of these women, if not most, have no health insurance through their employer. Taking the nanny option out, as it is affordable to only a very few, day care is acceptable, but only barely. Kids in day care are sick more often. A recent study showed that though they have better reading and math skills, they often have more social problems [though only just barely, admittedly].
I wanted to be with my child for his first two years at least, as all medical evidence points to strong health benefits of extended nursing for the mother and the child. I also wanted to keep my child with me because I suspect that a day care center, no matter how good, encourages a kind of conformity. I have major concerns about the spectre of standardized tests in public schools and other ways in which they enforce conformity. If I want to raise a child who will have the courage, the intelligence and the interest in challenging the status quo, oughtn't I start setting that example?
Yes, it will be important for him to see me fulfilling myself, eventually.
And, yes, our family will need more money, too. We are only able to fund a SAH lifestyle by living incredibly frugally, but there are many benefits to this: we simply consume fewer resources. I accept the tenents of feminism articulated in this article, and in Dr. B's post, but for me, for us, the war is elsewhere right now. We are at war with a society that demands we buy more and more things and with a government that won't take adequate care of ANYONE. We are trying to carve a space for ourselves outside of these two terrors. Of course I have reflected on the fact that I could be working somewhere where I can influence policy and my shouting can be heard by more powerful people. But for me, right now, what is most important is slowing down the pace of our life, respecting ourselves and one another. So far, it is working.
i gave my daughter my partners last name before i got feminism. that led on to my son also taking his last name, because i wanted the kids to be the same. now i have a huge dilemma. i want them to have my name. im still with my partner. he says if thats what i want then he'll go with it, but hes worried that its gonna insult his family. and its gonna cost money too. so what do i do? am i being selfish changing their names to mine at this stage?
Thanks for getting the ball rolling with your great post, Prof B.
The relation between the glass ceiling at work and the glass ceiling at home is often where I see people experiencing doubt and pain, whether they have good work or not, good communication with a partner or not, parenting responsibilities or not. I'm always happpy to see when couples are able to arrive at a mutually satisfying arrangement, but too often I see one partner grinding teeth while the other blithely coasts on privilege. Yes, there are lots of possible arrangements, but that pesky power issues is why I'm a feminist.
I'm an academic who never married, by choice. Like transmogriflaw, it had to do crappy family experiences and my pledge that I would never be financially dependent on anyone. Ironically, I thought I'd never have kids either until I got pregnant at age 36 due to birth control failure. Now I'm a single mom by choice, no regrets, no child support, but an unorthodox and lovely arrangement with my daughter's two dads (long story). I am no longer able to work the 60-70 hours a week I worked before I got tenure/got pregnant (got the news on the same day!) and my academic career has slumped because I'm not superwoman. My biggest struggle, along the lines of what Prof B and PorJ point out, has been with what I've internalized about my own value in relationship to my identity as an academic.
Being a money geek, the financial advice is excellent from Dr. B. Ladies (women) take heed.
One piece of defense work, lots of conservative men are married to strong women and we do just fine with that, as do our wives. That sterotype of the bible thumping cave man is just a little too broad.
(I do the laundry but she never cleans the gutters, so just who is the boss??)
Having taught and mentored many successful women, there is no single "menu" approach that makes life work for them. We all make decisions, we all make mistakes, and we all make corrections.
FWIW, there's a really good discussion about this article over at 11D which takes rather a different perspective (i.e., she hates it). Just thought people might want to check it out.
Ooops, duplicated No Nym - sorry.
In my opinion, the dismissal of "choice" asserts a false consciousness on the part of stay-at-home moms. How can Hirshman divine my preferences better than I can for myself? Like many opt-outers, I worked long hours at an unfulfilling office job, and felt thoroughly alienated by it, despite the fact that it paid very well (we lived quite well on my income while my husband was in grad school, earning next to nothing). I can't say as I love vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms, but I also get ample aid from my husband to accomplish household tasks--and when I was working those long hours, he pretty much took over them entirely. And I find the time I spend with my daughter extremely pleasurable. When she's a little older, I'll go back to work, hopefully with a career change (which, ironically, is one of those no-no female-dominated professions) that I hope will be much less alienating.
About the one child policy--if you want only one child, that's fine. I'm an only child, and it isn't a terrible thing. But the idea that I should give up something that I believe would make *me* very happy (more children) for some nebulous notion of serving the feminist revolution, well, that's really stupid, frankly. I love being a mommy, and I want to experience that as fully as I can. If I hadn't found pregnancy such a medically challenging experience, I think I would want an entire brood. I can't see how the feminist revolution is served if women are following lock-step along with something that actively makes them unhappy.
I've only managed to get through about half the comments, but I wonder if I'm the only hetero guy who has higher cleanliness standards than his partner. I've had to learn to accept when she does something not up to the standard I would do it. Otherwise, I'd have to do it myself. Quite sensibly, she gets annoyed when I comment on the quality of her vacuuming or clothes folding. She was an only child whose mother bought her designer jeans and washed them too. I grew up with 8 siblings, wore Tough Skins and had a "chore chart" that needed to be checked daily. She's gotten much better too. I almost stopped dating her when I first saw her apartment.
We combined our last names for official uses, but continue to use our given names in daily life. That way we can avoid confusion at our son's Drs appointment and what not. Our Driver's Licenses both have the same name as his.
We do not have much money but still keep 5 bank accounts, most free but earning no interest. Both of us are on three accounts. One checkbook goes to pay the mortgage and utilities, a fixed amount goes in each month. We have no bank card for this account. One checkbook pays for other family expenses, any surplus is divided for our discretionary money. We each have a bank card for this one. One savings account has our joint savings. Then we each have our own account with the small amount of discretionary money we manage to squirrel away.
I came up with a 2 checking account strategy before I was married precicely because I was on a super tight budget but too lazy to vigilantly balance the checkbook. I didn't want to bounce a rent (later mortgage) check because I took $40 out at an ATM.
I don't know how useful this is as a parallel, but the point of the article reminded me of the issue of women and politics in Russia. I don't have any helpful statistics and links, and I did this reading several years ago, but the gist is this: Many Russian women seem to be completely uninterested in politics because the viewed it as too sordid, rough-and-tumble and "dirty." They find it unappealing and uninteresting. Unfortunately, I can't find statistics on percentages of Russian women voting as opposed to men (perhaps they vote in equal numbers even though many are 'uninterested', I'm not sure). Women make up only around 8% of the Duma, down from around 13% in 1993.
One could argue that Russian women's choices not to be involved in or to follow politics is not an equally valid feminist choice since it does nothing to lessen the male heirarchy in Russia today. Or is it all part of their freedom to choose to not be a part of the system? Or is all my Russia info outdated and useless as an analogy?
I don't mean this as a direct criticism of mothers who choose to stay home, I'm just wondering if this analogy is apt, and what other people have to say about it.
P.S., Sorry the scholarship here is so sloppy...If I had more time, I'd try to find some nice quotes and statistics.
Mrs. Coulter,
No one is dismissing your ability to choose to stay home and love being a mommy. What is being dismissed are two broader issues: first, that you could come to this decision totally free and independent from all the social/institutional baggage that being a stay at home wife and mother in our patriarchal society comes with, and second, that this decision is one that should be lauded and held up as one that is good for women in a quest for social and economic equality between the sexes.
Or maybe your post was a joke? I don't know, the name....
I don't know how useful this is as a parallel, but the point of the article reminded me of the issue of women and politics in Russia. I don't have any helpful statistics and links, and I did this reading several years ago, but the gist is this: Many Russian women seem to be completely uninterested in politics because the viewed it as too sordid, rough-and-tumble and "dirty." They find it unappealing and uninteresting. Unfortunately, I can't find statistics on percentages of Russian women voting as opposed to men (perhaps they vote in equal numbers even though many are 'uninterested', I'm not sure). Women make up only around 8% of the Duma, down from around 13% in 1993.
One could argue that Russian women's choices not to be involved in or to follow politics is not an equally valid feminist choice since it does nothing to lessen the male heirarchy in Russia today. Or is it all part of their freedom to choose to not be a part of the system? Or is all my Russia info outdated and useless as an analogy?
I don't mean this as a direct criticism of mothers who choose to stay home, I'm just wondering if this analogy is apt, and what other people have to say about it.
P.S., Sorry the scholarship here is so sloppy...If I had more time, I'd try to find some nice quotes and statistics.
I wish I could respond to the interesting points, especially the exchange between No Nym and PoJ re. autonomy and meritocracy, but I have too much shit to do this afternoon.
Ms. C., I don't think the point is that women should have fewer kids/work for pay to serve "the revolution." I think the point is that both of those serve the self-interest of ambitious women and the economic self-interest (and hence, social/economic power) of all women.
"The point is that we have a class of people here who are highly (and expensively) educated and who have a great deal of potential power, and these people are "choosing" not to exercise that power--a decision that, multipled across a broad population, reinforces the dominance of men."
In other words, by staying home I've completely let down my entire sex. Thanks for laying that on my shoulders.
Dina,
Good lord, nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything we do is fraught with meaning. But I think it is dismissive and demeaning to say that women who spend time home with their children are necessarily undermining the feminist revolution, or that it is *unfeminist* to have more than one child or enjoy taking care of your children (or, apparently, working fulltime in a less-well-remunerated social do-gooder job) more than climbing the corporate ladder.
The biggest problem with Hirshman's argument is that her solution is not to strive to make the workplace more accommodating to people (not just women) with families, but for women to tailor their personal choices to the demands of a male-dominated workplace.
Her advice to young women is to marry according to retrograde social criteria (when possible marry an older, successful man, marry down (turning older advice on its head, I suppose, but it doesn't make it any less retrograde), pursue high-paying jobs even if you would rather do something else, simply because it doesn't pay as well, and if you really must have a child, have only one. Then she invokes "personal autonomy" and utilitarianism as her justifications! I certainly find that bizarre.
Lastly--like many bloggers, I use a pseudonym. Google "His Dark Materials" for info.
Dr. B:
Hirshman sets up *rules* and denies that childcare can be fulfilling (I wonder if she thinks the female daycare workers who care for my daughter two days a week while I'm in school are betraying the feminist revolution, or if it's different for them because they're probably not members of the social elite). Perhaps you have a different reading of this paragraph?
These choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.
BostonianGirl,
Life insurance is a good idea. If you qualify that is. Many people cannot get it at any possible price.
I never had the illusion of being secure should my husband die while I was at home with the kids, because he falls into the "uninsurable" category. That is why I continued to pursue an advanced degree part-time and jumped back into the workforce part-time soon as they were off the boob.
It is also how I convuinced my MIL to provide some childcare too. Otherwise I don't think she would have put herself out to do *my* job.
In any case, it served us well when the dotcom boom went blip.
One other point I didn't see here: it is possible for both partners to share in work/income that is satisfying and share home duties too. We long ago figured that it takes about 60 hours a week of adult at work time to make the finances work. The closer to spitting that we come, the happier we all are.
If we are going to be offering advice on how to live one's life, then I do not think that conceiving of one's choices as political is helpful.
Should one take one's partner's name? Maybe. Is it more important to your partner? Does it matter more to you? Will not doing so cause enormous conflict with his or her family? Vice versa? All these questions are relevant. Reducing the issue to one of political power simply distracts one from the real question: which option will better enhance my life?
Ditto for joint bank accounts and the like. I think it is prudent to consider just how much of a risk one is willing to take in getting married. Some might like the idea of a total commitment to the relationship, and the sense of collaboration that may come with it. Others might consider that love can fade and relationships can change, that a plan B would only be wise, and so they plan and act accordingly.
Again, the issue is which option would better enhance that individual's life. There is no one correct option, much less a politically correct option.
Also, I simply disagree with the combative tone of much of the advice that is offered here. One's relationship with one's partner/spouse should be open and considerate, and in part based upon dialogue and mutual respect. If one does not like the current arrangement, a frank dialogue would be far more fruitful than a sudden and uncompromising change. I don't think that asking what kind of "signal" one type of behavior or another sends is very useful---at least not prior to a discussion.
If a relationship is treated as antagonistic, it will become antagonistic. And what's the point of an antagonistic marriage?
First of all, neither I nor, I believe, Hirshman is passing *judgment* on individual women, and I explicitly said that I can't and won't judge individuals for making whatever compromises they deem necessary with their social realities. I've talked about my own compromises with social reality in other blog posts.
On the reading of that paragraph, I think the key issues are "autonomy to direct one's own life" and utilitarianism. Economic dependence severely hampers autonomy, sad to say. And while I'm willing to discuss this, I do rather suspect that from a utilitarian point of view, staying home while a kid is in school *does* achieve a lot less good than working for pay in any kind of halfway decent job. I'd even go so far as to say that staying home *all the time* before a kid enters school, imho, isn't especially good for the kid: my son had paid and unpaid caregivers, friends and family, who would take care of him on a regular basis starting at three hours/day when he was about three months old. It worked up to about 6-8 hours/day when he was two. I honestly believe that this was *better for his development* than spending all that time with one primary caregiver would have been--but then again yes, I believe he was getting high-quality care (and I paid $8-10 / hour).
Obviously a major part of the underlying issue is, and will continue to be, the fact that most workplaces are not child-friendly. But in theory, I really do think that the popular conception of the nuclear family--one partner works for money, one takes on primary / exclusive responsibility for childcare, and these two people are pretty much entirely responsible for their own familial well-being--really isn't the best possible arrangement for children's emotional, intellectual, or economic well being.
Andrew, baloney. All the advice I've offered is based on things I have actually done; and my marriage is not at all antagonistic. It's quite committed, respectful, and we communicate very well, thank you. In fact, my point is I believe our marriage is committed and respectful *because* a part of our communication means thinking these issues through and making decisions based on having done so.
one piece of the excellent post on this that has not to my knowledge been discussed here and than MOST hit home for me (recently married, heterosexual woman in a PhD program) was the following:
" It's really very difficult not to internalize the fear of pursuing power and status and convince oneself that one wants neither, and it's also very difficult not to internalize the fucked-up priorities of a fucked-up society and convince oneself that power and status are more important than a balanced life."
Exactly. exactly. exactly. I never could have articulated this so well. Thanks
Re: AB's comment that
"I don't actually agree with the whole 'What's wrong with Kansas' thing. It seems absurd to me that someone can argue that Midwesterner Republicans are acting irrationally by voting their social beliefs rather than economic self-interest . . ."
This isn't Frank's point at all in his book. I can't tell for sure if you're attributing this view to him by invoking the title of his book, but if you are, you're making a straw man out of him.
Dr. B said: "I don't think the point is that women should have fewer kids/work for pay to serve "the revolution." I think the point is that both of those serve the self-interest of ambitious women and the economic self-interest (and hence, social/economic power) of all women."
Maybe. Usually it's better to tell Ms. Grundy to take her own personal notions of self interest and stuff them.
Mrs. Coulter said: "I wonder if she thinks the female daycare workers who care for my daughter two days a week while I'm in school are betraying the feminist revolution"
Personally, I think that once we have robotic incubators and fully automated daycare, this whole issue will evaporate.
I was thinking more about some of the comments than your post when I mentioned a combative tone. And I certainly did not mean to imply that anyone's marriage or partnership was antagonistic. I should have been clearer.
It's wonderful that things have worked well for you and your partner. But surely you would agree that some partners might come, after similarly frank discussions, to different decisions that work well for them? My only point is that these are decisions that really can only be made on the individual level, with the particular needs, strengths, and weaknesses of a particular relationship in mind.
Hirshman relies, to be blunt, on cheaply glib characterizations of family life and equally glib characterizations of flourishing in order to generate a broad prescription for how women should live their lives. Life's just more varied and complex. I think many people are reacting strongly to Hirshman because her arguments fail to fully account for the validity and worth of choices different than the ones she might make herself.
Actually, I really do think that she is passing judgment on individual women. She writes that "educated women who make these choices are leading lesser lives". That's not merely a general statement about women as a class--it's about women who make that specific choice. You may not cast judgment, but she does.
While Hirshman has many valid points, I think that her "rules" are very much in contradiction to "autonomy," since they require girls to make choices based on *her* ideological preferences, rather than on what they understand as their own preferences. As I wrote above, nothing occurs in a vacuum, but it seems to me contrary to the very fundamental idea of personal autonomy to define others' preferences for them.
While you may be correct that continuing to stay home after children are in school full-time may provide less social utility than returning to the workforce, nothing in Hirshman's article suggests that her ideas about the different value of staying home vs. working fulltime in a high-paying corporate job is differentiated by the age of the child.
As for the financial dependence aspect, you are right that staying at home means that you are financially dependent on someone else. However, if I told you that I originally quit my job to go back to school, would your evaluation of the financial dependence involved change? Or that my husband was financially dependent on me when he was in grad school? Or that the decision to delay completing school was made mindfully, with a thorough evaluation of the costs and benefits involved? Or that my husband had planned to take a full semester of paternity leave to care for our child while I worked on my degree and that his department turned down the request? The fact of the matter is that in any marriage, the partners provide one another with all sorts of support, and that there are always compromises and adjustments to be made. I know you know all this, because you have written intelligently on this in the past, but Hirshman appears to dismiss all this as false consciousness. We can't have decided together that this was the best thing for our family--instead, she writes that it is a bad choice for me, because she thinks that it necessarily reproduces traditional family relationship.
Just so it's clear that there's a reason for noting Frank's real view -- his book is more about how people have become confused about what's in their best interest, and how this confusion conduces to the well-being of a small elite. He means much more by that than "economic self interest." His view is more closely related to this point:
"It's really very difficult not to internalize the fear of pursuing power and status and convince oneself that one wants neither, and it's also very difficult not to internalize the fucked-up priorities of a fucked-up society and convince oneself that power and status are more important than a balanced life."
It's the internalizing of fucked-up priorties that he's on about.
Mrs. Coulter said: "nothing occurs in a vacuum, but it seems to me contrary to the very fundamental idea of personal autonomy to define others' preferences for them."
Ditto.
No bonus points though, since you didn't put scare quotes around "personal autonomy."
Jennifer said: "It's the internalizing of fucked-up priorties that he's on about."
Yes. In his mind Kansas has been brainwashed. They couldn't recognize a rational evaluation of priorities if it bit them on the ass.
I would love to write a well-thought out, pithy comment to add to all this, but I am a single mom who gave up her career to move with her husband for his job, agreed to stay home with the child while he moved up at Microsoft, I got totally screwed in the divorce, so I have to get back to work and try to get more done before I have to go pick our son up at school.
Wow, DrB! You really believe "the popular conception of the nuclear family--one partner works for money, one takes on primary / exclusive responsibility for childcare, and these two people are pretty much entirely responsible for their own familial well-being--really isn't the best possible arrangement for children's emotional, intellectual, or economic well being"??? Ouch! So, who loves one's kids better than their parents!?!?
So, the fact that our daughter who is now in first grade (and who had spent enornmous amounts of time with her mother and me all day long from birth until kindergarten) and who is now in 1st grade and ranked first in her entire grade in reading is fluke? So, how much smarter could she be if we would have instead shipped her off to daycare all day and my wife worked at stressful job she hated just to have some "economic independence" from me?
That's unfair generalization on your part and you know better!
Zero tolerance for domestic assholishness!
I like the post, but I don't agree with the advice about bitching about house work. To me bitching just reinforces stereotypes about nagging wives and I think that men are likely just to tune it out. I think its better just to say, I'm not going to do X or Y, we need to sit down and make a chore chart.
If you know or suspect your partner is a lazy ass, then I am I firm believer in agreeing that everyone does his or her own goddamn laundry and dishes.
I certainly don't beleive in doing the chores whilst bitching, becuase not only will he probably not listen but also, you end up doing the chores anyway.
If your parter refuses to make a chore chart/ or refuses to do thier own damn dished they can just sit in a pile of thier own filth, and if this really bothers you and you make that clear to them , then they are obviously a selfish asshole and youd probably be better off slipting up or divorced.
TD, that is an unfair generalization--grossly unfair. It isn't, however, my generalization; it's yours.
There's a very American perspective here, and some of it is hinged, I believe, on health care costs.
Upstream, someone mentioned two friends: SAHM who died, SAHM whose husband died, and the SAHM who died's family is doing much better. They've received therapy, and they're in private schools, and their dad could take time off.
Hold up, here. Most *two working-parent families* can't go to "private schools" or afford expensive therapy. Most brown or black skinned people can't go to private schools. Call me a Canadian pinko, but isn't the solution BETTER PUBLIC SCHOOLS, rather than ensuring that women in the elite strata do their part to keeping their progeny elite? Isn't the solution making the society more fluid?
Okay, I am a Canadian Pinko. If I were conservative, I'd agree with Hirshman. However, I don't want the society she envisages, even if there is utter gender equality in the upper classes.
If I were "running feminism" in the politic sphere, schools and healthcare and transition homes and discrimination legislation is where I'd put feminist activist resources. Demand them. I'd work at making nurturance and society-building and community-building positive things again: the view of society is more and more economy and not people driven. I don't think gender equates to interest, BUT I also believe very strongly in the preservation of those values that were once considered "feminine". It is not wrong to caretake. Or share. Or give up your self-interest, occassionally, for the good of the community. It is wrong only to expect that to come entirely from one set of people based on their genes.
I'm seeing that there are a lot of women here (and elsewhere) who are feeling a little patronized if they have chosen to work less or not at all; I'm not going to ignore my social context by any means, but I'm of the absolute opposite opinion to Hirshman. If I were going to construct the agenda, I wouldn't be wagglin' my finger at those women who are doing the nurturance bits.
On a personal, not political level, I'd construct that the feminist's job is not to get the female elite to work more, but to bring the male elite home more. Into their communities: into their kitchens: into volunteer positions.
I also don't see that the SAHMoms are bailing out of their careers entirely. Since Strawman is used so often online, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's Straw-Stay-At-Home-Mom. Most that I know work part time. Most that I know still contribute. It's not as if we're all lazy, bonbon eating Oprah watchers who aren't making public as well as private contributions. As for "what's good for the kids", theoretically, I say everyone can stuff it: that's private, and making it political opens the door makes it an inflammatory rhetoric filled arena that can be used by anyone with a social agenda: preventing gays from adopting to getting women in the workplace, I'm not going there.
Women being dependant is another issue. If you have NO ability to walk away, that's a problem. I have constructed a life in which I have the resources to walk away, although if I did, for sure my income would be less than that of my husband, especially with two kids to support.
Here's the thing I really don't like about this argument: If you are able to provide healthcare and education to your kids, it's NOT as horrifying as it's being made out to walk away if you have to. Even if you take a major cut in lifestyle, and not eat organic and only wear second-hand, being poor is better than either an abusive husband or an abusive job, because material goods don't buy happiness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is SELLING SOMETHING; and this culture has been sold.
So, to me, the feminist solution is to make healthcare and education available, and transition homes, too, for those who don't have family or friends to go to.
TD,
My husband and I:
both worked a combo of 80 hours/week
had me stay home
had him stay home
During my younger son's childhood he experienced:
part-time daycare
full-time daycare
parent at home care
before he started school.
We were given a choice of putting him in kindergarten or first grade because he walked into the kindergarten registration office and read everything cold, then proceeded to calculate the maximum number of kindergarteners and first graders if there were four clases of twenty each.
(we put him in kindergarten for socialization reasons)
I don't think staying at home OR going to various types of daycare had anything to do with it. I consider it to be a function of him just being wicked smart as nature made him.
His brother, who was more consistently in part-time and full-time daycare than he was, needs to have Harry Potter books and The Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy taken from him at 10pm lest he read until the wee hours. He's nine. He honed his reading skills at age five by gathering his daycare podmates into a pile and reading to them.
So drop the superior attitude, dude. Anecdotes prove nothing, but can cancel each other out in a trice. What I suspect counts most to kid's brain growth is the type and amount and quality of attention and stimulation they get, not the genetic match or gender of the provider.
Arwen, you rock.
The problem isn't that caregiving is low status and thus to be avoided by the egalitarian and educated elite. The problem is that the unpaid labor of caregiving that is vitally necessary to our economy IS LOW STATUS.
The solution lies not in avoiding it, but in making it count as much as it truly does in families, communities, and our economy.
DrB, you said it upthread, I didn't?!
Look, I respect your opinions; immensely, in fact. I may not always agree with them, but they're always articulate and thought-provoking. But, I don't buy the implied assumption that all stay-at-home moms (or dads) are somehow prisoners and need to be felt sorry for. Many do so because they actually want to, not because society expects them to, but because they want to.
Turning the discussion around, is it not true that MrB stays at home and does most of the cooking and cleaning while you are sole income provider? Do you feel sorry for him and think he and your kid would be better off if he were to work instead? It seems ironic that you're advocating dual-income families are somehow superior. Yeah, they might be able to afford more "stuff" and both partners are better protected if the marriage fails, but look what you're giving up, especially if one of the parent(s) is not career/achievement oriented to begin with and doesn't have the same need/desire to achieve outside the home.
Arwen, I think the point of Hirshman's article--one of the points--is that as long as more highly educated women than highly educated men take on the domestic roles, those roles are going to remain undervalued because that will leave men with the financial and political power to make the rules. On the other hand, and perhaps paradoxically, if women follow their ambitions in the public sphere, that will give them the political power to change the system.
And isn't the whole point of the domestic glass ceiling argument *precisely* that men don't do their fair share at home? Hirshman's argument is that one way to make sure they do is to marry "down" and make other conscious decisions in order to balance the power in the relationship, so that men don't have the social, economic, and cultural power to "opt out" of housework because their wives "choose" to do it instead.
Ms Kate, in one breath you say "I consider it to be a function of him just being wicked smart as nature made him" and in the next you say "What I suspect counts most to kid's brain growth is the type and amount and quality of attention and stimulation they get, not the genetic match".
Obviously, intelligence is a function of both nature and nurtue and I would never claim just because somebody had a stay-at-home mom (or dad) it makes them smarter, especially if said parent was only staying home because they thought it was the right thing to do and not something they really want to do instrinscally.
So, what I have a problem with is DrB implying that "quality of attention and stimulation they get" perhaps isn't ideally suited to come from a parent that's "always there" and that mom's who stay-at-home are somehow doing their kids, their gender, and especially themselves a disservice. Perhaps in her case it would be true, because she's achievement-oriented and would have to really cut off a side of herself to do, but it's not fair to assume all women are/should be like her.
While I do agree with many points of Hirshman's article, the fact that it was shoddily researched and (as usual) focused just on the extremely small slice of privileged America that could actually afford to stay home, completely invalidated it for me.
In particular, a new study put out by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called "Are Women Opting Out? Debunking the Myth", examines population and labor data and shows that women are actually "opting out" less than they did in the 80s. Highly educated women in their thirties experienced no statistic difference in workforce participation rates between 2000 and 2004.
