Half Changed World

Following Anne’s suggestion, I signed up with BlogBurst, which is a new service that is trying to syndicate blog content to appear in newspapers’ websites.  It’s still very much in beta, but I’m interested to see how it plays out.

They strongly encourage bloggers to add an image to appear with the blog listing, which is limited to a 75 x 75 pixel square.  Since I’m not a particularly visual person, I’m soliciting ideas for what sort of image to use.  I’d rather NOT go with a photo of myself.  The only idea I’ve come up with so far is a photo of a cell phone and crayons.  Any suggestions?

I don’t intend to change what I’m writing here in order to try to make it more appealing.   I will stop posting poems that I don’t have copyright to, which I’ve done a few times.

I don’t have anything to add to Laura or Amanda‘s comments on Tierney’s column from Tuesday’s Times.  I do have a bit to say on Wilcox and Nock’s underlying paper, which is far more subtle and interesting.

The article tests the hypothesis that "egalitarian marriages" — marriages in which husbands and wives share similar work and family responsibilities — are happier than traditional marriages.  The authors reject this "companionate" model, finding that wives’ gender role egalitarianism (e.g. their belief that tasks ought to be split evenly), wives’ employment, and wives’ earning significant shares of the family’s earnings are all associated with lower levels of wives’ satisfaction with their marriages.  The factor most associated with wives’ satisfaction with their marriages was whether they were happy with the level of affection and understanding shown to them by their husbands.

I’m not actually all that surprised by these findings.  First, I think it’s more than a little insulting to suggest that employed and stay-at-home parents won’t have "common experiences and interests around which they can build conversations, empathetic regard, mutual understanding and the like."

Lots of people have pointed out that dual working couples — especially those with small children — are essentially trying to share at least three jobs between two people.  Of course they’re going to be stressed.  And often their marriage is going to be a lower priority. And when both people think they’re doing more than half of the work, they’re not likely to be especially appreciative of their spouse.

The authors claim that the husbands in dual-earner families are actually less affectionate than those in traditional families.  They hypothesize that wives who are unhappy with the division of labor in the family stir up conflict (e.g. nag) or emotionally withdraw, resulting in less emotional investment by the husbands.  I could also spin a similar story that was grounded in sex — women who are exhausted and feel unappreciated are less likely to be interested in it.  (In a footnote, the authors point out that their regressions of husbands’ satisfaction with their marriages had less explanatory power.  I’d love to see what happened if they were able to include a measure of satisfaction with the sexual side of the relationship.)

One thing to note is that the study’s main measure of husbands’ "emotional work" is actually a measure of wives’ satisfaction with what their husbands are doing.  I think it’s a reasonable interpretation of this study’s findings to say that the secret of marital happiness is low expectations.

Does this mean that we should all give up on trying to break through the domestic glass ceiling?  I don’t think so.  For one thing, the study only looks at happiness with the marriage, not overall happiness.  For another, the study also seems to suggest that to have a happy marriage, you shouldn’t have children — the number of preschool children in the family was consistently associated with lower levels of marital happiness.  But that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from having kids.

This week’s book is Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes.  It’s about his 30 years of teaching English in New York City public high schools, first in vocational schools and ultimately at Stuyvesant, one of the highly selective academic schools.  It’s a quick read, full of self-depreciating humor and well-told stories. It’s not as brilliant or compelling as Angela’s Ashes, but that’s a heck of a standard to try to live up to.

One of the ongoing themes of the book is how little respect teachers get.  More than once he points out that administrators and college professors get more respect and more money than teachers, and work a lot less hard.  He’s also somewhat sardonic about all the attention he got when Angela’s Ashes became a hit, after a lifetime of obscurity as a teacher.

