More Squirrel Stories Coming Soon, I Promise

The final section of the Homeward Bound article that I have been discussing ad nauseum is entitled "Why Do We Care?". My answer to this question can be found in the Part III discussion – namely that no one seems to be taking our children into account or even considering how present policies will impact the future. I grew up in Washington, DC, and watched about 10,000 hours more news than the average child, so I know that politicians have forever been saying how they don’t want to pass this or that problem on to their children. Well here I am, a mom myself, and the problems remain and the politicians still claim that they don’t want to pass the problems on (Hello??? National debt???). However, I figured I wouldn’t disappoint all of my tortured readers by combining the two sections. There are a few final points in Section IV that I wanted to comment on.

Ms. Hirshman says that one answer to “why do we care?” what the Times brides do is that “what they do is bad for them, it is certainly bad for society” because of the “regime effect” whereby poor little bourgeois middle class me quits my job because I want to be like a Times bride even though I’m too poor. Once again, I must state that that suggestion is a crock. I admit I am unlike the women in the Times wedding announcements, and that is the very reason why I would not choose to imitate them. I’ve never considered them “elite” except that they have more money. Since our circumstances are so different, why would I feel that they are role models for me?

Ms. Hirshman also states that “elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes.” Is this India? I thought we all had a shot at increasing our standing in society, based upon hard work, innate abilities, etc., etc. Since I wasn’t born to go to Yale, I’m out of luck? My possible contributions should not be considered? I should be more worried about finding a way to motivate the Times brides that don’t want to work than finding a way to get myself back to work or a way to support the hundreds of thousands of brides who do want to work?

I believe I understand why this article was so harsh. In a way, Ms. Hirshman was trying to draw attention to herself, but I also think that she has legitimate concerns and that framing them in the most controversial way was one way to ensure maximum exposure. I hope she is not actually so closed-minded to think that any combination of “choice” and feminism is impossible, but I understand that enumerating a list of exceptions to her argument would only weaken it.

This article gave me a lot to think about, because for now I am happy at home, and it is easy to focus on my own happiness and expect that someone else is out there working on preparing a better world for my kiddies. I can choose to stay home, but I can’t turn a blind eye to the women who are doing the work. The discussion of all these issues is important, if only because some women may turn their anger at Ms. Hirshman into a search for solutions to some of the problems she describes.

Part III: What Is to Be Done? or Male Teachers, This Is Your Lucky Day

Part III of the Homeward Bound article is entitled “What Is to Be Done?” and includes three rules that women should follow in order to get more access to positions of power.

The first rule is to “Prepare yourself to qualify for good work,” by using choosing college courses based on your future career goals and avoiding “the liberal arts curriculum.” I disagree. I went to a liberal arts college and most of my friends were liberal arts majors. Many who went on to law school, medical school, business school, or graduate school, believed that their writing and critical thinking abilities were greatly enhanced by the liberal arts curriculum. I always thought that college was the place where a person learned how to think, and that the actual classes (unless you wanted to be an accountant) were not as important as the abilities you developed while taking them. Since college I have worked in several different fields related to chemistry, the last one being chemical weapons demilitarization, and although I knew nothing about it going in, I had confidence that I would figure it out and excel over time.

Ms. Hirshman states that after college comes on-the-job training or further education. I agree, in fact, I think a very useful time for furthering education or developing other skills would be while out of the workforce and raising small children. Kiddies nap, daddies like to play with them after work, there is time to put toward personal development. Although Ms. Hirshman belittles volunteer work, a person can develop skills, gain responsibility, and sometimes even make a difference without getting paid. It does not need to be a lifelong full time commitment, but it doesn’t need to be seen as wasted time either. Similarly, part time work may not speed career advancement, but it does keep your foot in the door for the time you are ready to come back. I worked part time and managed to maintain my standing and respect in the workplace, because I took on the jobs I was able to do, and did them without making continual excuses about a late babysitter or a sick child. If I had gone back full time, I might not have performed as well.

My experience segues into the second rule which is “treat work seriously.” I agree that even when I was a working mother, I was a bit annoyed when someone had to regularly dash off because she (or sometimes he) had a child emergency. This was not very empathetic of me and was probably a hangover from my single days, but I felt like they had not planned enough redundant help to avoid the situation. One reason I will not go back to work full time right now is because I don’t want to be an employee that dashes off for every kiddie emergency. I’d at least like to have my husband as a back up, or perhaps a stay-at-home mom friend. For now, I’m willing to be a stay-at-home mom friend for the few women that I know around here that are working.

According to Ms. Hirshman, women are too idealistic which leads them into volunteerism or “indentured servitude in social-service jobs,” not toward money. Again, I agree that women should treat work seriously, but I disagree that money is the only marker of success. Unfortunately for everyone who knows me, I am still reading “The Power Broker” about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York for 40 years. He never cared about money, only what he wanted to do with his life, so he took on jobs without pay or for miniscule amounts of money. Rather quickly he had become a subject-matter expert in drafting laws and city planning, he had met and impressed many powerful people, so he was handed more and more power because he had the knowledge to back up his ambitions and was more worried about accomplishing his goals than getting paid. Of course the moral of his story is that with all his power he ruined New York City for generations to come, but it does illustrate that freed from financial worries (as many of the aforementioned New York Times brides are), a person can find ways to gain power.