Maybe if Hirshman had bothered to actually do some research instead of using a ridiculous sample of 41 over-privileged brides, she would have seen that her core argument was completely false.
DrB, what does "that will leave men with the financial and political power to make the rules" have to do with domestic power? As far as I know, my wife and I both get to agree upon our house rules, not some politician!?
I don't think I ever said that all women should be like me.
What I said is that I don't think having a single caregiver is the best situation for a kid. I don't. I think that one of the big advantages my son had is that he had a variety of different caring caregivers, which exposed him to different experiences and personalities, and, I think, made him very secure in the world. He was surrounded pretty much from birth by caring adults, all of whom liked him and some of whom loved him deeply, surely as much as I do. In some cases, he was cared for along with other children, which gave him consistent daily play opportunities he wouldn't have had if he'd stayed home with me. I think that a lot of his brains and curiosity about the world and expectation that new people will enjoy him and treat him well comes from having had those experiences.
It's interesting, though, how a discussion of what's best for women seems to be changing into a discussion of what's best for children. I'm disturbed by that.
Yes, bitch, especially because what's good for the parents is good for the children.
And you haven't even gotten into the question of age (ie women's "market value" declining over time while men's increases...) I'd like to see you go to town on that one.
Arwen, I'm the one with the two friends with spouses who passed away. I agree with you 100% that the answer should be better public schools, better public healthcare, etc. The two families I know were both upper middle class, certainly, though the one where the SAHM returned to work isn't in that category any more.
We don't have universal healthcare and solid public education and we should. It is good to think about that, and t
perhaps this goes to the lack of women in power.
However, the point of my anecdote is to point out the economic vulnerability of SAH spouses in our current system, even SAH spouses of the upper middle class (or, I assume, the elite). The house where the SAHM passed away is not economically vulnerable. The house where the WOH father passed away is very economically vulnerable even with substantial life insurance.
The former SAHM is not working for luxuries, or useless material goods. I am not sure you meant to intimate that with your post, but I want to clarify since that was the sense I got. She is working to keep her kids in the same city so they can still have family support. Moving to a cheaper city would remove the already-traumatized children from their only remaining ties to their father's family, who support her both financially and emotionally. She is working for health insurance, a big life insurance premium in case she herself dies, for later college expenses, for childcare, and for basic living expenses. These aren't trivial material goods, and I think it is unfair to imply that if she'd just tighten her belt a little, she'd be just fine. (Forgive me if that wasn't your point, but I do not want to leave people with the impression that this is simply a case of not eating organic veggies any more.)
The family where the SAHM died has none of these worries. The contrast between the two families, to me, is an anecdotal observation of the disparate power structure.
DrB, now we're getting somewhere! Neither do agree that having a single caregiver is the best situation, particularly of said caregiver keeps the child in isolation from other people and especally other children. Ideally, children have multiple caregivers (mother, father, grandparents, etc.) that all share duties. I understand the disadvantage of a single parent family (from firsthand experience growing up) and/or of having too few grandparents alive and/or around. It's truly unfortunate.
So, I agree with you wholeheartedly that "it takes a village" but this doesn't imply that a woman (or man) who consciously chooses to stay home and be the primary caregiver is necessarily doing something that they will regret. If done for the wrong reasons, then yes. And will everyday be a picnic? No. But, there's days I hate my job just as you do.
So, just admit that there's some women (and some men) who might actually feel a sense of accomplishment and fullfillment from staying home and who actually do so, gasp, willingly! And even if it means being "financially dependent", it doesn't necessarily imply a lack of "domestic power" around their castle (see Orange's XBox comment). If you can admit these, then I'll gladly quit bugging you!
Seriously, I don't mean to monopolize your board or disrespect you, I'm just trying to be an alternative voice in a crowded forum here (an excellent forum I might add).
(Sorry about the misformatting. Not sure what happened. It cut out a bit of my point, which was that I completely agree that caregiving work should be more valued, but in our current system, it is not, and SAHMs are vulnerable as a result.)
DrB says "It's interesting, though, how a discussion of what's best for women seems to be changing into a discussion of what's best for children. I'm disturbed by that."
Sorry to have been a part of the group of commentors who bent the conversation that way, but when discussing stay-at-home mom's versus working mom's, it's like the only "ammo" stay-at-home mom's have to trya and justify their decision to the working world for why they're choosing to stay home. Blame society for overvaluing money and status for why stay-at-home mom's have to play defensively on this subject!
Okay, Dr.B., I agree that's what Hirshman is saying. However, I disagree with her means to that ends. I think her way of approaching the problem entrenches the problem of devalued labour, it doesn't solve it. Again, I'm from a different political atmosphere where we have legalized gay marriage and have no laws regulating abortion and we have health care and a year's parental leave at 55% of our income. There are those in Canada who'd like to change all of that: but I would like to note that most of those things, which benefit 'women' as a class more than 'men' as a class (since women do have less economic clout), were put in place largely by men - who understood that there are more poor people than rich people, and the poor people know where the rich people live.
I would like to believe that this sense that somehow, only if you're earning $100,000 does your voice count, is something we can move past. Financial should not equal political power, and the system is broken if it does. A colition of economically disadvantaged women - stay at home moms or no - and their votes should democratically trump the incredibly small percentage of the population that has money. In the States, it seems that it's somehow the individual's fault that they're not extracting optimal resources out of an underfunded school system, and that if people "just worked harder" they'd make it. Hirshman's article accepts that premise, I think. If there... just ... were ... more ... THEN they'd have to listen, right? If there were more black people in power, THEN there'd be no ghettos?
I think it's essentializing, and is a lie. I don't think those elite women in NY would necessarily speak for "women", anyway, simply because they have ovaries. White, rich women have very little in common with most of us. And though I adore Barak Obama and would follow him into battle, how much is he "like" every other black and brown skinned person? Are his issues the same? His viewpoint?
No. I think giving politics back to the poor is a far better solution. You're right, as a feminist it's good do CR about the second shift. It's good to help our sisters know they've the brains and the talent to go for the brass ring. It's important to deal with rape and sexual assault and reproductive rights.
But still, don't do a goddamn 70 hour week if you don't have to just because that way what you say *counts*. Women's voices count simply due to the fact that women exist, and if women are, as a group, for some reason saying they don't like the system, then let's listen instead of shoehorning us into it. Why is it "our" reasoning that's flawed? Those scads of us waltzing out on our careers? Why is it "our" values - that perhaps do lead us to stay at home or be part-timers in greater numbers - that are broken? Are we "brainwashed", or are the men?
We can do something about helping the economically vulnerable. Start a letter writing campaign. Get your friends to vote. Be loud. Be uppity. We can vote, after all, and we can influence our communities: even those of us with very little money.
Action is not something I disagree with, obviously. But to each woman, her own action.
Transmogriflaw, I get your point about working for necessities--your former SAHM friend has got a lot of obligations to fill, and wanting to maintain her current location and schools narrows the pool of job options even further. However, I agree with Arwen that working FT for the sake of getting health insurance is a BIG limiter for one-parent families, because they're much less able to accept flex-time positions or to put together multiple part-time jobs, both of which could aid a parent. Sometimes kids can get government health care here in the US based on income, but even I find those forms and agencies difficult to navigate, and I'm not a single parent who's working full time. As for living in a cheaper city, it's an easy suggestion for an outsider to make but it's a huge burden for the family that has to move.
An interesting thing I picked up from learning about computer (& other) security systems is that while it is important to look at a system by how well it succeeds, it must ultimately be judged by how it fails. From what I've seen a successful single-earner/SAHP pairing is probably the gold standard (at least for infant/young child care), but when it fails, it tends to do so in a catastrophic way that harms the long-term interests of the children and SAHP.
I must say I admired Hirshman for being willing to say that women who do not continue some sort of career after having children hurts the cause of all working women. The distinction between caring for infants and school-age children is important. I think that so many SAHMs are defensive about their choice is that they should be. Not that they didn't make the right decision, but I rarely see anyone defend their choice in terms of the human race, not just their own family. There is so much of a cult of the child now, that giving up a career is seen as surrounding the woman who does it with a shield barring all criticism. At least most of my friends see it that way. (Note on the day care survey mentioned above: The bad behavior effect of day care was most pronounced in high income families.
On cleaning: Yeah! I would like to recommend the Clean Team approach. There is a book, video, and products, but the basic idea is that you develop a weekly cleaning routine that can be done in under an hour. Their routine comes with directions on how to split the job(s) between one to four people. I've found that doing the cleaning together in a limited time frame really cuts down on one person feeling they are doing all the work. (Actually, usually both people feel like they are doing all the work.)
transmogriflaw, I didn't mean to suggest that it's simple materialism that's made it harder for your SAHM whose husband died. I'm huge on the healthcare issue: I think that there's a lot in the States that would be mediated by universal health care, and I know the horrifying decisions families have to make to cover the basic nut: shelter, food, healthcare, education, clothing. Even with the basic nut covered, poverty sucks - I grew up extremely poor, so I'm not about to make the mistake of ennobling the state of poverty nor the incredible work your friend has to go through to make it through the day.
What I'm saying is more that when we frame the debate economically, we ignore the fact that "having money" is not in fact a direct collorary to "being happy". Being happy requires having your basic needs covered, for sure. It also means being in a place where you're respected and not being abused. Taking massive damage in the second category does not in any way make up for abundance in the material plane, and not having your basic needs covered will not make up for having great respect and self-esteem. Both are necessary but not sufficient.
Trope, absolutely. If there was universal healthcare, I don't think the disparity between the two families would have existed to the same degree: the insurance payout wouldn't have been eaten by uncovered bills and insurance payments, the need to work full time for insurance wouldn't have been there, etc.
As always the lack of universal healthcare is the most oppressive to the financially vulnerable.
NotThatMo: I will to go to the mat for the concept that SAH work - when it includes child-rearing, community-building, volunteerism, maintenance of family or friendship relationships - is valuable to the community. That it doesn't need to be done by women is a feminist given, to me: but financially unpaid work does construct society, and is good for the human race, in a way that is valuable.
It's interesting, though, how a discussion of what's best for women seems to be changing into a discussion of what's best for children. I'm disturbed by that.
But why would you be disturbed by that? I don't see how one can isolate what's best for the child from what's in the woman's best interest, especially in this context. The two issues cannot be separated in this context because the main reason behind most women leaving the labor force is having and taking care of their kids.
I second what Arwen says in all its glory wholeheartedly! Just because my wife who is a stay-at-home mom and happens to be finanicial dependent on me (if only at this point in our lives; in 5, 10, 20 years perhaps the roles will be reversed), does not mean she is not a very valuable contributor to society at-large. She's on numerous volunteer committees at our kid's school and in our local community and is very well respected with her leadership, organizational, and people skills. Just because she happens to use these skills for non-pay jobs instead of having a full-time, high paying marketing career doesn't mean she's not representing her gender well!
Arwen says: Financial should not equal political power, and the system is broken if it does. TD, if we substitute "domestic power" for "political power," is this what you are trying to say?
Domestic power is tricky--it is certainly not the same thing as financial power, not the same thing as being "in charge", and doesn't equal nagging rights. When I think about "domestic power" in my parents' household, it hinged wholly on my father's military career. We moved every three years. My father was gone and out of contact for a few months of every year. My mother ran everything about the household single-handedly when he was gone, and when he came home he always deferred to her, since he had no idea what was in the bank account or even where the grocery store was, if we had just moved. When I was young, I would have said that she had all the "domestic power" in the relationship, since she ran the house.
But, we moved every three years. She worked--part-time when I was young and full-time later--but was never able to build a reputation because we would leave unpredictably (from an employer's standpoint). After he left the Navy and they split up, she had no stable work history, no house, nothing. Looking back, I think now that she gave him *all* the domestic power by fact of moving for his job. So it's not really about day-to-day tasks, but who gets to make the decisions for the household. This has something to do with leverage from outside the relationship, such as one couple we know with A declining a better job because B has ill family members and cannot leave Chicago. I also know of families who have endured long-distance marriages for a certain length of time so as not to interrupt a critical school year, or one spouse supporting the other through grad school. It's less about what you do day-to-day, and more about what options the other people are willing to foreclose on your behalf.
As this relates to SAH spouses and kids, I don't think we can declare that the SAH spouse "always" or "never" has more domestic power. It's more fluid than that, and more particular to each relationship. So, if Mrs. TD says that she has lots of domestic power, I'm happy to go along with that. I also think that it's in many ways unrelated to whether or not she stays at home.
It's true, TD, that she's vulnerable to you being a nice guy, though. My suggestion is that, to help women and poor people generally, and write your senator asking for universal healthcare... And complain about the schools in the inner city. She's valuable to society, and we need to pay her in a society that helps her out if something goes wrong. Fight for it, and anytime anyone brings up the moral hazard bullshit, fight harder - especially at work.
But why would you be disturbed by that? I don't see how one can isolate what's best for the child from what's in the woman's best interest, especially in this context.
But this is exactly the point. Women perceive a tradeoff between "family" and career, in a way that men by and large do not. Part of this is because "family" can be used to mean different things (e.g. your kids being taken care of, vs. taking care of your kids). But not all of it, and it's worth thinking about what the other causes of this state of affairs might be, whether the state of affairs is problematic, and if so what causes are the most amenable to change.
I think that the unequal footing in relationships is a pretty big driver of this, and that hanging around law students at fancy-pants schools gives some interesting insights into how the situation continues.
Jake says "women perceive a tradeoff between "family" and career, in a way that men by and large do not.", but this isn't a good thing. We men need to start thinking about it harder too because there's plenty of research out there to indicate how vitally important an active and involved father is.
It'd be kind of cool - if confusing - if when we hit, say, 21 we got to each pick new personalized last names. Like a rites of passage ceremony for the modern world.
I have no sentimental love for my name, except for the fact that it is my name. My surname is not Rockefeller or Kennedy or anything interesting, and the less ties I have to my father the better - but it's still my name.
Why would I give my hard-won PhD to someone else's family?
If we all agree that staying home and raising children is so very important and satisfying, then why aren't more men clamoring to do it?
And one other thing that's struck me reading the comments: why isn't men's "choice" part of the subject of the conversation. For those "choice" feminists here, do you think that men deserve the same choice as women have to opt out of family/child support?
Red asks "If we all agree that staying home and raising children is so very important and satisfying, then why aren't more men clamoring to do it?" to which I say more men are doing it today than ever before, but also just as women feel societal pressures, so do men. It's not yet, unfortunately, considered "masculine" to be a stay-at-home dad.
Yep, Red, I sure do. I'm a big supporter of the SAHDad movement. And I don't think more Dads are doing it because we keep thinking of success in terms of the workplace.
"And even if it means being "financially dependent", it doesn't necessarily imply a lack of 'domestic power' around their castle."
Ah... finally it comes out.
Maybe TD will understand that his sentence is what Hirshman's piece is all about. TD keeps talking about how much power his wife has -- but it is clearly limited power, limited to the inside of the house and perhaps the small society of the neighborhood.
Hirshman's piece is about how the decisions of women [and we could argue until the cows come home about how much these decisions are 'individual choice' and how much they are determined by the childhood socialization that encourages one toward certain understandings of self that lead to what seem like 'individual choice'] have less power precisely because they are so often made in homes rather than in legislative or corporate hallways.
What we should be arguing about, really really really, is what it will take to raise children and change education and workplaces so that those hallways -- where air quality, going to war, family-shaping policies, and living wages are shaped -- hold a range of people from a range of lives.
I'm coming to this late, and I have no idea if anyone else addressed it, but I changed my name for a very different reason than the ones you listed in your post.
I don't much care for my "family of origin". I don't much identify myself as a *insert last name here*. I *do* very much like my husband's family, as they treat me like a person with her own ideas and opinions (unlike my own family, specifically my father, who consider me to be one of those "uppity" girls with her "college ways"). Plus, my husband's family has never emotionally and psychologically abused me.
I was very happy to leave that part of me behind and join my husband's family. I have, lately, considered changing my name back to the original familial German (it was changed when my grandfather came over). I may or may not pursue it.
Right now I'm happy with my decision.
Also, no one looks down on men for not taking paternity leave if they have the option. Most of society thinks it strange if men are primary caregivers for children. Whereas when a woman gives birth, everyone asks if she'll go back to work.
a reader, and just how much power do you believe I have outside "of the house and perhaps the small society of the neighborhood" just because I happen to have a salaried income? OK, I might be able to influence a few co-workers or managers once in a while, but big deal. It's not like I have any more clout than my wife when it comes to larger arenas just because I work. If anything, it's opposite because she does 80% of the spending in our house and so "votes with our money" in our capitalistic world.
So upper-class women have an obligation to the rest of us to work the awful hours, insane travel schedules, and soul-killing workloads that climbing the corporate ladder requires.
They have an obligation to the rest of us to ... go do that, while "hiring out" all the "menial" duties that aren't as important. The cooking, the cleaning, the childcare. Because the best way to model feminism to working class women is to hire working class women to do the stuff you consider beneath you. The stuff you consider menial, mundane. The lower status jobs.
I've got friends who have Opted Out -- without even having children, or being married. They aren't running in the Rat Race because when they got there they discovered it was a soul-killing nightmare. Should they go back and start clawing their way to CEO or Partner because by having high-status degrees, they are Representative of All Women?
Feminism would be better off addressing the fact that all the handed-off scut work is being done by women rather than haranguing educated women to get back in there and Represent the Home Team.
"women perceive a tradeoff between "family" and career, in a way that men by and large do not.",
Why does the answer to disparities like these always seem to boil down to "women should be more like men, who don't percieve this tradeoff," rather than "Men need to wake up, smell the coffee, and realize just what is involved in "family" when they say they want one?
Sayeth Red [i]And one other thing that's struck me reading the comments: why isn't men's "choice" part of the subject of the conversation. [i]
Ask a SAHD and you will quickly find out two things:
1) the offhand unkind things that have been said to them
2) their utter lack of preparation for the job because "boys don't do that"
If it weren't for the flylady, I swear DSS would have taken our kids away based on the living conditions that prevailed once Mr. "but you didn't dust the tops of the furniture" took the household helm. Or, more likely, didn't take the helm/understand how it was HIS JOB now. (oh, yeah 3) provider trap aka "I'm not running the household I'm looking for a job")
Even those with more househusbandly vocation than Mr Kate, who were not the highly genderized menopause surprise sons of WWII veterans, will tell you that if society values their work in the first place, it certainly doesn't much value MEN doing it. Having served my stint at home, I know it is bad enough to lose that outside adult connection and satisfaction. Even when you do have the job skills to make it go smoothly, the loss of status in society for women who stay home is not nearly what it is for men.
TD -- you don't get it. This isn't about *you* and *your wife.*
This about the class of women and the class of men and -- and in terms of Hirshman's article -- about how the one class tends to end up [for whatever reason] at home, with so much less decision-making power AS A CLASS in the decisions that shape the lives of whole populations.
Sure, individual anecdotal men have shitty jobs, just as individual anecdotal women get to go shopping for shoes on Fifth Avenue while Katrina rages. But as a class, it is men who decide how to fund the military and it is, as a class, women who end up deciding whether or not to buy broccoli.
Until those 'votes with our money' are votes about the Pentagon and/or schools instead of broccoli and/or a sofa, well, we are all going to be living smaller lives than we could.
It's interesting, b/c I think in some ways this conversation has gotten hung up, yet again, as Hirshman says, on the question of "choice." The real questions are, why is it almost always women who are faced with this choice, and why is it almost always women who "choose" to give up paid, prestigious work for unpaid, unprestigious work at home? I think that talking about health care and so on simply dodges the question, even though I also think, as I said upthread, that there is a parallel argument to be made (which I think Arwen, in particular, is making) that there is another real question, and that is why work and family are so often seen as mutually exclusive choices?
Second point: I like PoJ's point about the problem of identity, and I think that one reason this question becomes so fractious--and gets hung up on choice--is for that particular reason. When we start talking about the politics of these decisions, it's easy to take that very personally, *because* our identities are tied up in our work, whatever that work is.
I also think, as I was trying to say, that for various reasons women are more likely to get hung up on the problem of work-oriented identity. Surely part of this is b/c women's identity has traditionally been defined by something *other* than paid work, and we're struggling with what we're giving up and what we're gaining. Men, I think, as some comments here have also shown (and as my own marriage shows) are also starting to struggle with these questions, but perhaps not in as many numbers, or not as publicly, or else their struggles don't gain the same public attention, yet. And it would be very worth talking about the ways that men, as men, struggle with them, but alas: being a woman, my focus is on my own experience. But anyway, I do think that it's neither elitist nor merely a question of perpetuating the status quo to ask the questions Hirshman's asking or to make the arguments she's making and, in a lot of ways, I agree with her: women as a class *do* need to be more aware of the opportunity costs to women of marriage, children, and caregiving. And men who love their wives and want to be fair to them need to think about these things too.
Ok, a reader, so explain to me how you think those people who have a job/career versus those who stay home have any more real political clout!? We all get counted the same as one vote in November and neither subset has any real influence outside of voting, at least as long as we're talking about middle and lower class folk; perhaps, an elite upper class person(s) with tons of accumulated wealth or a large business owner might, but all of us ordinary working stiffs? Forget it, I'm not buying it for one second!
And I agree with Sara. It's dumb to suggest anybody - female or male - should do something they don't want to like going into a career for the sake of having a career any more than somebody should rush into marriage for the sake of being married. That's a recipe for an unhappy life.
DrB says "And men who love their wives and want to be fair to them need to think about these things too." to which I could not agree more! I know I for one would never want to guilt or force my wife to stay home. It's why I ask her a couple times a year if she's interested in finishing her degree or ready to start working as a consultant, but it's her that says she's perfectly content and happy staying home (not every day mind you, but most days).
I really like these kinds of family-related life/work discussions, DrB, it's what draws my interest about feminism because a happy wife is a happy home!
On more practical stuff:
Dr. ER pays her bills. I pay my bills. Dr. ER, who makes twice what I do, pays more of the common bills, I pay a proportionate share.
When we first got married, in '97, when I was somewhat more redneck than erudite, it "made sense" to me that we follow the obvious cultural division of labor:
I mowed the yard, trimmed, did all the outside stuff, and generally picked up after myself inside, but not to her satisfaction. She did most, but never all, of the "house work."
If there was a dead rat in the garage, or a spider running up a curtain, I took care of it. If one of our baby nieces were visiting, she gave the bath. Traditionally manly and womanly breakdown, see.
Now, Dr. ER suffers physical pain doing some simple tasks, like bending to put dishes in and take them out of the washer, wiping counters and running the vacuum. Medical stuff. So, I am taking up the slack, but again, not to her satisfication. Luckily neither of us is a neat freak.
We are having a bit of a time getting used to the different standards that come with the shift in responsibilities.
For example, she can't stand to see dishes in the sink, and so leaves them on the counters, and to me that's what the sink is for: placing dirty dishes until they're washed, either by nad or in the washer, which, of course, always seems to be full.
Also, Dr. ER can see dirst in the carpt that I just can't, and so I don't vaccuum as often as she would like me to but it's honest, not me being a jerk -- and it occurs to me this moment that I've been stepping around the vacuum cleaner in the hallway to our bedroom since Sunday, and it probably was left there as a hint -- but then our whole life rhythm was disrupted by a sophomore-teen-in-college mini-cris that still hasn't been resolved, so we both got distracted, plus she's been home sick all week and I've been busy as hell at work and running some errands for her and ... and ... and ... no excuse, I better vacuum the damn carpet.
On her name:
Before we got married, I wondered whether she would "take my name," and I wanted her to, because I am culturally conservative in some ways, but I was ready, I think, to accept whatever she wanted. I never brought it up.
We were in traffic one day and she laughed because the tag on the car ahead of us had three letters that spelled a profanity and she said, "Awwww, my new initials will be a bad word!" Never occurred to her not to "take my name," which is amazing if you conctrate on the "Dr." part of Dr. ER and not enough on the "ER" part.
Holy shit! I do not wash dishes "by nad"!! I wash them sometimes by hand! And damned if I'm not blushing. I can feel my face getting hot. What a hoot.
Dr. B, I had some very similar reactions to the article in question, though I believe you wrote them much better than I did.
My biggest realization was the following:
Women (including me) are socialized to self-sacrifice.
Childrearing, homemaking, volunteering, low-paid "idealist" work: it's true that all of these things can be fulfilling in and of themselves. But they do not come with salary and status. Should that be true? I don't think so. But it is true, right now.
The trouble occurs because women are socialized and expected all their lives to eschew salary and status, to do things solely for the love of it. We are taught that expecting external rewards for our work is selfish and bad. Moreover, we're taught that doing work that comes without external reward is good, even saintly.
So it's very easy, as a woman, to make the choice that will cause others to see you as a good person: to sacrifice money, status, recognition, and power in order to serve -- as a mother, a housewife, or even a teacher or social worker.
That doesn't mean there's not genuine joy in service work. It does mean there's something wrong with a society that expects every woman to be Mother Teresa.
Do I enjoy cooking for family and friends who appreciate it? Yes. But I want a career that gives me opportunities to be publicly recognized for my knowledge and accomplishments -- and to be monetarily rewarded for the same. It's the way our capitalist system places a value on my work.
The "rules" are pragmatic methods of making sure women get such careers. I think a lot of women still don't feel like they are allowed to want them.
The real questions are, why is it almost always women who are faced with this choice, and why is it almost always women who "choose" to give up paid, prestigious work for unpaid, unprestigious work at home?
How far does "men are more willing to go into fields that are ungratifying but pay well (eg tech/engineering)" and "men don't want to marry someone who makes more money than them / women don't want to marry someone who makes less money than them" get you?
I can personally vouch for the first, and surfing personal ads will demonstrate the second. Does this just push the question one step further back?
I think Ms. Kate hit the right answer to the questions about why men aren't worried as much about the choice between work and family:
Being a stay-at-home-dad is a far less socially acceptable choice than being a professional woman. I don't think anyone blinks twice, or notices anything unusual, at the sight of a woman working up the corporate ladder. But it's still very unusual to find a stay-at-home-dad, for reasons deeply tied to our conception of masculinity. I think it takes a truly extraordinary amount of courage, and self-confidence, to be a stay-at-home-dad.
The ability of a woman to choose, and the greatly reduced ability of a man to choose, may make the angst of a married/partnered woman (in a heterosexual relationship) all the more profound.
Needless to say, the reduced ability of the man to choose impacts the (nominal) ability of the woman to choose... and this is a situation that calls for repair. Providing health-care, day-care, etc., would go a long way towards reducing the dilemma married/partnered heterosexual women may face---though, so far as household roles goes, it would still leave men in the same boat.
Anyway, I think the analysis developed in this thread is far and away better than the "my way or the highway" analysis of Hirshman.
