Half Changed World

Will the person who found this site by googling "betty friedan and the goodie bag" please tell me what you were looking for?

Some of you may notice that I now have an ad running on the site for Perfect Madness.  I was somewhat amused the other day to discover that my post about her magazine articles is currently the number 2 google hit if you search for "Judith Warner," below the Newsweek article, but above the publisher’s official site.

Thanks to the kind person who nominated me under "Learn Something New Every Day" in the Share the Love blog awards at One Woman’s World.  (For once, I didn’t self-nominate, or put anyone up to it.)  If you feel like voting for me, here’s the link.  I see Mimilou, Landismom, and Danigirl got nominated too.

Moxie more or less tagged me to respond to this New York Times article, about upper-income black mothers, and their reactions to the whole work-family debate.

Jill at Feministe gives the Times credit for talking about race, but complains that once again, the discussion is limited to upper-income college-educated professionals.  She’s right, but the article is clearly framed in the context of the Times’ obsession with "the opt-out revolution" which is all about upper-income women with lots of choices.  So I’m willing to cut them some slack on that.

Overall, I do think that class probably matters more than race in determining who stays home.  I know Lareau deliberately studied a racially diverse population and found that parenting styles didn’t vary much across racial groups, holding class constant.  Edin and Kefales also didn’t find much racial differences.  (I think ethnicity/immigration status probably does matter; there are definitely ethnic groups where there’s still great cultural pressure against moms of young children working.)

Of course, "holding class constant" is a heck of an assumption.  As I’ve discussed before, stay-at-home parents are concentrated at the very high and very low income ranges.  And there are relatively few African-American families with a single wage-earner making over $100,000 a year.  And even holding income constant, African-Americans have significantly lower assets, making relying on a single income more risky.

The article suggests that there’s more support/pressure for African-American women, especially those who have higher education, to work outside the home.  That may well be true.  But it’s also true that, as Cashin argues, even well-off African-Americans are more likely to live places with higher crime rates, and worse public schools.  So that may provide an incentive to have a parent at home to keep an eye on things.  I don’t know what the net effect is.

Today’s book is Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan & Amy Hudock.  Specifically, this is one of the stops on Buchanan’s blog book tour.

The anthology is a selection of writing — poetry, memoir, fiction — from the Literary Mama website, and it’s truly a delight.  The first poem, Pregnancy, by Lori Romero, made me grin with recognition.  Johnny, by Heidi Raykeil, made me cry openly on the metro, wiping my nose on my coat sleeve because I didn’t have a tissue.  The authors write about the first day of school, and watching a grown child pack to leave the house.  They write about wrestling with the legacy of imperfect parenting handed down from their parents, and they write about parenting as imperfect humans themselves.

Some of the pieces made me nod, yes, that’s it, some seemed like maps to the strange countries I have yet to explore, and some made me wonder at how different my experience is from the authors’.  Barbara Crooker writes:

But to work is to abandon
to indifferent, casual hands,
what I, the potter, have worked
this demi-decade to achieve in you,
soft claygirl.

For me, one of the surprises of parenting has been how much my children are their own people, how little I feel that I am molding them.

In the introduction, Buchanan and Hudock discuss the conflicts between writing and motherhood.  I feel compelled to point out that writing is more compatible with motherhood than many careers.  The real problem is that (in most cases) it doesn’t pay very well, making it challenging to justify spending the money for child care in order to do it.  Furthermore, because writing doesn’t require you to leave home at set hours, many parents are tempted into thinking that they can be writers without having someone else provide child care.  And of course when you’re trying to squeeze anything into the margins of the day, you’re going to be cramped and frazzled.  But I really don’t think the conflict is something unique about writing.

Somewhere in the 231 comments on Bitch, PhD’s post about feminism, her marriage, and Kidding Oneself, someone asked her to explain what she thought constituted a good feminist marriage.  I’d also be interested in reading Bitch’s take on the subject, but thought I’d throw in my two cents on the matter.

I think Jenell at the Paris Project has it right, that what makes a marriage egalitarian isn’t the roles you play, but the distribution of power, and the assumption of equal personhood.  So I wouldn’t necessarily look at who earns the money in a family, but at who gets to make decisions about how to spend it.  Not how many hours are spent with the children, but who makes plans without arranging for child care.

But what makes a marriage feminist is the recognition that no couple is making their choices in a vacuum, that there are societal forces shaping those decisions, a lot of history hanging over you.  And as a result, it’s easy to drift into patterns that perpetuate inequality, so you need to keep paying attention if you want to keep things in balance.

The tricky part is figuring out how to pay attention to these things without it degenerating into petty scorekeeping, where every last dirty sock or wet towel left on the floor is recorded for history.  Perhaps the definition of a good marriage is one in which each party thinks that the other is doing more than their share of the work.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

I don’t think anyone goes into parenting thinking of having a child who will need organ transplants.  But that’s what happened to Moreena, whose daughter Annika has had two liver transplants, and is going to need a third, if she gets healthy enough that the doctors think she could survive the operation.  And if having a desperately sick child isn’t bad enough, Moreena’s family is about to hit their insurance limit for the year.

