Tell It To COACHIE

The final section of the Homeward Bound article that I have been discussing ad nauseum is entitled “Why Do We Care?”. My answer to this question can be found in the Part III discussion – namely that no one seems to be taking our children into account or even considering how present policies will impact the future. I grew up in Washington, DC, and watched about 10,000 hours more news than the average child, so I know that politicians have forever been saying how they don’t want to pass this or that problem on to their children. Well here I am, a mom myself, and the problems remain and the politicians still claim that they don’t want to pass the problems on (Hello??? National debt???). However, I figured I wouldn’t disappoint all of my tortured readers by combining the two sections. There are a few final points in Section IV that I wanted to comment on.

Ms. Hirshman says that one answer to “why do we care?” what the Times brides do is that “what they do is bad for them, it is certainly bad for society” because of the “regime effect” whereby poor little bourgeois middle class me quits my job because I want to be like a Times bride even though I’m too poor. Once again, I must state that that suggestion is a crock. I admit I am unlike the women in the Times wedding announcements, and that is the very reason why I would not choose to imitate them. I’ve never considered them “elite” except that they have more money. Since our circumstances are so different, why would I feel that they are role models for me?

Ms. Hirshman also states that “elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes.” Is this India? I thought we all had a shot at increasing our standing in society, based upon hard work, innate abilities, etc., etc. Since I wasn’t born to go to Yale, I’m out of luck? My possible contributions should not be considered? I should be more worried about finding a way to motivate the Times brides that don’t want to work than finding a way to get myself back to work or a way to support the hundreds of thousands of brides who do want to work?

I believe I understand why this article was so harsh. In a way, Ms. Hirshman was trying to draw attention to herself, but I also think that she has legitimate concerns and that framing them in the most controversial way was one way to ensure maximum exposure. I hope she is not actually so closed-minded to think that any combination of “choice” and feminism is impossible, but I understand that enumerating a list of exceptions to her argument would only weaken it.

This article gave me a lot to think about, because for now I am happy at home, and it is easy to focus on my own happiness and expect that someone else is out there working on preparing a better world for my kiddies. I can choose to stay home, but I can’t turn a blind eye to the women who are doing the work. The discussion of all these issues is important, if only because some women may turn their anger at Ms. Hirshman into a search for solutions to some of the problems she describes.

Part III of the Homeward Bound article is entitled “What Is to Be Done?” and includes three rules that women should follow in order to get more access to positions of power.

The first rule is to “Prepare yourself to qualify for good work,” by using choosing college courses based on your future career goals and avoiding “the liberal arts curriculum.” I disagree. I went to a liberal arts college and most of my friends were liberal arts majors. Many who went on to law school, medical school, business school, or graduate school, believed that their writing and critical thinking abilities were greatly enhanced by the liberal arts curriculum. I always thought that college was the place where a person learned how to think, and that the actual classes (unless you wanted to be an accountant) were not as important as the abilities you developed while taking them. Since college I have worked in several different fields related to chemistry, the last one being chemical weapons demilitarization, and although I knew nothing about it going in, I had confidence that I would figure it out and excel over time.

Ms. Hirshman states that after college comes on-the-job training or further education. I agree, in fact, I think a very useful time for furthering education or developing other skills would be while out of the workforce and raising small children. Kiddies nap, daddies like to play with them after work, there is time to put toward personal development. Although Ms. Hirshman belittles volunteer work, a person can develop skills, gain responsibility, and sometimes even make a difference without getting paid. It does not need to be a lifelong full time commitment, but it doesn’t need to be seen as wasted time either. Similarly, part time work may not speed career advancement, but it does keep your foot in the door for the time you are ready to come back. I worked part time and managed to maintain my standing and respect in the workplace, because I took on the jobs I was able to do, and did them without making continual excuses about a late babysitter or a sick child. If I had gone back full time, I might not have performed as well.

My experience segues into the second rule which is “treat work seriously.” I agree that even when I was a working mother, I was a bit annoyed when someone had to regularly dash off because she (or sometimes he) had a child emergency. This was not very empathetic of me and was probably a hangover from my single days, but I felt like they had not planned enough redundant help to avoid the situation. One reason I will not go back to work full time right now is because I don’t want to be an employee that dashes off for every kiddie emergency. I’d at least like to have my husband as a back up, or perhaps a stay-at-home mom friend. For now, I’m willing to be a stay-at-home mom friend for the few women that I know around here that are working.

