Half Changed World

This week’s book is I’m Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work, by Lonnae O’Neal Parker. It’s the book about a black woman’s perspective on the whole work-family thing that was mentioned in the Times article I discussed last month.

It’s an interesting book.  At times it delivers exactly what it promises — insight into the ways that work and family issues play out differently for black women.  Parker says that she never realized that some women feel guilt for working outside the home until she was in her twenties, as all the women in her families had worked for pay.  She writes about the extra time that she needs to carve out of her day to comb and braid her daughters’ hair, and illustrates her stories with quotes from the blues, R&B, and hip hop.

Parker also offers insights that cut across racial lines:

"I no longer ask the people around me to give me time.  I do not know if it is fair to ask them to go against their most basic nature, which is to want me there, available for everything they need me for, for as long as they can have me.  Instead I do the hard work of being completely clear about what I need.  Then they don’t have to give me anything.  They just have to respect the boundaries I insist on maintaining.  It can still be a tough sell, but at least I’ve got half the battle won."

But at other points the book wanders and loses focus.  The long discussion of 1960s television shows left me cold.  One chapter simply reprints Parker’s Post magazine article about her "white" cousin who lives with her.  It was interesting — I remember finding it interesting when it was first published — but doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the book.  Another chapter includes a random paragraph about Michelle Obama that seems to be a left-over remnant from a section that got edited out.  At times Parker can’t resist including every tangential bit of history that she knows about a subject.

In several places, Parker discusses the slave history of black women in the United States, and points out that her burden is light compared to what her foremothers endured.  How can she complain about juggling the demands of writing for the Post and caring for her family when women worked from sunup to dark in the fields, and stole moments with their children at night?  When women routinely lost their children to the slave trade and death?

It’s a brutal standard.  Given the horrors of history, and the suffering of millions worldwide today, who of us has any right to complain?  Certainly not me.  And such comparisons are often used as a silencing maneuver.  But Parker uses these stories as a source of strength, telling herself that she can handle whatever fate brings to her.  And I’m sure she can.

I’ve been reading JT Waldman’s graphic novel of the Megillat Esther, the book of the bible that we read at Purim (discovered via the Velveteen Rabbi).  It’s reminded me of what a very strange story it is.  There’s an old joke that all Jewish holidays can be summed up as "They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat."  That’s certainly the heart of the Purim story, with the added vengeful twist that Haman falls into his own trap, and is killed on the gallows he had prepared for Mordechai and that the Jews fall upon their oppressors, killing tens of thousands.

The Purim story has been racing around my head the past few days, bouncing up against the news of Slobodan Milosevic’s death, and the possibility of the judge calling off the Moussaoui trial.   While we like to think of "law’ and "justice" as synonyms, they’re really not.  And sometimes following the rule of law means that evil people will get off.   It stinks, but it’s better than the alternatives.

God is never mentioned in the Megillat Esther. There’s no promise here of infaliable judgment in a world to come.  All we’ve got is this world, full of drunken kings, conniving queens, and scheming counselors.

A while back, I ran across a meme of listing all the computers you’ve owned.   (Sorry, can’t remember where — happy to post links if you claim credit.)  I thought I’d revive it in honor of the new computer that I’m anxiously awaiting — according to UPS’s tracking info, it left Shanghai early Sunday and is now en route from Louisville, KY.

0)  My family’s first computer was my brother’s, which he got for his Bar Mitzvah.  It was an Apple II+, and didn’t have a floppy drive when he first got it — you could record programs onto an audiocassette.  My Palm is far more powerful than it was, but I’m still impressed with how much you could do with it.  Screenwriter was a perfectly functional word processor, and VisiCalc an adequate spreadsheet.  My brother and I spent hours playing the Infocom text adventures, and even my mother played Little Brick Out.

1)  When my brother went to college, and took his computer with him, I soon made the case that I needed a computer of my own.  Even though I was required to take typing in sixth grade, the idea of typing a paper with a typewriter was absolutely horrifying to me.  For my Bat Mitzvah, I got an Apple IIc.  I believe the "c" was for compact, and it was half the size of the II+.  Unfortunately, affordable LCDs were far in the future, so it was never better than "luggable."  It did have a modem, and I got onto my first BBS (Echo) using it.

2)  The Apple IIc lasted me until my senior year in college.  At that point, it was becoming increasingly less reliable, and I was afraid that if it crashed while I was writing my senior paper, no one else would have a computer that could read the disks.  My parents bought me a Gateway PC.  I’m pretty sure it ran Windows 3.1, not DOS.

