Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Meet The New Boss...Same As The Old Boss
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they are flown in the next war
Reading this passage from Linda Hirshman's essay in the Washington Post on Sunday, I had several reactions:
When I set out to write a book about how the first generation of women to grow up with feminism managed their marriages, I never dreamed I'd wind up the subject of a Web article called "Everybody Hates Linda."
Everybody started hating Linda, apparently, when I published an article in the progressive magazine the American Prospect last December, saying that women who quit their jobs to stay home with their children were making a mistake. Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings. They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings. Oh, and by the way, where were the dads when all this household labor was being distributed? Maybe the thickest glass ceiling, I wrote, is at home.
The first was puzzlement. I had, somewhat naively, always thought one of the smarter tenets of mainstream feminism involved Hirshman's bete noir: the freedom to choose. Choice feminism affirms the right and the ability of women to make rational choices regarding their time, their talent, their very lives. For those who think in economic terms, the word "choice" brings to mind two related concepts: tradeoffs (the idea that it is rarely possible to choose one thing - at least in the real world where resources are finite - without giving up other things) and the weighing of opportunity costs, which recognizes that intelligent decision making requires the evaluation of the most valuable forgone alternative.
My second thought was that Hirshman has an incredibly parochial view of work; notably, the long decried notion that only traditionally male occupations have value. In her much longer American Prospect article, the author rails against what she views as the demeaning choices made by educated professional women who "opt out" of the working world to raise their children:
Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in September The New York Times featured an article exploring a piece of this story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” the blogosphere went ballistic, countering with anecdotes and sarcasm. Slate’s Jack Shafer accused the Times of “weasel-words” and of publishing the same story -- essentially, “The Opt-Out Revolution” -- every few years, and, recently, every few weeks. (A month after the flap, the Times’ only female columnist, Maureen Dowd, invoked the elite-college article in her contribution to the Times’ running soap, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” about how women must forgo feminism even to get laid.) The colleges article provoked such fury that the Times had to post an explanation of the then–student journalist’s methodology on its Web site.
There’s only one problem: There is important truth in the dropout story. Even though it appeared in The New York Times.
I stumbled across the news three years ago when researching a book on marriage after feminism. I found that among the educated elite, who are the logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women, feminism has largely failed in its goals. There are few women in the corridors of power, and marriage is essentially unchanged. The number of women at universities exceeds the number of men. But, more than a generation after feminism, the number of women in elite jobs doesn’t come close.
Why did this happen? The answer I discovered -- an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face -- is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.
The disturbing (to Ms. Hirschman) implication of the opt-out phenomenon is that, while women now have the option of competing with men in the workplace, a substantial number of them choose, at least temporarily, their children over the rat race. Again, in the presence of scarcity this choice is not without consequences in terms of lost wages, diminished resumes, and a still lagging presence in America's boardrooms and to a lesser extent, academia.
Interestingly, underlying the author's heartburn with women who opt out are her unsupported assumptions that only traditionally male occupations have value and that the choice to stay home with the kids is somehow (she never bothers to explain why) a coerced one:
Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: 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. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”
I greeted Hirshman's first statement with mixed emotions:
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.
I chose to stay at home for most of the twenty or so years my two sons spent growing up. On the one hand, one could argue this choice was not entirely freely made and additionally that the consequences - periodic bouts of feeling trapped, impatience with routine, repetitive tasks, a wish for more intellectual stimulation, and the desire to take more risks with my life - at times gave me heartburn too.
But now that my sons are grown and I've been in the working world for seven years, I know these feelings are hardly unique to stay at home Moms. The heady rush of acquiring competence and credibility in a foreign and highly technical field, of taking on sometimes daunting challenges has been replaced by (quelle surprise!) periodic bouts of feeling trapped, impatience with routine, repetitive tasks, a wish for more intellectual stimulation, and the desire to take more risks with my life. Nor are these feelings uniquely female. My husband, an extremely intelligent and competent man capable of succeeding in any sphere in which he chose to exert himself, often feels these emotions too; arguably to a greater degree than I do.