According to Ms. Hirshman, women are too idealistic which leads them into volunteerism or “indentured servitude in social-service jobs,” not toward money. Again, I agree that women should treat work seriously, but I disagree that money is the only marker of success. Unfortunately for everyone who knows me, I am still reading “The Power Broker” about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York for 40 years. He never cared about money, only what he wanted to do with his life, so he took on jobs without pay or for miniscule amounts of money. Rather quickly he had become a subject-matter expert in drafting laws and city planning, he had met and impressed many powerful people, so he was handed more and more power because he had the knowledge to back up his ambitions and was more worried about accomplishing his goals than getting paid. Of course the moral of his story is that with all his power he ruined New York City for generations to come, but it does illustrate that freed from financial worries (as many of the aforementioned New York Times brides are), a person can find ways to gain power.

The third rule is “don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” By this Ms. Hirshman seems to mean, “do put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” Women should marry liberal men who are younger and poorer or older and richer. Where do you find younger, poorer, liberal men? Teaching school of course, so things are likely about to get much better for the average 6th grade math teacher. Where do you find older, richer men? They seem to be a rather scarce commodity. The fatal flaw in this marriage advice, is that you can’t help who you fall in love with, all you can do is make sure that you talk about how things will work in the marriage before you commit.

An interesting point that Ms. Hirshman makes in this section and that should be considered by women who want to go back to work is to avoid the “economic temptation to assign the cost of child care to the woman’s income.” I never thought of it that way before, but we did it too (of course, I went back to work and the HP had to stay in the Army, so it was mainly just a calculation not a turning point). The cost of childcare should be considered against the whole family income since some advantages of a woman staying in the workforce are not always quantifiable in dollars.

The final point of this section is one that I have already embraced wholeheartedly even though I’m not back at work: let the house get dirty. When you stay at home, it is harder to overlook the clutter and debris because you are in it all the time. When you are working, you are generally too tired to worry about the clutter and debris when you get home. The HP did a lot more around the house when neither of us was home during the day, and chances are he’ll do the same when I go back to work. I clean up more now because I don’t like to look at it. But we don’t have the sort of relationship where he judges what I do on the housework front, because he knows every complaint about the state of the house can be met with only one response “If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, please feel free to do it yourself.”

What is to be done? I think the main positive outcome of the outrage over Ms. Hirshman’s article would be for everyone to take a stab at developing strategies to support women that are attempting to achieve greater positions of power in society. Some women have no aspirations in this realm, but most women would probably recognize that if we don’t have women in positions of power, no one will be looking out for our interests or the interests of our children (has anyone seen the recent developments regarding the national debt, environmental policy, energy policy, etc. etc. etc.). We take great pride in keeping their children safe and happy at home, but the world currently being prepared for our children is rather horrifying, and the people in power now do not seem concerned with what will happen in 40 years. An article I read about the mommy wars made just this point, and it was one I hadn’t considered. We can’t expect single women to take on the whole responsibility, working mothers are needed too, and we stay at home mothers should try to find ways to help them (until we are ready to join them), rather than criticize their method of parenting.

Section II of Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article is entitled “The Failure of Choice Feminism” and I am sure is the source of most of the anger from the stay-at-home mother crowd. However, I do not think she is being controversial when she states:

Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.

Again, I agree. Everywhere I have worked, I have watched older men struggle with the socially correct way to interact with female colleagues. Some hold it in for a while, and then eventually blow, like when one of my bosses asked a potential future employee if she was planning to have kids any time soon (she didn’t get the job for other reasons, but she could have sued that company’s pants off, although apparently it only had a pair of running shorts left because it went out of business shortly after the incident). At my last job, I was often in the position of reviewing the work of four older (50 to 60 year-old) men. While I was merely performing my duty as a reviewer when I marked up their drafts and attached a list of questions, I could tell from the muttering that they sometimes thought I had “overstepped my bounds.” One other worthless coworker once brought me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled something that he wanted added to a report. I read it and said “Okay, type it up and send it to me,” which left him absolutely flabbergasted. Obviously he felt that since I was younger and female, I should type it up for him.

Right before our son was born, the HP and I met with a financial planner who was showing us all sorts of charts and figures of what we needed to save and how much insurance we needed, etc., etc. I finally stopped him and said “These projections don’t make any allowance for my income.” He said to me “Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again?” I said to him “No, I can’t wait to go back to work when the kids are bigger.” He looked at me for a minute and went back to his spiel. I didn’t insist that he recalculate everything, mainly because I didn’t want to have to see him again. The worst part of the incident was that he was not an old man, he was my age, and he thought I should aspire to a life of leisure. Something is not right there.

I’m sure that the anger about this article started brewing at the end of this section, where Ms. Hirshman states “Feminists could not say ‘Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.’”

