Half Changed World

When I was in sixth grade, I got into an argument with a substitute teacher who didn’t believe me when I told him that we didn’t celebrate Christmas.  I was outraged, but more by his stupidity* than because I felt religiously persecuted.   This was New York City, after all, where the public schools close down for the High Holidays.

NaomiChana at Baraita has a really thought-provoking post up about the "December Dilemna" for Jews.  She writes:

"Apparently we American Jews are supposed to spend the month of Kislev engaged in a nonstop angstfest about — well, mostly how we will decorate our homes. Single candles in windows are out; nine-branched candelabras are in; seven-branched candelabras depend heavily on context. Greenery is dubious,* especially triangular shapes, and circles are questionable, but any medium which can reasonably be shaped into a four-sided top is cool. Blue lights are fine; clear lights are fine unless they look too much like the ones the neighbors have strung around their creche scene; multicolored lights are Right Out. Also, lighted reindeer forms are frowned upon; my search for a lighted elephant form (preferably stepping on a lighted Eleazar Maccabee) has so far been in vain, but I like to think that would be OK."

I don’t think the solution to the December dilemna is to stick a huge menorah up next to the Christmas tree in the middle of the park.  When you do that, Hanukah is always going to seem like an afterthought, a sop toward political correctness.  And Hanukah is a third-tier Jewish holiday in any case.  I’d be a lot happier if school districts were less careful to include "I have a little dreidl" in their Christmas Winter concerts, and more careful to give teachers a list of the dates of major Jewish holidays with a letter saying "please don’t schedule major exams or projects for these days."  And, like Tiny Coconut, I’d like to see more floating holidays so non-Christians don’t have to choose between observing their holidays and having a vacation.

NaomiChana goes on to argue:

"You want a real dilemma involving Judaism and American culture? Try "whether or not to run errands on Shabbat."….These dilemmas run up against Jewish fundamentals. What you tell your kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall is probably not that kind of dilemma."

Ok, ok, point well taken.  But what do I tell my kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall?  D attends a Jewish preschool, so December isn’t all Santa all the time, but he watches enough television that he’s definitely got the concept.  He knows that we don’t celebrate Christmas, but that his paternal grandparents do.  And when we’re with them on December 25, they hang stockings for all of us.  We’re not seeing them this Christmas, having schelpped out to Portland for Thanksgiving.  I’m not quite sure whether D is expecting us to hang stockings without them.  And I don’t know if we should, whether or not he’s expecting it.  (Even without the excuse of non-Jewish grandparents, my family did do Christmas stockings when I was little; I’d guess my parents gave it up when I was 9 or 10.)

* It’s ignorant not to know that not everyone celebrates Christmas, but it’s stupid to persist in that belief when confronted by a real live person telling you that she doesn’t.

I’m totally blown away by the holiday cards that Andrea is making.  I love the idea of doing crafty stuff like that, but the reality is that I usually wind up spending a bunch of money on supplies and then finding that it’s not nearly as easy as it looks to make something that looks halfway decent.  And if I tried it with the boys around, I’m sure I’d wind up finding embossing powder in unexpected crevices until June.

I started making a photobook of the boys last week, but then I discovered that I was only up to July in my selecting/editing of my digital photos.  I like the photos I get by taking dozens of shots and throwing out most of them, but I always underestimate the time involved in staying on top of them.  It’s just so easy (and cheap) to take 30 pictures in a matter of minutes.

D got the idea that he wanted to decorate picture frames for some of his relatives (with pictures of himself in them, of course).  We got some wooden frames from Michael’s, but his idea of decorating them is to make three swipes with the paintbrush and then say "I’m done."  It’s taking enormous willpower for me not to impose my standards on him.

The one project that I did complete is the scarf I knitted for D.  I started it at the end of last winter, then abandoned it when the weather got warm.  It’s about as basic as you can get — moss stitch, cheap acrylic yarn.  I like it because I don’t have to count stitches or remember what row I’m supposed to be in.  It’s not exactly a work of art, but D said "it’s beautiful."

The nominees for the Weblog Awards are up (and they’ve also fixed the flash problems that were stopping people from actually voting).

Some of my favorite bloggers have been nominated:

• Geeky Mom, for Best Parenting Blog.  Interestingly, although I feel like read zillions of parenting blogs, I haven’t heard of half of the nominees.
• Bitch, PhD and Feministe for Best Liberal Blog.  (What a dilemma!)
• Pandagon for Best Group Blog
• Talking Points Memo for Best Blog
• Trish Wilson (the Countess), for Best New Blog.

The Weblog awards have a reputation for being slanted toward conservatives (one of the reasons the Koufax awards were started.) So far, that doesn’t seem to be so much the case this year.  Yellow Dog Blog is one of the leading vote getters among Best New Blog, and Kos is leading Best Blog.

