Half Changed World

The Washington Post had a nice article on labor force participation in the business section last Friday.  While the headline focused in on women — "Whither the Women?" — the article actually adds some useful perspective to the whole "opt-out" discussion.

Key points:

• Men’s labor force participation has been declining since 1949!  The article suggests that this is due to a combination of more time spent in school and pensions and social security allowing men to retire.  There’s presumably also a story about low-skilled men who are neither in school or working.
• Women’s labor force participation rose steadily until around 1990, and then rose more slowly until 2000.  It’s now down about a percentage point from its peak.
• This doesn’t seem to be a story about moms not working, as the participation rate has declined for women both with and without children.  (Heather Boushey at CEPR has also made this point.)  The share of women who give "home responsibilities" as the reason for not working has also declined.

Some of the reasons that men are working less also apply to women — in particular, women are staying in school longer than men.   The generation of women which has been most work-oriented is just starting to hit retirement age, so that’s likely to reduce labor force participation (if they can afford to retire). And women tend to live longer, and so are likely to spend more years out of the workforce in retirement.

By the way, the "recent analysis" by demographer Cheryl Russell appears to be a post in her blog.  Not that you could tell by reading the article. 

Via Becca at Not Quite Sure, I read Meghan O’Rourke’s commentary on Linda Hirshman’s book.  The part of the essay that jumped out at me was this:

"If you are a woman who is committed to gender equality, who doesn’t believe that a woman’s place is necessarily in the home, she argues, then you have to think about how your choices shape the collective good. Her stubborn insistence is refreshing. Unlike others, she is willing to come out and say, in no uncertain terms, that the luxury of making our own decisions as if they had no larger implications isn’t ethical at this point in time."

Fair enough.  Our choices have implications for the environment, for the economy, for society as a whole, and yes, they have implications for other women.

But Hirshman simultaneously asks too much of women (insisting that they should stay in jobs even if they’re unhappy and unfulfilled) and too little (because just showing up in an office every day isn’t going to change the structure of society). 

I’ve been thinking of some ways that we can further the "common good," regardless of whether we work for pay.  Here are my initial thoughts — I’d love to hear others’ suggestions.  I’m deliberately not including voting or other political activism in this list, although I do think it’s critical.

If you are a stay at home parent:

• Volunteer in the schools.  And spend your energy on things that improve education for all kids, not just your own.  If you’re in an affluent school district and are fundraising for extras, consider partnering with a school in a low-income neighborhood that doesn’t have access to those sorts of resources.
• Don’t insist that all school-related functions happen on weekday afternoons, because evenings are "family time."  Let working parents participate as much as they can. Don’t sneer at them if they send in store-bought cookies for the bakesale. 
• Don’t let your spouse off the hook for being an involved parent.  Fight back against the working world’s attempt to relegate family life to secondary importance.
• Occasionally, cut a working parent a break.  Offer to pick up their kid when the schools let out two hours early with no notice because of snowfall.  I’m not saying be a doormat, but a little help can go a long way.

If you work for pay:

• Stand up for your rights.  Show employers that you don’t have to be what Joan Williams calls an "ideal worker," free of family obligations, to be productive.  Especially if you’re male, don’t try to hide it when you have family responsibilities.
• Stand up for the rights of others, especially lower-paid workers who tend to get fewer benefts and less flexibility, as well as less money.  Fight for systemic change, not just special privileges for the favored few.
• If you have any hiring authority, take a second look at the resumes of people who are returning to the workforce after taking time off for caregiving.  I’m not saying you should hire people who aren’t qualified, but give them a chance to show their qualifications.
• Appreciate the people who make your work possible, the daycare workers caring for your child, the next door neighbor who keeps an eye on the middle schoolers waiting for the bus, the boss who lets you telecommute one day a week.  And don’t just think it — make sure they know.

What else?