The book is also an argument for teaching that doesn’t follow the curriculum, that doesn’t cover anything that’s going to be on a standardized test.  McCourt describes assigning his students to write excuse notes from Adam and Eve, of reading recipes out loud (and having a buffet of the results in the middle of Stuvesant Park).  He glories in the students who challenged him, and the bitterest passages in the book are aimed at the parents of the over-achieving Stuyvesant students, who worry about their grades, and whether his class will help them get into college.

McCourt had retired by the time I attended Stuyvesant, but his classes were still  legendary.  In spite of his complaints about the students’ sense of entitlement, a place like Stuyvesant seems ideal for a renegade teacher like McCourt– it didn’t matter that he wasn’t interested in teaching grammar, because the kids pretty much got it already.  Because of the self-depreciation, it’s hard to tell whether McCourt was a good teacher in his early years, when he started telling stories to his classes as a means of keeping bored and hostile students paying attention. 

My computer is on the fritz (just when I had almost finished doing our taxes on it!) so my blogging is likely to be light for a while.  I’ll check in from T’s computer, but probably won’t have much in the way of serious posts until I have it back in gear or give up and replace it.  (It’s scary, but the low-end machines are so cheap, that at any reasonable valuation of our time, it almost always makes sense to buy a new one.)

I did want to express my sadness at the unexpected death of Octavia Butler.   Fledgling wasn’t my favorite of her books, but she was a great writer.  I ran across this link to one of her short stories, Amnesty, today, and I recommend it to anyone who isn’t familiar with her work.  In miniature, it displays all the themes that Butler kept on returning to.

Interestingly, it seems that the news of her death spread across the blogosphere well before it was reported in the press.  Steven Barnes seems to have reported it first.  Edward Champion shares a nice memory of how Kindred rocked his world, and a roundup of posts from others.

This week, the new issue of Parenting magazine showed up at our door, addressed to my husband.  Our best guess is that the subscription is a gift from T’s parents, replacing the Money magazine that they’ve given us for several years.  T’s reaction is somewhat mixed.  On the one hand, as RebelDad has been complaining for ages, Parenting clearly doesn’t see fathers as a real part of their audience — the subtitle is "what really matters to moms".  On the other hand, it’s kind of nice to have his parents acknowledge that parenting is the biggest piece of what he’s doing with his life right now, and he takes it seriously.

The funny thing is that I think I’m going to continue the Money subscription. The first year we got it, it helped me catch a major mistake in our taxes that would have cost us several thousand dollars. It hasn’t saved us anything like that since, but it’s generally interesting and reminds me to think about things that I’d otherwise avoid.

Money is also consistently progressive on family issues.  The current issue includes an article on how a same-sex couple can best protect each other and their young daughter, given that Maryland doesn’t recognize their civil union.  In the February issue, a feature on Fix Our Mix helped one of the featured families "save enough so that Mom or Dad can stay home with the kids."  (I see that I pointed out a similar article last year.) In an article on spouses who travel separately, the authors acknowleged that "very few couples earn equal paychecks" and went on to say:

"Frankly, that shouldn’t matter. If one spouse is the sole or majority earner, does that mean he or she should be able to dine on steak and caviar with the gang while the other orders takeout with a friend? Of course not."

What I’m most impressed about is the matter of fact tone in which these issues are discussed.

I also wanted to point out Business Week’s new Working Parents blog, which I also found via RebelDad.  They’re still getting their blogging legs, and the posts are somewhat uneven, but I’m encouraged that they’re giving it a try.  The most recent post is about one of the writers’ battles with their insurance company over her son’s medical bills.  One thing that I hadn’t thought about until I read it was that one of the advantages of employer-based health insurance is that it offers some means of leverage in claims disputes. 

On that note, I do want to point out that Annika’s donations page is now up and running.  It’s through the Children’s Organ Transplant Association (COTA), which makes contributions tax-deductible, and assures that they’ll be spent on medical expenses. (See this post for background.) 

On D’s birthday last month, he woke up, remembered that it was his birthday and immediately asked us "Do I look older?  I’m five now!"  We smiled and tried to explain to him that it doesn’t work that way, that he gets a little older and a little bigger every day, not just on his birthday. 