I really don't think that's true. For instance, at Princeton, they had a "stop the clock" policy for family leave, which both men and women were entitled to take. Guess what? Women "chose" to take it LESS often than men. A woman provost (or president, or some upper-echelon administrator, I forget her title) came along and decided to look into it. Her findings? Women were afraid to take it lest they be mommy-tracked. Men were less afraid to take it, because the cultural overhead of "daddy track" just doesn't exist.
Her solution? Make it mandatory for everyone, thereby leaping over the "choice" issue entirely. Voila.
TD, if you don't realize that people with money have more political influence than people without, you're out of your mind. We worry, as a matter of policy, about unemployment. We worry about social security. We worry about payroll taxes and workers' comp. None of those things are available to women who "choose" to stay home. Those who work at home are not considered part of the GNP. All those things are political.
Dr. Bitch,
Under Hirshman's view, I'm not a feminist and neither are you, because we made "nonfeminist" career choices. As many of your astute commenters have pointed out, women who do pursue high powered, wealth maximizing careers usually have to hire a lot of support staff, generally other women, in situations that can be quite exploitive. How exactly is that being a good feminist?
The idea that what "elite women" do is very important because they are critical role models (and yet many are too stupid to do the "right things") is just sad. I talk to a lot of women and I have never seen any evidence that middle class or working class people make important life decisions based on what rich people do.
Finally, this return to "judgmentalism" that Hirshman advocates is unlikely to stop at personal relationships or career choices, and I have no interest in debating leg shaving or lipstick wearing, annd whether this is "feminist." I'd much rather build coalitions where possible.
A few more of my thoughts on this are posted here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/...ves/
002468.html
regards,
Ann
It seems to me that what mothers do is to do a little math: what course will end up with the best outcome for me and the children as a group?
The thing is, unless you really know a heluva lot about a woman's economic and family situation, and about their particular kid(s), it's very hard to accuse a woman of getting the math "wrong."
You'd have to do a lot more digging than the grapefruit spoon issued to most Prospect writers will allow.
Now, for a single mother, that might mean working two jobs and working like hell to make childcare arrangements with family. For others, it might mean staying home. For a third group it might mean staying in a high-paying career and hiring a nanny. There are almost as many optimal arrangements as there are mothers.
Never fear, whatever decision you make, there will be a Times Style writer to take a crap on you -- either for "opting out" or for "warehousing your kids." Of course, none of this can be anyone else's fault other than the mother's. Nooooo!
I really don't think that's true.
Don't think that what's true?
Her solution? Make it mandatory for everyone, thereby leaping over the "choice" issue entirely. Voila.
Nice. Did "mommy-tracking" morph into "family-tracking", or did it just go away?
Since women's traditional roles have been home-makers, we're the ones defaulting to home making, because for us it doesn't challenge the paradigm.
It's a problem, because home making is powerless societally and women do it more often. So women as a group are more powerless.
When we take 5 or 10 years out of our careers, "womankind" has got a deficit that means we end up in places of lesser power. Further, if we eschew the 70 hour week, we'll have lesser power, regardless.
Also, homemakers have less personal power if they are crippled by their financial dependance on their partners.
These issues do need addressing, especially where financial power means that the political agenda is being set: that's a larger issue than women, though. That's a failure of democracy.
The problem I find with Hirshman's article is that it puts me (again) on the opposite team than the working mom. It's devisive.
It's the Stay at Home Moms vs. the Working Moms and the Working Class Women vs. The Elite Women. It's not simply asking us to notice the woman taking on the unpaid labour; her use of Freidan actively promotes the idea that the "women's work" some of us choose to do is lesser work.
Are we as women smart enough to make choices about abortion but too stupid to make feminist choices about work? I don't think anybody really believes that. I make what I consider to be feminist contributions to society *in my stay at home work*.
I grant the questions are important. I grant debate is important. However, "choice" is not a dirty word - do I have to say that to feminists? Why we're making those choices has to do with our traditional roles, granted, and the fact that women are making those choices are due to that positioning. But you're a working woman. Hirshman, a working woman. Those choices aren't those that you're living with. I'd like to see an article that actually talks to stay at home women about how they contextualize their work, especially if they identify as feminists.
Sure, you can ask what we're doing for womenkind; if we identify as feminist, there should be something, right? That's utterly valid, to challenge us in our supreme privilege. I reject a paternalistic approach that ignores that there might be a societal thought in our perty little heads. Am I "fulfilling" my intellectual life? Yes, I am: if that's what Hirshman's really worried about. She's not, though. She's worried about economics.
Dr. B, you make a huge feminist contribution in this forum - and that's unpaid work.
Taking time off for paternity or maternity leave is not the same, imho, as becoming a full-time, committed, stay-at-home-parent. I agree that there is less social stigma attached to the father who takes time off to help with the baby--as the Princeton experience might show--when compared to the stigma attached to the father who leaves his career entirely to stay at home.
But I still suspect that there's enormous, thoughtless, and unfair stigma attached to men who forgo a career for tending the household sphere.
I think Hirshman, and many of the comments here, were talking more about the SAHPs, as opposed to those who take some paternity/maternity leave.
Ann is right about the "critical role models" thing not trickling down, as it were.
Many working class families are split shifting to avoid daycare expense and angst - one parent works swing, another night, etc. They are living many of the realities and compromises of egalitarian relationships, even if many are hesitant to call it by that nasty "f" word. Meanwhile, elite NY Times brides mull over their considerable options and set a bad example. Phoo.
Oh, and I did change my name when I got married. Either way, I was going to end up with some man's name -- either mine or my father's. Why not choose the one I thought sounded coolest?
It's kind of weird that feminism tries to replace one standard nonchoice scenario (take your husband's name) with another (keep your father's name).
Now there are two additional choices that are pretty rare: both partners choose an entirely new name, or wife choose husband's name. But if we're talking about the basic choice offered upon marriage, I actually had more choices than my husband -- there weren't tons of people giving him the option to change his last name.
Ann, I don't think that Hirshman is arguing that I, or anyone else, isn't a feminist. I think she is arguing that some choices are less productive of feminist goals than others. I've long realized that my decision to go into humanities rather than into science (as an undergraduate, I studied both) was, in that context, a mistake: I chose the more-travelled path, in part because I had women in my family who served as role models for that path, but not for the other one. And, as a result, I make less money than I would if I had a t-t job in the sciences, probably, and fewer non-academic options. I am less able to serve as a role model for younger women who might want to go into those higher-paying fields, which are still dominated by men. I have less direct power to change the way that women are treated in those fields, and less knowledge.
That doesn't make me not a feminist. It does mean that my "choice" didn't, in the end, achieve some of the feminist goals that another decision might have made. If I had had access to some of the kinds of self-awareness and knowledge Hirshman points out here--and, more importantly, if the women and men who encouraged me to make certain decisions had thought about these things--I might have ended up making a different, arguably more feminist, "choice."
Lisa, I had many friends make that argument--"not changing your name just means keeping your father's name." I think it's a bogus argument. I didn't keep it because it was my father's name: I kept it because it was MY name, the one I'd had all my life. I can't go back and change history to impose matriarchal or ungendered surname practices, but I can refuse to perpetuate them, which is what I chose to do.
Ah, and one thing: let's presume that the care of children is in the interest of both parents.
Now let's imagine that one partner does all the childcare duty, in the process forgoing a big chunk of their lifetime earnings.
In this context, doesn't it seem kind of unfair to say that the person who's bearing the cost is the one who's the domestic parasite, being "supported" by the outside-the-house partner? Why isn't the inside the house partner considered to be doing a big favor to the outside the house one by supporting their career in a major way?
Outside the house parents are only "supporting" inside the house parents if we see mothering as literally and figuratively worthless -- and I can think of few ideas that are less feminist.
a reader, and just how much power do you believe I have outside "of the house and perhaps the small society of the neighborhood" just because I happen to have a salaried income?
Okay, I have to jump in to point out that your house and neighborhood, and your family's overall status within your community, are much, much more closely linked to the income you earn than your wife's social & housekeeping skills or spending habits. You finance your family's operations, even if she runs them-- so let's say you're the financial backer to her COO-- but that still means your status is higher than hers. And from the perspective of outsiders like myself, of course you have higher status than your wife does, because your efforts [presumably] produce something a bit more tangible & generally useful than community goodwill... the fact is that your private domestic arrangements, and in most cases your community social activities, are completely irrelevant to us, and that is entirely as it should be.
Well, I guess I'll just turn in my feminist card then
I find it very hard not to think of Rosa Parks in all this, to be honest.
Give me a little while to explain why.
Hirshman is writing about women who have received the same education as the men who end up in the real power positions in our country, and she is questioning what results when those women *choose* (however we interpret the possibility of personal agency of that act) to live their lives within homes and neighborhoods where the connections and skills they learned through hanging out among the power-acquiring pretty much go for naught. We could go off in discussions about how their power plays out in the ways they raise their children or in how they influence their husbands' actions, but I think what Hirshman would like us to imagine is this: what if those women, instead of staying home, had become partners in their law firms or had used the connections they made in school to become (sigh) owners of oil companies and then baseball teams?
The worst case scenario is, of course, George W. We-wish-he-had-a-Bush. But it would also mean that more women would be in all those varied positions where the big decisions are made.
And even if they were raised in the homes of privilege that most of us ambivalently distrust and envy, they would be women, shaped by the larger culture and so aware at some level of what it means *not* to have privileged white testicles. As others have pointed out, being a woman doesn't necessarily mean all is milk and honey: think Jean Schmidt.
What is at the bottom of all this, I think, is that we do know that being raised a woman (or with skin color other than white) means that what happens in your life isn't all about some particular and unique experience -- just as being raised white male in this country doesn't mean you are a completely shiningly unique creature whose opinions all came to you ex nihilo out of your own head.
So: what responsibility do we have to each other? If we are who we are -- if we have the identities we do -- in some not insignificant part because we have been raised as females in this culture and in some overlapping set of years, do we have any responsibility to each other to use and work from that shared-in-some-way experience?
Now I hope it is clear why I started with Rosa Parks.
Hirshman focuses pragmatically on the group of women who are economically and culturally privileged. But her writing has gotten me thinking -- as someone far from privilege but certainly (now) in comfort -- about the choices I make that I claim are mine alone to make but that do echo out to the lives of other women.
Am I totally off the mark?
Ah, but to get back to your "choice feminism" idea...
In many cases, the problem isn't the availability of choices but the quality of choices. To use a very extreme example, Rosa Parks had choices -- she could sit at the back of the bus or walk. But what she wanted was to have her available choices improved.
Unless we can get together and support having the available choices improved, all that lies ahead is woman vs. woman sniping. The answer to what will improve the choices is pretty simple: a GI bill for parents that gives stay at home parents access to education to offset the dent in their careers -- along with widely available high-quality childcare.
Give me a couple months of what the War in Iraq costs and I'll pay for it and have enough left over to buy every person in this thread a Rolls.
The inside the house partner IS considred to be making a huge contribution to the outside the house partner--that's precisely the point. No one is saying that stay-home women are parasites. We're saying that they're taking enormous financial and cultural risks. And given that YES, caring for children is in both parents' interests, the question is: why is it almost always women who do it? If staying home is such a great deal, why aren't men doing it more?
I didn't keep it because it was my father's name: I kept it because it was MY name, the one I'd had all my life.
Thank you-- I do get sick of the implication that women simply cannot really have their own surnames because they're not from a matriarchal line. My first name is my paternal great-grandmother's and my middle is the feminine form of a maternal great-uncle's, but no one considers them less legitimate just because they've already been used or anything.
A corollary gripe of mine is the notion that women should somehow earn the right to keep her original surname with advanced degrees or a particularly public work identity, and that those of us who simply want to be called the same damned thing we've been called our whole lives are merely being petty & selfish. Grr.
The only things I really have to say is that, first off, I think you're absolutely right in that it takes constant vigilance and monitoring to make sure you aren't getting shafted in a straight marriage (and probably others, but in a straight one, the out-of-whackness of the power imbalance is such that we're getting the short end of the stick 100% of the time).
But the question that always surfaces for me is that, if it's so goddamned much work, if it's a constant frigging struggle, it you're ALWAYS having to watch out, be careful, and regard your partner as a potential enemy who is going to backslide if you let your vigilance fall for one second, why the hell would any woman want to get married to a man?
I'm serious. I'm nearly 40, bi, and unmarried with a happy social life and no desire for kids, and when I read things like this I simply cannot fathom why any woman would ever want to get married to any man. That's always the question that pops up in my head when I read things like this -- and I'm not saying you're awfulizing. I think you've got it accurate from what I've seen around me. Jesus, this is what that big white dress and expensive party is for, so you can live your life like this? And then to top it all off, this guy who you're living with is supposed to be the person you can relax around like no one else you know. How is that? How do you suddenly turn into this relaxed, accepting creature romantically when you've spent the rest of your waking time with this guy watching him like a hawk? Is there some sort of magic switch in the female brain that lets her make this instant reversal in bed, a magic switch that I apparently lack?
Jesus, sometimes I feel like there was some basic connection in my brain that didn't get soldered shut, where I just don't have the ability to bullshit myself. I know that sounds like some sort of second-wave feminist condescension, but I'm not kidding -- I do not see the point behind marriage. I've got to confess it. It means more work, more arguments, and you've got to be constantly on guard against getting screwed over. Why in GOD'S name are you people married?
I confessed to being a "litmus-test feminist" re: high heels. I think we need to give lots of thought to what's a mere litmus test -- the handshake that gets you into the F club -- and what is really important and why.
Great discussion here, and I've mostly resisted chiming in ... but then I just got wind of an article in Fortune about men waking up to work-life balance. (You can find it by scrolling down on their homepage - I remain too dim to link.) More focus on the upper-middle-class; but it eerily used the word "flourishing." Would you blogger types call this an emerging meme?
Actually, I think people are saying (in a very polite way) that they are. Go through the thread and count all the incidences of "supported by". Out of the home parents aren't "supporting" the parents at home -- they are supporting each other in their shared goal of raising their kid(s).
1. Assuming the earning power of an individual woman will be less than that of her husband out of hand and without particulars is backhandedly sexist. (I am surprised that anyone would not find the very notion insulting.)
comment: Yes, SAHMism removes a woman from the corporate grind, but does that make her unemployable? Hardly. I would be more worried about finding a job for a SAHD, and yes, that IS sexist and no, I did not invent it.
2. The particular advice of one harridan summoning up the ghost of Betty Freidan to proclaim a maximum issue of babies (one) is ludicrous from the get-go and should be rejected out of hand.
3. Arwen, you rock. Let's make the system better.
4. Mrs. Coulter, got the reference. How about that Isis Lecture? That's what we should be talking about!
5. Dr. B, I do not think your advice to be a constant bitch about housework is *always* the best thing to do. In my experience, it is the female who possesses the acute esthetic of domestic hygiene. A fair division of labor is appropriate, but not under a goddamned dictatorship, meaning, the female gets to judge all right and wrong, and the male must comply.
LMYC, it's a valid question. One reason, obviously, is that going into it we didn't know it would be like this (and to be fair to the guys, neither did they). Mr. B. truly does believe in equality and feminism--it's just that, when push came to shove, we both realized that (like any human being), his theoretical beliefs got trumped by getting away with what he could. So, I had to shove. And to his credit, he didn't really fight me on it.
Another reason is that, well, one falls in love. Moving from that to marriage is admittedly not necessarily a foregone conclusion, but it *is* the socially normative one, and in your early 20s you don't always have the perspective you have twenty years later. More personally, Mr. B. and I both had fairly demanding career paths, in terms of geography: I loved him, wanted to be a couple, and felt that having the formal and legal committment of marriage would make it a lot more likely that we'd figure out how to resolve the geography issues. Without the marriage, we might have decided at some point that it was impossible; with it, we had a promise we'd made (one that would be hard to get out of) and a lot of social and familial support to prioritize the relationship, even when it meant him leaving his career and moving, with me, to start mine.
And yes, I truly did think all that through in exactly those terms before I walked up to the altar.
Scott L, I am not a constant bitch about housework. I was a constant bitch for about one week when it became manifestly apparent to me that Mr. B. was getting away with "not noticing." I had married a guy who believed in fairness, and once I started pointing out how much more I was doing, he didn't have a leg to stand on. End of problem.
Assuming that the earning power of women in general is less than the earning power of men is not sexist; it's based on the verifiable fact of an income gap. The gap is sexist; acknowledging it is not.
Lisa, I think the point about "being supported" is about financial support, and the argument is that, god forbid, the man earning the money dies/leaves/gets hit by a truck and is disabled, then the family's financial support disappears. Yes, if the stay-home mom dies/leaves/gets hit by a truck, that's going to be a blow, too, but it isn't going to be a blow that's going to mean the family will lose its house.
Go through the thread and count all the incidences of "supported by".
Well, in the most basic and literal way, it's true-- the income-producing partner certainly provides shelter, food, and clothing for the non-income-producing partner. Really, though, it's more like (as I noted above) a working relationship in which the earner is necessarily the superior in that his (or her) income finances the whole operation, including, in the SAHP cases, the the costs of having a full-time manager on site. Of course it doesn't mean that both contributions aren't essential, but it's generally easier to muddle through without a manager than it is to completely lack an infrastructure due to lack of funding.
What I hear when you and latts say this is that you both agree that as a stay at home mother I am worth less -- to you -- than someone who works, and I'm probably Against The Cause to boot.
And futhermore to that, Lisa, I take it they don't think you were fully "alive" when you made the choice to be a stay at home mother as in society - and not genuine personal preference - is the reason for your choice not to be the financial and career equal to your husband.
I don't care what they say, money without love is really what is worthless. If the stay-at-home partner dies, it would be just as devestating as if the wage earner did. Some things are irreplacebale and priceless.
In my experience, it is the female who ...
... doesn't passive-aggressively slack off on the hosuework figuring that whether it's Mommy or Wifey, there will always be some compliant female around whose job it is to sigh, give in, and finally clean the damned dishes.
This is the sort of thing that really convinces me that marriage is pointless, honestly. Why the hell should I give up my freedom, independence, and the power to determine what my own damned environment looks like only to share it with someone who will slack the hell off and force me to live in a pigsty?
People -- especially men -- act as if the choice for women is to either give in and resign ourselves to living according to his standard of sloppiness, or to give in and just do it all. There's a third choice: women can say no to marriage and being someone's live-in maid or enabler. And you get your own disposable income and your own free time and social life to boot. That's win-win, AFAIC.
What I hear when you and latts say this is that you both agree that as a stay at home mother I am worth less -- to you -- than someone who works, and I'm probably Against The Cause to boot.
Oh, for heaven's sake... why in the world should your activities, being centered exclusively on your family, be any of our business, much less of interest? What you do is by definition personal, and anything but the most superficial interest in it by outsiders would be inappropriate anyway. And I never said you are "against the cause," although in all likelihood your efforts at the moment aren't furthering it either, simply because your focus is on your private life. That's just the way it works when one's priorities aren't particularly broad or public.
And FTR, this goes back to the criticisms of "choice" feminism in this thread-- we have to validate every choice just because the person making it happens to have two X chromosomes, even if it is not a particularly feminist choice. The truth is that I'll certainly support any individual's right to make choices, but that doesn't mean that I have to consider the choices themselves equally valid or useful in a given context.
BTW, If you'd like to whack me around on feminist grounds for wearing makeup & having had a nose job, feel free. Go ahead, just for the exercise.
If the stay-at-home partner dies, it would be just as devestating as if the wage earner did.
Have you ever seen your mother struggling with the threat of losing her home at the same time as she was strugging with the loss of her husband of nearly thirty years? I cannot imagine that anyone who has seen or been through that sort of loss can possibly be so glib about losing not only your partner of many years, but being under threat of homelessnes as well.
When the hell did the threat of bankrupty and homelessness become so easily dismissed? Which would you rather suffer: the loss of a partner or the loss of a partner, a life, and your house?
Do not treat the threat of grief-stricken homelessness as if it were equivalent to grief itself. It is NOT. Grief is bad enough, but grief when you're sleeping on a goddamned street grate is FAR, FAR WORSE.
One might view the income-earner as the supplier of raw materials--money--which the homemaker then turns into the more worthwhile, manufactured goods of food, clean clothes, a clean house, shopping, the raising of children, and so on. Yes, it is difficult to manufacture without the supplier of the raw material, but it would be incorrect to view the supplier as the "supporter" of the manufacturer.
TD,
That's very romantic, but a little disaster preparation strikes me as wise. I think a prenup or postnup is a better way to prepare than separate bank accounts and the like. Once a prenup or postnup is completed, one need not think of it again unless the occasion arises, thus allowing the collaborative aspect of marriage to be preserved as far as possible. But to each his own.
That said, Hirshman's view of "flourishing" (which seems to be borrowed from Arendt, though I'm uncertain) is, I agree, hidebound, and merely provides a ground from which she can criticize those who do not sacrifice their homelives to serve in the ranks of professionals.
I don't understand what's radical about anything I read in the post. It all seemed like very practical concerns two people engaged in the contract of marriage would consider. Marriage has no radical construction, it is a deeply reactionary institution that places a lot of unnecessary pressures upon two people that are/were in love and their offspring (if they have any).
If what women are doing with their families isn't anybody's business, or of interest, why is this such a long thread?
If what women are doing with their families isn't anybody's business, or of interest, why is this such a long thread?
Because the absence of women in areas of broader interest perpetuates the structural disadvantages women face in public life. See, we're back to the original point.
Ah, so you're stepping on my neck on philosophical grounds, and it's nothing personal. By all means, go on, then.
Not for nothing, but this statement is wrong:
"Feminists could not say, "Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.""
When did feminists not say this? Were not entire chapters of the Feminist Mystique built around this claim? There are two or three different songs on "Free to Be You and Me" that make the point that being at home and having to do all the housework sucks and it should never be divided according to sex (or gender, for that matter).
Hirschman implies [accurately] that feminism has failed to change the men. Men as a group, especially elite men, don't value flextime or opt-outs and they continue to make slightly odd and unaware claims about the "necessity" of 60-80 hours of work in their fields. As if there weren't an enormous prisoner's dilemma at work in almost all arenas of US work life, driving those hours higher and higher.
But why is it a good thing for Hirschman to concede the field? Women, stop trying to change the family, because men will never change? Go to work in the political arena, where the power is? How does this change the men? How does this change the family? We can't make men care less about work, so we have to care less about family? Why is this a good thing?
[I'm not arguing that choosing to be a SAHM helps, either. I'm just saying: why is it feminist to tell women to subordinate their own desires and values to the desires and values of men? Because it seems as if Hirschman says that, in this piece. And BOTH have been shaped, intimately, by the current set-up. The best book EVER on that particular dilemma is "Love, Honor, and Negotiate," which makes many of Hirschman's points, and concludes that the best long-term solution, perhaps the only long-term solution, is for both parents to use every resource they have to find flexible jobs that allow both parents to share fully in the life of their family, and to have commensurate economic power within the partnership. That elites have failed to pursue this ideal hurts everyone else who would have to struggle that much harder to achieve it.
But at least half (I would argue more than half) or the problem lies, not with the foolish women who want to spend time with their kids and exploit their husband's 80+ hour workweeks to do it (didn't the Times run an article about the resentful husbands a few years ago? because it's all the women's fault), but rather with the men, who value a work-family balance in the abstract but fail to perceive their own power to change the system.
There's a reverse parallel to immigrant laborers seeking unionization in the 1890s. So long as there are workers prepared to put in the long hours, why should employers negotiate with women for any sort of work-family balance? The men, who have power (unlike the scabs brought in to break unions when they dared take action), are perfectly happy to keep working the 60+ hour work weeks.
This is a problem of men's choices, not women's.
Political power hasn't changed the family so far, so it's not likely to do so in the future. We're still going to have to deal with a hearts-and-minds failure, those of us who are feminists married to supposedly feminist men.
Bitch, you seem to argue that if women just stop doing the childcare, men will be forced to step up to the plate. But too many elite men don't value it: they're not worrying about those issues. Why can we see so clearly that if women go on housework strikes, the housework stops getting done, but then turn around and assume that if women stop caring about childcare, men will step up? Given the miserable state of childcare provision in this country, and given the enormous amount of labor involved in negotiating your child from home to childcare (and then negotiating the rules, the meals, the extra changes of clothes, the unpredictable scheduling as kids approach the preschool years, etc etc etc -- "send the kid to childcare" is not one of those easy tasks you do in your spare time between work and home), if women aren't taking care of this, it's not being taken care of, in too many homes.
As an aside, I think Hirschman does a sloppy job of separating housework from childcare. I have to think that none of the women she interviewed actually cleans her own home. Working or staying at home, I bet they all have housekeepers. Then again, I'm assuming that there's a heavy representation of (to revert to a worn-out phrase) "ladies who lunch" in the vows section.
Since Hirschman quotes Charlotte from "Sex and the City," I'll ask: was Charlotte the feminist? Because if she was, I misunderstood the show. By a mile.
In any case, I think Hirschman's overall argument is sound, although I think it's been made repeatedly over the years, and without the unnecessary resort to the New York Times Style section. Women and men need to have equal power in the home and the workplace, and stay-at-home parenting deprives women of power on multiple fronts. Women need to know that.
So do men. And if they don't care, then it's those _men_ who should forego marriage and children. Because they're at least as much the problem as the women. And taking on elite male workplace habits and assumptions won't win women the concessions we want. It's more of a surrender of the field, it seems to me.
No one is stepping on anyone's neck; I think we all agree that individual women make individual choices as best they can, given an imperfect world. And with that we all are, or should be, empathetic: I'll wager *everyone* here has made some compromises with sexism, simply because one has to live in a sexist world. The point is to step *away* from the question of what choices *individual* women make to look at broader structural causes and consequences.
A very interesting discussion. I read the original article about ten days ago but have not been able to write on it because I had so much to say that I ended up writing about twenty pages. Then filed it.
One thing that has not been mentioned here has to do with statistical discrimination. Statistical discrimination is very common and means that employers will judge job applicants and workers based on how the average type in their group performs. So for women this would mean that a woman worker will be expected to act like women do on average.
This means that if suddenly lots of women opted out (which appears not to be the case, see Alas a Blog) then employers would perhaps stop promoting or training women in the expectation that they, too, would opt out. Also, we might start hearing complaints about women taking up seats in law schools or medical schools, because the tuition at university is highly subsidized by others and these others might not want to pay for tuition that will not be used to benefit the society.
At the same time, taking care of children is very important work. My definition of feminism has two parts: to offer equal opportunities for both sexes and to value the traditionally female areas of work equally with the traditionally male areas of work. We have come nowhere near reaching the second part of this definition, and I am afraid that we will not get there unless two things happen: a) a strong movement pushing this and b) more men involved in caregiving.
Ah, so you're stepping on my neck on philosophical grounds, and it's nothing personal. By all means, go on, then.