Where do I go with this one? I wholeheartedly agree that housekeeping is indeed not interesting or socially validated and it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, etc. A lot of the parts of child-rearing are interesting but a lot of them are drudgery. Childrearing is also not really socially validated, because if it was, more men would want to do it (although I don’t think social validation is the reason that women want to do their own child-rearing; it is certainly not the reason I do it). I also agree that it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, but I don’t think women who want to do these things should be belittled. Nevertheless, one person’s opinion on what those tasks are worth is just that, one person’s opinion. I won’t go red in the face trying to change this woman’s mind.

I’m sure that the anger about this article reached its white hot intensity with the following statement, “[these women] all think they are ‘choosing’ their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose.” For a thesis, that sentence seems a little glib. Anyone unfortunate enough to have known me when Aislinn was 9 weeks old (and I had decided I couldn’t put her into full-time day care) was subjected to an absolutely endless explanation of why I was going back to work part time. I spent days and nights trying to find a way to justify myself to all the working women I knew, to my parents who had paid for my education, and to myself, because I had so much ambition that it was hard to put it aside. I used up hours of the lives of everyone I knew, trying to explain what I was doing and why I thought I was doing the right thing. No one reacted with anything other than support or suggestions about how I could get the most out of my professional life while still spending time with the baby. To say that my current role was “passed on” to me and I that cheerily took it on like a Stepford wife without any sort of introspection is insulting to me, untrue, and a crock.

The article in American Prospect is entitled “Homeward Bound” which unfortunately evokes that quiet Simon and Garfunkel song, which is a bit at odds with the content of the article (and lyrics like “I wish I was, homeward bound” seem to be the opposite of what we’re supposed to feel). The article is divided into four parts, and Part I is The Truth About Elite Women. Apparently Ms. Hirshman was researching a book on marriage after feminism and was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City to interview the brides listed in the New York Times wedding announcements, announcements full of “brilliantly educated and accomplished brides.” Ms. Hirshman was surprised to find that after ten years, of the thirty brides with babies, only 10 were working full-time, 5 were working part-time, and the rest were not working at all. I was surprised by this because unlike me, most of the women I know went back to work after having children. None of them went to Ivy League schools, and none of them had their wedding announcements printed in the New York Times, but each was well-respected in a professional career.

Ms. Hirshman’s explanation for this situation states 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,” and that “the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism.” I agree. Does that mean I think child-rearing and homemaking is unimportant or that people who do them (like me) are losers? No, I do think these jobs are important and I do think there is honor in doing them, but I also think that although the modern husband changes diapers and cooks dinner, he has never been challenged to change what he thinks about the division of labor once the kiddies arrive.

I think that the average man (not every man) expects that even if his wife is working, when the kiddies are sick or the plumbing is broken, the wife will be the one to stay home. This is not because the average man is a jackass, but because that’s what happened when the average man was little, his mom took care of him and his mom took care of the house. In addition, the average man has probably experienced a feverish whiny toddler pushing him away and moaning for mama. Given those experiences and the fact that the average man wants his kiddies to be happy, it probably seems logical to leave the kiddies with the parent they are asking for. Ideally, the parent who stays home should be the one with the more flexible workplace, but usually it’s the mom. (Let me state here that the phrase “average man” does not include the HP. Whether or not the HP can stay home or come home early is usually dependent upon how well his boss gets along with his own wife. If there is trouble, the colonel keeps him in the office till all hours. If things are happy, the colonel is flexible about when he comes and goes. Also, the HP does not have any sick leave).

I don’t think the root of the controversy over the “Homeward Bound” article came from this section describing the lackadaisical brides from the New York Times. Some people may consider these women the best and the brightest, but how much can you really learn about a person from their wedding announcement? Are wedding announcements normally considered to be entirely truthful and without embellisment? It is unlikely that women who quit work before they had children or who “never want to work again” were ever seriously considering a groundbreaking career. Chances are many of these women are from a privileged level of society where power and money are already held by the family or the husband’s family, so any additional contribution by any of the younger generation is unnecessary. This is a hard obstacle to overcome. A harsh article on feminism is not going to shock them back into the office. You cannot shame a woman into ambition; you can only hope to find ways to aid the women who have it.

