Half Changed World

I’ve been trying to remember just how it felt last February, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that it was a violation of the state’s constitution not to allow same-sex marriages, when San Francisco started granting marriage licenses, when someone posted online that he wanted to send flowers to the couples waiting to be married and raised over $14,000 in a few weeks. I’m trying to remember just how giddy it felt, and how I cried and smiled at the same time every morning as I read the stories of happy couples in the newspaper on my way to work. (Don’t worry — I take the metro, not drive.)

We’re going to need some of that warmth this week, with measures on the ballot in 11 states that would explicitly ban gay marriage, and with 8 of those going much further, to prohibit essentially any recognition of same-sex couples. The best overview I’ve found of these — with links to the full text of all the amendments — is from the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) resource kit. As they say:

"On Nov. 2, voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and Utah will consider state constitutional amendments that would ban civil unions, marriage equality and, in some cases, any and all legal protections for gay and lesbian families (and, potentially, other families as well). Three other states — Mississippi, Montana and Oregon — will vote on proposed amendments which explicitly mention only marriage, but which could still jeopardize other basic protections for gay families."

My understanding is that the only state of these where there’s a serious chance of defeating these amendments is Oregon. (The campaign to stop it is discussed at length and with flair at Alas, A Blog.) I think everyone knew that there was likely to be a backlash against those joyous February days, and it’s here now. And there’s a real possibility that it could affect the results of the Presidential election, by motivating the right wing to vote. So I’m hanging onto the memories of that February warmth.

I got an interesting email last week from the Human Rights Campaign, quoting an op-ed by Vic Basile in which he argues that we should consider it a violation of "our bonds of love, trust and friendship" to vote for candidates who support a constitutional amendment against same sex-marriage. I can’t tell from the essay whether he expects people to break off relationships with their family and friends who disagree on this issue, or simply to let them know how much their positions hurt. I can’t agree with the former, but the message was certainly more thought-provoking than the zillions of political emails with pleas for money that have been filling my inbox laterly.

I’d also like to call attention to an interesting argument in opposition to anti-gay marriage legislation by FrumDad, an orthodox Jew who believes that homosexuality is an abomination. But he doesn’t think the government should be making these decisions:

"Every one of us should be incredibly leery of granting broad powers of this sort to the government just because we happen to agree with the particular exercise of that power. Every one of us should understand that the next time that power will be exercised it will most likely be in a manner with which we do not agree, in a manner which will, in fact be directed against us."

Today’s book is Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony. This is an absolutely fascinating book, published in 1995, that I don’t know anyone else who has ever heard of. I encountered it through a footnote in another book, perhaps The Second Shift.

Kidding Ourselves is almost two books in one. The first two-thirds is an attempt to answer the question of why so many smart ambitious feminist women in egalitarian marriages have kids and all of a sudden find themselves responsible for more than half of the child care and household work. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions:

"Our generation did not think we were marrying breadwinners; we thought we were marrying our best friends. But the husbands were pulling rank in a way that best friends don’t do."

Mahony’s answer is that it’s a matter of power, and negotiating positions. And she goes through an interesting list of negotiating strategies that women can use to try to persuade their husbands to do more: Telling them how unhappy the current situation is making, make moral arguments about equality, offer other things in return that will make them happy, nag, threaten to leave. Some of these are more or less effective. Wolf makes similar points, and grimly concludes that men simply aren’t going to make real career sacrifices unless forced to, and women aren’t going to be able to force them to do it, because their threat to leave isn’t serious.

I found Mahony a more optimistic read, even though she also thinks that — on average — women are going to lose these negotiations, necause she believes that there are things that women can do to increase their leverage. The key point, however, is that these are mostly choices made long before the children are born — what career to enter, what spouse to marry.

Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don’t maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework.

Is it Ms magazine that used to refer to "click" moments? CLICK.

The earning potential part is generally understood. The marriage point is interesting, because it’s not just about money. It’s that if you want a husband who is intensely involved in child-rearing, you have to marry someone who values it, even if it has a career cost. And career-oriented ambitious women tend to marry equally career-oriented ambitious men.

The child care is a point that I keep making to everyone I know. Child care is not an inherent skill. You can get some ideas of how to do it by reading books or taking classes or talking to other parents, but mostly you learn how to do it by doing it. And you make some mistakes — forgetting to bring a change of clothes on an outing, bouncing the child too much after a feeding — but you learn from them. Most fathers spend ridiculously little time on their own with their infants, which puts them behind. And once one parent is "the expert" and the other "the assistant" it becomes far too easy to maintain that role.

The last third of the book, much to my surprise, is a vision of a world in which breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers are as common as breadwinning fathers and caregiving mothers. Like me (!) Mahony rejects the goal of having all families divide breadwinning and childrearing equally. She writes:

"Not all fathers can do half the child rearing, or want to, or should. Much more to the point, some fathers can do lots more, and want to, and should. People give the incorrect answer [a 50-50 future[, I think, because they can’t boost their imaginations over the hump of the present to imagine a future in which there really exists no sexual division of labor. "