The working mother

Well, it looks like it's that time again, when people on the teevee gather to decide what makes someone a feminist. The decisive trait du jour is something near and dear to my heart: working mothers.

I've been watching this discussion from the sidelines since it was brought to the fore by Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in the Atlantic, about how women can't have it all. This same thesis is essentially being re-hashed in a more recent article for New York magazine called The Feminist Housewife, which is being billed as an antidote to Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, which urges women to be more assertive in the workplace. 

I may be particularly prone to feeling persecuted in this debate, as a working mother myself, and as the child of an incredibly successful working mother. So I'll state that outright as a caveat. But the takeaway from this debate seems to be "Working mother bad! Working mother selfish!" While working mothers are given voice in the debate, they're on the defensive. 

There are two major problems with the current debate. First, it's spurred on almost entirely on anecdotal evidence, and that anecdotal evidence happens to be especially terrible. Second, the debate is actually entirely fake anyway, and ignores the major reasons why most mothers work in the first place. I'll start with the older Atlantic piece by Ann-Marie Slaughter, since it's what brought this issue (back) to the fore in the last year. 

Essentially, the central thesis of the famous Atlantic piece is: "I, Ann-Marie Slaughter, found it really difficult to work in a top position at the state department with two teenage sons while they were living some 300 miles from where I actually had to work. Therefore, being a very successful woman with a demanding job and also a mother is virtually impossible." Read: I found my incredibly idiosyncratic situation stressful and difficult, so it must be that any situation that is even superficially similar (in other words, involving a human female who works outside the home and has reproduced), is also stressful and difficult to the point of being impossible. 

And this anecdotal evidence is awful. Slaughter's central argument from the piece:

The minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be.

Sounds reasonable. Except the "typical for the vast majority" part. Slaughter was working for the state department, based in Washington, while basing her family in Trenton, NJ. That's about a three hour commute each way, and that's being generous about Amtrak's efficiency. Slaughter explains that she commuted on Mondays and returned home on Fridays. For two years. To be entirely away from your family for five days a week some 50 or so weeks of the year is not "typical" by any stretch of the imagination. Elsewhere in the article she contrasts herself with a colleague who moved her family to Washington, only to have her husband commute to California. And she had a much easier time, and begged Slaughter not to write that it was impossible! No mention of how her husband felt about the 6-7 hour commute by plane, however.

Although I would still say it's terribly argued, Slaughter's point is actually very subtle, compared to the fanfare it got as a treatise about how women can't work and have a family simultaneously. One can't work at the state department and be home by 5:30 for dinner. Institutions in Washington need to be more flexible about people with families. And this is important, especially since Washington is a major locus of power in the United States. But an argument against working mothers generally - this falls far short of that. Even so, Slaughter specifically dismisses this notion, asserting that anyone who says they wouldn't generalise from her experience is "condescending". The piece would have been far more powerful if it focused on how power is distributed in Washington specifically, and how issues of family affect this. Instead, it was titled "Why women still can't have it all," full stop.

The newest iteration of this, and a far, far more annoying one at that, is Lisa Miller's article The Feminist Housewife.

Miller interviewed three whole women for the piece (two of whom, by the way, have since said they felt that Miller misrepresented them and their views). I could comment on almost every sentence in Miller's article and tear it apart, but I'll try to focus on a few things. The first thing that jumps out is the most garbage argument I've ever heard for why women should stay home:

Girls play with dolls from childhood, so 'women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox.' Women, [Kelly, one of the women profiled] believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums.

First of all, the notion that playing with dolls somehow prepares you to raise children successfully is a fucking joke, and is insulting to boot . Raising children is unrealted to playing with dolls aside from the likely number of heads and limbs per torso. Playing with dolls prepares you to raise children like playing with toy trucks prepares you to be a long-haul ice-road trucker: it doesn't.