Except that maybe it does work that way.  Since his birthday, D has a) gotten dressed entirely by himself (including finding clothes in his dresser) for the first time and b) willingly laid back in the bathtub and gotten his hair wet for the first time. (Yes, I know some of your kids did these things at age three. D somehow missed the "I do it myself" stage, and we made a deliberate choice not to press him on these things when there was a baby in the house getting lots of attention.)

Maybe it’s coincidence, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s simply decided that he’s a big five-year-old now, and can do these things.  That seems to be the way he operates; he was a late walker too, but walked with total confidence within weeks of starting.

Last summer, when D was zooming around the park quite confidently on his bike, we asked him if he wanted us to take off the training wheels so he could see if he could ride it without them.  Without hesitation, he answered "no, I’ll do that when I’m five."  I just bet he will.

I’m surprised that the blogs I read haven’t lit up yet with discussion of the Newsweek International Edition cover story on how the generous European family benefits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  The headline is "Stuck in Place: The Myth of Women’s Equality in Europe" over a photo of a woman’s legs with skirt, high heels and ankle chains.

The article makes a reasonably strong case (heavily drawing on this OECD report) that the generous paid leaves that American women drool over come at a cost to women’s professional accomplishments.  As in the United States, women who take several years off of work find it hard to get back on to the fast track.  Many wind up returning to work on a part-time basis, in jobs that are less prestigious and pay less per hour than full-time work.   (As Jennifer pointed out in her comment on my post about part-time work, national health insurance doesn’t make the problems with part-time work go away.)  And employers blatently discriminate against women of childbearing age — even those who plan to return to work quickly, or not to have children — for fear of having to carry them during extended leaves.

The Newsweek article includes a recommendation that European countries should shorten paid maternity leaves to 6 months to a year.  I’m not entirely convinced this would change things dramatically, but even if it would, it raises some interesting distributional issues.  All women, not even all mothers, don’t have monolithic interests; what’s best for some isn’t what’s best for others.  It it reasonable to ask women who don’t have any ambition to have a "career" rather than a "job" to give up some of their benefits in order to improve things for the elite who do? 

I’m more intrigued by some of the proposals that would make a portion of the parental leave only available to fathers.   I do think that even short periods of full-time childcare both dramatically increase dads’ confidence in their parenting skills, and give them a better appreciation for the work that’s involved.  And they might even the professional playing field a little bit.

Today’s book is Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money, by Harriet Pappenheim and Ginny Graves.  It was on display at Powells when I visited over Thanksgiving, and the cover literally made me swivel my head as I walked by.  As soon as I got home, I hunted down the book and requested it from the library.

I’ve been taking an excellent free course at Barnes and Noble online on Thinking Like An Editor and it’s helped me understand why this book was appealing to an editor.  Improving your marriage is one of the perennial hot-selling book topics, and this book is aimed at a clearly defined and large group of women (1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands) that hasn’t been addressed before.  The authors’ credentials are impressive — a therapist and a journalist.  On the book jacket, they promise to address such important questions as "why working women still do more housework than their husbands — even when their husbands stay home" and "how couples can navigate financial decisionmaking when the breadwinner’s reins rest firmly in the wife’s hands."  They promise to answer them based on Pappenheim’s professional experience and interviews with 100 couples.

Unfortunately, all this didn’t actual make for a very good book.  As it turns out, 100 interviews is a challenging number to write a book about.  It’s not enough to say anything statistically valid about overall trends, but too many for individuals to stand out from the mass.  All the Susans and Bills and Daves blurred together, so you never got a clear picture of any one couple across the topics covered in each chapter (sex, money, housework, etc.)  Pappenheim and Graves never really answered the gripping questions that they posed.   And the advice they offer is so generic as to be useless.  (Their top recommendation for how to make marriage work when she earns more is "Make mutual respect priority Number one."  As opposed to every other marriage, where mutual respect isn’t important?)