Vote early — vote often.  (Seriously, you can vote once every 24 hours per computer, until December 15.)

In a comment last week, Jen wrote:

"There are so many things you can do to fight the domestic glass ceiling beyond requiring all other women to share your life choices!… Like not judging your women friends when their houses are filthy, or at least vowing that we won’t teach our daughters this female-specific shame."

Amanda at Pandagon and Hugo Schwyzer also wrote about how women are judged for the state of their house(hold)s in a way that men aren’t.  I had a "click" moment reading these posts — for all the time that I spend thinking and reading about feminism, it hadn’t really registered on me that society really doesn’t judge men for having a dirty house.

A personal story to illustrate: When my parents came to visit after D was born, my mom noticed that our stove top was absolutely filthy.  I had been exhausted and sick for much of the last trimester of my pregnancy, and am not sure I could have reached the back of the stove even if I had had the energy to try to clean it. T had been picking up much of the domestic slack (on top of his paid job), but cleaning the burners wasn’t even on his mental list.  So without saying a word, my mom found a scouring pad and started scrubbing away.  I was simultaneously grateful and absolutely mortified.  T wasn’t in the least embarassed.

It’s important to remember that one of the main "weapons" in the drive to push women out of paid employment following World War II was rising domestic standards.  All those wonderful labor-saving devices wound up saving much less labor, because expectations for cleanliness rose.  When you had to boil water and wash clothes by hand, people got a clean pair of pants every Sunday. With the invention of automatic washers, people started expecting to have clean pants every day.

Perhaps the problem with hiring housecleaners isn’t that there’s something immoral about expecting someone else to clean up after you (as some have suggested), but that it helps perpetuate the expectation that houses should be kept at a level of cleanliness that’s possible only if it’s a significant part of someone’s job to maintain it.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but I think unreasonably high standards contribute to social isolation.  I know an awful lot of people who never have anyone over, because they don’t think they can do so without cleaning their house until it looks like something out of Home Beautiful.    And that’s a real shame. 

Yes, I caught the boys’ bug.  Ugh.  I’m about 80% better, at the stage where I’m starting to be hungry, but still nervous about eating real food.

Today’s book is Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis.  Imagine the women from Reading L.lita In Tehran, drinking tea and discussing sex — the advantages of being a mistress over being a wife, nose jobs, arranged v. love marriages, faking virginity.  It’s a short book, maybe 150 pages, with only a few sentences on each page, so it’s a quick read.  It mostly succeeds because Western readers don’t think of Iranian women as having conversations that sound like something out of Sex and the City. And then it catches you again because just when you’ve accepted that their lives aren’t that different from ours, Satrapi changes gears and throws in a casual references to "embroideries" or re-virginization surgery.

Satrapi’s books are generally classified as graphic novels, but I think they’re really closer to picture books — the images illustrate the story, but don’t advance it.  And I think she’s cheating a bit by dressing all the characters in black, even though the story appears to be set before the Revolution in Iran.  (One of the most memorable images of Persepolis is when all of Marji’s classmates are suddenly dressed identically.)  For a book about women, ironically, the picture from this book that resonates the most for me is the look of perplexity on Marji’s grandfather’s face when he comes out from his room and her grandmother shoos him away.

To give you an idea of the kind of day I’ve had, I’ll let you know some of the things I’m grateful for tonight:

• That after N woke me up early this morning because he was covered in diarrhea, when I cleaned him up, he said "back sleep now" and so we both did.
• That our friend invited D over for a playdate this afternoon, so I was able to go grocery shopping while T took N to the urgent care clinic for the horrendous swelling of his genitals that followed (and not the fun kind — he’s 2).
• That another friend went to the grocery store with me so I had company waiting on the huge lines that occur in the DC area whenever a flurry is forecast.
• That when D started puking this evening, he recognized it in time to make it to the bathroom.
• That we had already decided to pass on the party we were invited to this evening, so we didn’t waste the cost of a babysitter.
• That we have a gas stove, so I was able to cook dinner even though half our kitchen lost power.
• That whatever caused us to lose electricity to half of our kitchen this evening corrected itself when we finally decided to unplug the refrigerator and plugged it in on a different circuit.  (And yes, we tried flipping the circuit breaker about a dozen times before this.  Suggestions for long-term solutions are welcome.)

Good night.

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.

I see that Bitch PhD thought much more highly of the Hirshman article than I did. 

In particular, she picked up on Hirshman’s statement that:

"The answer I discovered — an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face — is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home."

I think it’s an overstatement to say that "private lives have hardly budged" — even setting aside the relatively small number of reverse traditional families, most people would agree that fathers today (at least those who are married to their children’s mother) are more involved with their kids’ lives than in our parents’ generation.  But certainly domestic tasks are far from equally divided.