I missed the Part I of the Linda Hirshman (December 2005) controversy completely, probably because the HP had just deployed and I was avoiding the news, which rarely mentions anything positive about Afghanistan. The first inkling I had of Part II of the Linda Hirshman controversy was a little bit that I saw of a morning show where she was recently promoting her new book, based on the article that inspired Part I of the controversy. I quickly flipped away, figuring she was someone like Joel Stein who said he didn’t support the troops in order to bring attention to himself or someone like Ann Coulter who said… or shall I say, will say anything to bring attention to herself. However, this past weekend, I was reading The Washington Post at my parent’s house, and I came across the article entitled “Everyone Hates Linda.” I didn’t notice until I began reading, that it was written by Ms. Hirshman, as a sort of answer to the fallout from part I of the controversy.

As a stay-at-home mom, I can tell you that given all the controversy, I was surprised to find that not much of what she had to say in the article was especially offensive to me. It seemed a little catty and a little snide, but she was obviously wounded or at least wearied by the reaction to her first article. However, what I read made me curious enough to print out the original article to see if I could figure out why everyone was so angry. When I read things that I do not agree with, I generally mutter to myself (in an entirely mentally healthy way) “What a crock,” and continue on. Taking this approach, I was able to find some points in the original article that I agree with, and some things in the article that I take strong issue with, but nothing that would make me screech.

I will provide my opinion of the original article over the next few days for what it’s worth, but this analysis will be about me (me me me me me) and based upon my experience and what I think. I am not claiming that everything here applies to every one who reads it. But first a little bit more about me. I am not what Ms. Hirshman identifies as the “elite” because although I have a college degree and a graduate degree, they are not in law or business but in science, so I never did stand much of a chance at becoming a CEO or partner or university president. I suppose technically, I have given up my career to support my husband’s, but the end of his career is a definite point on the calendar. Also, while he is always willing to be supportive of me, in the end the decisions about how much he travels (and let me tell you, this past business trip has been an enormous pain in the behind), what hours he works and where or when we move is out of his hands. It is hard to negotiate alternative working conditions with the Army.

I went back to work part time after our first daughter was born, because I liked working, not because we needed the money or because I felt I had something to prove. When the Army moved us to Kentucky, I was pregnant with our second daughter and we were under the impression that we would only be there for two years. Seeking out new employment under those circumstances seemed rather silly, so I took some time off to spend with the kiddies. We ended up staying in Kentucky for four years, and from time to time I wished I could go back to work, but the job opportunities in that part of Kentucky were pretty much limited to exotic dancing or check cashing, so I never did rejoin the ranks of the employed. Now with the HP deployed, I have sole responsibility for the kiddies, a situation with the potential to make me a crappy employee, one that would probably add to the stereotype of unreliable mommy workers. In addition, I am not the type who can do a half-assed job. I’d rather delay my return to work until I have the support in place to be a focused successful employee.

I have been out of the workforce for five years, but my return to work is on the horizon - the buddy boy is two years from kindergarten and the HP is less than four years from military retirement. Theoretically, in four years we will have settled into our own house where we want to live, and then we can decide how we can both work and take care of the kiddies. Since the HP has expressed his desire to drive a potato chip truck, I think his hours will be rather flexible and everything will work out. In reality, he may become a teacher (in which case he will fit the crazy marriage material rules that are included in the American Prospect article, but more about that later) which would greatly increase my options in building a career, because his hours would match the kids’ hours (and because he’s willing to take care of the kids).

I think that what Ms. Hirshman failed to realize when she wrote her article was not that it would be controversial, but that reasoned discussion, listening, and thoughtful consideration of other people’s opinions are no longer considered virtues in this society. If someone is going to take a sound bite from you, it is going to be out of context and the most inflammatory thing he/she can find. In a few of the comments and quotes I have seen from her, she seems to have taken a stab at following the new American rule of discourse: “I’m louder and ruder than you so I’m right.” She isn’t very good at it, so I will surmise that maybe she isn’t usually like that, maybe she’s just a regular human who is smarting from personal attacks that are unrelated to her article and/or based upon an incomplete review of it. I could be wrong, she could be a stone-cold bitch who will someday stumble across this post and scream “I don’t need any sympathy or understanding from you, you pathetic stay-at-home loser!!” But for now I will grant her the benefit of the doubt and attempt to discuss her points without attacking her personally. I can’t promise that this enterprise will be interesting to anyone, but somehow I think it may be therapeutic for me.

(Okay, one squirrel update: two squirrels were running around the yard today knocking the flowers from one of my day lilies and digging in my petunia pots which have been planted for so long, that only a mentally deficient squirrel (and really aren’t they all) would bother thinking something was buried in there. In a barely contained seething rage I grabbed the Tabasco and sprinkled it all over the pots and the day lilies. Tomorrow all of the plants may be dead, but so far the squirrel activity in the yard has disappeared.)