Jessica over at Feministing is a little perturbed over a New York Times article, sprinkled with the usual from the “opt-out-revolution” claim. The claim that women only go to the Ivy League schools, earn MBAs and doctorates, for the sole purpose of snagging a guy with the same degrees, so they can have the option of working only part-time or not at all, because naturally all of them will have children (and they’ll be the ones to stay at home with the kids, not the Dads). To quote Lisa Belkin as Jessica did to emphasize her point in her criticism: “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.” Riiight. All women think alike and just want to stay at home, and raise kiddies, right? Now obviously there are women who would rather stay at home with their children instead of working outside of the home full-time and *do so*, and it’s their choice. I have no problem with that. But the assumption according to these “opt-out-revolution” articles and books, that all women ‘naturally’ want to work only part-time or not at all in order to be with their children, and that’s the only reason why they go to college–to snag some guy who will earn an MBA and “bring home” fat checks–is just your usual backlash crap against women (with children) working outside of the home.
Also, the article doesn’t mention the women who don’t have the financial means to even have this choice available to them. The article only focuses on privileged, “Ivy-League-ish” women. That’s another annoying point. But I’ll let the article and Jessica take it from here. (Citations from the article will be in italics and Jessica’s words are in regular text)
[…]Belkin wrote about all the high-class ladies with MBAs and such “opting out” of work to stay home with the kiddies. Today, Louise Story writes the same about women at “elite” colleges:
At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.
There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.
Yawn. Sounds exactly like Belkin’s cringe-worthy quote: “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”
Another similarity between the two pieces is that both authors gloss over the fact that most American women don’t have the financial capability to make that kind of choice…even if they want to. Story only mentions this once:
It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.
Another thing that really pisses me off is the assumption that privileged women are somehow more worthy of examination.
[…]Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.
“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,'” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30’s now.”
Am I really supposed to be shocked that some guy “approved” of having a wife who stayed at home? (emphasis mine)
Do you really need that answered?
[…]Now, clearly I believe feminism is about choices, and that the work women do at home is just as important as work in the paid economy. (But somehow I don’t think that’s what this guy meant by his “sexy” comment.) But shouldn’t we be focusing on the women who don’t have the ability to make choices about their child care?
We should. But apparently pro-“opt-out-revolution” authors have a fetish for only examining the lives of privileged women, and assuming that all women are in the same situation, will make the same choices, because those “choices” will be available to them. And what’s with this other assumption that if *she* earns a MBA from some elite university and so does *he*, then *she* will automatically choose to stay-at-home with the children while *he* works outside of the home, all because they’ll presumably have the financial resources to make this possible?
And Echidne of the Snakes has some two-cents on this article.
[…]I can almost hear the gently purring threat there: We should weed out those applicants who plan to take any time off during their working lives, because they are going to waste the education and our investments in it. Because this would be hard to do based on what naive eighteen-year old students say, let’s just use sex as a proxy and weed out most women.
This is an argument that was once used to set maximum quotas on women in medical schools. It was believed that the expensive training, federally subsidized to boot, should be only available for a few women because allowing women to enter freely would fritter away the expensive education on people who will never wield the scalpel. Similar arguments are brought out all the time to “explain” why there are so few women in whatever area of the society you might look at.[…]
But I find it annoying how these stories are written, the woman deciding on her very own or at most thinking about her mother’s role in the family and wondering if she should replicate it or not. The writer could have mentioned how the media has been full of articles and books discouraging women by writing about the horrible difficulties of combining career and family (but only for women) and of articles and books about the solution of opting out (but only for women). The writer could have mentioned how the maternity leave is still about three months long and how very few companies allow highly educated people to work less than eighty hours a week. Or stressed a little more the 24/7 upbringing of girls into the care-giving role in this country and the almost total lack of societal support for this.
And for example, from the article…
“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.
Now back to Echidne…
But it is more fun to just make up a story and go and interview some people (mostly those who are not planning to work full-time) and then to suggest that this is a really severe problem for the elite colleges, one having its roots in the young women themselves.[…]
Sigh. The backlash crap never ends, does it? I wonder when I go in for my first interview in whatever career I choose by then–years from now–will my possible/future employer really pay attention at all to the interview, or will they be too distracted in thinking, “So when will she get pregnant and leave,” most of the time.