Um, you made it personal, not me... as I noted earlier, a lack of public validation is apparently a mortal insult to choice feminists whose choices happen to be mostly prefeminist.
It'd be nice to have a less capitalist society in which work flexibility-- for both sexes, even with a bit of prodding to get men home more-- was more the norm than the evil rat race, but as things stand now, economic power (the kind that produces, more than the kind that, y'know, does the grocery shopping) is the kind that counts most... and the kind of power women chronically lack.
I recently bought the book Home Comforts. Before this, both I and future-spouse had a stereotypically-male attitude towards housework. Didn't really pay attention to it, did things sporadically. Reading the book together and realizing *why* each part housework was important was a breatkthrough. Now we're working together on maintaining our house, and it's quite nice.
And we also realized that housework doesn't actually suck. We both had assumed it sucked, but when we were actually doing it we kind of enjoyed it.
I find it interesting that the criteria for being a "true" feminist seems to be a college degree and a job outside the home.
I worked full time while my husband was in school. Our daughter was a baby at the time, we had excellent daycare. I took a year off after he graduated because we knew we would be moving within a year and Lullah started Kindergarten (half-days). Once we moved to a more permanent place I went back to work full-time. I continued to work full-time until Lullah was diagnosed with diabetes at age 7. The decision for me to become a SAHM was based on who was better able to care for her needs and who could provide the income to do so. I'm a nurse and my husband is an engineer. It was not a complicated issue. We lived over 350 miles from our family, so we were alone. When we were able to move nearer, we did. At that point, I re-entered the workforce full-time. We had two grandmothers, three grandfathers and multiple aunts and uncles to help.
I have pulled back to part time the last two years because my schedule and my daughters schedule has become much busier. I haven't "dropped out" of life. Next summer when she gets a licence and is able to drive herself to activities I plan to go back to full-time work and probably part-time school.
I resent the implication that because
1)I am a SAHM that I have completely copped out and have brought women's progress at a stand still.
2)I do not possess a higher degree than that of an LPN that I am somehow "less" of a feminist. (not all woman want to go to college-nor should they)
I am weary of justifying my decision to be a SAHM. And in fairness, not just to feminists also to the women who are pissed because they think I sit home and file my nails all day. I was told yesterday that"it must be nice to not HAVE to work".
I was not coerced into being a SAHM. I have lost IQ points because of it. I am not wasting my life. I am not sitting home looking for shit to clean and launder. And for the snarky lady in Wal-Mart- we make alot of sacrifices because I don't work.
I am a feminist. Maybe not the exact model that you have in mind, but I resent that my worth is diminished because I don't fit some mold that people have in their head for what I "should" be.
The debate is a valid one, but the holier than thou attitudes (on both sides) are not. Women must at some point support one another. In the end, if we eat one another alive there'll be nothing left.
Edit that: I have NOT lost IQ points.
I have however apparently lost the ability to type.
Kim, I don't think that only college-educated women can be feminists--nor I think does Hirshman. She's just narrowing her topic by saying up front that she's talking about that specific group.
Jody, I agree: the problem is that men haven't stepped up to the plate. The problem that stems from that problem is, we, women, can't make them just by saying they should. So the question is, ok, how do we make them? In terms of childcare, I actually *do* think that refusing to do it helps--part of the reason society as a whole is becoming more aware of the childcare problem *is* because more women are working outside the home. Hence the cost of childcare and the quality problem and availability issues become something that--again, if women refuse to handle it all so that it seems to run smoothly to Daddy--fathers at least have to think about. Obviously, on an *individual* level, simply walking away and saying "it's your kid, deal with it" doesn't necessarily work; but in some way, the issue has to be pushed, just like housework. Because otherwise, why *would* men change? If I were a man, I wouldn't; it's great to not have to hassle over childcare issues, believe me.
Hirshman's argument is that another way to change things is to get women into positions of political power, and into positions as bosses who set policy. I agree that this seems to work, once a sort of critical mass is reached (we're not there yet).
While I understand your reasons for saying not to change ones last name, I'm sitting here busy trying to plan a wedding before I'm next likely to be published (entirely possible, I won't be starting my PhD for nearly a year, and probably won't be jumping on that bandwagon for six months or more) just so I can dump my godawful last name for an easier to pronounce one that doesn't contain an embarassing swear word. I can forget, momentarily, how awful the name is. I can forget most of the time, actually. But hearing it announced at a conference and seeing the skeptical looks? Yeah I'll take my fiance's name any day. Screw power in the relationship, his name would ultimately make me more pronounceable and hopefully my work more memorable, and at least I'll never have to answer "Is that.... polish.... or something?" ever again instead of questions about my gosh darned paper. And I have a number of "good" reasons to be married as well (long time committment, and he does do a lot of housework). But meh--that's the one that applies here.
A week or so in a personal vignette, fine. A life of it would suck. To illustrate: I was brought up in trailers, have no degrees, and would not particularly object to a photograph taken of our cat eating directly from a turkey's baked carcass on our table (okay, I would object until after we'd finished eating). My wife would fucking fly with the shoes of retribution.
There would be no cute pictures of the kitty eating the turkey; there would be serious shit dealt to the cat, the photographer. Pain.
It would violate her esthetics like you read about.
Imagine yourself a man, married to this woman.
Now.
My issue with human commerce between men and women as regards housework is that there is this goddamned esthetic that MUST BE OBEYED. I know that it is not always the woman who imposes this, but, quoting Hirsch, quoting some other moron, not for citation, "multiple instances of anecdotes = data"
Here's my happily promoted anecdote: My Dear Wife wants shit cleaned and arranged in a fashion in which I have not the slightest interest. I do not aspire to her levels of hygiene and decorum. I do not share her enthusiasm for well-placed gee-gaws. I refuse to take part in the ceremony, would prefer to never be beholden to her for cleaning anything ever. Never asked her to clean anything in my entire fucking life. And I demand not to be a slave to her clean fancy.
In other words, I am a royal pain in the ass towards all women everywhere!
Beauty!
But it is also an oversimplification of a complex dynamic. In truth, my wife has encouraged me, partially through bitching, but mostly through example, to be better and cleaner personally, to care more. The best way to express it is that I could no more live with my youthful- let-the-cat-eat-the-turkey-self today than I could house a burro. But despite this rehabilitation, I'll be goddamned if I will let my wife boss me around like a fucking chipmunk.
Truth: She would hate me if I let her do it. We have been married for 35 years.
The debate is a valid one, but the holier than thou attitudes (on both sides) are not. Women must at some point support one another. In the end, if we eat one another alive there'll be nothing left.
Kim, I wrote about some of this today on my blog
The Longest Revolution
Or what I think is the reason for the mommy wars. It's at the end of my longish post.
Interestingly, on this thread the most DEFENSIVE women seem to be those that chose (no scare quotes) to become a SAHP.
Perhaps this is an anamoly, but if it were broadly representative, it would cast doubt on Hirshman's claims that women do not enter the workforce in greater numbers because they are pressured by social expectations to do otherwise. Judging by this thread, it seems that the social pressures are exactly opposite.
Among well educated women, particularly those that attended expensive private schools, I suspect that the thread above IS representative. After spending 36,000 dollars on a degree, one would imagine there is substantial pressure "to do something with it."
Speaking as someone in their late 20s, Hirshman's article had an anachronistic air about it; I think the culture has shifted far more than she's realized.
"The preparation stage begins with college. It is shocking to think that girls cut off their options for a public life of work as early as college. But they do. The first pitfall is the liberal-arts curriculum, which women are good at, graduating in higher numbers than men. Although many really successful people start out studying liberal arts, the purpose of a liberal education is not, with the exception of a miniscule number of academic positions, job preparation."
Is she joking here? I enjoyed her essay until the section "What Is to Be Done" when it became obvious that she's spent her entire career in an ivory tower. A tower which does not value a liberal arts education. Very odd.
I would argue just the opposite. That a liberal arts education is the BEST course of study for both men and women. It is shocking to me how few people can actually think and write. Very few have a working knowledge of history, philosophy, literature. A society that values only a technical education is one that is designed to fail in the long run. Look at what is going on with the conservative movement in this country. Ideology trumps reason. Too few people are being educated to think critically and write clearly.
I know people with technical educations and I know people with liberal arts educations. You can't beat the liberal arts when it comes to developing sophisticated human beings capable of rational thought and intelligent discourse. It is simply common sense.
Maybe women excel in this area because we have strengths that many men lack. Why are we working so hard to conform to a man's world? Most women I know can run circles around men. Why don't we value our contributions more instead of bringing ourselves down to a level that fits better with the male agenda?
We need more liberal arts majors, not less.
Andrew, I doubt that we can make that assumption on an academic feminist's site. Or anywhere in the liberal blogosphere, really-- the conflict between more old-school (or second wave, or hardcore) feminism and SAHMs is simply more obvious online. There are plenty of people who wouldn't dream of spending any time at all arguing policy or social issues online, or anywhere else; they tend to generate much more social pressure in real life simply because of their lack of interest in analyzing social mores. IMHO, the reason this conflict is so particularly marked online is because feminist-leaning women (including many SAHMs) look for virtual community much more than traditionalist women, who can usually find more like-minded people in their day-to-day lives than I'm likely to.
But yes, the SAH contingent is more defensive... I find it understandable, but a bit odd simply because the discussions in places like this are necessarily more broad than personal, yet individual situations and feelings always have to be aired when they're not really that relevant to the big issues affecting millions of women.
Yes, I wondered about the part about a liberal arts education too--but in context, I think it makes sense. Don't you find that most undergraduates, who do not plan to go to graduate school, end up at the end of their liberal arts degree kind of aimless and wondering "ok, now what?" job-wise? And I think part of H's point is that being aimless makes it easier to lose one's way. In some ways--and believe me, I agree with you completely about the value of the liberal arts--liberal arts degrees postpone defining career goals in ways that, say, business or computer science degrees don't.
I agree that the readers of this blog are unlikely to be representative of the general population in many ways--but with respect to the defensiveness of well-educated women who choose to become SAHPs, I suspect the blog comports well with the general experience of that demographic.
And while structural issues are important, Hirshman's article was clearly aimed at individual conduct.
yet individual situations and feelings always have to be aired when they're not really that relevant to the big issues affecting millions of women.
Of course they do. Because the broad policy issues that you and others are proposing have direct impact on individual situations and feelings.
It's easy to say, as a policy statement, "Feminists should have only one child!" (for example). But no matter how often you add "Of course, people have to make the compromises necessary to their own lives," what people are going to hear you say is "Your second child represents a compromise to the ideals of Feminism."
Real people have to live real lives. If the political statements coming out of the feminist movement sound unlivable to women, if they make them feel defensive, if they feel that following them will be at a cost to their personal or family lives -- then that is a problem, yes?
Gads, Scott L. You sound like Mr. Kate.
Except Mr. Kate's idea of unnecessary housework, once upon a time, was doing dishes more than once a week. Or cleaning the toilet - ever. When I tried to divvy up the chores when we were first married, he denied that laundry could possibly take so much time as I said it did because "it is just putting it in the washer and moving it to the dryer". Never mind sorting, folding, and putting away. Those were slavery to an aesthetic. His pink underwear adorned the piles of tangeled garments in the bedroom, mute monuments to his ideal of beauty.
Now I was raised in trailers and had a mom who pretty much agreed with my husband about "tidyness" issues, as it were. The problem isn't that. The problem comes when men who are raised to think that somebody else will do all the housework outside of their notice if they are not interested in it simply do not understand the basic level of effort needed to maintain fundamental sanitation. Moreover, when they deride it as "unnecessary effort" or minimize the amount of effort their partner puts into it or knows that it requires for basic safety and sanitation.
Yes, I went on strike. At least I won some free time. No, I never gave in.
He worked part-time at one point before we had kids, took an interest in the house as his newfound habitat, and started to scold me about my lack of interest in housework. I laughed and referred to the his previous attitude in the above conversation. Sorry dude, but, as you said, it can't possibly take so much time.
He is still unable to clean and chat on the phone or clean and watch the kids at the same time. Somehow, I am expected to allow for this. Somehow, I refuse. And no cherry-picking is allowed either. I'll negotiate to split labor, but I'm so very not willing to have you do the dusting when we can't even cook because dishes cover every bit of counterspace.
So I'll agree about the geegaws and nicknacks (don't have them much anyway), but dishes clean and away are in a different league, don't you think?
On the subject of science doctorates...
I'm married to one, I watched him go through the process of getting that degree, along with a large cohort of men and women.
Many science graduates finish their degrees and end up in the same "Now what" place -- because they realize, too late, that they don't want to stay in the field. They don't want to work ridiculous hours for low wages. Or they realize they don't have the capacity to come up with their own research ideas. I've seen both men and women come to this conclusion. The dropout rate, in my (admittedly limited to two schools and 12 years) data sample, is huge.
To send people to the sciences because it is a higher-earning or higher-status area, without any idea of whether they like the field, is a recipe for even more aimlessness.
My liberal arts preparation may have made me less career-specifically focused, but it has allowed me to go get a job doing something that interests me, satisfies me (most days) and allows me a decent work-life balance at the end of the day.
Before I take off my coat, I'll put your shoes away for you, shall I? Oh, and I'll pick up your coat from the floor and hang it up. Okay, now I can take off my own coat and hang it up right away, instead of dropping it on the floor for someone else to pick up later.
Harumph.
In my household, I'm both the one who generally gets home first, and I'm the one who consistently hangs up his coat.
Also, is it still an unequal resources situation if one makes more than the other but neither is making enough to support the entire household alone? If the person in our household who makes less became no longer employed (for any reason), the other one wouldn't bring in enough for the three of us. Are we in an unequal situation? I'm not looking for absolution, of course.
If the political statements coming out of the feminist movement sound unlivable to women, if they make them feel defensive, if they feel that following them will be at a cost to their personal or family lives -- then that is a problem, yes?
Well, it's certainly a problem for people who are easily offended and/or expect unwavering support or validation, I suppose. Again, this is the language of feelings instead of the language of action or of policy, or even just analysis... I think it's fair to say that attending to the sensibilities of those who aren't personally interested in making substantive changes, no matter how valid their individual reasons for inaction may be, does mean that those changes will be longer in coming. One poster over at 11D (I think- ?) claimed that it's the dropouts that will change policy; I didn't comment, but I believe that precisely the opposite is true and that only those who are actually in the workforce will be able to demand changes.
There's a reason I invited Lisa to hit me for a nose job upthread (and on a related note, I believe someone said that high heels was their feminist dealbreaker)-- the fact is that we all make our deals with patriarchy and mine involves vanity, the beauty myth, and what have you. I can truthfully claim that my surgery is unlike work status or taking a husband's name in that it makes no real public statement & is completely unknown to most people, and even that the only other person in my family that had it is the one male with an Ivy League doctorate, but the bare-bones truth is that I chose to accommodate a standard of beauty that I could have defied, and defying it would have been more powerful from a feminist perspective. We might as well be honest about the areas in which we don't really live up to our professed ideals (we all have them) instead of claiming that whatever our personal choices have been manage to serve those ideals somehow just because we made them... that's the sort of circular logic that makes the political right so insufferable, when you think about it.
I would say that more science graduates need to be forced to accept a strong grounding in liberal arts.
I remember all the whining about how the humanities requirements at MIT were a burden that distracted from the important education - whining generally centered on "I don't wanna and I'm not goood at it so unfaiiiirrr" for the most part.
I am forever glad that I had to take these classes. Being able to shop the world of ideas gave me a base from which to launch new ventures once I recognized that the job market for my education really sucked unless I wanted to slave for military contractors.
Dr. B said: "No one is stepping on anyone's neck..."
Not literally. There's a lot of argument about who's pulling the strings, though.
"The point is to step *away* from the question of what choices *individual* women make to look at broader structural causes and consequences."
This approach is inherently dualistic, and relies excessively on notions that there is some deeper, true nature that is not being expressed, or that if we simply push in the right direction using the right tools, we can mold individuals as we see fit.
Purely structural approaches are inadequate, and not simply because they deny individual contingency. People create themselves and their worlds. Buying into the dualism turns people into brains. Onna stick.
Real people have to live real lives. If the political statements coming out of the feminist movement sound unlivable to women, if they make them feel defensive, if they feel that following them will be at a cost to their personal or family lives -- then that is a problem, yes?
Yes. But I think the problem is in the phrase, "feminists should." The question is, does this mean that doing X (having one kid) better furthers feminist goals--which, alas, I think it does in the world as it is now--or does this mean that women who have more than one kid aren't feminists? I would go firmly with the first: that H's (and my) "shoulds" are advisory, not commanding. We all make compromises; recognizing that they *are* compromises is part of what needs to be done.
Wow. You took the words right out of my mouth, sister. The only thing I disagree about is the joint bank account, but I can see your point. I want to control all the money, dammit. I don't want to be in a position where anyone is twitting me about how much I spend on whatever, and I do want to see where every dollar is going.
Okay, No Nym, I'm going to venture out and say that your statement that "this approach...relies excessively on notions that there is some deeper, true nature that is not being expressed" is the whole problem with the two sides talking past each other here. I'm going to stand up and say that I don't really think the argument that the more feminist choice is for women to work, that as a rule women should expect to work and be able to support themselves their entire lives, has anything to do with women finding their "true nature." That's crap, in my oh-so-humble opinion--feminism isn't about making you happy, or letting you choose to do whatever you want.
I realize this may take me to a place that many feminists don't agree with. But dammit! It's a *social justice* movement, not a self-esteem movement. I think the driving force behind feminism, since way-back-when, has been the demand that women be treated like adults, like full citizen adults, and sometimes being an adult means doing things that aren't all sweetness and light and 100% enjoyable. Sometimes, it involves working a shitty job for a while, even if it would be more enjoyable to not do so, even if we can work it to so we don't absolutely have to. I'm totally open to arguments that having to work in a capitalist society in degrading and wrong and we should have a Marxist revolution; or that we should change workplaces so both men and women can better balance work and families; or whatever. I just think it's not so feminist to insist that women ought to be able to opt-out of the parts of being adult that we find less pleasurable.
(And yes, insert the huge caveat about the structure of our labor market makes this hard as hell and a sometimes impossible situation if you're raising an infant or a small child and of course I understand that we can't live up to our ideals. I don't always. Or even mostly.)
As for the part about pushing in the right direction to "mold individuals as we see fit," well, that does seem to have been a major part of almost every social movement, whether it's to erase racism or end employment discrimination or whatever. Changing social norms, attitudes, and behavior does seem to be the name of the game.
Meh, I'm trying to edit this to make it sound less harsh, it's not meant to be an attack on anyone, but it does reflect my frustration that so much discussion in feminism today seems to endlessly circle back to the idea that if it feels good, then women are being feminist by doing it. (I'm posing for Playboy, but I choose to! And I like it! Thus, I'm making a feminist choice!) Is there anyone here, honestly, that thinks that this is the end goal of feminism?
but it does reflect my frustration that so much discussion in feminism today seems to endlessly circle back to the idea that if it feels good, then women are being feminist by doing it. (I'm posing for Playboy, but I choose to! And I like it! Thus, I'm making a feminist choice!) Is there anyone here, honestly, that thinks that this is the end goal of feminism?
Exactly-- you & Dr. B said it much better than I can.
I definitely agree MEN'S attitudes need to change more than women's because far to many men use work as a copout to being more involved with their own family and, thus, implicitly place more of a burden on their own wives. I do not see how just by more women going to work will change this one ounce. It just means the childcare will be displaced to lower status people (mostly women) - it won't certainly won't translate into more men picking up the slack. The only reason we're seeing more stay-at-home dads nowadays is not because more women are working, but rather because a small minority of men are starting to realize it's "ok" and actually rewarding to be more involved with their kids than previous generations of fathers! I hope the trend continues and women can't stop fighting amongst themselves pitting working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers.
Also, I still find the claim absurd that just because somebody has an income they somehow have more political power. So, you're telling me somebody making $6 per hour has more political pull than some stay-at-home wife to a wealthy business owner? Hah! And if you didn't mean "low income" people have power, then what's the cutoff point? How much does somebody need to make before they have political clout? $1? $10,000? $100,000? It's laughable that a working class man or woman has more political power than a wealthy stay-at-home socialite.
Of course I meant to say "I hope the trend continues and women CAN stop fighting amongst themselves pitting working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers"
Wow. Someone actually likes the article. A lot of someones, given the comments.
Many major problems with her article:
1. Since when are the elites the "natural heirs of feminism"? Everything I've read by an y feminist of any standing now for a decade has claimed that the single biggest problem with the second wave as it existed in the popular/mainstream sphere (to the extent that it did) was that it was governed by the elites, who had no clue what the majority of women needed or wanted and acted as if their own concerns were the same as women's concerns, period. Arguably the "natural heirs of feminism" should be those who were excluded from previous waves--the disenfranchised and underprivileged. I'm actually quite surprised to read anyone arguing that feminism ought to continue to focus on the middle & upper class white women it has so long been preoccupied with (in the mainstream) for so long.
Others have made this point elsewhere better than I will, but elites are elites; their concerns are the concerns of the elites; and more elite women in positions of power and influence will just mean a public policy that is more directed to concerns of elite women, not the concerns of women generally.
2. Assuming that work is the place for human flourishing is a tad, ah, strange. For millions of years humans were hunter-gatherers whose "work" was highly repetitive, laborious, and not mentally stimulating. Were their lives empty and without meaning because they had no lawyers, engineers, doctors and academics? I'm not saying that we ought to emulate or envy them; only that this argument dehumanizes anyone not living in a modern economy. Not good. Furthermore--trust me--work is not a place for mental stimulation for most people. The vast majority of people do not work in places where the brain is given much exercise and, considering we cannot all be doctors, lawyers, engineers and academics, and that we will continue to need janitors, assembly line workers, cashiers and grocery store shelf stockers, I don't see this changing. Work provides many things--stability, financial resources--but to argue that it is innately superior to home life in mental stimulation is obviously the product of a mind so privileged that it cannot conceive of the work that most people actually do.
3. Looking at finances from a family standpoint is a fine thing. But it won't help the couple in question financially. Whether they look at her income as "her income" or "their income," if they are making more money if she stays home than if she goes to work, it doesn't really matter, does it? Again, this argument presupposes an elite woman with a certain income--most women don't make enough money to pay for a nanny or daycare after taxes. It's true that leaving entails losses of future earning potential and security, and it's true that this is a problem; I do not believe it is true that the answer is for all women to continue working and taking the present financial hit and loss in happiness as an investment in their future. The answer is societal: Getting on and off the career track needs to be easier; full-time parenting needs to be valued financially. In the meantime, any choice any couple makes will be a tradeoff that should be theirs alone, and not read as an indictment or endorsement of "feminism." What HIrschman ignores in her example is that *regardless* of the family's decision, they will have $60g to live on--which will mean for most couples that the decision of whether or not to return to work will be made based on other factors--and she ignores the costs of going to work, such as professional clothing/uniforms, commuting, and so on.
4. This article falls right into the conservative trap of positioning this as "women's choices." But to what extent can this be demonstrated? She herself admits--and then dismisses in a line, without evidence--that employment is falling across the board and women might be leaving the labour force because they were fired, not because they quit. So why then does she blame them? Does she have any evidence that women are "opting out"? Yes, she interviewed 30-odd women; she interviewed 30-odd women in the only class in America that actually has a choice of whether or not to work--women whose finances will be good no matter what they decide to do. A woman who can quit her job as a lawyer to plan her wedding is not indicative of most women in America, or even most women lawyers. The vast majority of women in America make the choices they do because it's the only one they can afford to make, which hardly qualifies as a "choice."
But conceding this, as Hirschman does, and arguing on the rhetoric of "choice" only furthers the idea that all women really want is to be happy homemakers baking cookies. There is no proof of this; the idea itself needs to be countered. I would personally say that "choice feminism" is a red herring; the argument about it (regardless of the source of the argument) distracts from the central problem that for most women there are no choices, or no palatable choices.
In countries where public policy gives women more choices, in the form of better work policies and maternity leaves, more women choose to work. I do not believe this is a coincidence. In Canada, in 2000, parental leave was extended from six months to 12. Average hours of work are fewer, average hours of time off are greater, and the economy has been doing quite well. In teh same period in the US, work hours have risen, hours of time off have fallen, and the economy has gone down.
If one were to assume that women were simply making "choices" based on their ideology, one might assume that women in Canada would also be "opting out" and leaving the workforce. But no. Full-time employment for women has continued to rise every year for the past five years, for all age groups. One might reasonably conclude that the "problem" of American women/mothers leaving the work force is not one of bad "choices," but a result of public policies and workplace policies that do not support parents.
5. Here's my biggest problem:
When the economy tanks, historically, women (especially with kids) are the first ones forced out of the workplace. It's assumed they don't really want to be there, that they don't really need the income, that a man deserves/needs it more. This is highly sexist and traditionally presages a period in which more women return to the home, and this is traditionally cast as a "choice"--as women deciding they would rather be at home.
We need to be very careful that we don't echo that rhetoric ourselves, even if we mean to attack it. If the economy is going down and women are leaving the workforce then, to my mind, it's the 1950s all over again. And we need to look at what the conditions/policies/decisions are that are forcing women out, rather than admonishing them to stand up for themselves and "just say no."
I would also agree with Sara. It's a *bad* move to go into anything just "for the money". That is the surest way to depression and an unhappy life. Women (or men) going into something they don't genuinely enjoy just to make other people (family, society, a "social movement", etc.) is a bad, bad idea. People should always follow their hearts and, hopefully, some money will follow.
So, you're telling me somebody making $6 per hour has more political pull than some stay-at-home wife to a wealthy business owner?
Sigh... wealthy people, regardless of work status (and wealthy earners are undeniably more secure in their status than those they support, a fact you seem determined to ignore) have more political power than non-wealthy people. However, it is also true that working people generally have more power, be it political or personal, than dependents... or, to put it another way, it has long been obvious that those with the skills to scrape by and little to lose have more freedom in some instances than those who are without current skills and who are accustomed to luxuries that they enjoy only at the sufferance of a spouse or parents. You can't be ignorant of this; it has been a stock dramatic & literary device for decades (the gilded-cage vs. shabby independence plot, y'know), because it's true.
Caring for your own infant does not throw you back to the 1950's. It's called concern for more than just yourself, and concern for the health of a being much smaller than you are. Protesting the 1950's by acting like an angry school principal toward your spouse and spending as little time with your kids as possible is a psychopathic way of carrying out a social movement.
And if the way to protest a man not helping with the kids is to refuse to care for the kid until he does, then you are a truly inhmane and heartless person. Would you really neglect your child, refusing to feed or bathe him or provide a clean living space for him, if say your husband didn't come around right away? Children and cockroaches don't mix.
Parents don't go on strike, and babies don't take care of themselves. Many of you have a twisted, sick view of activism and family life.
