September 20, 2005

"Choosing" Mothering

A New York Times story focuses on the attitudes of young women at elite universities who are "smart, disciplined, competitive, musical, athletic, altruistic, and full of ambition" [edited slightly for clarity]. Many of these women, according to the story, plan to become full-time moms by the time they are thirty, rather than either enter the work force, or balance career and family.

This lead-in piqued my curiosity. After all, as someone who supports the rights of women to make the choices that best enrich their lives, I was curious about how these women saw the (I imagined) new world that allows them to express and pursue these desires.

And then the article went on to reveal that it was the same old world after all.

"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always have to choose one over the other."

You always have to choose one over the other.

The best. Of course, we are talking about Yale students, who have been groomed to be "the best" and fully expect to be able to be "the best" if they want to. And what's wrong with wanting to be the best parent you can be to your children?

There are several things about this that are disturbing. The idea that women have to be "the best" applies the "supermom" or "good girl" perfectionist pressures, the higher standards that we hold women to in their lives. And it's an either/or choice that they are forced into, that it's only OK to do it if you can be "the best." Because everyone knows, you can't be the best mother if you work. Ask the PTA police. Likewise, everyone knows you can't be the best professional if you have children. Just check the views of mothers in the workplace. The same view does not hold for men. Fathers who work and thus can't make elementary school activities? Well, that's expected. Fathers who have a career and children? More respected for how hard they work to support their families. It's not that fathers wouldn't like to be the best too, or that they wouldn't like more freedom to spend more time with their kids. It is that they are not expected to only be "the best" at these activities, and do it simultaneously. They are permitted to be normal.

Another young woman comments:

"Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all," said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

"Men really aren't put in that position," she said."

She is "torn." Torn between being able to be the best at mothering, and being able to be the best at her career. Torn between two idealized positions, because it's still not acceptable to aim for being anything less than the perfect mother. And in order to succeed in a competitive career, you certainly can't be perceived as just "a mommy."

And I think she is partially right but also slightly wrong about the position of men. The same kinds of expectations that hurt women by making these false dichotomies of perfection don't necessarily apply in the same ways to men. However men are just as caught by the expectations of gendered roles. How popular is it for a man in college to aspire to be the best stay-at-home dad?

Another issue that only gets a tossaway sentence on the second page of the article is how these women come from the class that is most likely to be able to make a meaningful choice about career and parenthood. This is the group of women with access to the best education, the best healthcare, and the best prospects of a stable economic future. It is unlikely that they will face criticism for lightly parenting their children, even if they do get arrested for public intoxication and resisting arrest. For most women, who labor under the same pressures of motherhood, work is not an optional choice. Feminism gets blamed for women being out of the home, but the declining ability of households to make ends meet without women working outside the home presses harder all the time.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

Rather than showing that women have new choices in the world, what this shows is that a new generation of women has seen the reality of ingrained expectations that they can't be both good mothers and good professionals. Their mothers tried, and many of them - but not all! - "scaled back." This reminds me of a recent conversation with a young politically active woman in which we talked about the perception of vocal women with opinions in organizations. We talked about how frustrating it can be to have to not only constantly battle to have your voice heard along with everyone else, but constantly battle the opinion of men and not a few women that "girls should just go along and be nice." It is a constant battle. It's hard not to be angry all the damn time. And it's hard to not get exhausted and quit.

Being a professional woman is much the same. Not only do you have to compete to do your job like everybody else, but you also have to compete with the expectations that you're just going to leave to have a baby, or that if you have a baby your brain cells have depleted, or that you can't focus on your work anymore, or that there is something wrong with you that you don't want children. Heaven help you if you do have children and want to come back to work. Men have their battles, but they don't face these same questions. Is it any wonder that a generation of women who faced these struggles got tired?

A generation later the young women now believe they have the abilities to have a career, but think the only way to choose it is to the exclusion of family.

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."

"It worked so well for me," she said, "and I don't see in my life why it wouldn't work."