What the hell is the point in getting an expensive education from one of the world’s best colleges if you’re just gonna give it all up to stay at home?!
Jessica’s comments are spot on. My own, similar reactions are here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002090.html
On the positive side, these young women are already giving some thought to the work/life family balance. I never really gave it much thought until I was pregnant with my first child, but I was really glad to have some choices to work with. My mom had to quit her job as a pharmacist when she was pregnant with me and didn’t really have the option of returning to work afterwards because there was only one pharmacy for miles and they had already hired her (male) replacement.
On the negative side, they seem to be continuing the whole self-centered focus of a certain segment of the baby boom generation – “If I do xxx, the results are automatically superior because I’m the one doing it,” where xxx is childrearing – combined with an almost fatalistic “There’s no point in fighting the system.”
The guys’ reactions were what I found the most scary. Why weren’t some of them piping up with, “No, I want to be the one to stay home!” Why aren’t both young women and young men saying they want more flexible work options than one parent staying home for five years?
My main hope after reading these pieces is that these college students will rethink their positions once they’re in the workplace and have exposure to colleagues who have different work arrangements than the ones they grew up with. My fear is that they will end up like the young(er) moms I encountered when my kids had swimming lessons at my parents’ health club this summer. The moms who were about my age had their laptops with them and were writing briefs or memos or otherwise doing renumerative work, but the younger moms were sitting around complaining about how they could hardly WAIT until their kids were FINALLY old enough to be in school full time, how bored out of their skulls they were being at home with their kids, and how jealous of their husbands they were. I should have said to them that they DID have choices – they could form a co-op to share childcare, they could jobshare, they could even volunteer – if they were unhappy in their traditional roles, then they could DO something about it. But I didn’t, and now I wonder what their reactions would have been if I had.
As my Dad put it so gently when I left for college, “I’m paying for your education, not a husband.”
Well, poor women, working or otherwise, shouldn’t breed. They should be kept on hand to clean house and care for the children of rich women. Case closed on that. [rolleyes] (Despite feminist-bashers like Whatsername Flannigan, one of the resident Righties in *Harper’s* magazine, I never assume that so-called stay-at-home rich moms spend all their time literally at home scrubbing and cooking– Does anyone other than a feminist-bashing Rightie assume this ?)
Oh, and I guess that middle-class women should be available as nurses, teachers, and what not. But they shouldn’t breed, either. It’s too much of a distraction and besides, we don’t want to offend corporate/male America –and their wholly-0wned subsidiaries, the House and Senate– with so much as a hint that they might actually want to accommodate working women with kids. That would be rude. Obviously we should all just continue to make our choices as if they were strictly individual and waste lots of time glaring and sniping at other women who’ve made different choices. That’s how it’s always worked, right ?
Cho—because they’re fucking rich and don’t give a damn about the expense. Or, they think of it as an investment—pay money, go to school, get a husband with good job prospects. A “MRS” degree.
Fucking stupid.
I recall this communications class I had to take; we were doing impromptu speechlets about what we wanted in a future spouse. This guy in my class—he’s probably a troll in his online hours—came up just before I did and delivered all this conservative bullshit, she had to be his religion, she had to defer to his authority, she had to be willing to be a stay-at-home mom. I wanted to loudly remind him that the topic was supposed to be what we want in a future spouse, not a future slave. I went up afterwards and delivered my speech on wanting someone who would respect my faith, let our children choose their own faiths, share work, housework, & childcare equally with me, be a completely equal partner and not some control freak—trollboy looked upset at this point—and so forth.
Cho & Kyra:
Do we really value parenting & women’s choices, if the choice to stay home w/kids is seen as throwing away an education? Would you say that someone who gets an English degree and then goes to Wall Street is throwing away the value of their education since they aren’t continuing to study English? Is a liberal arts degree only worth something if you follow an approved career path?
I’m considering whether to stay home or not when I have my first kid – there are lots of pros and cons re: whether I stay home or not & whether my husband stays home or not, but one factor IS the expense of child care and the fact that his work pays more than mine in a traditionally female field. Let’s focus on fixing those issues and fixing the disparities in choices for rich and poor women instead of bashing some women’s choices .