Overall, I think the problem is that they discovered that marriages where the women earn more than their husbands don’t necessarily have that much in common.   As I could have told them, a lot depends on whether it’s voluntarily chosen.  In other words, is the husband a SAHD, a low-earning artist, or umemployed?  Some of the generalizations they reached for totally missed the mark for me (fatigue and lack of time may interfere with our sex life, but not lack of respect), while others seemed right on target:

"Women’s hunger for options, for leeway, for relief from the relentless grind, were recurrent themes in our interviews.  Perhaps when women pine for a male provider, what they’re really craving is greater latitude in a life that’s come to feel too restrictive. What’s clear is that when a career becomes just another kind of trap, limiting our options, dictating the course of our lives, many of us become disenchanted and start trying to find a way out… It’s possible (maybe even probable) that male breadwinners feel the same way about being trapped in the daily grind, but unless they are very wealthy, it never occurs to the majority of them that they have an option to stop working… They certainly don’t seriously feel that they are entitled to be taken care of by their wives.  But many women, consciously or unconsciously, feel entitled to being taken care of by their men."

My dad sent me two articles that he thought I’d find interesting in light of the ongoing discussion here about work hours.

The first is an article on The Relationship between Specialty Choice and Gender of US Medical Students, 1990-2003.  It debunks the idea that the increase in the fraction of doctors who are women is responsible for the decreasing interest of medical students in specialties where hours are considered "uncontrollable," especially internal and family medicine, pediatrics, ob/gyn and general surgery.  In fact, in every time period examined, women were more likely than men to be planning on uncontrollable specialties.

The second is an article from the Johns Hopkins Medical School alumni magazine about the changes involved in implementing the 80-hour/week restrictions on interns’ and residents’ working hours.  On the one hand, it’s a little surreal to read about a world in which 80-hour work weeks are considered virtually part-time.  But, it’s also a story about a place where people swore that it was impossible to limit working hours without destroying the experience, until they didn’t have a choice, and then they managed to do it.  And if law firms and game companies suddenly faced economic disincentives to working people huge hours (instead of strong incentives to do so), they’d change as well.

To go with the Barbara Crooker poem that we were discussing earlier in the week, I want to share this one by Marge Piercy.

Your cats are your children

Certain friends come in, they say
Your cats are your children.
hey smile from a great height on down.
Clouds roll in around their hair.
have real children, they mean,
while you have imitation.

My cats are not my children.
I gave Morgaine away yesterday
to a little boy she liked.
I’m not saving to send them to Harvard.
When they stay out overnight, I don’t call the police.

I like the way they don’t talk
The way they do, eyes shining
or narrowed, tails bannering,
paws kneading, cats with private
lives and passions sharp as their claws,
hunters, lovers, great sulkers.

No, my children are my friends,
my lover, my dependents on whom
I depend, those few for whom
I will rise in the middle of the night to give
comfort, massage, medicine
whose calls I always take.

My children are my books
that I gestate for years,
a slow-witted elephant
eternally pregnant, books
that I sit on for eras like the great
auk on a vast marble egg.

I raise them with loving care,
I groom and educate them,
I chastise, reward and adore.
I exercise them lean and fatten them up.
I roll them about my mind all night
and fuss over them in the mornings.

Then they march off into the world
to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,
to be loved for the wrong reasons,
to be fondled, beaten, lost.
Now and then I get a postcard
from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.

People take them in and devour them.
People marry them for love.
People write me letters and tell me
how they are my children too.
I have children whose languages
rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,

children born of the wind that blows
through me from the graves of the poor
and brave who struggled all their short
throttled lives to free people
whose faces they could not imagine.
Such are the children of my words.

Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

I’m not sure what it says about me that I’m charmed by Piercy’s imagining of her books as children, growing up to have lives of their own, but am slightly alarmed by Crooker’s vision of her child as a poem, something she created.