How about, rather than getting engaged and married because you are both Democrats and like the same music, you explore each other's values prior to the wedding? if you're marrying a pig who won't do diddlysquat around the house, then prepare for a husband who wont' do diddlysquat around the house.
If you want a quality man, don't get married til you find one. But don't make your children pay. And "strong women" don't put so much stock in being sheeple to a political movement; they make their own decisions.
The only reason we're seeing more stay-at-home dads nowadays is not because more women are working, but rather because a small minority of men are starting to realize it's "ok" and actually rewarding to be more involved with their kids than previous generations of fathers! I hope the trend continues and women can't stop fighting amongst themselves pitting working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers.
Well, when people like many of the commentors to this blog stop making rants about how childcare is demeaning and doesn't require a college degree and is something any fool can do and that it's beneath a college-educated woman, then perhaps more men will stop seeing it as aversive and start moving toward it.
I mean if childcare is that bad, and throws people into dependency, and is boring and thankless, then why would you wish that on any man you love? Why would any dignified person want to play with a disgusting baby?
Men need to change their attitudes, but feminists do too. The feminism that declares that women who stay home "throw away their education" has got to go. What we need is more of the feminism that says "instead of sending both mom and dad out of the home, let's bring both home more often."
nd "strong women" don't put so much stock in being sheeple to a political movement; they make their own decisions.
Well, I would say that if you consider participation in a political movement being "sheeple," then political movements aren't really for you. And I'm relieved that you're so strong that you can make your own decisions and fully accept any future consequences without any need for a less unforgiving societal structure; my energy will undoubtedly be better spent on women who are a bit more invested in the issues facing their gender as a whole than those whose interests are purely personal.
Amen to that Christine!
latts, I agree with you for the most part actually. But, to close the loop, let's agree that a non-working dependent to a wealthy person has much more power than poor, working class person. I can see what you say in that both cases the dependent may have less power than the earner, but this is not the same as saying "just because a woman works" she will automatucally have power. All else being equal, perhaps, a little more, but not just because she works - it matters at least as much how high end of a job/career we're talking about.
Therefore, it's bad advice to say that a perfectly happy, stay-at-home mom is doing everybody a disservice (including herself) when she could be so much more *powerful* if she went to work as a full-time cashier and hired somebody beneath her to be the primary caregiver. This degrades stay-at-home moms who are excellent at what they do.
There are two divergent directions of argument here.
One, like Hirshman, argues that women should eschew the homelife, have one child (if necessary), and go to work because doing so will make those women happier.
The other, which also seems present in Hirschman, argues that women should do the same--not because it makes them happier--but because it advances the goals of feminism.
I think the first argument is implausible on the face, and has been thoroughly debunked here.
But what about the second argument?
my energy will undoubtedly be better spent on women who are a bit more invested in the issues facing their gender as a whole than those whose interests are purely personal.
So you'd prefer that women be forced into the will of feminists, regardless of their desires, much like they were forced into the will of men during the 1950's. nobody's happiness matters as long as they are doing things the Latts-approved way. I get it.
Ooh, I just changed my mind about staying home. I'm going to go back to work tomorrow, because I don't have Latt's and "my gender's" permission to stay home with my child. Thank you for the enlightenment, I never thought of that!
lats says "my energy will undoubtedly be better spent on women who are a bit more invested in the issues facing their gender" to which I say this seems offenseive and I'm not even female! So, what you're really saying is that domestic issues women face don't matter and that if every woman worked outside the home, then women would be better off, on the whole, and tough domestic work/life issues would decrease, not amplify!? Ha!
Aren't engaging in such "Mommy Wars divisive to your "movement" you're so worried about?
Therefore, it's bad advice to say that a perfectly happy, stay-at-home mom is doing everybody a disservice (including herself) when she could be so much more *powerful* if she went to work as a full-time cashier and hired somebody beneath her to be the primary caregiver. This degrades stay-at-home moms who are excellent at what they do.
The problem is that people are encouraging people to have careers for the sake of having a career, just to have power. If someone's in a carer she or he hates and is dying to be with their child, she or he will likely be miserable and make a miserable colleague.
There is just something outrageously insecure and sheeplish about doing something to please a social movement even if goes against the grain of what is best for you and your family. I am not going to go to work to please feminists and "further the cause" any more than I'll stop using birth control to please my pastor and "witness the teachings of my church."
Aren't engaging in such "Mommy Wars divisive to your "movement" you're so worried about?
Also comes across as incredibly elitist and snobby. "I am not going to associate with the likes of you, because your kind of people are beneath my movement."
So you'd prefer that women be forced into the will of feminists, regardless of their desires, much like they were forced into the will of men during the 1950's. nobody's happiness matters as long as they are doing things the Latts-approved way. I get it.
I don't prefer that women be "forced into" anything, but substantial percentages of women taking the path of least resistance (or the traditionalist path, or the path of huggy-kissy domestic bliss, or whatever) does mean that there will be fewer viable options available for women whose interests are, shall we say, a bit less traditional. And going back to the original point of the Hirschman article and Dr. B's post, there's little incentive either for employers or husbands to accommodate us troublesome and unwomanly types when there are so many women who provide "evidence" that women prefer marital protection to the dirty world of commerce. Again, I don't care about, or particularly condemn, your personal situation per se, but as AB said, this ain't about every individual getting exactly what she wants. It's about having respectable and productive alternatives for those who either don't want a picket-fence life or those who just can't have it for whatever reason.
lats says "my energy will undoubtedly be better spent on women who are a bit more invested in the issues facing their gender" to which I say this seems offenseive and I'm not even female!
Well, of course you're offended-- you've made it very clear throughout this entire discussion that anything less than a standing ovation for your felicitous domestic arrangements is completely unsupportive and inappropriate. As a side note, I find it interesting that men aren't really expected to support or care about others' private lives, while women are bitter, unempathetic meanies if we don't. In any case, it's kinda hard to accept your arguments as either representative or feminist because the fact is that you and your wife are apparently doing nothing different than could have been done in a happy marriage 150 years ago, except for her having just a few more legal rights should things fall apart. Yes, it's all nice & cheerful and bully for both of you and your offspring, but your situation is completely irrelevant to the broader societal issues involving education costs, workplace changes, actual economic power, and generally persistent inequity. Which I've said repeatedly, only to have a bunch of personal anecdotes and can't-we-just-be-happys lobbed back at me.
Also comes across as incredibly elitist and snobby. "I am not going to associate with the likes of you, because your kind of people are beneath my movement."
Weren't you the one accusing others of being crappy mothers for the mere suggestion that fathers might be prodded into greater usefulness, and proudly declaring yourself above mere political movements?
Can there be justice in the household economy while capital holds the commanding heights of the general economy?
Growing up male on a farm, the Old McDonald type of farm that persisted through the 1960's, leads me to think that the mode of domestic production has everything to do with household task assignment and the status of the tasks assigned.
The farm's demands on and for labor overwhelmed entirely any household division of labor based on petit-bourgeois notions of "man's work" and "woman's work". The farm household could not survive as a unit of consumption only. It was, by definition, a unit of production. Assignment of tasks had to be rationalized according to the demands of production without respect to traditional gender roles.
The only job not interchangeable was nursing infants and even that was frequently a joint task. I made many trips from the house to the field, carrying an infant sibling or cousin to be fed by my mother or auntie from her station on the tractor saddle, then returning the infant to the house where I bathed and powdered the little eedjit.
Most of the adults worked out for wages and it was in that outside economy where we confronted the traditional division of labor. My grandmother, mother, and aunties all taught school. My grandfather, father and uncles worked as carpenters and laborers.
It was also in the outside economy where we learned the concept of hustling and the complexity of moral issues that arise in the struggle to support a family. My grandmother, a devout Roman Catholic, operated an unlicensed snug and constantly admonished we garsoons on the difference between doing as she said doing as she did.
I'll stop here before I veer further into nostalgia-stan. I don't mean to assert everything was better back in the day. It wasn't. But I did avoid enculturation about what jobs should be reserved to men and what jobs should be imposed on women and that has made all the difference.
Beanie Baby- I was very bothered by the focus on elite women in Hirschman's article too, but further upthread Dr. B pointed out that the whole point is, in examining the claims of choice feminism, to focus on those people who should have the most economic freedom- hence, those elite women with expensive pedigree degrees and high earning power. When these very women make the decision to stay at home, or to marry men who make (or can make) more than them (despite the parity in their educations), whereas these elite men choose to marry women who do not make more than them, etc., then this can say something to us about choice feminism, or rather the choices that these women make in light of the economic freedom that they have can tell us something valuable about feminism as a whole.
I am still bothered by the "natural heirs" line, and I am still thinking about the women who are working as nannies and housecleaners, but her choice makes sense in that context. I have a more bell hooks informed understanding of feminism (but maybe without the Buddhism and the self-love stuff) being about changing the whole system, rather than accomodating to it, but if this is about real-world choices, then fine. I think we should expect more of ourselves, but whatever. I wonder, however, if we can see these women's choices in terms of a protest against the 60-hour week expectations. It's a stretch. And then there would still be the problem that because its women making such a protest, and not elite men, then it can't be effective. Same problem.
I have spent way too much time reading this fascinating thread, and not enough time grading, as per usual. Damn you all.
latts says "Yes, it's all nice & cheerful and bully for both of you and your offspring, but your situation is completely irrelevant to the broader societal issues involving education costs, workplace changes, actual economic power, and generally persistent inequity" to which I say so the fact that I lobbied to work from home a couple years ago so I could be more involved with my family and have been successful enough as role model for remote workers that my employer know lets *everybody* - including many working mothers - do so is "irrelevant" to advancing home/work balance issues for women (not to mention serving as a role model for other husbdands/dads)??
While I tend to agree that it's good to talk about movements as a whole, I don't think it's unreasonable to examine one's own motivations in approaching one's life. The personal is political and all that.
In our case, it's unlikely that my husband and I will ever have a fulltime SAH parent permanently. We are motivated by a deep fear of exposing our son to financial catastrophe should the primary wage earner be incapacitated. Both of us came to this conclusion through personal experience (see my comment above, short version is that life insurance, even a fat policy if you can afford it, will not offset a catastrophic loss of the primary earner.)
I've found that the sacrifice involved is mine, more than my son's. I am the one who misses time with him, but he's thriving. (Daycare in the morning, time with Gramma in the afternoon, then I get home). It's hard. I won't lie. I miss him. But based on our family experiences, we will not set up a situation where he would be economically vulnerable should the primary wage earner be incapacitated. His security is more important to us than my desire to not work outside the house.
However, I know that this is not a fear shared by everybody. I have friends who are SAH because their personal experiences led them to believe that was the model that would work best for them. Their motivations are different (worries about childcare quality, or, in one case, a child who is too sickly for regular childcare). I don't share them, though I do understand them. They don't share my worries of risking my child's economic safety on one earner, but I think they understand them.
Looking at this from the broader policy view, however, our decisions can be reconciled: we are all deeply worried about the wellbeing of our children. I think sometimes that the rhetoric becomes so sharp in the U.S. because there is an undercurrent of fear: fear of what will happen to oneselves, to one's kids. Which brings us to the safety net and why it is imperative to push for social change, and why I believe it IS critical to have women outside of the domestic sphere: I suspect that the divisiveness between WOH/SAH would ease off if there was a greater sense of a safety net. I sometimes wonder if the debate is not as heated in places like France or Canada, where women are assured of both healthcare and quality childcare.
I don't prefer that women be "forced into" anything, but substantial percentages of women taking the path of least resistance (or the traditionalist path, or the path of huggy-kissy domestic bliss, or whatever) does mean that there will be fewer viable options available for women whose interests are, shall we say, a bit less traditional. And going back to the original point of the Hirschman article and Dr. B's post, there's little incentive either for employers or husbands to accommodate us troublesome and unwomanly types when there are so many women who provide "evidence" that women prefer marital protection to the dirty world of commerce.
Here comes Straw Stay at home Mom again. Traditional, submissive, romantic, etc. Staying at home is not "preferring marital protection to the dirty world of commerce," nor is it always "domestic bliss" or "huggy kissy." It is hard work, and if you were truly a feminist instead ofa capitalist drone, you'd accept that.
In fact, your condescending attitude shows quite a nasty attitude and makes you sound bitter and jealous of women who are at home. It doesn't make you look any bigger or more self confident, and it makes your "movement" look like the stereotype conservatives think it is--angry and nasty.
is the solution really to say "If it's traditional, it's bad?" Do you really ascribe traditional, Stepford roles to every, single woman who stays home with her child? If you do, your portrayal is not just insulting, but so generally inaccurate that it's not even worth trying to debunk it any further.
True progress should be about holding on to what works while changing what doesn't, not changing everything. Not everything from the 1950's was so bad. It's clear that there was (and is) plenty of injustices, but this doesn't mean everything traditional is necessarily limiting or bad.
Here comes Straw Stay at home Mom again. Traditional, submissive, romantic, etc. Staying at home is not "preferring marital protection to the dirty world of commerce," nor is it always "domestic bliss" or "huggy kissy." It is hard work, and if you were truly a feminist instead ofa capitalist drone, you'd accept that.
In fact, your condescending attitude shows quite a nasty attitude and makes you sound bitter and jealous of women who are at home. It doesn't make you look any bigger or more self confident, and it makes your "movement" look like the stereotype conservatives think it is--angry and nasty.
Ooh, I'm now a bitter & jealous capitalist drone... except you don't know whether I am a SAH type or have been in the past, or whether I'm married or not or have kids or are even heterosexual, or anything about my education or background or employment history, or whether I'm housebound for medical reasons or am taking care of a sick relative, or even whether I'm seventeen or seventy years old, do you? And that's because I haven't found it necessary to make this discussion all about me & my oh-so-fascinating life... excuse me, choices. I specifically am not talking about my experiences because, objectively speaking, they're nowhere near as important as you seem to think yours are.
Oh, you may want to avoid resorting to catty little she's-just-bitter-because-I-have-a-better-man-
than-she-does comments... they're an invitation for negative feminine stereotypes of the antifeminist variety.
Latts--you're making it pretty obvious that you are not SAH, or if you are, you're pretty self-hating considering the comments you made. So your "you don't know me" act is laughable.
Who called whose lifestyle "kissy face" and "domestic bliss?" I never called you a selfish career woman or even made blanket generalizations about all working moms, but you called the stay at home lifestyle by names I didn't appreciate, and even said "bully to you," which only makes you look small.
I could say "bully to you" for working, but guess what--I didn't. Rather than judging all working moms, I simply made a comment about people who would boycott childcare and do things at their children's expense just to prove a point. It was based on a quote from another commentor. If you're not doing that, then my comment does not address you.
So there is no basis for the "I know you are but what am I" argument you are starting, because I did not commit the behaviors you did.
If feminism means acting like you, then I'll gladly opt out. If anyone in real life ever made the comments you made about the decision to stay home, you better believe they would get a not so polite earful, so why is online any different?
Why does it make you so angry that other woman don't live like you?
True progress should be about holding on to what works while changing what doesn't, not changing everything. Not everything from the 1950's was so bad. It's clear that there was (and is) plenty of injustices, but this doesn't mean everything traditional is necessarily limiting or bad.
TD--Well said, that's exactly what I mean. We can change the '50's without banning anything remotely associated with them.
TD, I applaud your efforts to develop a more family-friendly workplace and wish more men would join with women-- and sorry, it has to be working women because non-working women might as well not exist from most employers' perspectives-- to do the same. However, unless I completely missed it, that's not what you've been debating; your argument has mostly been that your family's arrangements are traditional and that everyone's happy, so it must be a good thing. My position is that it may be a good thing for your family, but it still reinforces structural and domestic inequity for women in general and that your wife's status is entirely dependent on your financial support, which means that over time, her options for work participation become more and more limited. That's not a matter of impugning your happiness; it's just fact.
,i>My position is that it may be a good thing for your family, but it still reinforces structural and domestic inequity for women in general and that your wife's status is entirely dependent on your financial support, which means that over time, her options for work participation become more and more limited. That's not a matter of impugning your happiness; it's just fact.
So your solution is for TD to change his lifestyle, put his kids in daycare, and have his wife work, because you think you know what's best for his family?
ugh, bad italics. Latts quote on top; my response on bottom.
It is hard work, and if you were truly a feminist instead ofa capitalist drone, you'd accept that.
This is not about being capitalist drones, it's about being capitalist non-drones.
Law firms (and probably consulting companies, and accountancys) are set up so that you have a bunch of partners who fund the thing, and everyone else works crazy hours for their benefit. Colleges are set up with tenured professors who get to do, if not exactly what they want, something close to it, and adjuncts who get the shaft. In the technology field, you have engineers with a lot of personal autonomy and good working conditions, and those who do exactly what they're told for ten hours a day.
In most of these cases, the former are disproportionately men, while the latter are women.
Why is this? The men in these roles say that it's because women don't want them badly enough. The women say it's because they want to have a family. The men reply "I have a family. Women just don't want them badly enough." If there were more women in these roles who recognized the tradeoffs they had to make to get there, things might be more likely to change.
So your solution is for TD to change his lifestyle, put his kids in daycare, and have his wife work
The decisions that brought TD's life to where it is, which sounds like a fine place to be, have already been made.
The solution is to create situations where when the choice about who has (or gets) to stay home and who has (or gets) to keep working, the choice is not automatically "man work, woman keep house." Hence the bitching about liberal arts degrees and the like.
The solution is to create situations where when the choice about who has (or gets) to stay home and who has (or gets) to keep working, the choice is not automatically "man work, woman keep house." Hence the bitching about liberal arts degrees and the like.
Just curious--What type of policy change will encourage "creating those situations?" I think TD already made it clear that his wife isn't staying home because she's a woman, but because that's what she wants to do. If a decision is made consciously and by a lot of thought and discussion, then who cares if it ends up being the woman at home? What makes you think his situation is automatic and gendered, and why fix what isn't broken?
latts says "your argument has mostly been that your family's arrangements are traditional and that everyone's happy, so it must be a good thing" to which I say there are certainly traditonal components to be sure (two parents present, father brings in an income, mother stays home with kids), but there is a new age twist in that I'm very "plugged in" to my family, involved in day-to-day actuvities with my kids, and I don't say this or that is "woman's work". Moreover, I left a higher paying job a few years ago for one with more flexibility and freedom. It did require we lead a more frugal life, but it's worth it in spades.
And, you're right, if your family is happy, I do think that is a good thing. What human being would not?
Christine, to be perfectly honest, I'm not even interested in engaging with you any more at this point, because you have said nothing that indicates that you have any interest in this issue other than aggressively defending your own lifestyle, as if it were some sort of feminist example just because you have discovered that housework is hard (no shit) and that the horror stories about being alone at fifty with no job skills don't always come true. Guess what?- the rest of us know that perfectly well and some of us still consider it more productive to address issues of female independence than to focus on creating a more enlightened dependence.
I also refuse to let you goad me into relating life stories because, as I said, mine isn't all that relevant when we're talking about women and equality instead of whether you're happy in your choices. Some of us are capable of arguing issues that either don't apply to us or that are no longer relevant for whatever reason, or even playing devil's advocate.
You may or may not be an example of feminism in action, but you're certainly not an example of rational detachment if your comments here are any indication. Individual lifestyles don't make me angry; expecting props just for having a particular sort of lifestyle does, since most of us presumably function at least passably within our own homes without demanding recognition. And btw, I have no recommendation at all for TD other than his eventual acknowledgement that his wife is by all objective standards financially dependent on his salary, which is true unless she's sitting on a fat trust fund that he has not disclosed (which is of course possible), and that does make her vulnerable in ways that he is not. That's it.
Jake says "The solution is to create situations where when the choice about who has (or gets) to stay home and who has (or gets) to keep working, the choice is not automatically "man work, woman keep house."" and to which I could not agree more!
To make this more widespread, culture needs to change such that a man who chooses to stay home can still be perceived as "masculine" in the eyes of his family and his buddies. I think we can all agree on that, but we disagree to the means to this end. Some people are arguing that if just more women would work, then more men would automatically pick up the slack. I don't see that as plausible.
I'm not sure how we get there, but I do agree both men and women should not be chastised for their choices. And it bugs me to hear that if it happens to be a woman who chooses to stay home that she's somehow not doing so with a willing spirit.
Latts--Clearly, we will have to agree to disagree. I still see in you a general resentment for anything that does not completely rebel against anything that resembles the traditional, and a general tendency toward groupthink instead of following one's own family's needs.
I cannot be brought to accept either one, so we can drop the issue.
Nobody is here for "props" either, but when we are told day in and day out that our lifestyles make us traitors and nonthinking women, then I think any human would get defensive after awhile.
I just hope that if you do have a family of your own, you don't make decisions you don't want to make just because the feminist movement approves of them. Because in principle, that's really no less oppressive than the patriarchal 50's, true?
And, you're right, if your family is happy, I do think that is a good thing. What human being would not?
It's a good thing for you, but as I've said before, it's not relevant to the issues we're supposedly discussing here, which have to do with gender roles and inequality within the broader population. Advice to just have better, more equitable marriages that allow both partners to conveniently ignore the harsher realities women typically face both at home and at work aren't really helpful, no matter how fortunate you happpen to be.
Again, how will public policy force equality at home? If the issue lies in the home, then isn't this more a matter of relationship counseling? No amount of government policy or activism and organizing will turn a couch-potato asshole into a gentleman who helps out at home.
latts says "I have no recommendation at all for TD other than his eventual acknowledgement that his wife is by all objective standards financially dependent on his salary ... and that does make her vulnerable in ways that he is not." to which I say, "I acknowledge it". I can see this point now. But, like I've said before, I'm vulnerable in ways she's not either. That's the magic of marriage. Both partners have different strengths and weaknesses and different vulnerabilities.
Therefore, exrapolating to society at large, which is of more interest to you than my own personal life, I can further see how a higher proportion of women than men are left financially vulnerable after broken marriages, and the further up the societal ladder, the worse the devestation. But, your solution (and Hirshman's) to suggest *all* women should work and be financially indepedent first and foremost seems like a pretty broad stroke. Especially for those of us in the middle class for which there's more important things in life than affluency, prestige, and power. Don't get me wrong, a dose of these things are nice, but they're not more important than family, love, and self-esteem.
latts, see Christine's comment. That's my bottom line too. Public policy is fine and good (and there's no doubt we need more family-friendly laws), but what we really need is cultural changes that embrace more equal opportunities at home besides the workplace.
I still see in you a general resentment for anything that does not completely rebel against anything that resembles the traditional, and a general tendency toward groupthink instead of following one's own family's needs.
No, what you see is that I think that the traditional model still holds particular risks for individual women, which is fine on its face, and cultural & economic risks for women in general, which isn't so fine at all. Also, groupthink happens on both sides, y'know.
Nobody is here for "props" either, but when we are told day in and day out that our lifestyles make us traitors and nonthinking women, then I think any human would get defensive after awhile.
We could all take those arguments to their logical conclusions, you know... I contributed money to John Kerry, for example, but didn't go out and knock on doors, and he lost. Am I directly responsible for that?- not exactly, but had I and others done more, it's possible the outcome would have been different. I accept the fact that I might have done more, that I avoided unpleasant tasks because, well, they were unpleasant. In terms of my individual actions (or inactions), it's still insignificant, but a hundred more people like me trying harder may have been far more influential.
I just hope that if you do have a family of your own, you don't make decisions you don't want to make just because the feminist movement approves of them. Because in principle, that's really no less oppressive than the patriarchal 50's, true?
As you would probably say yourself in a totally different context, sometimes doing the best thing for one's family isn't doing what one wants to do-- sometimes it's doing the more difficult thing in order to model whatever principles one particularly wants to impart. Having a family is not an excuse for unbridled emotionalism or a complete reversion to instinctive responses. And while the fifties were pretty oppressive in some ways, one old-fashioned notion I hate to see dying out is a sense of rational prudence.
So, yes, we can agree to disagree.
Can we please stop talking about our individual circumstances? This is not about TD and his wife. This is not about latts having children or not.
This is about women with children *in general* being screwed when their husbands die or leave because, on the whole, household work is not valued in this culture. This is about childcare being a continual problem because very few people who make policy about childcare have experienced knowledge of the time, effort, and creativity it takes to do well.
Everyone reading and writing here is a thinking moral human being who deserves respect for thinking and doing her best in the morass of compromise that real life demands.
The questions, instead and imrho, really do need to be about how it is that women -- as a group -- end up so screwed so that we end up feeling like others don't like us because we are at home or because we don't have kids.
The questions and the discussion can't be personal, please. They have got to be about how we get more women into positions of policy making power -- politically and corporately -- so that we don't end up feeling trapped (as so many so clearly express now in this thread) between only two decisions: work or family.
Yes, we need the advice about how to do it on an individual in-the-home basis (as the Bitch's script for making housework visible shows) -- but we also so desperately need to figure out what it will take to get more women to have corporate and legislative power.
Christine, if there was government support for good daycare, education, and healthcare, a lot of women wouldn't feel so close to the edge in terms of their decisions. Choosing between risky financial dependence or questionable childcare, which is what the majority of non-elite women face, is not really a feminist choice. In my view, it's not a choice at all. It's a forced decision, and no matter which way a woman goes, she's encountering substantial risk.
If we had such public support, public policy will very much help ensure equality at home, because the underlying structure is there to support it. In other words, women wouldn't be forced to risk financial independence on a husband, or risk bad childcare options for her child. Either way, she's more equal to the primary wage earner, and there is more equality in the home.
Especially for those of us in the middle class for which there's more important things in life than affluency, prestige, and power. Don't get me wrong, a dose of these things are nice, but they're not more important than family, love, and self-esteem.
TD, "family, love, and self-esteem" will not keep a family out of poverty or at least a material drop in standard of living if the sole earner disappears.
And, to tag onto an earlier observation that got posted while I was writing, corporate and legislative power are hugely about cultural norms. What movies get made, how much money goes to education, how the pay to childcare workers is taxed, who counts as married -- all those decisions have huge impact on what happens culturally.
Beanie Baby,
1. Since when are the elites the "natural heirs of feminism"?
I read that as "(its) beneficiaries", and I still think that may be what Hirshman meant.
2. Assuming that work is the place for human flourishing is a tad, ah, strange.
perhaps not for a feminist of her generation (also, she clearly does think "house-work"'s devalued)
4. This article falls right into the conservative trap of positioning this as "women's choices."
but also she attacks liberal feminism's embrace of "choice" (The Failure of Choice Feminism esp. paras 4-7): I don't think she's consistent on this but then I think it's difficult if not impossible to be consistent:
"I choose
you are falsely conscious
s/he is a slave".
Your point 5: yes. Right.
Last -- a general point, not aimed at your post (and anyway I think you and I probably agree on most matters) people have attacked Hirshman's concentration on these women, so, I quote her on that:
Why Do We Care?