2a)  Sometime a couple of years later, something went wrong — I think with the video card.  I discovered that no one else’s products could fit into the cute mini-tower case from Gateway.  So I had the local computer store transplant all the brains from the Gateway into a generic standard size case and replace the fried card.   That hybrid lasted me through graduate school.

3)  At some point after we had moved to Virginia, I was coveting a laptop, but couldn’t justify their cost, since I really just wanted it for wordprocessing.  I bought a used one off of eBay, a few years old.  It turned out to be a lemon — the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and even plugged in, it often turned itself off without warning.  This is the only thing I’ve ever bought off of eBay that I really felt like I got ripped off on.

4)  A couple of years later, the Gateway computer crashed.  After fighting with it for a few hours, my husband pointed out that I could get a brand new computer — much faster — for $600 from CompUSA.  This one was a HP.

5)  This was the first time I got a new computer because I wanted more processing power.   About two years ago, as I was getting into digital photography, my husband gave me some tips on how to do things with Photoshop.   I complained about how long they took to do, and he was surprised.  When he tried for himself, he suggested I get a new computer.  I got a $400 machine from Dell, and it was about 20 times faster.   

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been the most reliable machine — the hard drive crashed completely while it was still under warranty, and then this month one of the system files got corrupted, making it impossible to boot.  T popped the hard drive out, and we can read it from another machine, so at least I can rescue the last month or so of un-backed up files.  Once everything is copied safely over to my new machine, we’ll try reinstalling Windows.  But I used this as an excuse to finally get a laptop.

What struck me most as I thought about this list is 1) how much more affection I have for the early Apples than for any of the PCs I’ve had in the years between and 2) how much shorter my replacement cycle has gotten.  Some of that is because I’ve gotten more affluent, but it’s also because the price of computers has gotten so low.  When I got the Gateway, a respectable desktop was going for about $1000, and the comparable laptop for twice that.  Both those figures have fallen in half, in nominal dollars.

I’ve been thinking about that NYTimes article on mother’s labor force participation.  The article suggests that the slight recent drop-off in women’s labor force participation in recent years is because we’ve pushed unpaid work — housework and child care — about to its lower limit, and there are only so many hours in the day and something has to give. 

Bitch, PhD thinks that makes sense.  She wrote:

if, broadly speaking, we’ve wrung about all we can out of the 24 hours in a day, then it makes sense both that some women would step back from the grueling regime in favor of a more balanced personal life, regardless of the possible risks they run in doing so: when you’ve reached the limit of your energy, you can’t keep going and that’s all there is to it. It also makes sense that women who are still trying to hang onto the stressful balancing act of career, children, and coupledom would feel that they’re singlehandedly carrying the world on their shoulders. And given the pressures on all of us, of course we’re all defensive and insistent and argumentative about our choices.

But one of her commenters, Steve Horwitz, points to this Economist article (based on this paper by Aguilar and Hurst) which uses the same underlying data as the Times article and comes to the conclusion that total leisure time for all groups — including working moms — has increased significantly over the past 40 years.  Is this possible?  And if it’s true, why do we all feel so tired?

I think there’s a bunch of different things going on.

If I’m reading the papers accurately, the biggest issue is whether you consider time spent with children doing generally recreational activities — reading to them, taking them to parties, watching school plays, even going to the park — as leisure.  Aguilar and Hurst do, while I think Bianchi (whose data the NYTimes uses) counts them as child care.  Conceptually, I think these activities somewhere between true leisure and work.  They’re not in the same category as changing diapers or attending parent-teacher conferences, which you do because they’re important, but no one really considers fun.  But they’re also at least semi-obligatory —  you feel guilty if you don’t do them enough, and you often have to do them even if you’d really rather be doing something else.  So they add to the modern parent’s endless to-do list.

While the time-use studies clearly show that the amount of time spent on housework has dropped significantly, they don’t account for the fact that people’s expectations  haven’t fallen as much.  So even if we only vaccuum once a month, we feel like we ought to do it more often, and it stays on our to-do list, even if we know that we’re never going to get to it.

Aguilar and Hurst also point out that there’s been an increase in inequality in leisure time, with more of the gain in leisure concentrated among less educated individuals.  If you believe Annette Lareau, the parents with more education are also spending more of their "free" time in intensive parenting activities.  And if you’re reading this blog, or Dr B’s, the chances are high that you’re in that group.

As the Economist article acknowledges, the blurring of the lines between work and free time are also a factor in our perception of overwork.  If you have to carry a blackberry to your kid’s soccer game, and check your voice mail over the weekend, it’s hard to leave the office behind.  And I don’t think it’s coincidence that Dr. B and Sandy Piderit are academics.  It’s not just that professors work long hours, but that their hours of work are unbounded — there’s almost always something else that they could/should be working on.