So, Linda Hirshman has a book out, and the Washington Post gave her op-ed space over the weekend.  I’ll take a look at the book if either of my local libraries gets a copy, but so far, I haven’t heard her saying anything that wasn’t covered in her original American Prospect essay or responding to any of the substantive criticisms that I and others made at the time.  (I do feel compelled to point out that Julia’s post in which she says that she’s not a capital F Feminist is a precise illustration of the point that I made about the dangers of litmus test feminism.)

I’m somewhat amused by Hirshman’s defensive reaction to the criticism the article got in the blogosphere — and her implicit assumption that "mommybloggers" are all stay-at-home moms.  And I really don’t understand why she’s so hung up on Miriam Peskowitz’s roof.  (And yes, it’s a sign that I spend way too much time on blogs that I knew exactly who Hirshman was referring to, even though she didn’t mention her by name.)

Via RebelDad, I read this post by Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic in which he criticizes Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of Mommy Wars, and author of a blog on the Washington Post website.  He begins:

"To my way of thinking, the Washington Post’s Leslie Morgan Steiner represents everything that’s wrong with the way the mainstream corporate media cover children and parenting: she’s shallow, blind to anything that falls outside her cultural and economic comfort zone…"

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a chance to have dinner two weeks ago with Steiner, Devra Renner and a group of working moms as part of a Women’s Information Network event.  While I share many of Jeremy’s frustrations with Steiner’s blog, and the "mom v. mom" framing of her book, she charmed me.  She was gracious, listened as well as talked, and was quite funny about the way her personal life gets dissected by the posters on her blog on a regular basis.  Moreover, she seemed to get the fact that professional-class parents enjoy a huge amount more flexibility and freedom than lower-income families, and argued that those of us with time and influence should be working to benefit all families, not just our own. 

So why doesn’t she push this harder in her writing?  Steiner claimed that the "Mommy Wars" framing was pushed on her by the publisher.  And she also pointed out that that day’s post, in which she talked about the huge settlement that Verizon had made in its class-action pregnancy bias lawsuit, got fewer comments than almost any post she’s made.

The work-family discussion tends to be very focused on middle-class professionals and on the US.  Here’s some links to new resources that broaden that perspective:

• Ruth Marcus had a nice Mother’s Day column in the Washington Post about the lack of work-life flexibility for people not in white collar professional jobs.  It’s based on a report from the Center on WorkLife Law (Joan Williams’ group), called "One Sick Child Away from Being Fired."
• Jody Heymann has a new book out, Forgotten Families, that looks at work and family issues in an international perspective.  Mother Jones interviewed her, and CLASP has an audioconference with her up. 

Judith Warner’s back blogging in the New York Times, and this week she takes on Caitlin Flanagan:

"The Caitlin Flanagan interview turned into a knock-down-drag-out fight. I had entirely misunderstood her book, which is, in large part, a paean to traditional wife- and motherhood, and which I had read as an extended metaphor, given that — as Flanagan makes exceedingly clear — she is a modern working mother who does no housework whatsoever."

"I’d taken her book — which begins and ends with chapters about Flanagan’s mother’s death and the author’s own bout with breast cancer — to be about love and yearning and identity and desire and memory, when, in fact, it is about cooking and cleaning and sex and child-rearing (sometimes a pressure cooker is just a pressure cooker)."

And she concludes:

"I will start by saying: I disagree with Caitlin Flanagan. I believe that the enormous investment we bring to things like “home” and “motherhood” — as to things like birthday parties and profiteroles — is metaphorical. It’s about ideas, not reality, and those ideas can’t be taken at face value. Our lives are material. We have to mine that material for the deeper truths it can reveal about ourselves and the world around us. And we have to have a sense of humor about it. For the other way, madness lies."

I didn’t think I’d ever find myself agreeing 100% with anything Warner wrote, but this comes pretty close.