Andrea has organized a web page to share information about ways to help Moreena’s family.  I’ll be contributing, and will have a button up as soon as the donation account is set up.  I encourage you to consider contributing as well, and to spread the word.

I’ve written before about the craziness of our health care system, and I’ll write about it again.  And I also encourage you to contribute to organizations working on health care more systematically, especially in countries where small donations go a long way.  But this one hits home to me.  Annika is very close to D’s age. Reading about what Annika goes through makes me realize what a blessing it is to have a child who can consider a needle stick for a standard blood test a major indignity.  I can’t imagine what it feels like to have a severely ill child.  But I know they don’t need the financial stress on top of that.

Today’s snow was about perfect as far as I’m concerned.  It came on a weekend, so wasn’t the huge logistical nightmare that midweek snowstorms are around here.  And I got to play with the boys instead of going into work.  (Since we live close to the metro, it almost never snows enough that I can’t make it into work.  And since T is home, even the schools shutting down doesn’t give me a good excuse to stay home and play in the snow.)  We got about 8 inches, enough to make snowmen, have a snowball fight, and take the boys sledding at the Masonic memorial, but not so much that there was danger of either of the boys getting stuck in a drift.

Playing with the boys was especially sweet because I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get to do it, at least with D.  He has mild sensory issues, and this is the first time that he’s been willing to play in the snow.  In the past, he’s totally refused to walk in the snow, even in boots.  He liked the idea of snowball fights — but only the throwing part, not the getting hit part.  He’s outgrown a lot of his issues — he used to be unwilling to walk on grass — and so I was hopeful that he’d eventually be willing to play in the snow, but I wasn’t sure it would happen.  But today, he had a great time, and was even willing to lay down and make snow angels.

I feel a little sheepish admitting how bugged I was by D’s dislike of snow and sand.  Obviously, in the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal.  But playing in the snow and digging on the beach were parts of my mental image of childhood and parenting.

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.

My name is Elizabeth and I’m a book addict.

The vast majority of the books I read are from the library.  I have cards from two library systems — the city I live in, and the larger nearby county.  Both libraries have online catalogs, where you can search for books you want, and put holds on them if they’re out, or at a different branch.  So there’s usually a stack of books waiting for me every time I go.  The problem is that it’s easy to get carried away — I currently have 10 books checked out from one library, and 21 from the other.  (Yes, some of them are for the boys, who don’t have their own cards yet, but most of them are mine.) 

You can renew books online too, but only if no one else has put a hold on them, and there’s no way to check whether that’s the case in advance.  So it turns out I’ve got about 4 books that I haven’t started which are due this weekend and can’t be renewed.  So I’ve got to either return them unread, suck up the late fees, or sit up all night to finish them.  Probably some combination of the above.  (Even with the late fees, it’s much cheaper than buying the books, but I feel guilty about having overdue books, especially when I know someone else is waiting for them.)

If neither of the libraries that I use has a book, and I really want to read it, I’ll try to get it used, either from Powells or Amazon marketplace.   Powell’s has free shipping if you order $50 a time, which just encourages me to buy even more books.  And then I feel like I need to read the books I have out from the library first, so the ones I buy tend to sit around for a long time before I get to them.  One year I vowed not to buy any books until I read everything I owned that I hadn’t read.  I didn’t make it through the year, but I did catch up a bit.

I almost never buy new books for myself, but they’re my favorite thing to give as a gift, so I feel like I’m doing my share to keep the publishing industry afloat. 

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

For a total change of pace, today’s book is Fledgling.  It’s a vampire story, but since it’s by Octavia Butler, the main character is a vampire, Shori, who looks like a 10-year-old African-American girl.  Thus, the book is an opportunity for Butler to revisit some of her favorite themes from her award-winning Xenogenesis trilogy — race, human-alien mixtures, multi-member families.

Unfortunately, Fledgling is pretty weak compared to the Xenogenesis books.  What made them stunning is that Butler conveyed both the hope that the Oankali offered to humanity and the horror that humans felt about them.  The main characters are put in situations where there are no right choices, and they stumble through, sometimes hurting people around them in the process.

In Fledgling, almost all of the complexity is gone.  The "Ina" (vampires) are not monsters, but benevolent masters, who provide their human symbionts with orgasmic pleasure and healthy long lives.  The only exceptions are the bad guys, who have no redeeming characteristics — they’re even racist.  The lingering discussions of the complex families of the Ina (sibling groups marry each other, but live in single sex communities) and their human companions reminded me of nothing so much as Heinlein’s late novels in which he waxed ecstatic about group marriages.  (And yes, many sci-fi writers would give their right arm to be compared to even lousy Heinlein, but Butler’s better than that.)

And, to be honest, I couldn’t figure out what was the point of making Shori appear to be a young child.  There’s no portion of the book where she has to live with the restrictions on her activities that minors are usually subject to.  And I was ooked out by the sex/feeding scenes between her and adult humans. 

All this said, I read the book in a weekend, and found myself staying up later than I should have to finish it.  Even at her weakest, Butler’s a compelling storyteller.