The status quo is rewarded. It's easier in many ways to go along with what the world expects of you, than to fight every day not only to be something different, but to be accepted for who you are. Traditional gender roles are "approved of" or "sexy" even. Real choice for women and men to stay home, work or both, backed up by social acceptance and support, isn't here yet.

UPDATE: Steve Gilliard has opinions on this too.

Posted by binky at September 20, 2005 12:40 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Gender and Politics


Comments

i recognize the article reveals legitimate concerns, and reflects a double-standard (qua externality) only a fool would deny exists, but i do have a question about the particular tone and vein of your critique, which as best i can tell dispenses quickly with externalities and makes a quick and not entirely supported leap to a critique of parallel internalities:

is it unthinkable that a woman or a man with a 160 IQ and impeccable credentials might want to stay home and raise kids for a goodish fraction of her or his life, even at the expense of professional advancement? does everyone who's been channelled by parents teachers and advisors into the dog-eat-dog's-diamond-studded-collar world of the ivy league track vindicate his or her privilege only by agreeing to work 60 hours a week in some slavish job just because it's got a waspy name with a one-hundred-year history and pays gobs of money; is it inconceivable that the privileged, really the only ones with such prerogatives in this day and age, might reflect a significant cross-current of people who would do the single-income family if it weren't denied about 75% of them by the vicissitudes of the quiet caste system currently at work in this country?

is it unthinkable that a meaningful, if not predominant, number of smart women who stayed at home in the forties and fifties and sixties did so because they felt like it, notwithstanding that if they hadn't felt like it they might have been pressured into doing it anyway? i mean, how can one credit these women with the high IQ's and the equal intelligences and everything else they wholly deserve, but then get sufficiently paternalistic to imply that these smart women are making choices that can't possibly be their own. why are they responsible for, and laudable in virtue of, their first 23 or so years, but hopelessly incapable of resisting revanchist pressures as adults? how is it feminism to suggest women are so impressionable, so incapable of fending for themselves when the world pushes them somewhere they don't want to go?

i don't ask this out of a sense of devil's advocacy, and i'm actually not that focused on gender issues inasmuch as i think what i'm getting at is shared by both genders.

this is the thing: why is it assumed that the good life, such as it might be, is defined by the sort of success that only comes from the freedom to surrender most of one's best years to an employer. most jobs occupied even by smart people lack the autonomy familiar to those in the academy who tend to spend the most time writing on this topic, people who surely feel various pressures (one mutual friend of ours filled me in a great deal over gender-driven inequalities of expectations, and i took it at face value and was very disturbed), nevertheless tend to enjoy considerably greater freedom in their schedules than their peers (and more supportive support groups, one suspects, in like-minded academics than one finds in the suburban world of soccer moms, who stand for nothing if not conformity (whether with a single-income or super-mom paradigm) in more corporate environments.

and lots of smart people -- the vast majority of them -- end up in just such environments. it beats working at Wal-Mart, but the world's mainstream doctors and lawyers and so on also are denied a lot of meaningful choices implicating the quality of their lives.

cards on the table, i don't think anyone, male or female, can play an equal and effective role in parenting with a 60 hour per week job commitment. i just don't. and i don't think any child should be substantially raised by proxies during his or her first couple of critically formative years. i have no commitments about who should stay home, should i ever end up in a family way, but something's going to have to change about my baseline attitude if i'm going to have a child into a situation where neither i nor my partner, nor both in concert, are willing and free to make that professional sacrifice to do as well as possible the most important job of all -- replacing ourselves with good, critically minded americans, who as this site knows well, are in short supply.

the ability and freedom to run around like a moron for every $10K per year one can get one's hands on shouldn't be, and isn't in my experience, co-extensive with the impulse to do so -- far from it. and i think a lot of the rhetoric about inequality operates from the baseline assumption that everyone who can take on that sort of employment both wants to and should.

and that's just not consistent with my experience of people at all. maybe some of these smart women really want to stay home. who is anyone to fault them that, or to insinuate that their decisions along those lines are wrongheaded, coerced, or the product of some sort of brainwashing?

again, i grant and disapprove of the externalities. i just don't see that providing a basis for treating grown women, especially those who come from privilege and are extraordinarily intelligent, as though their decisions aren't their own, informed, and as voluntary as any other decisions any of us make.