Overall, I think it’s that sense of things left undone, rather than the total number of hours worked, that makes people feel overwhelmed.  When I started work after getting my masters, I remember how excited I was at the concept of the weekend.  Look, it’s Friday, and I get to go home!  And I don’t have to think about work, or feel guilty about not doing it, until Monday morning!  What a concept.

But at this point in my life, my personal to-do list is a lot longer than my work one.  Some days are busier than others at work, but I generally leave the office having accomplished most of what I need to do.  At home, I almost always feel like I’m running behind.   Therefore, I need to make a conscious choice at times to let go of the endless to-list.

Or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

Shabbat Shalom.

I’ve been getting a bunch of hits today from people searching for "Annette Lareau" or "Unequal Childhoods" because David Brooks wrote about the book today in his NYTimes column.  Time to break out the "I blogged about that last year" bumper stickers. 

The Washington Post has a new work-and-family blog, by Leslie Morgan Steiner, of course  It’s frustrating that they’ve got this huge built-in audience and are covering so much of the tired old mommy wars ground.  (On a technical note, like the NYTimes, the Post blogs allow comments, but don’t let you link to your own blog.  Kudos to the Business Week bloggers for acting like a real part of the blog community.)

The April Working Mother magazine has an article by Arianna Huffington that lauds the advantages of blogging as a career that lets you work from home.  Yeah right, if you’re already a celebrity, or started blogging before 2003 (cf. Dooce).  I emailed off a letter to the editor, telling them that they missed the point.  If you’re looking for a way to quit your day job, blogging probably offers only slightly better odds than a lottery ticket.  But if you’re looking for ideas, laughter, and comraderie, and you can only do it when the kids have gone to bed, I don’t think there’s a better place to look.

Today is International Women’s Day, as well as Blog Against Sexism Day.  I started to write a post about what I mean when I call myself a feminist, but thought it was getting too wordy and not saying anything particularly interesting.  Instead I’m just going to share two links.

• Dawn’s Salon article about her open adoption.
• Flea’s letter to her sons, 12 years from now.

Neither one is explicitly about sexism or feminism, but they made me think of the old bumper sticker, Feminism is the Radical Belief that Women are People.  I’ve always assumed that the word "radical" in that was sarcastic, but reading these posts made me think about the ways in which the world would be different if we really did act as if everyone we encountered was fully human, as valuable as our loved ones.

Trying a different approach than usual, this week I’ve got three different books to talk about, all of which are about parents who live in Manhattan.

First up is Love and other impossible pursuits, by Ayelet Waldman.  After reading Becca’s post about it, I couldn’t resist requesting it from the library.  It was a quick read, full of amusing references to Bugaboos and the craziness of preschool admissions in New York.  And while I was never entirely clear on what exactly was so compelling about Emilia’s husband, her affection for Central Park shone loud and clear.

The main story in Love&… is about Emilia’s ambivalent relationship with her five-year-old stepson. Stepfamilies are also at the heart of This is my daughter, by Roxana Robinson. If Waldman writes like Warhol painted, full of bright colors and pop references, then Robinson is the master of the black and white sketch, bringing out the spirit of her characters with a few deft strokes.   She tells the story of Peter and Emma’s failed first marriages and their attempts to build a family with their young daughters, moving smoothly across viewpoints, revealing each characters’ hopes and failings.

I got this one out from the library because I really liked Robinson’s collection, A perfect stranger and other stories, and wanted to see what she did with a novel.  Unfortunately, I was left thinking that this is almost a novel-length short story, without a real plot to move things along.  And at novel length, I found myself stumbling over some of the superficial details — what Upper East Side mother would ever let her daughter sit on her lap in the front seat of a moving car?

Last up is What do you do all day? by Amy Scheibe.  This one has been weighing on my conscience for a while, because I got it free from the publicist, and I felt an obligation to write about it.  (As you may recall, I don’t feel any obligation to say nice things about the books I get for free, but I do feel like I should acknowledge them.)  I started reading it when I got it, and was enjoying it, but then put it down for a while and never felt particularly compelled to pick it up.

When I did pick it up again, I found that I enjoyed this book.  The plot is flimsy, with the writing not quite strong enough to keep me suspending disbelief at some points.  But I liked Jennifer Bradley, Scheibe’s heroine.  She’s lovably imperfect, always feeling that those around her are happier with their lives, more on top of things.  She’s also nice — inviting an emotionally needy fellow mom to join her and her friends for lunch, knowing how much she’d want to be asked, something I can’t imagine Emilia ever doing.

