Half Changed World

Having been quoted as saying I don’t know what’s going to break through the domestic glass ceiling, I’ve been thinking a lot about what will.

In Judith Warner’s op-ed on Friedan, she suggests the usual laundry list of "family-friendly" policies: parental leave, child care, universal preschool, better afterschool options, good part-time jobs.  I think that these are good things to demand for other reasons, but I’m intensely skeptical of the idea that they’re going to change the division of household labor.  In particular,  I agree with Rhonda Mahony, that increasing the availability of part-time options is likely to accentuate the gender division of labor — because if you have one part-time worker and one full-time worker in a family, the part-time worker is likely to do the vast majority of the housework.  And in the absence of other major societal shifts, women are much more likely to avail themselves of the part-time options than men. 

It’s really hard to think of public policy levers on this issue.  I can’t make a case that there’s a public interest in cleanliness that justifies subsidizing housecleaning (vs. the very real public interest in well-raised children).  Feminist authors sometimes wax nostalgic about the government interventions during World War II, such as public canteens, that made "Rosie the Riveter" possible, but in a world with a McDonald’s on every third block, cooking is probably the household task least in need of further outsourcing.

The one area where I think there might be some productive intervention is in pushing back against the increasing number of hours expected of full-time workers.  As Laura at 11d wrote in The Wolves From Work:

Let me get this straight. He’s gone from the house for 60 hours per week. He sees his kids for an hour per day. And now he’s supposed to be checking his e-mail, while he watches his kid’s soccer game. The people that he spends 10 hours a day with are making him spend more time in the evening with them, so they can do jello shots and pat each other on the back for closing all those deals. As he’s pounding shots and head butting the other guys, the kids and I are supposed to amuse ourselves.

It’s just not realistic to expect people with any choice in the matter to work 60+ hours a week and then come home to scrub the bathroom floor.  And men pretty much always have a choice in the matter.

I’ve been running across a lot of very thoughtful commentary on Friedan, so thought I’d do a links round-up.  I’m not going to be exhaustive, but feel free to add in the comments.

• Joan Walsh, at Salon: Feminism after Friedan. (with annoying site pass, sorry, but it’s worth it.  I’ve been disappointed in Salon lately, but this is excellent)
• Judith Warner, in the NY Times, The Parent Trap.  (Yes, that Judith Warner)
• Jen at Literary Mama: Repeating Our History
• Jill at Feministe: Goodbye to Betty Friedan
• My Left Wing: Feminine Mystique Murdered My Mother; Friedan Saved My Life (via CultureKitchen)
• Rebel Dad: Betty Friedan and Progress and the Lack Thereof
• Ann Crittenden in the American Prospect Online: The Friedan Mystique

When Terry Martin Hekker’s Modern Love column (non-select link, thanks to Jody) was published at the start of the month, Mieke emailed me to ask if I was going to blog about it.  I sort of shrugged, and emailed back "She needed a better lawyer; I don’t have much else to say."

I decided to write about it after all after reading Christine’s DotMoms post about her reaction to the article and Ellen Goodman’s commentary.  I was struck by how much Christine reads Hekker’s regrets about her choices as devaluing the housewife role:

"But, what’s wrong with being a housewife? Why do I feel a sense of inadequacy, a sense of broken dreams when I utter the term?"

I don’t think Hekker’s saying that either caring for her children or the volunteer work that she did when they were in school was not worthwhile, or in any way diminished her as a human being.  (In fact, she explicitly says that she wishes she had furthered her education after her youngest child started school.) She’s just saying that the sense of accomplishment she got won’t pay her rent.

Does the risk involved in stepping out of the labor force mean that no one should do it?  Of course not.  People do financially risky things all the time — from quitting corporate jobs to become schoolteachers, to starting their own businesses, to taking low-paid but flexible jobs so that they can work on a novel. 

As Anne and Laura pointed out when the article first came out, there are plenty of things that one can do to cushion the financial risks involved in being a SAHP, from signing a pre- or post-nuptual agreement spelling out the breadwinner’s obligations to keeping up your professional skills.  Warren and Tyagi would add that you should be keeping your fixed costs as low as possible, to increase the odds that the SAHP could cover them by returning to work if needed.  (They encourage families to consider having non-working adults seek employment if fixed costs are more than 50 percent of family income: "A family that is financially strapped and yet has an able-bodied adult who isn’t even looking for a job is, 9 times out of 10, a family that is living out the consequences of a decision that once made sense — but no longer works.")