The reason is simple. Looked at objectively, my husband's life has been in many ways less well-rounded and balanced than my own. He has never carried a child to term, nor been intimately engaged in the decades long dance that is child rearing. I, on the other hand, have both raised children and established myself in my career. Hirshman looks at stay at home moms and sees only drudgery and repetitive chores. Those elements are undoubtably part and parcel of homemaking unless one has the luxury of domestic help. But she misses what I found most stimulating and challenging about staying at home: the luxurious freedom to think and read and the intellectual challenge of constantly re-evaluating applying the moral precepts with which both my husband and I were raised to a constantly changing set of circumstances.
How much freedom should I give my children? Should I "cover" for them when they make mistakes, or stand back and let them suffer unpleasant consequences in hopes that experience is the best teacher? What if, owing to immaturity and lack of context, they draw different or even destructive conclusions from those experiences? How should I teach them to handle conflict and adversity? What values should I seek to instill in them? These are choices presented to any leader, but Motherhood is very nearly unique in the sense that no healthy adult relationship compares in intensity to the raising of tiny beings who start off completely dependent on their parents and gradually, over the years, must make their own way in the world using the tools their parents have given them. Motherhood, in many ways, is a pure form of leadership as well as a teaching profession. The curriculum involves teaching not just practical knowledge but abstract concepts like honor, civic duty, and ethics to students who see life through an entirely different prism.
Raising children requires the ability to step outside your own experiences and frame of reference; to view the world again through a child's eyes. Simply answering the thousand ubiquitous "Mommy, why does..." questions posed by one's offspring forces one to reexamine virtually every experience and moral teaching in life. It forces one to think about human societies, how they evolve, and what our goals are (and should be) both as individuals and members of a larger social construct.
As a returning 4.0 college student in my early thirties (an eloquent refutation to the notion that the sacrifices associated with child rearing are of necessity permanent ones), I found myself applying what I had learned about human nature and how the world works to subjects like economics, law, and political science. Working both case law and calculus problems, I quickly outpaced my classmates using the same problem-solving process I'd used at home for over a decade: assess the facts, find the applicable abstract principles or rules, and apply them to the problem.
But the ease with which I made the transition from full-time Mommy to college student did not surprise me. Even when I still filled part of my days with uninspiring tasks like scrubbing the toilet bowl or de-fleaing our pet beagle, my husband often remarked that I thought - and talked about - about subjects he hadn't addressed since college. It is impossible to be a good mother without also being something of a philosopher. Moreover I would argue the influence of a good mother's moral, ethical, and intellectual tutelage literally shapes the lives of her children and often by extension, those of future generations.
David Brooks, in an essay Hirshman thinks "attacks" her and relegates women to the realm of the sub-human, mirrors my own views:
When you look back over the essays of 2005, you find many that dealt with the big foreign policy issues of the year, but also an amazing number that dealt with domesticity. That's because the deeper you get into economic or social problems -- national competitiveness, poverty, school performance, incarceration -- the more you realize the answers lie with good parenting and good homes.
Hirshman has it exactly backward. Power is in the kitchen. The big problem is not the women who stay there but the men who leave.
Brooks' observation begs an interesting question I often ask of feminists who deride choice. Is it really in society's best interest for only uneducated and stupid women to raise children? And why do feminists like Hirshman value selling one's talents to the highest bidder over selflessly using them to enrich the lives of our loved ones and, inevitably, society? Is she so quick to dismiss the paid "helping" professions: social work, teaching, psychology?
The secret of Hirshman's discontent appears to lie in the equitable distribution of power:
If women’s flourishing does matter, feminists must acknowledge that the family is to 2005 what the workplace was to 1964 and the vote to 1920. Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed with language of choice.
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. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules -- rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.
There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.
But the interesting thing is that the women who most upset her: those "wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females" who start out in the working world but later decide they'd rather be at home with their children, are extremely well qualified to work. And demographics suggest (as most educated white women, at least, tend to marry men with a similar background) these women were not in "a position of unequal resources" when they married. It was only after being out in the workplace that these women chose to barter the benefits of the working world for those of hearth and home. Finally, there is little to suggest these women did not take their careers seriously. It is more likely that a significant number of them also take their families very seriously.
