OK. I have to start this by acknowledging that
A) humungo numbers of people want jobs and can't find them right now so I am not talking about you and
B) humungo numbers of people are stuck making a decision between working a job they despise and having their pay go directly to child care (ie, no net gain, only net misery at working a job they despise) or staying home with their kid. I do realize this. I can imagine how hard that decision would be. So I sympathize. The number one wish in this post is that we had affordable, subsidized childcare available so that the decision about whether to go back to work was not a financial one. The number two wish is that people had jobs they liked more.
C) I am purposely being provocative by not adding "OUTSIDE THE HOME" to the title of this post. I have had enough of that title. I have grown actively opposed to it unless we are going to start using it for fathers, too. The work of home should just be considered LIFE and it should belong to whomever lives in that home.
D) Much of this centers around hetero marriages where both are college educated, though there are points that apply to all women.
E) Excuse my poor scholarly formatting - graduate school was more than a decade ago.
F) This is really long.
Now, all that said, mothers should work.
I researched the hell out of this post. OK, I spent two hours in a cafe reading articles on my iPad. It was not that hard. Still. I have an actual bibliography for you and more ideas than can be addressed in one post. I felt the need to arm myself in this way because this post is slightly awkward. I have friends who love staying home and feel fulfilled. And I have a job wherein I serve large numbers of children of Stay At Home Moms. I feel the need to tread carefully. But still I feel the need to say something, because I am sick of the guilt and judgment carried around by working moms. It's hard to believe this stuff is still going on - it is only because I both live it and work in it that I can testify to the lingering weirdness around this issue, long after it should have been laid to rest by the work of feminism.
When I spout off about this, and when I think of it on an almost daily basis while dealing with my students, I always go psychological in my reasoning - women (and men!) need a life outside their children and children need a life apart from their parents. The amount of time and energy and brain power focused on child-rearing is, in my community, astounding to me. I am all for quality time, but what we are often seeing here is people spending all their time focusing on, worrying about and advocating (both with reason and without) for their child's every quirk and action.
A 2007 study, discussed here, shows that “the labor force participation of married mothers, especially those with young children, has stopped its advance.” The opinion piece goes on to say:
"What has changed in the last decade is that the job of motherhood has ramped up. Mothers today spend more time on child care than women did
in 1965, a time when mothers were much less likely to have paying jobs,
family scholars report."The pressure to increase mothering is
enormous. For years, women have been on the receiving end of negative
messages about parenting and working. One conservative commentator said
the lives of working women added up to “just a pile of pay stubs.” When
the National Institute of Child Health reported recently that long hours
in day care added but a single percentage point to the still-normal
range of rambunctious behavior in children, newspaper headlines read, 'Day Care, Behavior Problems Linked in Study.'"
That last bit is absolutely fascinating, no? A single percentage point difference in a rambunctiousness study but yet the media jumped on it and linked day care and behavior problems. This is one of those insidious ways it creeps in.
But once I started reading, I realized how much deeper it is. Work isn't just something that benefits individual women by giving them a life outside their kids. It isn't just something that would make my job easier by producing children who do not think they are the center of the universe. Women should work because this "choice" is affecting everyone.
Many of the articles I read referenced this 2005 article: Homeward Bound by Linda Hirshman from The American Prospect. This is an important one to read - I will outline all the key points but I can't explain it as well as she does.
- Half of the wealthiest, most privileged, most highly educated women choose to drop out of their careers when they marry and have children. In many cases, they quit before they even had one child, making this issue not about daycare (and we are talking here about women and families who could almost always afford a nanny or daycare if they chose to).
"The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and
have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money
to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out. Their words conceal a
crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing
and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism.
Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace has become
more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural
campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you've got a perfect
recipe for feminism's stall."
- Feminism failed when it did not take on home life, embracing a "choice" message instead:
"... [F]eminism 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.
"The movement did start out radical. Betty Friedan's original call
to arms compared housework to animal life. In The Feminine Mystique
she wrote, '[V]acuuming the living room floor -- with or without makeup
-- is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any
woman's full capacity. ... Down through the ages man has known that he
was set apart from other animals by his mind's power to have an idea, a
vision, and shape the future to it ... when he discovers and creates and
shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being.'
"Thereafter, however, liberal feminists abandoned the judgmental
starting point of the movement in favor of offering women “choices.” The
choice talk spilled over from people trying to avoid saying “abortion,”
and it provided an irresistible solution to feminists trying to duck
the mommy wars. A woman could work, stay home, have 10 children or one,
marry or stay single. It all counted as “feminist” as long as she chose
it....
"...As feminist
historian Alice Echols put it, 'Rather than challenging their
subordination in domestic life, the feminists of NOW committed
themselves to fighting for women's integration into public life.'"
No matter how much you love your kids and no matter how much work it is to take care of a home, your brain is bigger than that. This message was too judgmental and threatening. We instead backed down to "choice." I still contend that our brains are capable of tougher stuff than home life. Indeed, without tougher stuff, our brains atrophy and fixate and stew.
"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.”"
- So what do we do? Here are her rules, harsh as they may seem:
"Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat
work seriously, and don't put yourself in a position of unequal
resources when you marry."
She contends that liberal arts degrees do not prepare us for most serious jobs (other than academia) and we should be clearer about what various job paths require as college students advance through their undergraduate years. A woman should know, she says, that her art history degree is well and good but she also needs to do x y and z to actually be an art historian or whatever.