I really appreciated the thoughtful comments that people left on the post about the MotherTalk event.  I don’t think Flannagan makes a serious argument that any of us should feel compelled to respond to.  (And if you’re really looking for a book about the satisfactions of ironed sheets and vacuumed floors, I recommend Cheryl Mendolson’s Home Comforts. )  Hirshman at least makes a case, although I think she’s fundamentally wrong in her claim that women who succeed by following traditionally male career paths are necessarily going to be better for women’s rights than their male counterparts.

I’ve written so much about Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars book and the press it’s gotten that it almost seemed beside the point to read the book.  But when I picked up the book in a store and realized how many of the authors I’ve written about here — Lonnae O’Neil Parker, Jane Juska, Anna Fels — I decided to give it a second chance, in spite of the dreadful title and the worse subtitle (Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families).

The good news is that the book is far better than media coverage or Steiner’s blog would suggest.  Many of the essays are thoughtful, some are funny, others tender.  Almost all of them come to some soothing conclusion about how we’re all doing our best:

• Parker: "I can have it all, just not on the same day."
• Leslie Lehr: "I also hope they’ll respect all women, no matter what choices are made in terms of work and motherhood."
• Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff: "There is no formula for success, but there are many individual solutions, and I’ve found mine."
• Page Evans: "Happy children.  That’s the bottom line for mothers."
• Juska: "I am in favor of choosing, consciously, to have a good time with kids."

Only a few of the essays conclude with what I would call true "mommy wars" moments.  Interestingly, both authors attribute the stinger lines to their 10 year olds —  Catherine Clifford’s son’s asking "Yeah, you love him so much, how come you leave him with some nanny person all the time?" Sara Nelson’s son saying "There once was a time when women didn’t work, wasn’t there?  Is that what they call the Dark Ages?"

The downside of the book is that, as Sandra Tsing Loh nastily points out in the Atlantic, the writers lack a certain diversity.  (Thanks Sandy.)  It’s not just that they’re almost all white and affluent.  It’s that they almost all seem to work (or used to) as writers, editors, or television producers and use brand names to prove their credentials.  That said, I think Loh takes her criticism to an extreme (and is somewhat hypocritical, as she’s the one who turned a book review last year into a tale of her own troubles getting her kid into preschool).  And, as we discussed last week, I think the work-family issues of the affluent are worth discussing.  The problem is what Steiner writes in her introduction:

"Most of the debate in the United States about the benefits of working versus stay-at-home motherhood has been taken over by experts: researchers, academics, politicians, journalists.  Many of them aren’t women.  Some aren’t even parents.  The most authoritative (and fascinating) answers come from moms themselves."

I just don’t think that’s true, especially when the only moms you’re talking to are the ones like you.  I enjoyed many of these essays, but I learned a lot more from reading journalists like Jason DeParle and academics like Annette Lareau and Kathryn Edin. 

A more fundamental problem is that — as usual for these work-family discussions — fathers and husbands are all but invisible (with Sarnoff’s "I Do Know How She Does It," where she explicitly says that she couldn’t have succeeded in her high pressure career without her husband’s sharing of parenting duties, as a notable exception).  One passage in particular stood out for me, from Beth Brophy’s "Good Enough":

"It’s been eight years since I quit my job.  I’ve never looked back.  My husband has glanced back, usually with a calculator in one hand and a stack of mortgage and orthodontia bills in the other.  He misses my paycheck and I do too.  When I had a steady one and I wanted something, I usually bought it.  Now I can’t.  Or if I do buy it, I feel guilty…. While I’m feeling a lot more relaxed with the new world order, my husband is developing an ulcer.  As I’ve made abundantly clear to him and anyone else who asks, I hope never again to work full-time in an office."

I wonder what he thinks about this.   

Over at 11d, Laura wrote an interesting post about "What Do Men Want?", specifically about whether men overall prefer stay-at-home wives, as Jane Galt suggested.  Laura thinks that most men underestimate the ways in which stay-at-home wives contribute to the family’s well-being, and so would prefer that their wives work.