What Hirshman cannot accept is that these women, much like men who often remain in financially secure but unrewarding jobs rather than trading in their pinstriped suits for the life of a starving artist, have made different (and apparently unacceptable) judgments about the relative value of work and home life:
During the ’90s, I taught a course in sexual bargaining at a very good college. Each year, after the class reviewed the low rewards for child-care work, I asked how the students anticipated combining work with child-rearing. At least half the female students described lives of part-time or home-based work. Guys expected their female partners to care for the children. When I asked the young men how they reconciled that prospect with the manifest low regard the market has for child care, they were mystified. Turning to the women who had spoken before, they said, uniformly, “But she chose it.”
Hirshman's attitude towards women's choice smacks of, dare I say it? the very paternalism rightly rejected by mainstream feminists decades ago. It is undoubtably true that if more men were willing to pitch in around the house and to share parenting tasks, some women would spend more time in the workplace. But conversely, if more women forced this choice on the men in their lives, many men would opt to spend time at home rather than face the breakup of their marriages. Not content with limiting womens' choices, Hirshman wants to limit mens' choices as well.
But Hirshman neglects to examine the role of free will in all of this. The truth is that women don't have to fulfill the expectations of their male partners. It is also true that no one is forcing them to stay home. They can always park the kids in day care and head off to work without so much as a backward glance. That they do not do this more often reflects the reality that for many women, the happiness and welfare of their husbands and children is inextricably intertwined with their own. In that context one could argue the decision to stay home is as much a selfish as a self-sacrificing one. Women are simply happier when their lives include both family and work, and if men take advantage of this to some degree that doesn't change the fundamental truth Hirshman so detests; namely that women now have freedoms that were unthinkable in the 1960's. Abortion and birth control have given us the same advantage men possessed for centuries: the ability to enjoy sex without bearing children. Workplace legislation and the women's movement have opened the doors to the executive washroom. If women choose to forgo these benefits for the privilege of having children, it is not for women like Hirshman to tell them they've made a "mistake".
Second-guessing the voluntary decisions of women who are, for the first time in human history, truly free to choose infantilizes women and robs them of responsibility for their own behavior. If they are unhappy and unfulfilled at home, they have chosen to be. No prison bars block the exit door. In her quest to free women from what she views as outdated patriarchal notions, Hirshman has merely traded the old boss (rigidly defined gender roles) for an equally tyrannical new boss which demands women adopt traditionally male criteria for what matters most in life: competition, money, and power.
Is it really a surprise that so many women haven't rushed to embrace Hirshman's world view? Perhaps a new generation of working women has simply decided they won't get fooled again.
UPDATE: This could not be more on point. I am constantly amazed that more people do not recognize this man's comic genius.
5 Comments:
By 
Chris, at
Tue Jun 20, 04:52:00 PM:
What is it with progressives and individuality? I thought that self-fulfillment was the pinnacle of human achievement according to them.
When people fail to validate progressive choices, then apparently it makes them so uncomfortable that they insist that everyone else must be stupid or repressed.
Good call on the infantilization of those off the reservation. This is such a predictable outcome that one might begin to believe it was deliberate, if one could believe that progressives could be malificent.
By Cassandra, at
Tue Jun 20, 05:18:00 PM:
To be entirely fair here, several progressive bloggers (Echidne comes to mind, for one) took Ms. Hirshman to task too, something which gave me hope that the entire blogosphere have not lost our collective minds :D
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Jun 20, 07:46:00 PM:
Cass, this was a great post. One additional thought:
It is possible to think about the division of labor within marriages as reflecting a taste for risk and efficiency. Some marriages involve two "generalists" -- the man and woman both handle a lot of household tasks (even if those are divided along traditional gender lines) -- and they both earn a paycheck. These marriages spread risk, insofar as both spouses are capable of performing all relevant tasks, from changing a diaper to bringing home the bacon. If something happens to one spouse, the other is in a better position to keep things going. Generalist marriages are less efficient, though, because one cannot do everything well. Neither spouse is as exclusively focused on career, so they may not earn as much or get promoted as quickly as the career specialists. Neither spouse is as dedicated to hearth and home as a spouse who dedicates himself or herself to that function. Working parents (usually moms) don't bake nearly as many cookies, to sieze on Hillary's politically fraught but reasonably honest observation.