I have to wonder if part of this gleeful reporting on how a few Yalies aspire to their MRS degrees has to do with a subtle implication that what scarce jobs we have belong to men? The economy is still shaky, good jobs which pay well and have benefits are fewer and fewer. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of this “Stay-home moms are sexy!” headline trumpeting has to do with reducing the potential competition for such jobs. Resentment against working women, immigrants “taking American jobs”, affirmative action and so on seems to go hand in hand with a poor economy. White men start to want to keep those precious jobs for themselves. And so we get the Minutemen vigilantes as well as National-Enquirer-level “journalism” such as this.
Most people know that Rosie the Riveter was sent packing after WWII because men “needed” her job. Sian Rees in her “The Floating Brothel” documents how working-class women in Georgian England lost their jobs at the end of the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars, when they were booted from shops and laboring to make room for returning men, who “needed” the jobs more than the women. (As well, the concept of retirement was created in the 20th century to get the oldsters out of the way so that young people could find work.)
It’s now illegal to blatantly throw women and minorities out of work, but subtle pressure to make room for the men remains.
thanks for the link! i just don’t understand why we’re not talking about the insane child care problem most American women have. it’s all well and good for the folks who have enough money to make choices about staying at home/working/having a nanny, whatever. but the fact that so many women are paying half their frigging salary for child care is what really needs to be addressed.
I have a real problem with this whole idea that if you’re not going out and getting a high-powered job after graduation, you’ve wasted your education. The value of an education is not where it gets you (although the ability to get a great job is certainly a perk), but rather the knowledge you gain, and even more so, the ability to think critically, creatively and with an open mind. I will graduate from Yale in the spring, and even if I somehow drop off the face of the earth (which is what this article seems to imply that women who stay home with with their children have done), these last four years will not have been a waste.
I’m also upset about the alternately alarmist and condescending tone of the article. So what if some women want to stay home with their kids? Focusing on one’s family is every bit as valid a choice as focusing on a career – there’s a big difference between being forced into a traditional role and choosing it. The author skimmed over the important issues (the lack of social support for women with both a career and a family, the continuing assumption that it’s up to women to stay home and be the caretakers – why didn’t they interview a single male student who wants to be a stay-at-home dad? There may not be many, but they certainly exist!) and instead chose to reinforce the same awful biases women have been fighting forever.
Staying at home and raising one’s children is not an invalid option for EITHER spouse regardless of an education. However, articles like these aren’t trying to say: parenthood is valuable, they’re trying to say that it’s not valuable to educate women. The two are not the same.
Cho & Kyra – speaking from the point-of-view of someone who went to a high-powered school, got my degree and is now a SAHM. That is not a wasted degree. I use it every damn day. Even as a SAHM my life is more than scrubbing floors and changing diapers. I’d go stark raving mad if it weren’t. Then there’s always the minor point that staying home now doesn’t mean that staying home is what I will always do. My youngest started a part-time pre-school a few weeks ago, and that valuable 12 hours a week is getting used. By the time he’s in school full-time, I anticipate working (at home) most of that time.
To say that being a full-time mom is necessarily a waste of a high-end education is simply wrong. It’s a waste if women are forced into making choices that they don’t want and shouldn’t have to make. A waste of the women – not necessarily the education.
I’m still waiting for the article that actually interviews college age men. I am the pre-law advisor in a not-elite large public university. Of the hundreds of students I see — all above average students hoping to be on their way to law school — a substantial minority ask questions about work/family balance. And that substantial minority who is concerned abotu these issues are (surprise!) pretty evenly split between men and women. They are all concerned about how the debt and the expected hours will impact their ability to have a family and actually spend time with that family.
I find this a heartening trend, in particular the gender neutral quality of it.
After reading the coverage of Story’s non-story at various blogs, adn the comments, I can tell you that I do not want to be one of these women.
I attempted a professional career in an academic field where the number of Ph.Ds vastly exceeds the number of available professorships, let alone tenure. Despite publishing good academic work, I could not find a position, after several years of looking. I have been doing part-time (office and library, but non-academic) work. I have also been writing and publishing more academic work (living near a city with major libraries). I am trying to get another book out, having recently finished the manuscript.