My guess, with absolutely no data to back it up, is that most men would prefer that their wives worked part-time — enough to bring in some money to allow for extras (nicer cars, better vacations) — but not so much as to result in an expectation that they’ll be responsible for making serious addditional contributions to the domestic front.  This isn’t because they’re evil.  I know I sound like a broken record, but Rhona Mahony’s point is that once you’ve stepped off the career track, it’s hard to get back on at a level that (economically) justifies your spouse making significant sacrifices (covering an equal share of sick days, relocating) to further your career.

Certainly, all else equal, when the boys are both in school, I’d like it if T figured out a way to bring in more money.  It would give me the freedom to consider lower-paying but more interesting and/or meaningful jobs without feeling like I was sacrificing my family, and it would give us more options generally (see yesterday’s post about schools for an example).  And I’d like to be more involved in the boys’ schools, which is hard to justify while I’m working full-time and T’s staying home.  But it’s probably not worth making him miserable doing database work (even if he could still get hired to do so, which is unclear).  So we shall see. 

The discussion on Laura’s post got a little sidetracked into a back and forth on whether it’s upper-class indulgence to discuss any of this.  I liked Tim Burke’s answer:

"We live our lives, not someone else’s lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of "deserving poor" is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse."

Via RebelDad, I found Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic’s post about why he’s happy to claim the title of Mr. Mom:

"When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. "Fathering" is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role."

"A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That’s also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom?"

I commented that I worry that this definition implies that working mothers aren’t real mothers, and there’s been some interesting back and forth on Jeremy’s blog. 

But maybe Jeremy’s right in some ways.  I write here a fair amount about what I call "reverse traditional families" — families with working mothers and at-home fathers.  One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners.  We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don’t do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do.  Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we’re good enough mothers, and decide that we’re damned good fathers.

I can’t remember if I posted here about the "daddies and donuts" event at D’s preschool last month.  This was a chance to have a snack and do a craft with the kids, at the relatively working-parent friendly hour of 9 am (vs. the 11 am time for "family snack" and most other events to which parents are invited).  When I got the flyer, I asked T if he thought in this context, "daddy" meant "male parent" (e.g. him) or "the parent who never gets to do things at preschool" (e.g. me).  [The flyer did say that if a father couldn’t come, a mother or "other Very Important Person" could attend.]  Ultimately, since I was taking off a day the week before to go on a field trip with the class (to the Planetarium), I decided not to fight T for the chance to go.  As it turns out, the "craft" was that the kids decorated paper ties. 

***

On another note, RebelDad is having an online chat with Leslie Morgan Steiner at WashingtonPost.com tomorrow (Thursday) at 1 pm.  If you can’t be online at the time, you can submit questions in advance and read the transcript later.  I got Steiner’s book out of the library — look for a review in the next week or two.

I know, even I’m getting sick of hearing about mommy wars.  But, via 11d, Jane Galt has a different perspective on them:

"But I would like to point out that if you think you’ve found the One Right Way to raise YOUR child, then it does indeed make sense to fight hard to persuade as many other women as possible to make the same choice. If you are at home, working mothers are your enemy, at least until they chuck the rat race, and vice versa.

"Why do I say this? Simple: having the majority of people live the way you do has significant positive externalities.

I think she’s at least partially right about the externalities, wrong that they’re the explanation behind the "mommy wars." 

If you’re a working parent in a neighborhood full of at-home parents, all of the social and school-related events are likely to happen while you’re at work.  The afterschool program at the school is likely to be not very good, because few parents are fighting for it.  And if your coworkers who are parents all have partners at home, they’re probably not going to be as sympathetic of your need to take off for a sick kid as someone else in your situation would be.