The second part is less incendiary, but includes a key phrase: Women are conditioned to be more patient with children. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this (despite having several bits of anectdotal evidence to the contrary), but where I break from Miller (and possibly Kelly, depending on how drastically Miller twisted her words), is what we might do with this "fact". To her, somehow, the logical conclusion is that women should care for all the children. To me, the logical conclusion is that we should try to spread some of that sweet, sweet conditioning around to men so we can distribute this responsibility more evenly.

Miller seems to be trying to create a piece where she defends the choice of women who stay home (against who, I'm still not sure - my best guess from reading it is Betty Friedan? A powerful straw woman). Perhaps worthwhile pursuit, but unfortunately, she can't seem to do this without tearing down women who do work:

Home, to these women, is more than a place to watch TV at the end of the day and motherhood more than a partial identity. It is a demanding, full-time endeavor, requiring all of their creativity, energy, and ingenuity.

This handily misses the entire point of everything. The precise reason that it is difficult to be a working parent is that home is more than a place to watch TV, and motherhood more than a partial identity even when you work full time. It remains a demanding, full-time endeavour, still requiring a tremendous amount of creativity, energy, and ingenuity. Can stay-at home mothers do more Pinterest activities with their kids? Probably. But to argue, even implicitly, that this makes the home of a working mother less of a home, and motherhood less of a feature of her identity, is entirely unecessary to do in defending the plight of stay-at-home moms. It's an elementary school-level argument tactic, and it fails. "You don't like my skirt? Oh yeah? Well, I don't like your skirt!" Your opponent remains in a state of disliking your skirt, and you lose.

Another major failing which threads through both Slaughter and Miller's pieces is that they fail to address accurately why women "choose" to work outside the home. The entire debate, in their eyes, is predicated upon the assumption that women work outside the home because Betty Friedan said so, or maybe because it just fufils their wildest dreams, and doing your dreams is what life is all about!

But this "choice" is a distinct priveledge, and it's one I think most women don't have. I can't find any hard data on this - I think it's a study that needs to be done - but I don't think most women go to work outside the home primarily because they can't abide the thought of staying home with some boring toddlers, or because they're ardent fans of Betty Friedan, as Miller suggests. They do it because they have to. Likewise, I'm sure my husband is not alone (especially in this economy), in recently having no choice but to stay home: what money he could make teaching English without a steady contract couldn't cover the cost of daycare. To put it bluntly: it's about money, stupid. In a couple (we won't even touch on the fact that most single parents are women), a woman staying home means forgoing an entire income, an issue Miller tries to address with impressive myopia:

Last summer, when her husband, Alvin, a management consultant, took a new position requiring more travel, [Kelly] made a decision. They would live off his low-six-figure income, and she would quit her job running a program for at-risk kids in a public school to stay home full time...Her sacrifice of a salary tightened the Makinos’ upper-middle-class budget, but the subversion of her personal drive pays them back in ways Kelly believes are priceless

A low six-figure income, and the sacrifice of a second salary which "tightened" their budget. A priceless decision! Miller ignores that for many, many women and families, a decision like this would not "tighten" their budget; it could remove the roof from over their head or the food from their table. To the mothers in these families, it's not simply about sitting down and introspecting about whether they want to have a career or a family - what's best for me and my family in the abstract emotional sense? It's about lining up the cost of daycare below their salary and subtracting it. When they come out with a positive number that they can tack onto their rent, electricity, or grocery bills, it's time to go to work no matter what they want. Later, Miller tries to gloss this over again, arguing that such a choice used to be the province of women whose partners made over $100k, but now extends even to women whose partners make between $75k and and $100k! It's catching on like wildfire...in the upper middle class. This, by the way, was what was so infuriating about the Ann Romney debacle last year. Yes, being a stay at home mother is definitely a job. But the point is that Ann Romney never had to work outside the home - she had the luxury of being able to choose to stay home (and I'm doubting that Ann Romney was doing the tasks involved in stay-at-home mothering without some help in her cavernous mansion...but I digress...). 