I think we’re in denial about how ordinary risk is.  As a result, people often feel like they’re being criticized when someone points out that they’re making a risky choice.  (Alternatively, they feel like they’re special — see the new Peace Corps ad that asks "Has anyone ever called you crazy?")  The response is often denial ("Yes, 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, but mine won’t") rather than rational planning.

One time I was taking a self-assessment, and one of the questions was "what’s the riskiest thing you’ve done?"  My answer was having children.  That sounds bizarre, even to me.  How can something so conventional be considered risky?  But parenthood is an irrevocable commitment (much more so than marriage, as I’ve written before) and you don’t know what hand you’re going to be dealt.  And while most of the cards in the deck are good ones, there are some real heartbreakers in the pack.  I once compared being pregnant to being strapped into a rollercoaster as it slowly chugs up the first slope — nothing much is happening, but you know it’s leading up to a wild ride, and it’s too late to get off.

Via Brad Plumer, I ran across this interview with Bob Moffit.  Moffit is a labor economist who does a lot of work on welfare and low-income populations, and generally has interesting things to say. 

In response to a question about why welfare reform passed in the 1990s, Moffit answers:

"As for the source of the increased conservatism on the part of voters, I think that the increased labor force participation of middle-class women was part of the cause. That transformation really changed the attitude of voters. Once a large percentage of middle-class women were working and putting their children into day care, the public began to question why we shouldn’t expect the same thing from poor women. There was no longer the support for paying women to stay at home with their children, which was the goal of the original legislation in 1935."

I think this is dead-on, in the sense that a lot of low to middle-income married parents thought "I’d love to [have my wife] stay home with our kids full-time, but no one’s handing me [or her] a check to do so. Why should I pay more taxes so these single moms can stay home?"

But I want to distinguish this claim from the similar-sounding one that Caitlin Flanagan made in her screed against female professionals:

"…women like herself [Chira], who have chosen to separate themselves from their children for long hours of the day, and who feel a clawing, ceaseless anxiety about this. Conflating the hardships of the working-poor mother with the insecurities of the professional-class mother ennobles the richer woman’s struggles (entirely self-inflicted). Describing how even poor mothers are "working and thriving," and extolling the benefits of passing a child around among family members while her mother is gone for hour after hour, makes the richer woman’s choices look not like what they are—a series of decisions often based entirely on providing herself with maximum happiness—but, rather, like the empirically proven superior way to raise children."

One more post in response to Hirshman’s article.  (See here and here for what I’ve already written.)

Hirshman is explicitly critical of what she dubs "choice feminism."  She writes:

"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."

Well, what’s the alternative?  I think the opposite of "choice feminism" has to be "litmus test feminism," under which there’s a set of prescribed answers for all women.  Change your name when you get married = bad.  Stay at home with your kids = bad.  Bake apple pies = bad.

I don’t know how I’d rate — I think I’d get points because both T. and I hyphenated our last names when we married, but I might lose points because we’re married at all, and even more because we met when I was 18.  I don’t know if I gain or lose points in Hirshman’s scorecard for being in a reverse traditional family.  (Good because it reverses the usual expectations, or bad because there’s a stay at home parent who is financially dependent?  Would it be ok to be a stay-at-home mom if your partner is also female?  What if you’re independently wealthy?)  And like Bobbi Harlow, I shave my legs to the knees.

But the problem with litmus test feminism isn’t that some of us might not get gold stars.  After all, being a certified card-carrying feminist and $2 will get you a ride on the NYC subway.  The problem is that if you convince the world that "being a feminist means X," (say, climbing the corporate ladder) the vast majority of people doing Y (e.g. staying home) won’t suddenly start doing X, but will decide that it must mean that they’re not feminists.

In a comment at Literary Mama, Hirshman gets on her high horse and writes:

"I think — and can defend the opinion — that perpetuating hierarchy with women on the bottom by psychological,ideological, economic or any other means is immoral whether it occurs in the family or in the pages of the New York Times."

I agree.  But demeaning the choices that real live women make is another means of perpetuating hierarchy.  (Hirshman also takes a ugly swipe at Miriam Peskowitz and the choices that she’s made, as well as making a bizarre crack about "the weird space the internet creates.")

The bottom line is that I think feminism is about asking questions, and yes, sometimes those questions may make people uncomfortable or even defensive.  But it’s not about telling women what their answers are supposed to be.