I have lived with parents for this time, and do the cooking and housework. They both work. They say I am the “wife.” I like cooking but I would go out of my f – – -ing mind if I had to do this in perpetuity. I want a job, and am looking to change careers. I want to work, and feel guilty about not working full-time, except that I am frightened that after this hiatus I will not be able to find good full-time work.
I can see perfectly well why so many 1950s and 1960s housewives went mad, committed adultery, or became addicted to Valium. I remember Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
I don’t particularly like children, or want them. I’m not even attracted to men, but that’s another story.
The last-ditch solution of courting a prospective husband, agreeing to bear and rear his children, and keeping house for the rest of my life feels like cowardice and slavery. I live in a neighborhood with many Catholic SAHMs (of the demographic envisioned in the Story article, though I doubt they went to Yale) and that’s driving me crazy, too.
Sorry to have been so confessional, but one who has had a taste of both a professional career and the homemaker lifestyle (temporary, and without the children) looks differently on the latter.
Reflecting on my experience, in college and presently, I think that Story’s non-story reflects undergraduate rebellion and fantasy.
These undergraduate women (may I call them girls?) have been told all their lives that they should be the next Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court justice, Nobel Prize winner in physics. It’s over the top, and even at Yale, it bears little resemblance to reality.
They adopt a passive rebellion: reading bridal magazines and watching Desperate Housewives. (Whether anyone who watches Desperate Housewives really wants to be these women, I doubt, except as a snarky, cynical form of rebellion.) Other forms of anti-feminist revolt include sexy, NSFW clothes, and dieting.
That the undergrad guy in the article thinks that women who want to be SAHMs are “sexy” tells you everything. It’s as content-free as could be, and the undergrads have not imagined for a moment what it really would be like to be immured in the house all day with two children under five, to undergo the chronic financial anxiety of family life on a single income.
Sorry if I’ve made the undergrads sound like twits. The people who really bear the blame are the marketers, editors and right-wing pundits who encourage and create the “opt-out” revolution.
Focusing on one’s family is every bit as valid a choice as focusing on a career
Because the two are mutually exclusive in women?
Or that you must do one or the other? I’m neither a mother nor dedicated to a career (oversupply of Ph.D.s in my field led to the latter). I hate it when those two are presented as the only choices (for women only, mind you) we have.
It’s not really much of a choice. I’ve noticed that these “opt out” articles always admit that it’s the women who will raise the children, leaving the man to do the “important things”. In a similar vein, those articles about the wage gap being primarily about moms who either leave the work force or work part time so they can raise their children always admit that it’s the moms who are raising the children. Every one of these articles says that. However, when a divorce is on the horizon, all of a sudden her status as primary caregiver that was touted so much in those “opt out” and “wage gap” articles become negligible. For the sake of “equality”, men must be given some sort of custody, like “shared parenting”, even thought they did not do the bulk of the childrearing. In divorce and custody cases, those elite moms who “opted out” find that all the work they’ve done being the primary caregiver of their children goes right out the window. Those articles don’t mention that moms who stay home do so for the convenience of the men they marry. If they divorce, his “rights” are more important than the childrearing work those women had done.
cringe-worthy quote: “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”
I would love to run the world. In my fantasy, I would offer my work to the society and have my say in the affairs of state from my front porch while my children played at my feet and homemade chicken vegetable soup simmered on the stove. The problem is that parents have been forced to choose between doing remunerative work and being with their kids. If I were working full time as a nurse-midwife, I could afford to put my son in day care. But I don’t want to. I want to be with my kids and homeschool. I have the audacity to think that I should be able to do both. But forced to choose, I chose the kids.
I am in the unique position of having a part-time job where I can bring my children with me when I work on-site. Lots of women would give anything for an opportunity to do that, and I am thankful for it. Still, it’s not a job that “uses” the multiple degrees I have behind my name. I am making a significant financial sacrifice by choosing to be a full-time mom.
One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’
My husband would have a perpetual stiffie if I starting bringing in the kind of money I was making back when I worked in the OB-GYN’s office. He would be thrilled if I put the six-year-old in school, put the three-year-old in day care, and got that job back. But he respects my desire to be with them. I really think that doing prenatal care would be a fabulous work-from-home business if the city of Lynwood didn’t forbid me from seeing patients in my home.