The privileged brides of the Times -- and their husbands -- seem happy. Why do we care what they do? After all, most people aren't rich and white and heterosexual, and they couldn't quit working if they wanted to.
...
A lot of people are being unfair to Hirshman (understandably: I didn't like her comment about socialism!); I was glad to see bitchphd's post.
reader--I just hope that the way to do that isn't to force all women into "powerful' careers they don't want (please note that all jobs aren't powerful career jobs--how powerful is an office temp or a librarian, but both can be necessary). It's also not to force people to use daycare when they're not comfortable with that, or to encourage spending 14 hours a day away from a six-week-old baby.
not saying that you said that, but what I don't like is this "Everyone should be a high-powered career woman, no other job is good enough, and childrearing isn't good enough" sort of attitude that's out there in the world and blogosphere.
And there should be solutions other than feeling no other choice but to go back to work when your child is only 1.5-3 months old. I don't think you can fault people for feeling uncomfortable with that.
Note that in Europe, women aren't called Stepford wives or dependent when they scale back to spend time with kids. And Europe's pretty feminist.
Actually, the one major point on which I disagree with Hirschman is that forcing the issue at home will lead to better outcomes in more public venues; it's mostly a convenient set of excuses for both men and women. I must reiterate, though, that women dropping out of the workforce will not affect its structure in any way... it's not like employers are going to drastically revise their policies to lure people who obviously don't want to be there. They'll do it to accommodate employees they value and think they can keep by doing so. Ideally, men and women in the workforce will eventually achieve this together-- theoretically, I suppose that Hirschman's argument is that men who do more housework will be more likely to help us move in that direction-- but there's virtually no reason to believe that a traditional family structure does anything other than support family-unfriendly work environments by allowing the exploitation of unpaid domestic labor and earners who bear huge financial responsibilities.
No amount of government policy or activism and organizing will turn a couch-potato asshole into a gentleman who helps out at home.
Who's claiming there's a government policy solution? Government is composed of people who are fine with things the way they are, or at the very least aren't massively opposed. What will turn a couch-potato into someone who helps out is a partner who won't put up with it.
But if women who won't put up with it are thin on the ground, they won't be able to make it stick. Collective bargaining 101, and if you think the vitriol being heaped upon women who do the cleaning because it's easier than bitching about it is bad, look at the history of labor relations.
Christine, if there was government support for good daycare, education, and healthcare, a lot of women wouldn't feel so close to the edge in terms of their decisions. Choosing between risky financial dependence or questionable childcare, which is what the majority of non-elite women face, is not really a feminist choice. In my view, it's not a choice at all. It's a forced decision, and no matter which way a woman goes, she's encountering substantial risk.
That's fine and well--all I didn't like was other commentors' dripping poo-pooing of staying home, while claiming that working is just fine and dandy. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. One is not inherently an advantage and indicative of "strong woman" status, while the other is inherently a disadvantage and deserving of namecalling.
What will turn a couch-potato into someone who helps out is a partner who won't put up with it.
But if women who won't put up with it are thin on the ground, they won't be able to make it stick. Collective bargaining 101, and if you think the vitriol being heaped upon women who do the cleaning because it's easier than bitching about it is bad, look at the history of labor relations
Never get married because you think you can change someone.
If there were more women in these roles who recognized the tradeoffs they had to make to get there, things might be more likely to change.
Except, of course, that women who do rise to those roles within their fields are far more likely to not have children, and thus not have struggled with the issues of childcare and of having to build that career on the backs of low-wage female childcare workers.
My position is that it may be a good thing for your family, but it still reinforces structural and domestic inequity for women in general
Here's a problem that I see with the "Political is personal" approach in this direction.
In the short term, you *have* to be able to convince women that taking actions that may negatively affect their happiness and the happiness of their families will *improve* the lot of *all* women in the long term.
Yes, change is often painful, revolutions require sacrifice -- but the outcome has to be something that the people who make the sacrifices consider worth the gains.
When you hear women saying that they don't want to join the rat race like their parents, that they don't want to work an 80-hour week to make it to the tp of their profession, that they want to see their kids and have time with their husbands, that says that right now, the gains are not seen as worth the sacrifices.
Why are women saying this more than men? You're right, it probably has to do with socialization. Men have been taught to expect that for generations. I'm sure you can argue that women just have to learn to expect that too. But we're working within a paradigm that thrust men into an unnatural, stressful environment, made them responsible for *all* the breadwinning, and told women they *had* to stay home.
Its not that women are "refusing" to support themselves, or wanting it easy, or kicking back from their obligations. We're just seeing how resistant any *sane* person is to the kind of work paradigm that requires people to never see their families or have time for their own interests. Men -- and working class women -- went through this adjustment at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as jobs first moved off the farms and out of the home.
transmogriflaw, with respect to "'family, love, and self-esteem' will not keep a family out of poverty or at least a material drop in standard of living if the sole earner disappears.", I say "true". But, conversely, having a high standard of living at the expense of two stressed out parents in a job one or both hate will not bring a solid family, love and happiness. Which is more important? There's a risk either way and there's no single objective, right answer.
a reader says "we also so desperately need to figure out what it will take to get more women to have corporate and legislative power" to which I agree, in general. However, in my limited experience, the female corporate CEO at my last job was much less family friendly than my current job's male CEO.
However, I can buy that, in general, having more women in positions of power is a good thing. I'm just not convinced the way to achieve this goal is to force/guilt all women into the workplace. The other half of the balance of power - getting more men out and into the home - is at least as, if not more, important.
However, I can buy that, in general, having more women in positions of power is a good thing. I'm just not convinced the way to achieve this goal is to force/guilt all women into the workplace. The other half of the balance of power - getting more men out and into the home - is at least as, if not more, important.
Exactly--and not by encouraging every woman to put the smallest baby possible into any shitty daycare, claiming that they'll "do fine." Too many studies have revealed horrid cases of neglect and abuse in American daycares; again not sure about European, as well as too many kids per teacher, etc.
Improve the quality of daycare, make it less expensive and less impersonal, don't just tell us to quit worrying so much about our kids' wellbeing and focus on our own.
and to pre-empt latts here, I'm guessing she will suggest that the only way to achieve those "improvements in quality of daycare, make it less expensive and less impersonal, etc." is that there must be a period of sacrifice and pain where enough women go to work and fight their way up the corporate ladder until enough collective power has been achieved to change the status quo. And any female who consciously chooses not to enter that battle is doing her gender a disservice. I can appreciate the idealism, but seems a little too hardcore and destructive to individual women.
... destructive to individual women who don't want to lead that stressful, high powered, career-oriented lifestyle.
True. And hasn't it struck anyone that many MEN aren't career-oriented either? this focus on "power" has everyone pretty much expected to have a high stress tolerance and type A personality. If you think about it, if everyone held a high-powered career job, who would do any of the support work anyway? Even daycare workers wouldn't exist!
Christine, again back to the personal anecdote, but when a group of women in my community tried to organize/support high quality subsidized childcare in my community, a lot of opposition came from families with SAHPs because "we don't need it and we don't want to pay for it." So, the problem is that while it's fine and well to say that good childcare should be subsidized, without people out there fighting those battles and pushing the boundaries, nothing will happen.
Yes--That's the quandary of how to make childcare affordable without taxing families down to the point where they have no choice but to have 2 incomes and use childcare.
How to have subsidized childcare without essentially coercing people into using public childcare--it is something to consider!
Point well taken, transmogriflaw.
Actually, TD, in spite of what you & Christine want to claim, I have made no policy pronouncements or suggestions. I have mostly said that dropping out of the workforce basically means giving up whetever small influence one might have on how it's structured, barring an immediate, WWII-scale labor shortage, and that while one individual may not make a huge difference, a larger contingent of people who do make the more difficult choices might. My main point has been that while making your decisions based on your immediate personal concerns is reasonably likely to produce more immediate personal happiness, it is in no way likely to influence the bigger issues in which you (or in your case, your wife) are pointedly not engaged. If you want to claim that not participating in the workforce will somehow change it for the better, I must disagree... the efforts you eventually cited regarding flexibility at your own workplace are far, far more useful to that end, but still have much more to do with your activities than your wife's.
At the end of the day, what is there that the family needs to do (note: order of appearance does not denote a value heirarchy):
1.generate income
2.do housework
3. (if applicable) care for children
4. maintain physical plant
5. (if applicable) maintain trainsportation unit
The problem lies not in who does what according to that family unit's internal dynamics. The problem is that "the system" interferes in those family dynamics to the point that the division of tasks becomes 1)gendered and 2)statussed.
I find it ironic that those same people who whine about government interference in the family are very often whining about initiatives which REMOVE government interference from the family within this context. The anti-gay marriage crowd in my state seems to hold the egalitarian marriage model postulated by gay unions in great forboding fear for this very reason.
Instead of dissecting each other's individual "deals" and how "feminist" they are according to some arcane formula of narcissism and rebellion, we need to get back to the central question here: how do we remove the gender variable from the equation. I don't think it involves an "elite" who has absofuckinglutely no motivation to change squat - I think it must be of, by, and for the everyfamily.
Because while we bicker about the feminism of staying at home or going to work for educated women, my cop neighbor and his wife trade shifts of work and childcare duties and quietly expand and blur traditional gender roles without so much fuss.
I should add that in terms of trying to organize subsidized daycare, the costs per family in the city were extremely minimal. The resistance came not because of the costs, I think, but resentment at the general idea of paying for high quality childcare that somebody else's child might use.
It was a very demoralizing experience.
I have mostly said that dropping out of the workforce basically means giving up whetever small influence one might have on how it's structured
Ok, I do buy this. Fair point. But, I'm not so quick to buy the implied converse; namely, that by virtue of more women working will necessarily lead to better work/life balance policies for all. Especially, if said women simply end up conforming to the status quo workplace as the workplace environment has always existed the last 50+ years. Therefore, let's instead applaud and encourage the women (and men) who are willing to fight for change within corporate culture to become more flexible and family-friendly instead of presuming quantity in numbers will guarantee quality. Look at the military. It's at least as important that one has highly skilled and trained soldiers as it is a numbers game. We can all still appreciate and be thankful for our armed service volunteers who service willingly without having to become one ourselves.
A number of important structural issues have been lost in the autobiographical orgy:
1. Is it really true that if fewer women choose to devote 95% of their working hours to careers, then women will have less opportunity in the workplace? This seems a questionable assumption, but I don't have any firm opinion.
2. Is it really true that more women working will result in more political power for women? I'd say that organization and turnout, not employment status, are the primary mechanisms by which a demographic exercises influence.
3. Even assuming that the answers to both questions are true, should the individual woman, whose conduct will have a negligible impact on the condition of women as a whole, choose a less satisfactory lifestyle for the sake of advancing the feminist cause?
95% of their working hours to the home, that is.
I've read through about two-thirds of the comments, so I hope that I don't replicate what has already been said. I'm finding this discussion fascinating for all sorts of reasons, but the frustrations that many people are exhibiting here remind me that Virginia Woolf discussed these issues almost 70 years ago in THREE GUINEAS, a feminist/anti-fascist manifesto for the "daughters of educated men." In addition to calling for a state-subsidized wage for mothers [I know, I know, many people are balking already] so that they can have financial and intellectual independence, she also outlines the dilemmas of "choice" for women who want to enter the professions [please bear with me for a set of long quotations]: While discussing the work and lives of famous male professionals, she says, "They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. . . Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. . . What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of porportion? Only a cripple in a cave." A few pages later she says, "we, daughters of educated men are between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle, like caterpillars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property. It is a choice of evils. Each is bad. . . "
On another note, Ann Crittendon's THE PRICE OF MOTHERHOOD offers very startling statistics about how dangerous life can be for women who stay at home with the children and whohave no independent means of support. She was a columnist for the NY Times and chose to stay home with her son. But...she also compares how other industrialized nations make it easier for families to combine raising children and working. It's a very well written and important book.
Sorry to make you read such a long post.
Great questions, Andrew.
Loved the Bitch manifesto, naturally, some of it I totally jived with,
and other parts I disagree with. Case in point: I personally believe that
being a mother has far more feministic qualities than being a career woman,
which I see as is a patriarchal influence to promote materialism and
government structure. im not saying that going to school and learning about something you love and then working in that field is against feminism, on the contrary, it definitely builds a persons character, regardless of gender.
However, I think that, as modern women, there is a shame or devalued
outlook associated with motherhood when compared to career. It comes down to what exactly makes you happy. Then go and do that! There is a quote from
Harold Thurman Whitman that I love: "Dont ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
I could go on forever, but I'll make one last comment. - I'd like to
remind some of these women that you dont HAVE TO get married to have children. In fact, if you want motherhood and career, then do that, but dont marry...marriage is what further divides your personal needs and desires, while being a single mother actually gives you the freedom to raise the child to your own structure and ethics, not to mention that you would get all sorts of school grants! The other bonus would be that your child WOULD have YOUR maiden name then if and when you decided to marry, it would be "easier" to keep your maiden name...for the sake of the children! Hows that for a nice twist.
ok, Im finished ranting.
Peace out Sista's
~Mer
The men married to Hirschman's subjects are probably really successful and powerful, yes? Near the top of admired professions, in a cynosure of a city?
And look, they can (and can be expected to) work 80+ hour weeks because they have brilliant support at home.* Everyone working for them has to live up to that standard. Everyone working for them... etc.
The family-killing model of 80+ hour weeks is following these few men, who are enabled by those women. The more of them (men and women) who have to choose between work-madness and life balance, the sooner the rest of us get to take up the model in which both parents have enough time to engage with their kids and chores, and both parents spend some time at work evening out the economic risks of late capitalism.
TD said: But, I'm not so quick to buy the implied converse; namely, that by virtue of more women working will necessarily lead to better work/life balance policies for all. Especially, if said women simply end up conforming to the status quo workplace as the workplace environment has always existed the last 50+ years.
I would say that more women working will lead to better work/life balance. I am an associate in a large law firm. Full-time, on partnership track, with two kids under 5. I'm not part-time. I don't have a flex-schedule. But, I'm a mother that demands flexability in a way that many of the men around my firm don't push for. It is not that they don't want a better balance, I'm sure, but they don't work for change. I do and many of the women associates do as well. I have to try and prove everyday that I can bill 2100 hours a year, be home for dinners and bedtime, go to doctor's appointments. I do it not by having the same old 70-hour work week, but by saying that this is my life and some days I'm going to home with a sick kid, but that doesn't make me less of a lawyer and less valuable to my firm. I can do this better if there are more like me.
lawmom, but you are a highly educated and professional woman. You think the mother who is a full-time cashier or office clerk somewhere working just barely above minimum wage is equally influential to her employer or social change? So, it's not just having a job, it's also what kind of job and influence you have.
Yes, TD, I think that many women at any given job will tend to push that employer for more family-friendly policies. (Whether or not they are successful is a whole different matter, but replacing those women with men would mean that the workers feel less societal pressure to be home with the kids and don't bring the work-life conflict as often to their boss' door.) Any particular woman may not be able to do it by herself, but in the aggregate they can make a huge difference even if they are not highly educated and professional. I'm concerned that women in the upper eschelons are hesitant to do this because (a) they don't have kids or (b) their career has socialized them to deal with the conflict in their few, off-work hours.
Interesting thought, Trope. Thanks.
Sure it is the kind of job. Most of the articles about working women have been about my sort of job and that obviously leaves out the vast majority of working women. I can speak about my job. I wish there were more women trying to be full-time partner tract associates and raise a family because I think the more of us there are the better we chance we have to change the norm. I don't purport to argue that if there are changes in law firm culture for women it would somehow directly trickle down to women working as cashiers, but the more women there are in leadership positions in corporations, law firms, the political realm, the universities, the chances are better that things can change that would directly benefit the women working as cashiers.
And I agree with all of the lawmom, but I don't agree that women should be pushed and prodded into going into a career that they don't enjoy just to inflate the ranks.
In regards to women with cashier-type jobs: I worked for years in high end retail sales. If a mom needed accomodations - however reasonable- the SOP was to penalize her by cutting her hours rather than rearrange her schedule. This occurred at more than one company, so I can only assume it is a widespread practice. In hourly wage or commission based jobs, moms (and dads) cannot afford to speak up.
One small point--it's been mentioned but not made. There's a BIG difference between more women in the workforce and more mothers in the workforce. The head of my business is a woman--never-married, childless, and one of the most total workaholics I've ever known. If you are going to report to her, you need to be able to work anytime--any night, any day of the week--at a moment's notice. More women who aren't balancing work and family in leadership positions won't necessarily help women who want to balance those things. (In my observation, fathers are far more friendly to the demands of a family than childless women.)
I could see that having more mothers in partnership positions could lead to a change in culture at a given firm.
But I suspect self-selection might crimp the process. Those mothers likely to make partner might be disproportionately be composed of the very mothers who find it reasonable (or maybe compulsive) to work extra long hours every week. Upon making partner, they may either 1) find no problem expecting others to do the same ("if I can do it, so can they"), or 2) be unwilling to cut into the firm's income by relaxing billable requirements ("I earned a big slice of a big pie").
In fairness, it should be added that there are different types of firms, some of which are far more friendly to quality-of-life issues than others. I suspect that men and women together led the push either to construct those firms with such a culture, or to preserve such a culture at those firms.
But it would be fascinating to see the relationship, say, between more "quality-of-life" firms and more women in the workforce.
I'd like to believe that more families in which both parents are juggling like mad will lead to changes in the workplace, but change is slow at best, and in the meantime we all have lives to live. Part of the problem for professional-type people (not that they're the most important, but they're what I know best) is that the returns from the marginal hour of work are so wildly skewed. My wife and I are both lawyers, both working full time, which means maybe 50-60 hours a week in the jobs we're in. Our standard of living isn't particularly fancy, but nothing to complain about, either. But we're both stressed as hell a big part of the time. The problem is that trying to cut our work hours back by 10-20% would reduce our income way more than proportionately. OTOH, if one of us increased our hours by that same 10-20%, we could make a LOT more money, but the only way we could keep the juggling act going would be for the other spouse to quit working or cut way back. Within a pretty short time, we'd probably be at least as well off economically, and maybe better off, with a single breadwinner. It's not particularly hard to see why lots of people in our type of situation end up making that choice, and given the continuing cultural pressures, it's not surprising that it's more frequently the woman who stays home. I wish I had the power to change the world so that we could both work decent hours, make enough to live decently in this overpriced town, and still get home at a reasonable hour every night, but I don't.
Those mothers likely to make partner might be disproportionately be composed of the very mothers who find it reasonable (or maybe compulsive) to work extra long hours every week. Upon making partner, they may either 1) find no problem expecting others to do the same ("if I can do it, so can they"), or 2) be unwilling to cut into the firm's income by relaxing billable requirements ("I earned a big slice of a big pie").
Yep. I work with people like that. Most of them are really, truly good people trying to do the right thing, and yet change comes slowly. Partly it's just that this is a fairly tough way to make a living, but it's also tough to change an organizational culture that's built around "we'll do whatever it takes."
Italics begone.
My former office mate and her husband went back to Utah so her husband could "waste" his Harvard Law degree at a cowstate firm rather than have him be treated like chattel-on-demand at the Way Too Self Important Big Boston law firm he had been on the fast track at.
The reasons?
Family time, being near to family, and both of them agreeing that his job shouldn't be so ridiculous that it made her unable to pursue her data base administration career too!
Even Mormons get the work-family blues, folks. Even the men.
More women who aren't balancing work and family in leadership positions won't necessarily help women who want to balance those things.
Well now that we've been evicted from feminism, I suppose there's no call for we women who haven't gotten our reproductive punch-card for the human race validated to do any of this.
How many men do you know who head their own business who aren't total workaholics? Come on. I've worked for three high-tech startups founded by men who sound precisely like this one woman you are talking about as if she's some sort of example for all unmarried, childless women in business. People who start and run their own companies are always overachieving workaholics who sleep three hours a night.
Christ, the more I hear about all this working mommy/SAHmommy shit, the more I figure I might as well just back the hell out of feminism altogether. We awful, mannish, emasculating unarried career women with no kids are everyone's goddamned straw man. The working mothers are quick to point out that they aren't one of those icky career-bots like me. The SAHMs are quick to point out that their worst fear is to turn into someone like me.
Of course, the men in these companies I've worked for are also all too happy to discriminate. Whether I have kids doesn't matter; I've got TITS, and as a woman, even a childless one, I'm fair game for the shit treatment from CEOs who treat the women in their company like shit and rotate their trophy girlfriends when they change their socks.
Unmarried career women with no kids are treated by women like science fiction fans talk about Trekkies with Spock ears. "Hey don't tar us with that brush! We're not like them or anything!" We're everybody's fucking lepers.
Well, I am like them. One of those awful, evil career women. One of those nasty, mean unmarried harridans with no kids who can't possibly understand the transcendent joy of wiping up baby urp. You know, the boogeyman that people tell their daughters about to scare them out of taking too many career chances with their lives.
Of course, I love and do handcrafts constantly. I have decided to learn a third language and am doing so quite nicely. I'm currently reading up on strict-meter Celtic poetry with an eye toward writing some of my own. I'm a published writer. Gee, that sounds like a life to me ...
ROCK ON! I too am the female breadwinner in a house blessed with a stay-home dad. And I think it's INSANE for women to take their husbands' names, unless they really truly do believe we lived in a better place and time when women were men's property. The three of us have three last names (his, mine, and the hyphenated kid), and it hasn't caused us a problem. Ever. Of course, luckily we have few relatives to nag us, but that's another story.
LMYC,
Try this. If you doubt the existance of "well your kids aren't my problem blah blah blah" managers of all types (including childfree and kept men), check into one of the "childfree" boards sometime. Never mind that people with these attitudes also fuck over men and women without children who need to care for parents or simply desire to have a life outside of work.
We are all in this together. The cop and his shiftworking wife, the childfree man or women, the traditional family with or without an SAHP, all of us. We need to take gender and childed status out of it and make a fair space for all of us to be human, damnit!
I'm sorry you don't like talking about families, but families count too. So do the leisure pursuits and community activities of singles. The more idiot pirhana type A "well, I don't have a life so I'll penalize you for having one and not sucking company ass uberallis" types there are, the more we ALL suffer. You simply shouldn't have to justify your need to not be owned or set decent human boundaries on work intrusions - not with kids, elders, spouses, or gender.
We need to work toward a world where being a woman or man, having kids or not, working or not, etc. does not matter in how decisions are made or basic human rights are meted out.
I've worked for three high-tech startups founded by men who sound precisely like this one woman you are talking about as if she's some sort of example for all unmarried, childless women in business.
And that, LMYC, was exactly my point. My many-levels up division president has spent her career working for one of the biggest companies in the world; she is one of the top 5 executives in a Fortune 100 company; and she is, to all appearances, no more accomodating of people's (men or women) desire to spend time with their families and children than any other executive (and much less so than many male executives). Having more women in leadership positions will not make it easier to achieve work-family balance if those women are equally workaholic, and equally demanding on subordinates, as the men currently filling the roles.
Surely having more women in leadership positions *will* introduce a broader range of ideas about women's labor issues. Given that not all women--not even all high-achieving women--think alike.
I don't think women should have a choice until men have a choice. I'm sure there are lots of men who would really like to stay home with their kids, but don't have the luxury that many of sahm moms have which is to decide that it's better for her, or satisfies her maternal needs, or she just doesn't like her corporate job and wants a change. Educated women are brought up with the idea that if the competition gets tough, or they lose their ambition, or the stress gets too intense, they can opt out. Similarly educated men are inculcated to think that manhood, by definition, means responsibility. That they can't just decide one day not to work. When we can all decide that supporting oneself is a choice, rather than a necessity, and that men and women are both equally entitled to opt out, then feminism will be fair. As long as women are the only ones who really get to choose, the cards are, ironically, stacked in their favor.
Red, the families we're talking about give that choice to the men as well as the women. You can make it on one income? Fine. All these SAHMs are being supported by somebody, and in many cases looked for a mate with precisely that ability. If a man really wants to be a SAHD, my best advice to him is to find a mate with good earning potential in her career, who wants kids but doesn't want to sacrifice all adult contact, who has not been inculcated (good word, btw!) with the notion that women should stay home and bake cookies. Supporting feminism, in the long run, will give him a greater pool of those women to choose from.
Well, is any of this empirically testable? If more women in higher positions would lead to changes in labor policies, what kind of changes would we expect to find as more women climb to the top? Better/more daycare? More generous leave-time? Less stigma associated with part-timer schedules?
So far as having space to be human... we do have space to be human, imho. But to do so you might have to give up a bit of your income.
Or am I underestimating the influence of one's perception of one's relative social standing upon one's happiness?
The irony is that so-called "choice" feminism depends on the willingness of men to the be the rock upon whom the whole family edifice depends. And why should it be their responsibility, after all? Most of them have crappy jobs that they hate, don't enjoy working those long hours....They're more trapped by traditional gender roles than we are. And choosing to stay home only enslaves them further.
Here comes the new boss ... same as the old boss.
Selection effects, damn them all.
But we can't all be like Margaret Thatcher, now can we?
Andrew, I would imagine it wouldn't be empircally testable, no. But then again, I *believe* that industrialized countries in which women hold political office at rates approaching 50%, and/or countries in which women hold prestigious jobs on par with men, that there are also more reasonable family leave policies and work hours, etc. And vice-versa.
And it certainly seems true to me that it is the women in the U.S. Congress who can best be counted on to push issues like making Plan B available, who tends more often to be pro-choice, and who seem more aware of family leave act laws and the like. And the women on the Supreme Court, including a Reagan appointee, were both at least moderately pro-choice.
Hmm well my girlfriend is very good at domestic things like cooking, and she likes to clean. Seriously, it seems like she cleans the kitchen or her room in her apartment every couple of days.
I am messy but not dirty. That is, I have clutter, but I am fairly hygenic (especially for a college male) and don't leave trash on the floor. But I can live with baskets of clothes and books and papers on the floor for years without it bothering me.
But, I do janitorial work to help get through school so I CAN do the cleaning work, vaccuming, bathrooms, etc. But I'll NEVER think to do it on my own. Basically I'm saying if the girl TELLS ME WHAT TO DO (i.e. "do the laundry please) I will say "Okay" and go about the task. If she doesn't, it probably won't occur to me until I have 1 outfit left.
Isn't everyone just defending their own choices? Bitch thinks it is better for her son to have a variety of caregivers--and he did. TD thinks it's better for his kids to have one on one time with their parents--and they did. The stay at home moms are annoyed by this essay, where the working moms applaud it.
I think it's great that we've all had the opportunity to *make* these choices, and haven't been forced into something we don't want to do. Its the judgement here I could do without. What works for some doesn't work for others.
Dr. B: Canada in 2004 was at 21% women in parliament.