The blogosphere (or at least the corner of it where I hang out) is lighting up over the American Prospect piece by Linda Hirshman where she argues that the "Opt-Out Revolution" among elite women is real and that we should care about it "because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times."  I found the article incredibly irritating and off-base, even though Hirshman cites one of my favorite books about work-family choices, Kidding Ourselves.

Let’s look at Hirshman’s claims in order.  She says that staying home is bad for the women who do it because:

"Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world."

I think "classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way" is Hirshman’s convoluted version of the discussion we had here a few weeks ago about whether SAHPing is compatible with an intellectual life.  I’ve said all I had to say on the topic then, but I will note that even Amy, who never backed down from her original position that it’s not, agreed that not all paid employment is compatible with an intellectual life either.

I agree that "having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life" is important.  I think that Hirshman is right that women often make choices that make sense at the time, but that cut off future options and reduce their bargaining power in the process.  But I think that Hirshman is wildly off base in interpreting "autonomy" solely in terms of increased earnings capacity.  She’s equally scornful of women who choose "indentured servitude in social-service jobs" as she is of stay-at-home moms, assuming that this makes them less autonomous than the big firm lawyer working 80 hours a week at a job he hates.  (Ironically, at the same time that Hirshman is saying that feminism failed by not making women more career-minded, David Gelernter is whining that feminism is the reason his students are excessively career focused.)

As far as "doing more good than harm in the world," this could score as a point in either direction.  Hirshman makes no case for why she thinks this is an argument against at-home parenting.

Turning to "bad for society," Hirshman writes:

"As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes — the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. "

I agree with this, more or less.  BUT, I think it’s true precisely because women often have different life experiences than the men who are making decisions.  To the extent that women can only become part of the decision-making class by being what Joan Williams calls the "ideal worker" — fully available, without household responsibilities — they will tend have the same perspective that the men do. 

My fundamental issue with Hirshman is that she assumes that there’s essentially only two options — full-time continuous commitment to the labor force in a job that pays as much as possible — and anything else, including at-home parenting, part-time work, and any job that pays less than the maximum wage the worker could conceivably get.  And instead of arguing for more and better options — meaningful part-time work, on-ramps as well as off-ramps — she hands women a list of cookie-cutter rules to follow.  Hirshman dismisses those better options as "utopian dreams" but when Fortune magazine has a cover story on work/life balance — one not framed as a women’s issue moreover — maybe they’re not so utopian.

Last week, in response to my post about income and SAHPs, Amy commented:

"If you’re a person who can live reasonably happily spending all day, every day with small children for 5-10 years — if you don’t require an intellectual life and work, sustained adult conversation, trips to the doctor or dentist where your priority is your health rather than keeping your child safe and amused, exercise, regular sleep, the security of a well-funded retirement account, an active resume, and a few other things — then sure, have at it."

I called this a "low blow" and she responded "in all honesty I have trouble understanding how someone with a serious intellectual life sustains the multiyear desert you get when you do fulltime childcare.  I sure as hell couldn’t."

I disagree with Amy’s suggestion that full-time parenting is incompatible with an intellectual life, but agree with her that I’d have trouble doing it.  (At some point, I realized that all my fantasies about being a stay-at-home parent involved school-age chidren.)  But I don’t think it’s because my brain would rot.  The two main reasons that I think T is better suited for being the at-home parent than I am are:

1)  He doesn’t mind the lack of adult conversation.  At the playground, he’s usually the one on the climbing structure with the kids, not on the bench trying to talk to the other adults, so he isn’t frustrated by the constant interruptions.  He has some online forums where he hangs out in the evenings, but doesn’t miss the water-cooler conversations.

2)  He’s not a multi-tasker.  I know, this is counter-intuitive; aren’t SAHPs supposed to be the masters of multi-tasking?  But it means that when he’s on the floor playing dinosaurs with the boys, he’s generally not stressing over whether the laundry’s getting done.  Whatever he’s doing, he’s giving his attention to.  I think I might get more done if I were the at-home parent, but I’d make myself crazy in the process.

Some interesting related links:

• Dadventure’s list of tips for potential stay at home dads (which generally apply to moms as well).  Via RebelDad.
• Mommy Chronicles argues "in defense of the bake sale" and the skills involved in parenting (although I would suggest that parents who work for pay also do many of the things that she describes).  Via Playground Revolution and MotherShock. 

Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post.  For those of you who aren’t addicted to statistics and didn’t find it quite as thrilling, this is why I think those figures matter.