If you’re an at-home parent in a neighborhood full of two-income families, you’re likely to be socially isolated during the day.  Your kids probably won’t have as fancy birthday parties or go on as many trips as their peers.  The PTA will be more likely to meet at night, when you’d rather spend time with your spouse, less likely to meet during the day.

(I think Galt is seriously overstating the case when she suggests that there’s a real shortage of at-home parents for socializing with:

"Let me point out that staying at home with children is not nearly as rewarding as it was in the 1960’s. All right, there are more daytime television options than there used to be, and gyms now have day-care centres. But there is something huge missing, and that is all the other women in your neighbourhood. The ones that your mother had coffee with, asked to watch the children for an hour, played afternoon bridge with, formed the pillar of the PTA with, and so on . . . they’re all off trading bonds or editing books or waiting tables…"

Although there are fewer at-home parents, there’s still an awful lot.  I think the increase in social isolation has more to do with a) suburban sprawl — a lot of the suburbs of the 50s and 60s look pretty urban by modern standards; and b) expectations of intensive parenting — it’s no longer socially acceptable to send your children out to amuse themselves in the street or to watch TV for hours while you drink coffee with the neighbors.)

But, I don’t think any of that is why the mommy wars exist.  I just don’t believe that thousands of people are thinking — gee, my life would be easier if my neighbor also stayed home, so I’ll make cutting remarks every time I see her in office clothes so she’ll decide to quit her job.  Or — it’s not fair that I need to compete at work with Roger, whose wife stays home, so I’ll try to convince her that she’s wasting her brain and would really be happier if she worked.

I think two types of parents make mommy wars type comments.  One is those who are so happy with their choices that they truly can’t imagine that everyone else wouldn’t also be happier if they made the same choices.  And the other is those who are deeply insecure about their choice, and so need to constantly try to prove that it’s objectively better.

In keeping with the housework theme for the week, today’s book is A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It, by Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman.  It’s a quick read, in an easy conversational style, and I’m quite sure it’s the only book ever written to receive blurbs from both John Gray and Rhona Mahony.

In spite of the provocative title, Sherman really doesn’t have much to say about the division of household labor.  Her basic argument is that time spent doing housework is almost always time that could be spent on higher priority activities, whether working for pay, caring for children, volunteering, or just enjoying yourself.  For most middle-class and above families, time is more valuable than money, so why not spend some money to buy yourself more time? 

Lots of families do buy themselves time by hiring housecleaning services, eating out or getting takeout.  Sherman suggests that you can get more help for the same amount of money by hiring less specialized workers — housekeepers — and providing them with extremely detailed instructions about what to do.  She provides step-by-step guidance on how to figure out those instructions, as well as advice on recruiting, complying with tax requirements, etc.

I thought the book was interesting, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and hire a housekeeper.  Maybe if the boys were older.  But at this stage, a huge part of the work is just staying on top of the clutter, and I can’t imagine a housekeeper being able to make the judgements needed to know what to do with everything.  And I’m not willing to limit ourselves to a weekly rotation of meals.

The latest from the housework tracking experiment: Monday, T spent 1.25 hours shopping (I think that includes driving to Costco and back), 3 hours cooking (he made a triple batch of curried chicken buns to freeze), and 2.25 hours cleaning.  I spent about 20 minutes cleaning.  Today T spent 15 minutes cooking, and an hour and 45 minutes cleaning.  I spent 30 minutes cooking, and about 20 minutes cleaning.

For me, the most surprising part of this experiment is how much cleaner the house is getting.   The act of writing down how much he’s doing has clearly motivated T to clean more.  And he insists that it’s not because he wants to look good for all of you.  In fact, he’s planning to keep tracking it for himself, but not tell me each day.  He suggested that when he doesn’t track how much time he spends doing things, it can feel like he’s spending all the time cleaning, since it’s interspersed with hanging out with the boys.  Writing it down also clearly helps him remember that once he’s put a load in the washer, it really need to move along to the dryer and eventually to get folded.