Most of Miller's treatment of the financials involved in staying at home ignores the rather vast section of the working mother population that doesn't have a choice. Likewise, I'm sure a lot of stay at home mothers don't have a choice either. It's as if we're out to dinner and Miller says, "Steak or the chicken? The steak is local and will probably be better." Steak, I say! The problem is the steak is $200, everything else is $20, and I only have $30. Miller may have really sold this stay-at-home mother gig, but for most of our diners, it's simply not an option. I'm not saying we should demonise women who do have the choice and don't choose to stay at home, clearly. But the problem is that the entire debate centres on arguing for which of these choices is best, and rarely acknowledges that in reality, the sort of choice lauded by Miller is not actually a choice available to most working mothers. 

The largest problem with this debate is that a handful of highly specific personal stories can't really inform complex debates like this all on their own. For that, you need actual empirical research using large samples of women to draw conclusions about what might be going on in the minds of working mothers (and non-working mothers). To be perfectly clear, Ann-Marie Slaughter and the two women interviewed by Lisa Miller for the New York piece do not constitute a large sample. When researchers do look at large samples, the actual results on this highlight how important the issue of choice is.

From an admittedly rather superficial reading of the scholarly literature (although I would argue I googled it for two seconds in a way that Lisa Miller didn't bother to do), the data says that it's not about making one specific choice over the other, but about being able to make the choice you want. A study by Glenys Parry shows that the attitudes women have towards working mothers affects their satisfaction with either working or staying at home. In other words, if you want to be a stay at home mother and you are, you're happier. If you want to be a working mother and you are, you're happier. Another series of studies shows that attitudes in traditionally male-dominated professions can lead to increased anxiety in women working in said professions - not the professions themselves. So the answer is not "stay at home," and it's also not "work full time," it's "do what you want."

And as far as I know, the actual feminist argument has always been that women should do whatever the fuck they want. I never got the impression that second-wave feminism was about creating an army of forced labor outside the home. It was about allowing women the choice to work outside the home if that's what they wanted to do - and prior to the 60s and 70s, this was not a realistic choice. This line that stay-at-home mothers are demonised in the same way that working mothers are seems mostly fabricated to me. Not that they haven't been misunderstood - the notion that staying at home and caring for children and a household is a cushy job, for example, is just wrong - especially if you're not Ann Romney. The ideal would be that neither the choice to work or stay at home would be met with such judgement.

Instead, the focus needs to shift to actually creating a series of choices - that  exist in reality, not just in Lisa Miller's head - between work, family, and both. Moreover, in the true spirit of feminism, this choice should be extended to both men and women. According to Miller, if my son plays with enough dolls he'll be well-trained and highly disposed to full-time childcare. He should be able to choose to do that, and have that be a perfectly acceptable and normal choice. As Joanna Coles points out, the term "working father" is non-existent - yet there are billions of them. Instead of wringing our hands about what we think is better for a mother to do with her family - home or work? - we should follow the research that says families are happier and healthier when parents have a choice about how they divide and manage their time.

In my opinion, how we do this should not be about women, but about families. Maternal leave is an antiquated concept (though less antiquated than the notion that women should get no time off at all when having a child, as is the case in many situations in the US) - parental leave should be the norm. In Sweden, and hopefully soon in the UK, a certain amount of leave is given to the parents. They can divvy it up between them however they see fit. Daycare should never cost more or as much as a single individual can make in a given year. In other words, my solution would be to socialise the hell out of a bunch of institutions to provide better support for families, and thus, for mothers and fathers - working or not.

Some would argue this is not the best solution, but the point is that this is the type of solution we should be seeking. We should be arguing about how we can protect and ensure the choices of parents, mothers and fathers alike, rather than ignoring reality and crawling back to the comforting imagery of the 1950s housewife. And in the meantime, since this choice doesn't actually exist for most mothers, let's just cool it on demonising however they manage to run their family.