Abortion laws were overturned in Queen vs. Morgentaler in 1993 in a unanimous decision with 2 women and 5 men in the Supreme Court. Since then, we've been electing liberal governments because we're afraid that the Conservatives will start setting constrictive laws - they've shut up about the issue, now.
Gays and lesbians have the right to marry. Recent parliamentary action after Supreme Court decision.
We have a total of 50 weeks combined parental leave - 17 goes to a birth mother only (I think that's the split), but the other 33 weeks could be taken by a biological or adoptive parent to care for the child.
Plan B is ... The morning after pill? I've taken it twice, covered by my medical when I was young and scared, and both times I walked into a clinic and walked out with the pill in my hand and the words "general consult" on the chart. (That was many years ago. I'm not sure what the American political struggle is.) Now, it is prescription only - Health Canada does tend to be a little more wary about drugs than the FDA and we wait a little longer.
I think it's fatalistic to assume gender parity is necessary in order for people to be treated fairly. We might be waiting a really long time, especially if the patriarchy's reaction to women coming in is to make the workforce hostile to the needs and values that have been traditionally in the female purview. Do you want to wait that long for a voice?
You have a two party system in which money seems to be buying political wins. That's really broken. I understand it will always be the case - I'm not an idiot - but I also think that a tacit acceptance of that, a shrugging of the shoulders, is a dizzying level of cynicism. Especially since women are often economically disenfranchised.
Obviously, your ideological right is farther than our right wing. Seems that Hirshman is selling something that pulls the debate even *farther* to the economic right, and I'd be careful about accepting her base premises. It is NOT acceptable that the only way that women/black people/latino people have their majority opinions addressed is by having money. There will always be an out group. The in group, regardless of their gender or race, will have different concerns than the out group.
But there's MORE out group. There's the balance. Fewer rich people with more individual power. More poor people with one vote each.
I can't blame anyone who IS working a 70 hour week to start feeling a little resentful: "I've sacrificed my whole goddamn life and now you want my taxes to pay for those damn lazy whatevers..." If people lose their lives to their jobs, the lens of what the world is becomes very tunnel visioned. I think Hirshman's lens is already clouded. People are paid by their lives as well as their paycheques: if they've utterly given up anything but their paycheques, they're going to naturally be defensive about that ground. If *lefties* in the states believe that they're only *valid* by accepting those terms, my god.
I think I want to chime in and back up Ms. Kate to say to LMYC - for me, at least, it's not all about the kids. Work life balance is an issue for everybody: kids don't justify an adult life. Kids come up because women sacrifice economically for them more often than do men, but ALL women have various stereotypes that constrain them. You've named yours, and I've named mine, and we are on the same side.
Having more women in leadership positions will not make it easier to achieve work-family balance if those women are equally workaholic, and equally demanding on subordinates, as the men currently filling the roles.
There are lots of reasons people put in the effort it takes to get to leadership positions. But as long as women aren't doing it to give their family a good life, or to acquire a better mate, or to get in a position to advance whatever group they have loyalty to, most of the women you'll get in these leadership positions are going to the ones with the workaholic personalities.
Sorry, Dr. B - the 1988 ruling of Queen v. Morgentaler was the landmark ruling. 2 women, 5 men: 2 dissenting male opinions.
"supporting oneself is a choice, rather than a necessity"
Did anyone else go "wtf" upon reading this? I believe that WAY upthread there was a discussion of the 21 year old college dropout who "didn't feel like" getting a job, and how unacceptable that is ... I mean, people have to be supported by somebody, and a SAHD presupposes a working mom and vice versa, barring trust funds of course.
Red: I don't think women should have a choice until men have a choice.
And you plan on enforcing that how? Imprisoning stay at home mom's? I've been hearing that line since the 1970's but nobody has ever clarified how it would be practically enforced.
Also, what constitutes "having a choice?" Would you require everyone to work full time, on a salary (thus, no restaurant work, temp work, etc, is acceptable for women)? Is part time okay? Is job-sharing okay, or is that caring for your kid a bit too much? Do all women have to be doctors, lawyers, CEO's, or is it okay to be a teacher or secretary? (Teachers, after all, GASP, SPEND TIME WITH THEIR CHILDREN more, due to shorter hours--not sure how you feel about that).
How many hours a week are women allowed to spend with their children so as not to be considered Stepford?
Do women have to stay out of traditional female professions until there are an equal number of men? For instance, women banned from being not just mothers, but also teachers, social workers, or librarian?
Just how much do women have to be like workaholic men before you'll be satisfied, and how will you go about making the change? I really want to know.
Thank you, bitch. This entry in your blog has created an awakening in me. A long overdue awakening now that I get "it" but I guess things happen in their due time. I hope my marriage can survive the new me. I think my husband will rally and get "it" eventually, too. I do love him dearly and we have a wonderful baby together.
We are both a victim of our we were raised, etc. But if the marriage doesn't work out, it doesn't. Inequality is no way to live.
Y'know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the direction of this debate makes a strong argument that a certain percentage of women-- not all by any means, and certainly not as many as our relative economic status would indicate-- simply aren't that well suited to the working world. Maybe the same is true for some (maybe even a similar percentage) men, but that is not a viable option for enough of them to freely choose not to participate, so it's a bit of a moot point since they'll mostly have to just suck it up & deal.
Sooo... maybe feminism has done everything it realistically can. I suppose we could argue to reinstate stronger alimony laws for women who SAH in the name of inclusiveness, even though there's obviously a price to be paid for that as well, and there's always work to do in the developing world, but it seems likely we've done all we can do to promote gender equity in America. Also, since capitalism seems to be the undisputed winner in the economic-system sweepstakes here and we cannot seem to produce enough of a critical mass of women and enlightened men in the workforce to make it more friendly, perhaps we should just be grateful that they haven't yet decided to pull the plug on subsidizing higher education and focus on protecting the gains we have made. Seriously, beyond the usual and ongoing issues of sexual abuse, body image, etc., I think we've reached the end of the road here... in that context, Hirschman's article makes a lot more sense to me, because while its sample group is ridiculously elite, its advice is probably the best that can be given to whatever percentage of women that actually does want to shoot for labor equity & sharing of duties both at home and at work. At first, I thought it was mostly true but wouldn't sell; after looking over the various blog posts & discussions, that opinion still holds, but I understand more why she chose not to be particularly diplomatic.
That may be true latts, but I think we need to understand that SAHPs are workers too, just not explicitly paid workers.
As Britain's recent hearings on elderly female poverty attest, not getting paid for your work puts you at a serious benefits disadvantage, even in a social democracy.
One might say that women opt out of the paid workplace for stress/cultural reasons. But I really wonder if that is true when I see programs targeted at reducing the cost of eldercare by giving a designated caregiver a stipend. Suddenly, the 50-something women who often provide this care on an unpaid, often second-shift basis give way to 20-something sons and daughters. While I would not say that these grandkids are doing it for the money, the money makes it possible for them to do it, particularly when they are living with grandma or grandpa.
That demographic shift makes me think the "unpaid caregiving" issue is more than a simple matter of traditional roles and opting out of the workforce. Like housework, it may just fall to the person least able to refuse it for any number of reasons.
I would like to make notice of EA Spouse - an anonymous female blog poster who complained of the long working hours of her spouse in my industry. All of a sudden, there was an avalanche of men also complaining. (Class action lawsuits had already been introduced by a few good men but not largely joined, etc.) Union talk started drifting around. And the culture (and pay structures) at EA are changing.
Men don't necessarily want such horrible work life imbalance either.
That may be true latts, but I think we need to understand that SAHPs are workers too, just not explicitly paid workers.
Of course, but I'd say that the food, shelter, clothing, & transportation provided by a middle-class (or above) provider spouse usually beats anything that can be purchased at a minimum-wage job, which is also hard work and provides virtually no future economic security. The idea that taking care of a house is work is not news, and people who have outside jobs manage most or all of the same tasks, or pay a higher premium for someone else to do them. There's nothing particularly dazzling about SAHPs' day-to-day tasks, you know, except in the amount of time devoted to them relative to those who split their energies.
Like housework, it may just fall to the person least able to refuse it for any number of reasons.
Also true, but while there's certainly an element of basic unfairness in women's lower prestige and salaries, part of that tendency does go back to women choosing lower status for personal satisfaction, and the price one pays for flexibility is, well, occasional demands that one be flexible. And for my first actual personal revelation in this discussion, I'll say that several years back I faced the prospect of caring for a dying parent (she died more suddenly than anticipated, so I ultimately didn't have to arrange it), and it was both terrifying and miserably unfair, especially since I had a brother in the same town (300+ miles away from where I lived) who earned less than I did, but there was never even a question that it would probably be me who would have to take unpaid leave. And we weren't raised with any sense of strict gender roles! So the equation there, at least in this anecdote, was purely gender-based, since in economic terms it was certainly more damaging for me to take leave or quit than it would have been for him.
Y'know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the direction of this debate makes a strong argument that a certain percentage of women-- not all by any means, and certainly not as many as our relative economic status would indicate-- simply aren't that well suited to the working world.
I think that's about exactly right, not at all out on a limb, and further that the percentages are high for both genders. And, if we pull together a little bit, we can change the way things are done: not by killing ourselves working a system for a gender ideal (men) or a feminist ideal (to compete with the men), but by constructing economy differently.
In my industry, at least, it's been shown that the ultra extended work week doesn't lead to better code. Long work weeks aren't about productivity, which is actually what the economy cares about. I believe they're about patriarchy entrenching around those who have the means to ignore the rest of their lives whether by not paying a wife (but buying her bling) or underpaying a nanny.
There are so many unobserved assumptions in Hirshman's article.
Actually, I'd say the wife is usually better paid as a percentage of income, than the nanny, and her kids will usually be awarded some of dad's money should there be relationship disaster. The nanny's kids are SOL if she's fired. IE: If I were able to choose the man I married, I'd rather be a wife to a rich man and take care of my own kids, economically, than be the nanny of a rich woman and take care of her kids. There's more of a social net in the first instance.
Challenge the root problem. I think those of us working alternative careers are attempting that - I'm a part time consultant as well as a SAH Mom - but of course, Hirshman rather roundly scolds us for flushing our educations without asking our reasoning.
In Canada, actually, self-employed women are one of the fastest growing sectors. Women are huge on starting their own businesses and setting their own hours.
For the record, in New York City where I live, the going rate for housework is higher than for childcare. Nannies get, on average, 11 dollars an hour. Housekeeper/cleaning ladies get at least twice that.
There's no way for a stay at home parent to opt out of the workplace short of independent wealth. This parent, usually the mom, is the only parent the kids can reliably count on having. It's all fine to caution people to have enough insurance. But what about if something else happens? What if the other parent doesn't die, but is disabled? What about divorce? Settlements are not always equitable, and in any case resources will be much reduced. As a college educated person who has worked mostly at bluecollar jobs, I know that I was the only thing my kids could count on. I worked hard both at my job and my family and managed to have good insurance and good savings, and good retirement plans, and even so, a long illness nearly put us into bankruptcy. It wasn't quite long enough, however, and my spouse, who had a work at home business, is now training for a regular job. And we still have the house. But it was close. I can't believe people who think it will all come out all right because they are so fair to each other, or they have good insurance, or plenty of relatives. I have plenty of relatives too, and they have also had problems, and money's tight everywhere, but we're still okay. Barely. We've been lucky. Luck. That's the ticket.
There's no way for a stay at home parent to opt out of the workplace short of independent wealth.
Untrue. Most stay at home parents live on an extremely tight budget, some even resorting to government, just to be home with their kids. Why don't some of you go out and meet a SAHM instead of assuming. You'd be shocked at what they give up.
Kathe, you do make good points, except you assume stay-at-home parents can't "opt back in" to the workforce, if necessary. Granted, they may be less employable the longer they've been away, but it's not impossible.
But, if you're assuming that's not possible and they have not enough savings, well, there's plenty of dual income families with zero savings as well living paycheck-to-paycheck.
However, like I said, you make good points.
I agree with Someone. To make it work for us, we moved "closer to home", to a much cheaper place, where our house payment is 1/3 what it used to be. We now also have no choice but to buy very used cars instead of brand new cars, etc. But God is it worth it! There's something to be said for "the simple life".
TD and someone - I know you mean welll but I don't think you are really aware of how hellish the lives of a surviving SAH spouse and kids are when the sole earner dies suddenly even with insurance.
This happened to a relative and it was not just a matter of living "the simple life" as you call it. It was full-on poverty where the surviving mom often didn't eat dinner so her kids could eat, not just a matter of not buying a new car. The surviving mom now thinks choosing to stay home was the biggest mistake of her life because that decision did way more damage to her kids longterm than spending some time in daycare would have. Poverty is worse than daycare by a longshot.
TD, women in their fifties who have been out of the workforce for 15 yrs are employable only at poverty-level wages. There is no "opt in."
Kathe is right.
Someone, I do know lots of women who are SAHMs. And yes, some of them are or have been on public assistance. That's Kathe's point: if you stay home, and aren't independently wealthy, you are counting on luck to insure that a catastrophe doesn't come along that ends up putting you and your kids on the street. That's not a judgment, or a "bad mom" accusation; it's a simple statement of an appalling economic fact. It shouldn't be that way, but it is; and it's going to continue to be that way until *someone* in a position of power changes it.
I have to admit that this conversation is starting to frustrate me. First, the assertion that "most women who end up in high-achiever careers will be workaholics who won't care about family" is far more supportive of the status quo than anything Hirshman or I are saying. In my own field, fifteen or twenty years ago, women who succeeded mostly did not have children. Nonetheless, the presence of women opened up the profession to other women, and inevitably some of them did have children; and my presence in the classroom inspires my students (they tell me this to my face), who know I have a child. So it does make a difference.
Second, I honestly don't think anyone is crapping on SAHMs. The point is that policy changes that would benefit most people, including SAHMs--things like childcare assistance, universal health care, maternity leave, investment in public schools and public parks, and the like--don't come about by magic. They come about because people with power and money push to make them happen. Why is national health care on the radar now? Because Hillary Clinton--an ambitious woman and a mother--pushed it onto the agenda. The FMLA was passed in 1993 after being pushed by the National Women's Defense Fund, an organization founded and headed by ambitious women.
Hershman's argument--and my argument in defense of her--is that these women, a small subset of all women, are very important to the advancement of laws and public policies that benefit women. And these law-making women come from the ranks of ambitious, hypereducated women for the most part (not exclusively, though).
DrB says "Hershman's argument--and my argument in defense of her--is that these women, a small subset of all women, are very important to the advancement of laws and public policies that benefit women. And these law-making women come from the ranks of ambitious, hypereducated women for the most part (not exclusively, though)." to which nobody here debating disagrees at all! Everybody acknowledges, recognizes, and thanks these women profously!
The sticking point in this debate seems to be the underlying assumption that somehow pushing all women - and all college-educated women, in particular - into believing just by them choosing a job/career they'll actually belong to that small subset that can affect change and that by staying home and "opting out" that they're somehow letting down their entire gender. Look, it's like saying everybody that drops out of playing ball after high school is making a huge mistake because if they would have kept playing in college they would have assuredly made the elite ranks of professional sports and then would be a public role model that can change the world. It's an unfair burden.
Now, I can agree somewhat to the financial risk Kathe and you agree to, but again, you both assume dual income families are somehow above poverty if one of them were to lose their jobs. And, anyway, ironically, isn't MrB a stay-at-home dad (i.e. you're a single income family yousself!)? So, it seems very inconsistent on your part to say that a SAHM situation is too risky to the mother, but somehow a SAHD situation is not for the father?! You may say MrB's is well-employable and it's a temporary situation, to which I would counter so are many SAHM situations. Besdies, it's a small minority of SAHM's who actually stay home for dozens of years.
Lastly, I don't mean to continually be a thorn in your side on this topic, but it does "crap on SAHM" because it says "feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots", "treat work [outside the home] seriously", and tells women "don't put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry". It's just very offensive to non-"ambitious, hypereducated women" and basically says they don't count.
And, believe me, I do not want to minimize the pain and agony a family feels if a single-income family loses the "breadwinner", but life is a game of probability and calculated odds.
But, by your logic, nobody> should ever work at all because the odds of dying in a car crash on the way to work are much higher than if everybody stayed locked up in their house.
Interesting thoughts everyone. I didn't like Hirsh's article very much. I think her fundamental problem is that she is equating "womens' work" as not being valuable, from a capitalist standpoint, and insodoing, buying the patriarchal mindset that "women's work" is not valuable. She is, in effect, shooting herself in the foot.
Children are not some commodity to be shuffled off and cared for by someone else because they are inconvenient or whathave you. If having a child is indeed going to be such a burden, then for God's sake, don't get pregnant. I don't have a problem with WOHM's or SAHM's. The mommy war sucks. I think each family has to make a decision according to their needs and desires. and if you've had a child, for many women leaving that child when they are baby is no easy task, even if half of them wants to be back at work. The whole idea of feminism, I thought, was to bring value to what women were doing, recognising that much of what is done is unpaid and under appreciated by a male dominated society. to me, it is a betrayal of the sisterhood to say that if you've achieved a degree of academic success and chosen to stay at home with your childre, you are not a feminist. I thought feminism was about having the freedom to chose what to do with your life and the opportunity to work in an environment that supports your parenting choices (like having a room to pump your milk if you decide to breastfeed for example). I think its too bad that there is such a chasm between "work life" and "home life" and ne'r the twain shall meet. Its proven that if workers are happy there is more productivity. and guess what makes them happy? flex time, mat leave, and a day care on site. that even fits into capitalisms narrow definition of what is valuable.
she is equating "womens' work" as not being valuable, from a capitalist standpoint, and insodoing, buying the patriarchal mindset that "women's work" is not valuable
I think this is the best comment so far. I question whether *Hirshman* is making this equation, or merely pointing it out--I think that in rejecting her argument, we're shooting the messenger. I *think* her point is that the best, perhaps only way to change the presumption that women's work isn't valuable is, paradoxically, to get more women into "valuable" positions where they have the power to change the definition of value.
But that's my take; I'm willing to concede that it's not the only one.
if you stay home, and aren't independently wealthy, you are counting on luck to insure that a catastrophe doesn't come along that ends up putting you and your kids on the street.
And you are specifically counting on the continuing regard of another person-- not the government and not employers, both of which are at least a bit more likely to be infuenced by social & political movements-- to stand between yourself and the street. There's really no way to reinstitute generous alimony without reinforcing the notion that women can't make their own way, but the longer one stays out of the workforce, the more likely that is to be true, in purely practical terms. So it's a gamble, but the more people who take that risk, the more are likely to lose, and then we're right back where we started.
Or, to talk about it terms of risks & investments, the fact is that it's much easier to do well in the stock market in the long term if one is able to cushion oneself against losses. Monogamous relationships aren't what you'd call diversified investments, and being the SAH partner is the equivalent of putting one's entire net worth, including at least part of one's retirement funds, into one stock, albeit with some influence on its performance. It's no one else's business on an individual basis, of course, but at some point extreme losses do tend to affect even those who aren't directly involved or who explicitly tried to insure themselves against such losses.
The point is that policy changes that would benefit most people, including SAHMs--things like childcare assistance, universal health care, maternity leave, investment in public schools and public parks, and the like--don't come about by magic.
True, and IIRC someone noted upthread that a movement to provide quality childcare in her community (city? state?- I don't remember) was squashed at least partly by SAH families who didn't want to contribute to its costs (and possibly who didn't want its availability to create any pressure to change their arrangements, I imagine)... that's a problem. Agreeing that such programs are a good idea-- in general, maybe for other people-- is nice, but meaningless when one refuses to help bring them into being with at least money & political influence, even if one doesn't want to be in a position of claiming to need them personally.
I *think* her point is that the best, perhaps only way to change the presumption that women's work isn't valuable is, paradoxically, to get more women into "valuable" positions where they have the power to change the definition of value.
Yes, that's exactly what I thought... as I've said, less eloquently of course, the women who simply refuse to participate just aren't likely to change the system. I think that both capitalism & traditional gender structures are very harsh & unforgiving systems, and that changes in either will have to come from within, but everyone's pointing fingers & demanding that someone else change the other side before they'll consider involving themselves. I'd guess (I'm not an economist) that capitalism has adapted slightly more than accepted gender roles over the last century, but that's also thanks to related issues like child labor laws & affirmative action that have made imposing social values on commerce more routine.
i made the decision when i was 14 to not have children. i always worried that the man i fell in love with would push me into having his babies, but thankfully i met and married a man who hates the thought of children as much as me.
i'm the major breadwinner in the house and after reading this, i realize that i have to do more screaming at my husband. i pay all the bills, do the cleaning and the cooking etc. and it's no one's fault but my own. things are going to change, that's for sure.
IMHO, the effect any single individual can have on national policy is far too small for that individual to sacrifice her own pursuit of happiness for the sake of inserting another woman (herself) into the "upper ranks" of professionals.
Hirshman may be correct that more women in those places would have a beneficial impact on policy. But that doesn't mean that each of those NY Times brides suddenly has a duty to eschew her own happiness for the cause.
Hirshman avoids this problem, and completes the argument, by adding a crucial assumption: she thinks those women WOULD be happier if they were not SAHMs.
This crucial assumption, I think, has come in for some stinging criticisms. And without it, her prescriptive argument becomes fatally incomplete.
Exactly!
I was discussing this IRL this weekend, and was told by a fifty-year-old man that this was just like union issues in his previous career-- people refused to pay dues "for nothing" or go to meetings, and made fun of the union guys' concerns when it came time to renogotiate the contract, and sure, they were grateful for the holidays & the 40-hour week & established pay scale, but everyone had that now anyway... until they themselves had a problem with management, and then who do you think they'd call?
That's just how it works with any establishment-questioning political movements, feminism included. So the people who were in the trenches plug along and still find ways to help the people who mocked them before, when and if they need help, even though it's galling.
But we're not talking about whether to pay dues or not.
We're talking about whether a person should radically alter her lifestyle, forgo things she might value very highly, and lead a life she personally finds less fulfilling.
Unless the contribution that derives from that kind of sacrifice is very substantial, and perhaps even urgent, I just don't think it justified. Each of us only gets one life.
I think we're just talking in circles at this point, to be honest... my sense that sometimes it's worthwhile to make sacrifices on principle, and not just from necessity, is routinely countered by implicit claims that that which fulfills individual desires in the most expedient way is at least equivalent, if not superior. I'm glad that some people do take the tougher road, and that so many manage to benefit from it by extension.
Why not join the military, latts? Surely, if we could talk more people into joining the regular army - even if they don't want to - we would be a safer country.
Why not join the military, latts?
Doesn't pay enough. I kicked ass on the ASVAB in high school, though, & finally had to start hanging up on recruiters, if you'd like to lament my choice to attend college and work a normal job, though.
Bad analogy, though, because there's no particular cultural advancement to be promoted by my joining the military, since despite its highly gendered orientation, it still is more equitable in many ways than a private-sector workplace. The same's probably true for you-- your flex-time efforts are meaningless in an environment that cannot possibly support such proposals. And for what must be the umpteenth time, no one's going to knock your poor, cheerfully domesticated wife over the head and sentence her to retail-clerk drudgery-- if that's all she's suited for, I would agree that her participation in the workforce would be pretty meaningless, given that retail's enough of a pink-collar ghetto already-- so kindly put that strawman away. All I ask is that everyone quit pretending that middle- and upper-class women who drop out are somehow serving or promoting feminism as much as they're just enjoying its benefits in negotiating their personal relationships (which, if you'll recall, was my problem with the Hirshman piece; I think that plenty of women use feminism primarily to get better deals with their husbands, and skip the unpleasant stuff like applying it in public life). Unapologetic honesty is far more appealing-- or at least more adult-- than self-serving doublespeak or constantly diverting the topic to better serve one's personal interests.
Well, that last bit was redundant... serves me right for trying to do too many things at once.
thanks for posting this.
No, you just need a divorce,and experience the joy of single life.
It's like Sex in the City, only the people aren't as pretty.
But this isn't a sacrifice based on principle. There's nothing WRONG, in the act itself, in choosing to be a SAHM instead of a professional.
The argument at issue here is that the consequences of choosing to be a professional (better policy) ought compel one to select "life as a professional" over "life as a SAHM," regardless of which choice would make one happier.
Because there is nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing to be a SAHM, the individual ought simply weigh the respective benefits and costs of each option, and choose accordingly.
IMHO.
Well, Andrew, I guess that's all true, at least in the Land of the Societal Vacuum, where it's always best to just do your own thing because no one would ever suggest that the aggregate choices of a specific subgroup might ultimately affect the availability of alternate choices for other similar groups. Never visited there, myself, but it sounds pretty pleasant in its simplicity.
As opposed to the Land of No Individuals?
I'm not claiming that we should never, at times, ignore our own interests to serve a greater cause.
But in this case the sacrifice is so enormous, and the benefit so slim, that it simply does not seem justified to me.
Hmm... if capitalism is bad in this context, and individualism is good, yet they're almost invariably linked philosophically, then we have some seriously inconsistent processes going on here. But I suppose that philosphical consistency, like the question of setting moral examples, is something that is much better applied to the lower classes anyway, especially when the conclusions are somewhat unpleasant.
Guess I've been doing things all wrong all these years, what with that weird sense of obligation to the systems that helped me out along the way... ah well.
Hire a housekeeper
I don't favor the most extreme forms of capitalism OR the most extreme forms of individualism, latts.
And I think that everyone should find a balance between living a fulfilling life on their own terms, and doing good for others.
This conversation, imho, ultimately boils down to the nature of that balance---not logical inconsistencies.
latts, I agree with you in principle that if more women, in the aggregate, held positions of power than they might be able to affect better change. I also don't deny the fact that there's men in positions of power that shouldn't be. So, like Andrew, believe it's a matter of balance.
What I disagree with you (latts) on is your assumption that all women somehow owe it to their gender to strive for such positions of power without taking into consideration individual personalities, interests, and skills. I don't dispute the sad reality that many girls are unfortunately discouraged from pursuing certain fields in which they might have otherwise succeeded brilliantly. But, the truth is women today do have more options than ever, perhaps even more than men. It's much more socially acceptable to hear of a female doctor than it is of a male nurse, for example. (think Fockers)
As for financial risk and stay-at-home parents, I'm still waiting for DrB to explain to me why she thinks it's just too financially risky for a woman to be a stay-at-home mother, but somehow it's not for a man to be a stay-at-home father (i.e. MrB)!!
