{"id":1852,"date":"2005-09-21T04:00:17","date_gmt":"2005-09-21T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/09\/20\/a-little-critical-of-an-opt-out-revolution-article\/"},"modified":"2005-09-21T04:00:17","modified_gmt":"2005-09-21T11:00:17","slug":"a-little-critical-of-an-opt-out-revolution-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1852","title":{"rendered":"A little critical of an "opt-out-revolution" article"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica over at Feministing<\/strong><\/a> is a little perturbed over a New York Times article, sprinkled with the usual<\/em> from the “opt-out-revolution” claim.<\/strong><\/a> 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<\/em>.” 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<\/strong> problem with that. But the assumption according to these “opt-out-revolution” articles and books, that all<\/strong> women ‘naturally’ want to work only part-time or not at all in order to be with their children, and that’s the only<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

[…]Belkin wrote about all the high-class ladies with MBAs and such “opting out”\u009d of work to stay home with the kiddies. Today, Louise Story writes the same about women at “elite”\u009d colleges:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.”\u009d <\/strong><\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Another thing that really pisses me off is the assumption that privileged women are somehow more worthy of examination.<\/p>\n

[…]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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“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.’ <\/strong>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.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Am I really supposed to be shocked that some guy “approved” of having a wife who stayed at home? (emphasis mine) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do you really need that answered?<\/p>\n

[…]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”\u009d comment.) But shouldn’t we be focusing on the women who don’t have the ability to make choices about their child care?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

And Echidne of the Snakes<\/strong><\/a> has some two-cents on this article.<\/p>\n

[…]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.<\/p>\n

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.[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And for example, from the article…<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now back to Echidne…<\/p>\n

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.[…]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,116,31,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-feminists-and-their-pals","category-families-structures-divorce-etc","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-gender-and-the-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}