She also puts some of the blame on a sort of idealism on the part of women when it comes to work:
"Every Times groom assumed he had to succeed in business, and was
really trying. By contrast, 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. So the second rule is that women
must treat the first few years after college as an opportunity to lose
their capitalism virginity and prepare for good work, which they will
then treat seriously."
And finally, she focuses on whom we marry. She offers up the solution of marrying poorer or younger, of finding someone with less social power than yourself. If this seems calculating, she says, it is merely what men have been doing for ages.
If that seems a bit much to you (as it does to me), her alternate recommendation of marrying a liberal could be a good one. The problem I have seen among some liberal men is a sort of strange disconnect between their pre-babies liberal ideal and their actual behavior post-babies. However feminist he may be, I would suggest it is not a bad idea to hash out LONG before marriage the fact that work is important in both lives and that all home duties are going to be shared equally. I like the end of her article:
"If you have carefully positioned yourself either by marrying down or
finding someone untainted by gender ideology, you will be in a position
to resist bearing an unfair share of the family. Even then you must be
vigilant. Bad deals come in two forms: economics and home economics. The
economic temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman's
income. If a woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000
decides to have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000,
the couple reason that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes
$30,000, just enough to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home.
This totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together and
the demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the
woman who quits. Instead, calculate that all parents make a total of
$150,000 and take home $90,000. After paying a full-time nanny, they
have $60,000 left to live on.
The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and
superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never
figure out where the butter is. “Where's the butter?” Nora Ephron's
legendary riff on marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when
looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. “Where's
the butter?” actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember
when we're out of butter. Next thing you know you're quitting your job
at the law firm because you're so busy managing the butter. If women
never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty,
but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender
ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the
children will grow up with robust immune systems."
I argue with her dirt analysis. Women are not, by definition, the cleaner ones. I know many families where the opposite is true (Ahem. And PLEASE do not give me that absolutely heinous line I have been handed before about our reversal of cleanliness stereotype being due to Wes' gender of birth - that is hooey). The key lies in no one person being in charge of all elements of the home - that much is true. It has to be shared. This has to be agreed upon and demonstrated before childbearing.
The economics bit is important. If I were more scholarly (or less interested in spending my nights on Twitter and Facebook), I might have read this important book on the topic: The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? by Leslie Bennetts. She calls staying home a DANGEROUS choice for women. The average age of widowhood is 55, according to this NPR interview with the author from 2008. There is a definite argument to be made for women finding financial self-sufficiency for that reason alone, not to mention the possibility of divorce.
"If you are 35 and you're home with your children, you might say, "Oh,
it's worked out really well for me." But what about if you're 50 and
your husband leaves your or dies or gets sick or incapacitated or loses
his job and you're suddenly struggling to support your family. What
you're likely to find if you try to go back into the workplace at a
moment of crisis or need is that you can't get back in and get a decent
job with benefits. This is a very unpleasant surprise for women who
suddenly find that they do need to earn a living."
She points out that the ageism and sexism of the world kicks in quickly, and that if you are going to take time out of the workforce, you should be positioning yourself through volunteer work or part-time jobs that keep you on track in your chosen career.
Finally, there is the role model piece. It is not to be taken lightly. I do believe that one of the reasons the world continues to be full of women tending home and children, the way that seems to feel right for so many families, is that the world has just always been that way. One of the reasons it could never feel right for me may be that my mother worked her butt off. She never intended to be home with me and stayed home for just two weeks after her c-section. She did not mourn it. She was proud of her work (even when she was a "secretary" for a ton of years - she stayed with Intel for decades and eventually became something she called a liaison between geeky tech people and non-techish executives). It never occurred to me to stay home until... I found myself at home for a year. And then I began to see how easy it is to get sucked in, how lovely and squishy little babies are and how surely no one could care for him better than I, how nearly all the other women in my mom's group were not planning to return to work any time soon (save the mom who writes screenplays and works at home - she had a nanny lined up almost from birth). It was harder than I expected to go back to work, and there was no choice involved (unless selling our house and changing our entire way of life could be called a choice). It is easy to see how I might have wanted to stay with him longer if there was a choice. And this sort of decision is helping to form our children's ideas about what normal is - if they see a whole bunch of moms with the kids, our daughters will believe that this is one of those woman things and our sons will, however subtly, conclude the same.
My point is that the world has to look different for our kids to believe in the difference being possible and important. And therefore it can't just be simply an individual choice.
I got started with all of this because of the recent Times article about Sweden. They now have 13 months of paid parental leave and two of those MUST be taken by the father. This has led to actual social change. The interesting bit is how they got to this point - they gave the leave to each family to divide as they liked. That didn't change the fact that moms took all the leave. It was only when the government MANDATED that men must take part of the leave that things started to change, that companies started working with flexible work times, that child-rearing no longer felt like a primarily female area of life.
I have a feeling the US is many many many many years away from this sort of social development. I am not even sure we will see such a thing in my lifetime. Which means that women have to keep working toward this sort of change from within our own families. We have to find spouses who are committed to equal parenting. We have to keep our foot in the work force for the sake of our brains and our finances and as a model of what the world should look like. This is from a 2006 Slate article:
"[I]f women really do stay in the work force, even part-time, a few decades
from now it may be easier for parents to opt out according to their
personal preferences, rather than their gender. If one parent didn't
want to assume the bulk of the child-care duties, as may well be the
case, two could split it. The demand for elastic or part-time work by
men and women alike would lead to more flexible jobs."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