Actually, Andrew, it was only the second or third post in this ridiculously long thread (and this will to be my last contribution to it; nothing in the blogosphere should really keep tottering on for this long) before someone was complaining about not feeling like she, as an individual, was being supported enough, or receiving the proper affirmation of her choices. What started as a discussion of a factually correct-- given the sample group limitations-- and thought-provoking article turned into a whole bunch of personal crap that had nothing to do with the big, broad issues that the elite group Hirshman examined might represent, and a whole lot to do with people wanting kudos, or at least equal feminist credit, for making the exact same nonfeminist (I won't say antifeminist, although that can be the subtext in some cases) choices that the women in the article did. People can work on balancing their personal lives all day long, and should, but they should probably not try to stake out turf in a societal movement that they're at best ignoring, if not mocking & actively repudiating, in favor of personal comfort. Of course, maybe I misinterpreted some community members entirely and expected them to be actively feminist when they are more likely to be conflicted about the entire movement.
As I've said, it doesn't mean that one can't consider oneself a feminist, but it's like professing religious faith without attending services-- it's great that the ideas help individuals, but without an active community, any positive effects are also limited to the individual, and are likely to be pretty easily shaken in a crisis.
TD, the difference is huge. Mr. B.'s lifetime earnings to date are several times my own. His social security reports show that he'll earn quite a lot of SS--so far, I'll earn almost none. He also has lifetime health insurance through the VA (if, that is, it doesn't get cut entirely by the Republicans). He has a 401K from his previous employer. He also has certain job skills that are far more marketable than the ones I have. All in all, he is *much* more economically secure than I am, and than most women are.
Latts,
I can profess religious faith and attend church, and work for churchy causes, *without radically altering my life and becoming a priest.*
Hirshman doesn't really ask SAHMs to become priests, because she thinks that she's offering a better lifestyle.
But those people who deny that part of Hirshman's argument, and STILL ask women to forgo being a SAHM for the sake of the cause, are essentially asking women (to continue the analogy) to become priests.
That level of radical sacrifice is, imho, not necessary or justified. And I think many in the above thread found the call for it threatening.
Fair point, DrB regarding SAHM vs SAHD in your situation, as well as other families, on average (per usual my foot tastes pretty good about right now)
Regarding Latts vs. Andrew, obviously, I agree once more with Andrew. I respect your (Latts) desire to see more women strive for power and "success" in the face of great obstacles in our patriarchical society, but like Andrew said, you can still believe in a cause and even live it in some small way without having to become a chief yourself. It does sound like you have sacrificed alot for the movement and that should be commended, but it's not fair to assume everybody else has it in them to give the same 110% before they've earned their stripes.
For example, I've invested a-l-o-t of time, energy, and years learning about database programming, an interest in numbers and computers that began when I was still a child, but I don't go around expecting everybody who uses a computer to know as much as I do before I'd bestow the label "computer user" on them. Like everything in life, there's different levels of knowledge, experience, and desire. Therefore, I would imagine somebody can still be considered a "feminist" without being a harcore veteran feminist like yourself - if they atleast have the "desire" and practice some of the basic tenets in their life. That is, membership in any group or movement (be it feminist, Christian, labor union, whatever) simply requires a certain basic level of desire and knowledge. So, it's unfair and unrealistic to assume everybody within that broad group will possess the same level skill and knowledge as the most advanced members. It doesn't make the entry-level people any less worthy of inclusion.
Lastly, so, some of the SAHM who have commented haven't sacrificed as much as you or don't share the same views for what qualifies as feminist or not. Big deal. Ask any two programmers what language or way of coding is better and you'll get two completely different answers. Does that mean person A is any more a "real" programmer than the person B just because they don't like how person B defines things? I don't think so. As long as you both desire for the same long term outcome, it doesn't matter.
TD, the difference is huge. Mr. B.'s lifetime earnings to date are several times my own. His social security reports show that he'll earn quite a lot of SS--so far, I'll earn almost none. He also has lifetime health insurance through the VA (if, that is, it doesn't get cut entirely by the Republicans). He has a 401K from his previous employer. He also has certain job skills that are far more marketable than the ones I have. All in all, he is *much* more economically secure than I am, and than most women are.
But if he were married right out of high school, was a SAHD right out of high school, and never held a fulltime job, while you started working a family-supporting job at 18, then he would NOT have that much in "lifetime earnings." But you would.
Hence, a man who never works full-time IS as financially dependent on his spouse as a woman who hardly works fulltime before having kids. And we can turn the whole argument around--"what if she dies or divorces you?"
I don't know where you're getting that SS pays more just because you're a man. A woman who works until she's 35 and then has a child, has some SS and 401k backup, but her husband stays home, will be in the exact same situation as your husband. The amount in your SS fund or 401k depends on how long you worked and for what salary, not your gender.
Last I checked, SS doesn't come out of nowhere, nor do savings. If he has more saved up and has been working longer than you, it's because he's been working longer than you, not because he gets a paycheck just for being male.
I know many on here will argue that it's harder for a woman to get hired than a man, so therefore a displaced housewife is worse off than a displaced househusband. But that assumption STILL isn't enough to convince me to send my kids off to daycare.
Oh and one more thought? For all the talk about divorce and infidelity being big risks to SAHM's, I have to ask WHO was the group who originally called for no-fault divorce and painted marriage as casual and unnecessary? Could it be...the COUNTERCULTURE and the FEMINIST MOVEMENT?
Once you managed to downplay the importance of marriage and family, men, figuring you were serious, took it as their green light to leave at the drop of a hat (or the first sighting of a pretty younger woman).
It's one thing to open up other options to families--allowing gays to marry, for instance. It's another to claim that relationship commitment doesn't matter--and then wonder why even your marriage isn't any more secure than a highschool fling.
Yes, Christine, we feminists deliberately undermined marriage in order to make women more economically insecure. It's all part of an evil plot, you see.
What the heck have you been reading?!?
Who else came up with the idea that you shouldn't trust a man for any reason--not to support you, love you, or stay with you? Bible-thumping conservatives?
The idea that women shouldn't trust men is way older than feminism, and is in many ways anti-feminist.
Look, no one is telling you to live your life differently than you do. Go, stay home with your kids, be happy, I hope it all works out and I'm sure it will. The only argument at hand is whether doing so is (1) productive of feminist goals and (2) safe. You say it's safe, fine: I hope you're right. You seem disdainful of feminism, so I don't see why you care about (1), either.
Ok, break it up girls!
The bottom line is life is all about balancing risk versus reward. It's not fair to judge how other people come to choose their decisions. How much financial risk one woman is comfortable stomaching if it means higher rewards in the departments of love, respect, and appreciation shouldn't mean she's any more or less concerned about "women's issues" than another woman who is more risk-adverse. The set of issues these two women worry about may be slightly different, but who's to say either one is more or less "feminist" than the others?
It hinges on whether one thinks feminism is about individual choices or broader consequences. Which is the whole point.
So, what's the "right" answer? Isn't there an infinite number of population-size issues that comprise "feminism"? Who defines what issues count?
Like, can Christine still be considered a "feminist" if she instead worries more about "mommy issues" and BROAD consequences to society of TOO many working mothers, not enough breastfeeding, etc. but disagrees, or cares less, with other goals of feminism, like more woring mothers and financial independece? Is one type of woman more or less a feminist than the other?
I don't think that there's a real dichotomy between thinking of feminism as about either individual choices or broader consequences. It seems to me that it must be about both. Cultural norms and expectations certainly shape and constrain the environment in which individual choices occur; and to the extent that these norms unfairly constrain the choices of women, and simultaneously enhance the choices of men, these norms are probably patriarchal.
These norms and expectations can be changed by a mixture of individual choices AND policy choices (though the real effects of policy will show in the effects upon individual choices).
The two questions here are:
A) whether the financial insecurity of SAHPs is better remedied by
1) women choosing a professional life NOT because it is more fulfilling but out of a duty to future generations of women, OR
2) policy changes that do not require women to make such a radical sacrifice,
and
B) whether women's issues generally will be so much better advanced by women choosing a less fulfilling lifestyle as a professional that women have a duty to so sacrifice and so choose.
With respect to issue A, I think the answer must be policy. There is nothing stopping women everywhere (and men too), whether at home or in the office, from supporting such policies, and making such policies a priority in the minds of voters. That's a tough fight, imho, because of the other pressing concerns the public faces.
And, frankly, it's always tough to sell the idea to a SAHP who wants to have complete faith in her or his spouse that her husband or his wife might leave---and not only leave, but leave coldly and completely, without any measure of consideration for the financial and personal plight of the spouse s/he leaves behind.
Nonetheless, measures that benefit everyone, like job training, cheaper education, perhaps more vocational education, and universal healthcare, would go far towards repairing the insecurity of the SAHP. These policies do not lack for proponents, and I do not think that more women in upper level positions will make a difference here. But I'm open to correction.
With respect to issue B, I don't think women's issues will be so much more advanced by such radical sacrifices that women should make them, for reasons that have been explored above and better stated by others.
Finally, (if anyone is still reading), I think it somewhat dangerous to argue that feminism must be a totalitarian ideology---by which I mean that it must overwhelm every other value of the individual if it is to be accepted. Women can be feminists AND a great many other things, as all individuals can. When someone (and I'm not sure anyone has, though latts came close) claims that to be a feminist one must completely subvert one's life goals and values, I think the ideology becomes far less humane, far less appealing, and, frankly, sets itself in opposition to what I see as the core value of feminism, which is simply that women be equally respected and equally treated as human persons.
And, frankly, it's always tough to sell the idea to a SAHP who wants to have complete faith in her or his spouse that her husband or his wife might leave---and not only leave, but leave coldly and completely, without any measure of consideration for the financial and personal plight of the spouse s/he leaves behind.
I think you're stuck in the soap operas. if you think about it, if 50% of marraiges end in divorce, in the majority of cases, people see the trouble coming. If your marriage is in trouble, smart people usually know it, and by all means, if your relationship feels rocky, get a job just in case.
An even tinier minority of marriages end when one person thinks everything is fine, and the other walks out "coldly and completely," unless of course you watch too many movies where happy woman comes home and man has packed up and left without a trace.
That's more melodrama/fiction/country music than real life, although I'm not denying that in this world, anything is possible.
If you're mature about your relationship, have committed to marriage with BOTH of you determined that it is forever, then I think you're more likely to work on it when things do get bad. And if you're truly invested in the relationship and make it a priority, you'll know when things are going sour. Most divorces don't take you by surprise; only some do.
If I ever feel that my husband and I aren't working out, I'll start looking for a job again, but for now, I trust (I know so many of you hate that concept) that he is here for me. I know I will not be surprised one morning to find out that he has left.
If someone wants to offer me discouraging advice in that regard, I won't listen to you because you have not met us. I am tired of people projecting their unhappy relationships and emotions onto my family. And I STILL don't see it as a reason for me to make work a priority over childrearing. The likelihood of it happening is too low.
I know I will not be surprised one morning to find out that he has left.
Clarify: I am not expecting any such surprise. I realized that sounded wrong when I read it.
thanks for this great discussion...its great to see so many of us engaged in this topic.
i think that hirschman is on the right track in her article, but is missing a big piece of the picture. i would agree completely that gender roles in the home have not shifted nearly as much as they have in the workplace - and that this is a powerful place for feminists to put their attention.
where i think she weakens her argument tremendously is in her complete devaluing of childcare and household work. her perspectives are not only classist in their demeaning of physical labor, they miss the boat completely in their assumption that raising children is somehow not an intellectually stimulating endeavor.
she states: "The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government." the idea that being engaged in a capitalist workforce offers more opportunities for human flourishing than does the amazing task of raising another human being and building a family is a narrow and uninformed perspective.
i think hirschman has a shot at making a powerful argument, that marriage and family roles are in need of a serious overhaul. without an accurate picture of the immensely challenging and engaging task of raising children however i think her perspectives are limited. especially because i'd assume her argument will be that men should do more of this work - thus stating that it's "bad" for women to choose it will clearly make it a hard sell for men.
This entire issue is just so much white noise.
It's a needlessly complex set of questions and arguments, with a very simple (and false) underlying premise:
that somehow, success in the public sphere is more relevant (in any sense) than success in the private sphere. It's absurd. What an antiquated, male-generated idea.
Everything done by humans in a professional sense, excepting academic studies of what is done by humans, is (originally) intended to help us live our lives more smoothly or comfortably: they help us keep healthy or safe, they help regulate our monies on scales ranging from personal to global, they make goods we need or try to publicize what goods are available, they help us enjoy ourselves, shelter us, allow us to communicate or travel near or far, and so on. Sometimes they try to be leaders so they can help organize the way large numbers of people get places and keep safe.
I mean, I'm sorry to get philosophical, but if you reduce everyone's professional role to the absolute fundamental purpose of what it is, you begin to realize how totally ridiculous any heirarchy of one cog over another really is.
Humans need to be productive in some way. They need to feel busy. They need to use their brain. They need to feel purposeful. They need, in short, to self-actualize.
However any and all academic discussion about where and when one should do this kind of self-actualizing is ridiculous. It's a pseudo-problem. It's all a matter of context, which is a false and misleading basis for judgment.
What is our context? Our context is that men have inhabited the public sphere roles for hundreds of years, and have drilled on and on about how important they are. They were the ones writing history books, so they featured themselves. It's baked into our brains now that the public sphere is the sphere in which one should self-actualize.
So now many educated women – specifically feminists – seek to divorce themselves as much as possible from the notion that women inherently belong in the private sphere. Which is a good idea, because that notion is bullshit. The problem is, they don't do so just for the sake of setting the record straight. They repudiate the private sphere, and therefore a huge part of themselves – not as women, but as humans. All because they are swallowing whole a male-centric worldview. We reveal ourselves as products of a zeitgeist which is so pervasive, we don't even recognize its influence on our values.
I said to my therapist that I hold deep and painful regrets that at at several points in my life I did not follow through on certain educational or professional opportunities because I placed a higher premium on maintaining my relationships with the men in my life (including my father). And she said, "Why were those not good choices?" And I said, "Because I didn't choose my own success, I was worried about these relationships. They wouldn't have done the same for me. I made the sacrifices because I was the woman." And she said, "You sound like a man."
I thought a lot about that, and Christ, she was right. Most of my ideals of success were not organic, but totally influenced by what men had woven into our collective consciousness about what is valuable.
If I genuinely wanted those opportunities, I would have taken them. There's no question of balance, either – a person can't be in two places at once. The fact is I valued the people in my life more than whatever (even intellectual) busywork I was set to do. Whether on not they would have made the same decisions doesn't matter.
It seems to me that many women who want to work and not stay at home, want to do so not because they genuinely enjoy working outside the home more, but because they cannot bring themselves to "devalue" themselves by leaving the public sphere.
The value placed on work in the public sphere? Was placed there by men. So as far as I can see, a woman who thinks she's being a feminist by choosing NOT to stay at home with her children for political reasons (as contrasted with real personal preference) is making a pretty sad mistake, because she's STILL letting men manipulate her worldview.
Now, if someone were to tell me they just feel bored hanging out with a toddler all day, I'd say two things: 1. You're the boring one, because there are a zillion complex experiences the two of you could be/should be having all day long, and you're not doing your job if the two of you are bored, and
2. Go back to working outside the home, if you aren't willing to make the commitment you need to make to being an intellectually, creatively involved caretaker. Your child deserves more. Put the kid into daycare, and get yourself into another kind of job. There's nothing good or bad about that, except that you will be happier, and your child probably will, too.
And I'll grant you, I stay at home with my son, and I am often bored, and it's because I'm lazy. Period. But obviously I don't really want to go back to work, or I would. So there you go. I have no right to complain.
As for this question of why shouldn't dads stay home, instead of moms, and is there some persistent anti-feminist societal expectation? ... if you don't want to stay at home with a small child, why should your husband want to? And if neither of you want to stay at home, put your kid in childcare, and move on. What is all the fucking angst about? No one HAS to stay at home, and no one, except single parents, HAS to work.
Even if it's true that a woman who stays at home for 5 years has a hard time getting back in to the workforce, why is that surprising? Would you hire someone who hadn't worked for 5 years, and/or had no work experience? No. And a stay-at-home dad would be just as subject to this kind of post-SAH discrimination
And, uh, does anyone have to stay at home those 5 years? Again, no. Childcare is there. Is it sad that one can't stay at home and enjoy one's child and then have instant entry back into the workworld? Sure! Life isn't fair.
Now if we want to talk about someone with real problems, let's talk about the single mom. She's working and she's not doing it for political or psychological reasons. Any two people raising a child together have no reason that I can conceive of to complain, if either one or both has a job.
I've never had kids myself but I've had various living arrangements, including a house-husband for a while, etc. Seems to me that actually once you're in a relationship it suddenly becomes how-are-we-two-going-to-survive rather than what is or isn't socially appropriate here?
Strong post - provocative and well written. The imbalance of who does what work and how s/he is credited is still grossly imbalanced in favor of men, but recognizing that being superwoman/superboss/supermom requires a lot of work and doesn't come "naturally" is vital. Divesting oneself of guilt and creating a democracy in the home do help, when they can be achieved.
Meanwhile, GMTA - check out my recent post on the gendered politics of housework!
disclaimer: I thoroughly agree with you.
Just a question, though: you say 'Set up your finances from the outset so that you have separate bank accounts', but you also say 'DO NOT make the mistake of agreeing that "his" money is what comes from his paychecks, and "her" money is what comes on hers'.
Do you think there's some tension here?
After being a powerless and patronized stay-at-home wife/mom, I divorced with 2 kids and got my career going, and did what was suggested above, married a younger fellow with less socioeconomic power. He is not motivated to take up the slack in housework in good faith to compensate for the fewer financial resources he throws into the mix.
On the contrary.
He enjoys the benefits of a higher-economic-scale lifestyle provided by myself, while refusing to do much housework at all.
So now I am stuck with an idle pot-smoking nitwit who will get HALF our assets if I divorce him in spite of a very low contribution. YOU. CANNOT. FORCE. MEN. TO. DO. HOUSEWORK. GET IT??
So please don't see "marrying a guy with less socioeconomic power expecting that in good faith he'll take up the slack elsewhere" as a solution.
Now I am faced with having to figure out how to get out of this, with three kids, a tangled legal/financial situation in a foreign country, and a demanding freelance home business. Ultimately the person with the best passive-aggressive tactics (as in: marry a pet rock and then you get to draaaaag him along) wins, because he is expending the least energy. I can't afford to "slack back at him" because I have more to lose and because I am a more purposeful person in general.
I don't see a solution at all, in fact, everywhere I look women are ending up with the water-carrying. If some woman can come up with a solution for all of us, I'd give her a prize.
I happened upon this discussion late---but have been enjoying the many interesting posts. I have been married for 24 years and have found that life situations and work requirements change as we go through various stages of life. In my case at various points I have worked outside the home full time (as the lesser of 2 incomes) part-time, and full time as the primary income. I have also worked full-time at home for years when my 2 children were young. Adjustments are continually made by both my husband and myself as required by finances, childrens' needs, business opportunities etc.
Many of the issues involved with the "work" of raising children versus work in the market-place (i.e. for pay) are discussed in the book, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued by Ann Crittenden.
You might find this a good read, as I did.
One additional comment---I think it is important to watch how we talk.
I never ask a woman, "Do you work?" for of course we all work (whether we are raising children or not)...rather, if the question is really, "are you working for pay in the market economy?" I'll ask, "Do you work outside the home?"
A small, but I think important distinction that recognizes both market work (i.e. for pay) and non-market work (house cleaning, parenting etc) as equally important.
One additional comment---I think it is important to watch how we talk.
I never ask a woman, "Do you work?" for of course we all work (whether we are raising children or not)...rather, if the question is really, "are you working for pay in the market economy?" I'll ask, "Do you work outside the home?"
A small, but I think important distinction that recognizes both market work (i.e. for pay) and non-market work (house cleaning, parenting etc) as equally important.
Andrew, you wrote: "Being a stay-at-home-dad is a far less socially acceptable choice than being a professional woman. I don't think anyone blinks twice, or notices anything unusual, at the sight of a woman working up the corporate ladder."
How do you think we got to the point of noone blinking twice at a woman with high career aspirations? Pioneers!! That's right--people who braved the social norms and the status quo and ultimately paved the way for future working women. Current SAHDs are making it easier for future SAHDs, and it's Hard Work!!
This is what makes me crazy about all the women here and on other boards who resent Hirshman's points...they refuse to consider the impact of their retreat into private life on the lives of other working women, invoking 'personal choice' in their defense.
But if highly educated, intelligent women opt out of the workforce, where does that leave less intelligent, less educated women? Or where does that leave their own daughters, who will be well-educated, presumably, and may even have major career ambitions?
Andrew, you wrote: "Being a stay-at-home-dad is a far less socially acceptable choice than being a professional woman. I don't think anyone blinks twice, or notices anything unusual, at the sight of a woman working up the corporate ladder."
How do you think we got to the point of noone blinking twice at a woman with high career aspirations? Pioneers!! That's right--people who braved the social norms and the status quo and ultimately paved the way for future working women. Current SAHDs are making it easier for future SAHDs, and it's Hard Work!!
This is what makes me crazy about all the women here and on other boards who resent Hirshman's points...they refuse to consider the impact of their retreat into private life on the lives of other working women, invoking 'personal choice' in their defense.
But if highly educated, intelligent women opt out of the workforce, where does that leave less intelligent, less educated women? Or where does that leave their own daughters, who will be well-educated, presumably, and may even have major career ambitions?
I am interested why, in your example, if the man makes 100K and the woman makes 50K, do you split evenly what's left over ? Shouldn't the man be given a higher percentage of what's left ? If not, why not ?
Because we are a family. And we both contribute equally to the family. Period.
I sent a link to this response to my husband. This is a never ending issue in our marriage. No matter what I say he continues to think that his "I don't think it's my responsibility to do housework, so of course I care less/don't bother/don't notice/will "help" if you think for me and tell me what to do." attitude is correct and my expectations that he own a fair share of the home duties are unreasonable.
To me this is the one major issue that could destroy our marriage. We are in therapy now and our (male) therapist stood up for me last week when he complained that I didn't ask for help with the child while we were out for dinner with friend's so it's my fault he didn't help. I thought he (the therapist) made my point elequently. (Is it her responsibilty to take care of the child at a restaurant? Well not... well then why should she have to ask for help?) In talking about it later with my husband, I still don't think he got it. ARGH! I may bring this article to our next appointment because he has to get it through his head that's it's his house, his family, and his responsibility too. Any advice on how to get this through his phenomenally thick skull would be hugely appreciated.
So now the question is: What did our parents generation do wrong that the men still feel entitled this way? And how do we raise the next generation of men so that they share in this work with their wives and support them so that everyone in the family can achieve a home/work/life balance that works.
WTF?
You must be unmarried. No man in his right mind would put up with this bullshit.
Unless he's a pussy.
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I'm an Indian guy .. and I have no problems with feminism where women are treated as equal to men . They shouldn't be oppressed in any way.
But a few women have become radical and they are too difficult for relationships. I broke up with a post-femnist woman , who doesn't want to accept responsibilities for her behavior or actions. It is really surprising that post feminists ( some of them) are too difficult and yet present themselves as "victims" . What i realized is that I would be happy with a woman who is feminine rather than a feminist , who is caring and respectable and who can be my equal in every way i can think of.
Most post femnistc women are like the ones in the tv show "sex and the city" . Many have them have been "used" by men.Women have begun to think its ok to be promiscuous ( remember they are liberated and free to choose who they will have sex with) and such women are likely to be single moms of the future ... whose kids are going to be fucked up..and its going to be a cycle.
Women are superior than men in many areas where men wont match up to them . Nature created women and assigned the role of a caregiver to women, who give birth , take care of young and other people. Women also have more empathy compared to men.
I think in today's world , women are increasingly mislead by post-feminist propaganda that they are oppressed and so on, thus driving them away from their primary role of a caregiver as they were since 100000 BC or earlier. This system won't work and will fail sooner or later as its against the laws of nature. I would be interested to hear others' opinion.
I'm the flip side to this article. My wife earns twice what I do, due to intelligence, drive and opportunity. I do 80% of the housework, and our household finances consist of what is "hers" and what is "ours". She drives a Lexus, I ride a bicycle. Still, I know whose friends will help them in a crisis and who is truly content with their lot.
Now that I have been fired from a small competitive law firm for being unproductive, largely due to the complaints of two female attorneys who will likely not have kids, because I am doing all of the housework, child care, cooking and cleaning, so much so that I cannot write/edit briefs, pleadings, etc. at home - as my two female competitors/co-workers routinely spend all night at home doing - because my wife refuses to do any work at home, just like you describe here.
Unfortunately, I cannot be a full-time domestic god because she quit her job a few months ago to start her own law firm. Now she is "angry" at me for being fired. Now I have to try to find a job as an attorney in the worst legal market in a long time in order to feed us and keep her law firm going. She refuses to see that her "positional bargaining" refusal to do any housework - I mean any - helped get us to this point.
While there is clearly a long way to go in creating honest male-female relations in this country, at least if I were not a "guilty liberal" I would still have a job and we wouldn't be going bankrupt.
As I write this, I know it's wrong to say that this is irresponsible bullshit - just like the unnecessary abortion a few years ago - but I can't help it. Sorry. It's bullshit - you're bullshit.
Now that I have been fired from a small competitive law firm for being unproductive, largely due to the complaints of two female attorneys who will likely not have kids, because I am doing all of the housework, child care, cooking and cleaning, so much so that I cannot write/edit briefs, pleadings, etc. at home - as my two female competitors/co-workers routinely spend all night at home doing - because my wife refuses to do any work at home, just like you describe here.
Unfortunately, I cannot be a full-time domestic god because she quit her job a few months ago to start her own law firm. Now she is "angry" at me for being fired. Now I have to try to find a job as an attorney in the worst legal market in a long time in order to feed us and keep her law firm going. She refuses to see that her "positional bargaining" refusal to do any housework - I mean any - helped get us to this point.
While there is clearly a long way to go in creating honest male-female relations in this country, at least if I were not a "guilty liberal" I would still have a job and we wouldn't be going bankrupt.
As I write this, I know it's wrong to say that this is irresponsible bullshit - just like the unnecessary abortion a few years ago - but I can't help it. Sorry. It's bullshit - you're bullshit.
Fantastic article! I am printing it for my husband to read. I see myself and my family in every word of it. There are some parts I disagree with, especially the one that deals with managing the housework. My DH just says, "So just leave it there. I am not making you clean it up. It is YOUR choice to do the work."
The author presents her readers with two alternatives: if you let him know he is not doing his fair share, he will either get off his ass and do it or he will divorce you for nagging. Well, what about another choice? YOU divorce HIM for being a leech (yes, he DOES enjoy the fruits of your domestic labor, even if he says it does not matter to him whether you do it or not).
Another point is the issue of name change. The author assumes that women change their names to be more of a family, etc. BS. I changed mine not because I wanted to be more of a family, but for professional reasons - my married last name is a lot more "American," which in my field (teaching English as a Second Language) is a huge asset.
But the points on financial parity are right on!
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