Posted by: joshua at September 20, 2005 02:12 PM | PERMALINK

in reviewing your post, i recognize that the vein the above took to some extent sidesteps the point.

you write: "Real choice for women and men to stay home, work or both, backed up by social acceptance and support, isn't here yet."

perhaps that's true, but i'm not sure how much sympathy i have for the creme de la creme that they need the approval, the social acceptance and support, of others to make decisions. inasmuch as these are the trendsetters, the decisionmakers (those who choose professional achievement as a principal goal). when they start taking responsibility for doing whatever it is they feel like doing, sensibilities will start to change. when they start making decisions in hiring and labor policies that run against this grain, the externalities will start to change. and they actually have the power to do this.

i'd much rather focus on an article about a middle-class couple who simply doesn't like working miserable unfulfilling jobs more than full-time for meager wages just in hopes of sending one or two kids to a state college so he doesn't have to work quite so hard. the article reflects nothing so much as the Times bias, in fluff pieces if nowhere else, to preach to its own choir -- the elites whom it principally plays to.

ah, the top 1% faces some difficult choices. choices (and concomitant social pressures, to be sure) most of america would give a dominant limb to to share.

so maybe all i'm saying is i don't care much for yalies at the moment. and maybe W has something to do with that.

Posted by: joshua at September 20, 2005 02:21 PM | PERMALINK

I'm with (largely) Joshua on this one. My first thoughts on this article:

1) Gee, being rich, well educated and having a happy family life - that's sooooooo tough.

2) Where exactly do these university administrators get off - expecting that these people aren't entitled to do whatever they want with the high-priced education they just paid for.

It looks to me like a lot of the earlier steps in the direction are working out quite well. For example, women are getting great educations all across the country.

Still, the country is deeply wrapped in all sorts of gender stereotypes (lots of stay at home moms, few such dads). Indeed it is hard to go against the status quo here, as it is in other areas.

But just because some people choose to ride the wave of expectations, that doesn't make their choices wrong. The can be talented and well educated and happy and not work. Or at least these Yalies have opportunities like that.

Posted by: Armand at September 20, 2005 02:31 PM | PERMALINK

Joshua, I think you miss my point. I wasn't boo-hooing over the sad life of Yalies. If you read the article, it suggests that this new generation of the elite is making a deliberate choice to stay home. I would welcome the ability of any parent to make that choice.

but i'm not sure how much sympathy i have for the creme de la creme that they need the approval, the social acceptance and support, of others to make decisions.

But if you read more closely, there are some things that come out of the discussion that suggest that the choice isn't as free as it sounded at first. And if anyone is going to be free to make such a choice, it is going to be the very people profiled in the article. So if they, the most able, are still not fully free to choose, then what about the rest of us poor schlubs?

You are almost certainly right that there are some women in the 60s who chose to stay home. My mom was one of them. She worked for awhile, but after having my oldest sibling loved it so much she realized she could live the rest of her life with a(nother) baby in the crib. Had she not had complications from pregnancy there would have been more than four of us. But just because she and other like her enjoyed the role they were expected to fulfill, doesn't mean they were choosing it. In a way, they were lucky that they liked what society expected them to do.

You say:

i have no commitments about who should stay home, should i ever end up in a family way, but something's going to have to change about my baseline attitude if i'm going to have a child into a situation where neither i nor my partner, nor both in concert, are willing and free to make that professional sacrifice to do as well as possible the most important job of all

You realize that the ability to make such a statement is premised on your relative affluence, don't you? I imagine that you make at least twice what I do, and likely more. Should your (at this point, imaginary) partner choose to stop working (or the inverse) you could always drop back to my standard of living. For someone making $21,000 a year, whose wife makes $13,000 as a secretary (what our institution pays ours, shamefully) where do they drop to?

i don't think anyone, male or female, can play an equal and effective role in parenting with a 60 hour per week job commitment. i just don't. and i don't think any child should be substantially raised by proxies during his or her first couple of critically formative years.

