Just Call me a Conscientious Objector in the Mommy Wars

I have no idea why this war even needs to be fought.  I also object to the frame that redefines feminism as something it isn’t and then casts it in the catalyst role. Frankly, my lifestyle choices are no one’s damn business.  I also don’t want to hear any whining about put upon stay at home mothers or selfish working moms or whatever freaking black and white witchy stereotype folks dream up and embrace. This would include the appalling cartoon I used for this post.  There seems to be a media obsession at the moment with painting women into corners and guilt tripping them for which ever corner they wind up in.  Women are even participating in the self immolation. We’ve been regaled by lectures like this one on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All“.  Like we need some other woman defining what “all” is for the rest of us. We also don’t need a bunch of self righteous right wing wind bags that continue to blame all of the world’s problems on mothers.

It’s enough to make Betty Friedan spin in her grave.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel took up the keyboard today at WAPO with a reminder that most working mothers aren’t struggling to “have it all”.  They are struggling to feed their kids and provide homes. For some reason, a lot of folks seem to think there’s all these great, supportive, bread-winning men out there just dying to reproduce and do right by their wives and families. I frankly don’t recommend marriage to any woman. Most husbands are bigger pains-in-the asses than colicky babies.  A lot of them can’t even hold down jobs these days and then there’s the entire emotional trip that goes along with marriage. You know the TV sitcom stint that goes like this.  Asking men to do the right thing by their families puts them in the position of being the oppressed, hypernagged hubbie who goes to work and takes it out on the resident working women and stirs up the other men in one big woe-is-me session. There’s a lot of reality out there that these BS narratives miss. Even the best intentioned man can get pulled back into the old boys club after a number of years of marriage and fatherhood.  The media, their jobs and the entertainment industry absolutely empower them to be reckless with their family relationships.

This is the reality that faces millions of working women. More than 70 percent of all mothers and more than 60 percent of mothers with children under 3 are in the workforce. Two-thirds of them earn less than $30,000 a year. Nine of 10 less than $50,000. In the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s powerful image, “They catch the early bus,” or, in Vasquez’s case, the late bus. They work out of need, whether they want to or not. Half are their family’s primary breadwinner.

These mothers don’t have the luxury of flexible time or the ability to leave when a child is in trouble or sick. Most can’t afford to take unpaid sick leave to care for their children — and many would lose their jobs if they did, despite the federal law guaranteeing unpaid leave. Many work in jobs — as home-care workers, farm workers, cleaning people — that have scant protection of minimum wage and hours standards. Many cobble together two or three part-time jobs. Child care gets done by grandmothers, neighbors or simply the TV.

Okay, so this is the deal.  The problem is not with WOMEN.  The problem is with the way “work” and “income” is structured in this country.  It doesn’t change because most men in power don’t want it to change. Things used to be different when most businesses were family run and family owned or when most families lived off farms.  Working for some one else in this country but a few enlightened companies basically means placing your family outside your major time commitments.  That is not the way it should be.

Here’s something that caught my eye as I thought about this. This is written by a journalist as a response to the articles run by The Atlantic recently in the vein of mommy wars. I like it because it states what I find is obvious.  Feminism is about finding options and accepting and empowering women’s choices.  It’s not about pitting our various roles against each other.  Every woman should make her choice.  There is no sainthood or martyrdom prize for whatever that choice is so can’t we just knock it off now?

The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you’d use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick. When you do the simple math, the American workplace seems utterly inhumane in its unwillingness to adapt to the fact that women make up half of all workers.

Economist Claudia Goldin has made a career out of studying what she calls the “career cost of family.” The industries that thrive and hold onto talented women are the ones that figure out how to minimize the cost of taking time off for your family. It’s not all that complicated. They take advantage of technologies to let parents work at home or be more efficient, they schedule shifts, they minimize face time, they let people do what Sheryl Sandberg says she does: go home at 5:30 and pick up again later after her kids are in bed.

Feminism was about making women’s lives less constrained and giving them more choices. Right now, most women have none — not because they are spoiled and unrealistic and want to do lunchtime yoga, but because they are working hard to support their families and everyone is colluding in the fiction that they have nothing else on their minds. I return to a modest proposal I made last week in Slate, inspired by Slaughter: Mothers, fathers, don’t lie to your employers about the kid things you have to (or want to) do during the day. If you are taking a kid to the doctor, say so. Ditto for parent teacher conferences or the school play. At this point, honesty would be a radical act.

One of the bottom lines to me is that if men would actually do something about making the country, the work place, and their family more children friendly, we wouldn’t be having these problems or this discussion.  Our situation exists because men do not treat women or children as anything valuable unless there’s something at the time that they need from them.  There are work environments out there that are family friendly.  They are very successful.  They got that way because the men in charge made them that way to attract and maintain talent.  They attract men and women to work for them that value families. There are far too few companies that do that because there’s a lot of men that get away with ignoring their families.  They’re rewarded for it. European countries do not do this.  France doesn’t do it.  Germany doesn’t do it.  None of the Scandinavian countries do it. It’s an American value to fuck over you family because you have to work.

The other interesting thing in all of this is the role of birth control and the empowerment of controlling when you have children.  Economist Claudia Goldin calls this The Quiet Revolution.  I have no doubt that there is an equal role in all the re-ignition of the mommy wars with the attack on birth control.  Reproductive rights is essential to women’s freedom and children’s well being. It’s also necessary to the transformation that could occur in the work place if more women got into positions of power and more men were motivated by family concerns and demanded the work place empower them to parent.  Taking away this important right means undoing women’s autonomy.

All of this just continues to impress upon me how little this country actually cares about its children. There seems to be this silly idea that if you just strand a woman at home with children and giver her a husband with a paycheck then all the problems of the world will just fade away.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Just reading literature on depression and unhappiness should put this damaging canard to bed.  Again, look at that damn cartoon up there.  We need to be a society that supports family choices and provides resources to all our children to be in the environment in which each child thrives.  This will never happen in less our institutions stop prioritizing the wrong things and until every one refuses to participate in the Mommy Wars.