The working world wants to have everything on its own terms. They don’t want to make any concessions for, or think about, anything that resembles a life outside of work. So parents are expected to make an all-or-nothing choice.
My husband and I divvy up the childcare about 50/50. When she was a baby, I was unemployed/ stay at home (coincidence). I always say I found my dream freelancing job because I refused a cubicle job to be with my baby.
That said, I always get a little sad when educated professional women leave the workforce permanently. I think if we are really, really honest, we can admit that a lot of training and expertise is lost when women “opt out” permanently. What I don’t get is why this is a zero-sum game for so many people- some people seem to think that the natural desire to be with babies and small kids to protect and raise them means you have to give up all possibiility of work and pay and fulfillment away from your kids forever. I think the home-school movement is a part of this- they made what they see as a defiant choice to stay at home and when the sort of sad truth sinks in that our kids need us less and less as they grow and change, they decide to homeschool, because they are stay at home moms, dammit!A lot of times, homeschooling seems to be more for the moms, less for the kids- it’s part of this whole mommy wars attitude that prevails.
A belief in autodidacticism is not about Mom, it’s about the kids. It’s very true that my kids will need me much less as they get older. But I believe that the freedom to choose their own paths in their education will continue to be the best thing for them. That’s what homeschooling is about to me.
I probably shouldn’t take the comment too personally. It just reminded me of people who say that women who choose home birth are doing so in order to create a Hallmark moment for themselves, rather than thinking about what’s best for the baby.
Somebody posted this link over at Pandagon. Apparently, the views of some of the women were misrepresented in the article, and the views of other women that did not support Story’s thesis were not included at all:
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/on/a_note_on_sources_or_the_story_behind_the_story_26204.asp
Those articles don’t mention that moms who stay home do so for the convenience of the men they marry
And speaking as the breadwinner of the family (my husband is a SAH dad), it is an enormous convenience to have a full-time spouse at home. The only time I ever need to worry about childcare is if my husband is ill on a weekday. I never have to worry about parent-teacher conferences, checking homework, making dentist appointments, cooking dinner, or stocking groceries.
Which is not to say that I am uninvolved in my family’s life; I am. But I am freed up to concentrate on my job when I’m at work, because somebody else is primarily responsible for managing the childcare and the household.
As for a second salary, let’s be honest–when one parent is the primary breadwinner, the “second income” takes a back seat. Who do you think takes time off work for a sick kid or to pick up the kids from school on a half-day? Not the person with the Power Job. My husband’s ability to make money is limited by the fact that he has to work around my job.
What Mythago said. My husband and I are currently wrestling over who gets to cut back to part-time; his paycheck is bigger and he gets more leave time but his job is less stable, my job has better health benefits and a more reliable schedule. Unless the kids are really ill, he’s the one who stays home with them and takes them to the doctor, but I’m the one who picks them up from school on a half-day or in case of inclement weather. I think if we could be confident that re-entry would be fairly easy, we would just take turns, but as things stand now, whoever goes to part-time is likely to be in that track for many years to come.
Also, I agree with Jessica on the childcare issue. A two-worker family (or a single-parent family) exists best with affordable, reliable, trustworthy, available daycare, and too many couples have to put up with a situation that is only 75% or 50% satisfactory in order to make ends meet.
Antigone, you are so right about the POV of articles like this on the value of educating women (although I read it more as, no point in letting women have an Ivy League education). “Let them fill up the community colleges and be teachers or secretaries until the babies come!” is the subtext, only it’s a lot less blatant than in the immediate postwar years, when many magazines touted the successful MRS-hunters.
I was wandering around the web is search of research for an English essay when I found this page. I thought I’d express my views on this issue…
I believe both men and woman are able to stay home and take care of children. My mother was and is a stay at home mom, and often misses her chance to finish college but is also thankful that me and my siblings always had her around. Now she is trying to get back in the workforce; which is NO easy matter.
I have an uncle who always stayed home with his daughter while his wife worked. Things did not work out, and as of now they are getting a divorce. The judge decided to give most of the parentship to the mother, even though the father was the one who cared most for the child during her life. I feel this judge was biased ih his/her desicion because of my uncle’s gender.
This biased..needs to stop. But I can’t truly complain because I might just be feeding the problem.