I think Hirshman is totally off-base in thinking that increasing women’s earnings will automatically lead to men doing more housework.  Already, about 1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands, but it doesn’t seem to have set off any huge changes in the division of domestic labor.  I’ve written before about stay-at-home dads and housework, and argued that "two basic cultural assumptions — that housework is the responsibility of the SAH parent, and that housework is the women’s responsibility — conflict.  So there’s no default position about who does what, and everything is up for negotiation." 

I don’t remember the source right now, but I’m sure I’ve read something that said that the graph of the relationship between the share of family income brought in by women and the amount of the housework they do is u-shaped — men who bring in a very small share of the income do less housework than men who bring in about half.  My guess would be that some low-earning or unemployed men feel that their masculinity is threatened by their low earnings and therefore are more resistant to doing traditionally female tasks.  (I have a hold at the library for a new book called Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money; I’ll be interested in their take on this issue.)   

Bitch offers the following advice: "be willing to be a bitch about housework."  In particular, she suggests:

"My advice is, go ahead and do what needs to be done. But let him know what you are doing every goddamn step of the way, and let him know that it pisses you off. "I’ve just gotten home from work, it’s nice to see you’re home earlier than I am. Before I take off my coat, I’ll put your shoes away for you, shall I? Oh, and I’ll pick up your coat from the floor and hang it up. Okay, now I can take off my own coat and hang it up right away, instead of dropping it on the floor for someone else to pick up later. I see there’s no dinner started, I’ll just get on that shall I? First, though, I’ll clear the mail off the dining room table where you seem to have dropped it when you walked in the door. I’ll file it over here where it belongs. Ok, now I’m going to go into the kitchen to get a sponge to wipe off the table, which I see hasn’t been wiped since breakfast–I guess you didn’t have a chance to do that yet, since you had to sit down and read the paper first, right? Wow, now that I’m in the kitchen, I see that before I can start dinner I have to load the dishwasher, but before I can do that I have to unload it…."

Oh my god would that drive me insane.  Either as the person doing it, or as the target of it.  I’d rather live in squalor — or by myself — than have that kind of running monologue. I might win the battle over the chores, but I can’t imagine my relationship surviving it.  As I’ve written before, I’d rather pick up T’s socks than sulk about them all day.  (Although, honor requires me to note that T’s gotten much better about moving them to the hamper since he read that post.)

Yes, I want the house to be clean enough that I’m not embarassed to have people over.  But I don’t want to live like a perpetual houseguest either, afraid that if I leave something out for five minutes someone’s going to resentfully start cleaning up after me.   And I don’t think it’s fair to expect my partner to clean on my schedule or to do it exactly the way I would.

I honestly don’t know what’s going to break through the domestic glass ceiling.  I used to think that it just was going to take time, that of course the younger generation would adopt a more equitable distribution of labor.  I don’t see that happening.  But I do think these conversations — these virtual consciousness raising sessions — contribute to the change.

I read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty last week (yes, the boys were good enough that I was able to read on the airplane), and enjoyed it, but don’t have a whole lot to say about it.  As with her debut novel, White Teeth, I think Smith is better at creating characters than building a plot, but the characters are interesting enough that I’m willing to go along for the ride.   I’ve never read Howard’s End, which it riffs off of, so I probably missed some of her cleverness.  (I’m sure I saw the movie, but can’t remember any of the plot.)  In general, I think it’s hard to write a really good novel about academics.  Wonder Boys was disappointing and Moo was clever but nothing more.

The NY Times published its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, so I thought I’d report on the ones I’ve read:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling  A great improvement over the last one in the series.  I’m glad I just read it though, rather than making the huge time investment in reading it out loud with T.
• The March, EL Doctorow.  I’m in the middle of this, and liking it very much.  Not to be confused with March, by Geraldine Brooks, which is also set in the Civil War.
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I really didn’t get why this one got such good reviews.  I just didn’t care about any of the characters, or what happened to them.  I actually didn’t finish the book, just skimmed the last chapter to see what the big surprise was.  If any of you read it and liked it, I’d love to hear why.
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith.  See above.
• Saturday, by Ian McEwan.  This one pulled me in neither by force of plot nor by likable characters, but by sheer brilliance of language.  McEwan captures individual moments absolutely perfectly, and also tips his hat to Mrs. Dalloway.
• Shalimar the Clown, by Salmon Rushdie.  I don’t know if this one should make my list, since I only read about 10 pages of it before realizing that there was absolutely zero chance of my finishing it before it was due back to the library, so I stopped.  Midnight’s Children is the only Rushdie book that I’ve really liked, but I liked it so much that I keep giving him more chances.
• COLLAPSE, by Jared Diamond.  Another one that I started but didn’t get very far into.
• Freakonomics, by Leavitt and Dubner.  Some interesting ideas, but if you’ve read an article about it, you’ve heard most of them.

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.