Obviously, many marriages go through phases when they specialize, and phases when they generalize. Your's apparently has, as has mine. Same for my parents and my in-laws.
Point is, these questions need not be about virtue. They may just reflect perfectly reasonable choices about risk and efficiency and personal satisfaction. It is not clear to me why they need to be examined for the extent to which they validate one or another world view.
By Papa Ray, at
Tue Jun 20, 09:43:00 PM:
I don't know or really care about the "world view".
It's my view and the view of others around me that count and that I know about.
Notice I didn't say agreed with.
I haven't read a lot about this, except what you would expect, if you were waiting in an office, bank or doctor's office and there was nothing but women's reading materials.
And of course this post.
""wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females"
They seem to be mirror images most of the time of their mothers. The one's who dropped them off at the day care and that they saw for about a total of an hour a day, if that much.
That mother and her child when she grew up, didn't have any experiences, memories of a loving, warm relationship with their mother (more likely one with their father) and since they did have the wonderful world of choice, they made the one that you would most likely expect, to be like their mother. In most cases. I can only think of three women that turned out to be great, wonderful, giving Mothers, that were raised by day cares and busy wealthy independent [m]others.
Mind you this is only from the people (women) I have known in my long, long life, and I have known a great many.
"It is also true that no one is forcing them to stay home. They can always park the kids in day care and head off to work without so much as a backward glance."
I'm not sure who the "them" is that your talking about. The majority of women I have known that stayed at home, did it because they wanted to but also because they didn't really have a choice. They didn't have great educations and high paying jobs available to them so if they had worked half their paychecks would be going to the day care and the gas and car expenses associated with it.
Many men will not tolerate their wives working, and if by chance they do, then they ( the women) will still have to do the same amount of work, as if they were not working.
At least all this is the case in my little corner of the world. I don't know about yours.
A man that has a working wife will still do the man's work around the house, fixing, carrying, yard work and such.
He might even drop the kids off if he happens to be going the same direction at the same time.
But forget about picking them up, unless they want to leave when he gets there and it wasn't out of his way,
And you can forget about getting him to do any "women's work".
If they had left(divorced), they would have had to take the children with them and raise them alone unless they could luck out and find a man that wanted a "ready made family".
Once in a blue moon, the woman leaves and just leaves the kids too.
So in our little world, most women have to just get over being unhappy or unfulfilled unless they want a divorce and want to force the husband to take full custody of the kids, or just leave the state.
This modern "world view" just hasn't made it down here yet.
Give it a few more generatons.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
By Cassandra, at
Tue Jun 20, 10:37:00 PM:
Papa Ray:
I spent twenty years at home with (to be honest) mixed feelings at times, but my children's welfare and my desire to raise them myself outweighed any other considerations and I'd do it again if the same choices were presented to me. I also (frankly) wanted to provide some stability and a tranquil home for my husband. That is an underrated thing in today's world.
TH makes a good point about efficient division of labor: that's exactly the criterion my husband and I used in deciding how our home life would be run. I would stay home with the kids until the last year or two of HS, then go to college so my income could pay their college tuition. I also generally found the money to pay for their grammar school tuition b/c it was important to me. And I did it while still staying home with my boys.
Hirshman specifically mentions well-to-do, educated women who drop out of the work force voluntarily b/c they can afford to.
Those are the ones who really frost her, not the ones who have less appealing choices.
But the truth is, we all make choices in life and before you have kids you really ought to be thinking about all of these things. Having kids isn't like buying a puppy.
Some women (like me) have kids before they planned to. We were using birth control with my oldest (and using it correctly) but all I have to do is look at my husband or hear his voice and I conceive.
The point is, most women really do have a choice, even if they don't like it much or it's not the same choice as men. The question is do they want to live with the consequences. I agree with Hirshman that no women ought to go into a marriage totally dependent on the man in this day and age. You ought to have some skills, if for no other reason than to support yourself if something happens.
Marrying a man who won't "let" you work is a choice. My husband is not thrilled that I work - he'd gladly have me back at home. But he loves me and realizes that I'd be miserable now that the kids are gone, so he supports me.
But then I knew he would, even when we were just teenagers. I have never expected any less and wouldn't be much inclined to tolerate it. I support him, and he supports me.
It seems to work.