The third rule is “don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” By this Ms. Hirshman seems to mean, “do put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” Women should marry liberal men who are younger and poorer or older and richer. Where do you find younger, poorer, liberal men? Teaching school of course, so things are likely about to get much better for the average 6th grade math teacher. Where do you find older, richer men? They seem to be a rather scarce commodity. The fatal flaw in this marriage advice, is that you can’t help who you fall in love with, all you can do is make sure that you talk about how things will work in the marriage before you commit.

An interesting point that Ms. Hirshman makes in this section and that should be considered by women who want to go back to work is to avoid the “economic temptation to assign the cost of child care to the woman’s income.” I never thought of it that way before, but we did it too (of course, I went back to work and the HP had to stay in the Army, so it was mainly just a calculation not a turning point). The cost of childcare should be considered against the whole family income since some advantages of a woman staying in the workforce are not always quantifiable in dollars.

The final point of this section is one that I have already embraced wholeheartedly even though I’m not back at work: let the house get dirty. When you stay at home, it is harder to overlook the clutter and debris because you are in it all the time. When you are working, you are generally too tired to worry about the clutter and debris when you get home. The HP did a lot more around the house when neither of us was home during the day, and chances are he’ll do the same when I go back to work. I clean up more now because I don’t like to look at it. But we don’t have the sort of relationship where he judges what I do on the housework front, because he knows every complaint about the state of the house can be met with only one response “If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, please feel free to do it yourself.”

What is to be done? I think the main positive outcome of the outrage over Ms. Hirshman’s article would be for everyone to take a stab at developing strategies to support women that are attempting to achieve greater positions of power in society. Some women have no aspirations in this realm, but most women would probably recognize that if we don’t have women in positions of power, no one will be looking out for our interests or the interests of our children (has anyone seen the recent developments regarding the national debt, environmental policy, energy policy, etc. etc. etc.). We take great pride in keeping their children safe and happy at home, but the world currently being prepared for our children is rather horrifying, and the people in power now do not seem concerned with what will happen in 40 years. An article I read about the mommy wars made just this point, and it was one I hadn’t considered. We can’t expect single women to take on the whole responsibility, working mothers are needed too, and we stay at home mothers should try to find ways to help them (until we are ready to join them), rather than criticize their method of parenting.

Yes, It Continues, My Analysis of Part II

Section II of Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article is entitled “The Failure of Choice Feminism” and I am sure is the source of most of the anger from the stay-at-home mother crowd. However, I do not think she is being controversial when she states:

Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.

Again, I agree. Everywhere I have worked, I have watched older men struggle with the socially correct way to interact with female colleagues. Some hold it in for a while, and then eventually blow, like when one of my bosses asked a potential future employee if she was planning to have kids any time soon (she didn’t get the job for other reasons, but she could have sued that company’s pants off, although apparently it only had a pair of running shorts left because it went out of business shortly after the incident). At my last job, I was often in the position of reviewing the work of four older (50 to 60 year-old) men. While I was merely performing my duty as a reviewer when I marked up their drafts and attached a list of questions, I could tell from the muttering that they sometimes thought I had “overstepped my bounds.” One other worthless coworker once brought me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled something that he wanted added to a report. I read it and said “Okay, type it up and send it to me,” which left him absolutely flabbergasted. Obviously he felt that since I was younger and female, I should type it up for him.

Right before our son was born, the HP and I met with a financial planner who was showing us all sorts of charts and figures of what we needed to save and how much insurance we needed, etc., etc. I finally stopped him and said “These projections don’t make any allowance for my income.” He said to me “Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again?” I said to him “No, I can’t wait to go back to work when the kids are bigger.” He looked at me for a minute and went back to his spiel. I didn’t insist that he recalculate everything, mainly because I didn’t want to have to see him again. The worst part of the incident was that he was not an old man, he was my age, and he thought I should aspire to a life of leisure. Something is not right there.

I’m sure that the anger about this article started brewing at the end of this section, where Ms. Hirshman states “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.’”

Where do I go with this one? I wholeheartedly agree that housekeeping is indeed not interesting or socially validated and it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, etc. A lot of the parts of child-rearing are interesting but a lot of them are drudgery. Childrearing is also not really socially validated, because if it was, more men would want to do it (although I don’t think social validation is the reason that women want to do their own child-rearing; it is certainly not the reason I do it). I also agree that it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, but I don’t think women who want to do these things should be belittled. Nevertheless, one person’s opinion on what those tasks are worth is just that, one person’s opinion. I won’t go red in the face trying to change this woman’s mind.

I’m sure that the anger about this article reached its white hot intensity with the following statement, “[these women] all think they are ‘choosing’ their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose.” For a thesis, that sentence seems a little glib. Anyone unfortunate enough to have known me when Aislinn was 9 weeks old (and I had decided I couldn’t put her into full-time day care) was subjected to an absolutely endless explanation of why I was going back to work part time. I spent days and nights trying to find a way to justify myself to all the working women I knew, to my parents who had paid for my education, and to myself, because I had so much ambition that it was hard to put it aside. I used up hours of the lives of everyone I knew, trying to explain what I was doing and why I thought I was doing the right thing. No one reacted with anything other than support or suggestions about how I could get the most out of my professional life while still spending time with the baby. To say that my current role was “passed on” to me and I that cheerily took it on like a Stepford wife without any sort of introspection is insulting to me, untrue, and a crock.