Ultimately, What do you do all day? is a fantasy novel, a story of a world where you have the perfect response to racist putdowns on the spot (not 20 minutes too late), where you can waltz into a new, better kindergarten for your daughter the same day that her old teacher has a psychotic break, and where your old boss offers to hire you as partner, not assistant, after four years out of the work force.   Think of it as Bunny Planet for stressed out moms.

Today is NARAL’s Prevention First action day.  Click here to take action.  It’s easy to get so focused on what’s going on in South Dakota that we forget that basic access to birth control is under attack as well, with the FDA still delaying on approving emergency contraception, pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, and the NIH apparently sharing inaccurate medical information.

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the ways in which society hasn’t changed as much as I think it should.  But it’s important to also remember how much it has changed.  And while I reject the claim that second wave feminism was simply a by-product of the pill, I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate the impact of reliable birth control on women’s lives.  Today, when childbearing is often postponed until the 20s or 30s (or foregone entirely), and when women can expect to live for decades past menopause, it’s hard for me to imagine what it must have been like to spend essentially your entire adult life either pregnant or breastfeeding.

I can’t decide if I’m more pleased with all the recent attention that work-family issues have been getting in the mainstream media these days or frustrated that so much of the coverage is stuck on the same old groove, setting working (for pay) moms against at-home moms, and ignoring dads completely.

I love RebelDad’s suggestion that we should googlebomb the term "mommy wars" to refer to Miriam Peskowitz’s excellent book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  It’s a much more productive contribution to the discussion than the new book by Leslie Morgan Steiner that’s been getting a bunch of attention.  (See also Miriam’s blog, where she’s had some interesting posts this week about the NYTimes article on trends in women’s labor force participation.)

RebelDad’s ready to write off the Steiner book because of her stupid comments about dads in the interview with her posted on the Business Week working parents blog.  (He also points out this strong piece from Time online called "Bring on the Daddy Wars.")  I agree, if she can only find men "whose lives haven’t changed as much dramatically" it’s because she hasn’t been looking.  (She also said she couldn’t find any interesting blogs that talk about work-family issues — I posted some of my favorites in the comments section there.)

And yet, I don’t want to dismiss the book entirely, both because I want to take advantage of the big Random House publicity machine’s efforts to get these topics aired, and because Steiner gets some things exactly right.  In the Business Week interview, she says:

"I thought the battle was between stay-at-home and working moms. But women don’t fall into these neat categories. Most women see it as a continuum. A mom who left a hard-driving job may be at home now, but she plans on being back at work two years from now."

Yup.  And in the Post article she makes the point that the biggest mommy war is often internal, and tells a sweet story about the lift she got when her daughter’s preschool teacher complimented her:

"Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?" Mrs. Rahim whispered so that the swirling crowd of stay-at-home moms, lingering by the school door, couldn’t hear. "You are a happy mom. Your face glows with it. That’s what matters most to your kids. I think you should have 10 more children. Now go to work."

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from the book.  One taste is provided by the excerpt from one of the essays published in Newsweek.  It’s by a woman who suggests that her children’s overall meltdown was due to her not being home to meet the school bus (even though she did in fact work from home two weeks a month, and her husband was home the rest of the time).

As I’ve said before, I’m generally sceptical about the degree to which you can draw a straight line from parental choices to children’s outcomes.  But even setting that aside, my reading of the essay is that, to the extent that Hingston contributed to her kids’ problems, it’s not because she was working, but because she felt so guilty about working that she had trouble setting limits, even when her son’s therapist and teachers all agreed that they were badly needed.  I’m quite curious whether Hingston draws the same conclusion in the full version of her essay.

I’m so excited.  Not about the Oscars, about the Koufax awards.  They’re finally open for voting.  (Not that I’m complaining about the delay — they’re a major effort to put on, and a total work of love.)

I’ve been nominated in two categories: Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and Best Series for my posts on work-family issues.  I think this is a preliminary round of voting, and then there will be another round after they’ve narrowed the nominees down. I know that some of my other favorite blogs — Bitch, PhD, Geeky Mom, Feministe, Pandagon, Majikthise — have been nominated as well.  I think Pharyngula gets my vote for best single post.  I know that there are lots of other great blogs out there.  Please vote for your favorites.

About those Oscars.  I might TiVo them.  Not seeing the movies takes a lot of the fun out of it. Of the movies up for major awards, Brokeback Mountain is the only one I’ve seen.  I’ve seen two of the three nominees in the animated picture category.  (We took the boys to see Wallace and Grommit, but saw Corpse Bridge on our own.  Yes, we’re geeks.)  I’ve also seen King Kong, March of the Penguins, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the last two on video).