It’s really hard to talk about income and work-family choices without getting into the mommy wars.  I think most of my readers would recognize that it’s a fairly hostile  statement to tell parents in dual-income families that if they just got their priorities straight and "cut corners" and didn’t waste money on luxuries, they could afford to stay home.  It’s obnoxious because it implies that you, the speaker, know better than the parents what their priorities ought to be.  But, as Jody pointed out, comments like that get made all the time.

It’s just as annoying for families who have chosen to have a parent stay home to have to listen to comments about "how lucky they are" to be able to afford it, especially when those comments come from dual-earner parents who live in bigger houses, drive nicer cars, or send their kids to private school.  Attributing it all to "luck*" denies the real financial sacrifices that many families make in order to live on one income, as jen commented.  Suggesting that only the rich can afford to have an at home parent makes the experiences and concerns of lower-income families invisible.

I think that the vast majority of discussion in this country about the incomes and needs of dual-earner families, and of families with SAHMs are totally disconnected from reality — they’re about people’s fears, fantasies, and projections.  So I was excited to find real data — especially data on the distribution of income, not just averages or medians — because it helps us develop a more accurate picture of the real range of experiences of American families.  And then maybe we can start to have a dialog that doesn’t assume that a single solution is going to be right for everyone.

* I’m not denying that luck can play a role; as I’ve mentioned before, we can afford to live on my salary because we were lucky enough to have bought our house before the real estate market went haywire.  That said, we made a deliberate choice to spend significantly less than the banks would have loaned to us.

RebelDad asked today if anyone could find the Census data that journalists are using to say that there were 147,000 SAHDs in 2004, up from 98,000 in 2003.  Of course, I took that as a challenge, and dug it up.    It’s this table, cell I7.

However, the part of this table that caught my attention was rows 27-38, which have income data for different types of married couple families with children under 15.  This is the first hard data I’ve seen on the subject.  I have seen lots of conjectures, including Stephanie Coontz’s statement (in Marriage) that the only two segments of the population in which male breadwinner families predominate are the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution and the top 5 percent, and Nathan Newman’s provocative suggestion that SAHMs are "luxury goods."

So what do the data say? First, that married two-parent families are overall fairly well off — over 40% have incomes over $75,000 a year, and only 7.3% are poor.  Second, at the level of detail the Census provides, such families with SAHMs are generally worse off have lower cash incomes than average — only about 31% have incomes over $75,000, and 12.2% are poor.

The income categories most likely to have a SAHM are those with annual family incomes between $10,000 and $25,000.  The women in these households are likely to have low potential earnings, and between child care costs and the phaseout of some tax breaks, it probably doesn’t pay very much for them to work.  I would also guess that many of them are from cultures that highly value at-home mothering.  At the other end of the spectrum, married couple families with incomes over $100,000 are slightly more likely than those with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 to have a SAHM.

Turning to the families with SAHDs, I was surprised to see that they were generally worse off had lower cash incomes than families with SAHMs.  Less than 22% have family incomes above $75,000, and 15.6% were poor.  This presumably reflects the overall lower earnings of women compared to men. But I would have guessed that the influence of selection would have pushed the average family incomes up.

Revised 10-20-2005 to reflect Parke’s suggestion.

I’m wiped, so this is mostly going to be a few pointers to some links I found useful in putting that Times article about Yale women and their future plans in context.

• Gelf Magazine has the full text of the "survey", showing that many of the questions were fairly leading.
• Mediabistro reports that the students quoted in the article are pretty unhappy about it.  Am I being too cynical when I think that maybe they just realized that this is the first thing that’s going to come up when anyone — a potential employer or a potential date — googles them for a long time to come.  (Via Alas)
• Jack Shafer at Slate hit the ground running last Tuesday with an article pointing out Story’s use of "weasel words" like "many" in the article.  Friday, he followed up with a second article, noting that the Times had run a very similar article back in 1980.  I was particuarly amused by that, since the last time I went hunting for statistics on mothers’ labor force participation, I found a 1994 BLS article entitled "Are women leaving the labor force?"  Some things never seem to change.
• There’s been a ton written about this article around the blogosphere, but I think Fred Vincy at Stone Court does a particularly good job of sorting out the different questions that can be asked.
• Judith Stadtman Tucker at Mothers Movement Online offers a thoughtful response to the article that goes beyond pointing out its flaws.
• Finally, I think it’s worth noting that none of the family-oriented young women quoted in the story seemed at all interested in David Brooks’ and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s advice that they get busy having babies right away.

I’m also working on a post about SAHMs and welfare, but I know too much about welfare and so keep getting lost on tangents…