Wow. I don't know what to say to that. I think there are probably some single mothers who would like to kick your ass.

In the end, Joshua and Armand, you focused on the Yale part. As I noted in my post, the article barely examined the issues of class. What I wanted to do was show how if even these most powerful and educated of women are still caught in patterns of behavior - and you can see that some of them have an inkling that they are caught - that the rest of us are even more constrained.

Posted by: binky at September 20, 2005 03:43 PM | PERMALINK

"caught in patterns of behavior" is different than having no choice. ditto w/r/t your mom. she had fewer choices than women do now, granted, but that doesn't mean she had none. there were professional women then, too. one of them just retired from the united states supreme court.

i have little to say to your observations regarding my feelings about child-rearing, but i do hope you recognize the idealism reflected in my use of the word "should." i also think teachers should be among the highest paid professionals in our society, and that society should be structured, where possible, to encourage stay-at-home parenting during early developmental years for single and two-parent households alike, or at the very least so that single-parent households can make ends meet, no matter how menial the job, on a forty-hour week, while providing serious government assistance for quality day care. i think if the republicans really cared about family values they would work hard in this area, because for the reasons mentioned in my longer post (which talked about far more than yalies, and you know it), i think there is a vast untapped audience of people who would love to parent in a more time-intensive fashion given the opportunity (granting, as i did previously, that many people lack that opportunity).

i think that parenting should be the most valued enterprise of all. good parenting leads to good citizens leads to a good democracy, and if the GDP goes down a touch, then we adapt our policies to deal with it.

i have the utmost respect for single parents, and know among the few that i know at all parents who are dedicated and good at it, just as i know, or know of, stay-at-home parents who watch soap operas more than the children -- who lack the temperament or the je ne sais quois to be comfortable in that environment on a continuous basis. hell, there's a good chance that my ADD ass would prove to be one of them.

be all of that as it may, i still think there's a familiar feminista paternalism, in your original post and your riposte, that you reserve for women as soon as they stop the supposedly cool stuff (avidly pursuing their careers to prove what men already know, however much they reist -- that anything we can do you can do) and opt for the square stuff (parenting above all).

again social programming isn't enough of an excuse in itself for a proposition that people lack meaningful choice. we may do what we can to mitigate social programming, but at some point, as history evinces time and again, a choice becomes mainstream because a few brave souls make the choice when it isn't and illustrate its worthiness by example. you can't legislate it; at best, you can create an environment where the exempla are more numerous and swift in arriving.

notably, it's been a long time since young women wanted for exempla of professionally successful women, with and without families, with and without spouses, in real life and in pop culture, which suggests the calculus is even more complicated, and even less amenable to legislation.

and btw, while i do pretty well for a state employee, i'm quite certain i don't make twice what you make (and i make less than some of my tenure-track friends at private institutions). i make literally half of what i was offered to join the private sector not long ago, and at that almost 50% more than i made in my first position out of school. it's a living, and one in which i could do very well, but "Esq." only equals "Money" if you accept precisely the faustian bargain that limned everything i said above about the tacit and illicit expectation that the most privileged can vindicate their privilege mostly by proving that even the smart can sunder every iota of their beings in service of the slightly more privileged.

Posted by: joshua at September 20, 2005 04:25 PM | PERMALINK

by the way, i think undergraduate hypothesizing about problems that are thoroughly repudiated by the work-and-family careers of accomplished women all over the place might insult those very women, who stared the same or an even less hospitable world in their youths and didn't allow themselves to be forced into the all-or-nothing framework. and gender relations may be fraught with all sorts of valid issues -- a proposition i wouldn't dispute -- but there are an awful lot of these women, far more than there are yale grads of whatever stripe.

Posted by: joshua at September 20, 2005 04:38 PM | PERMALINK

Re: salary...you'd be surprised. I have a former student who works part-time at a pawn shop who makes at least 1 1/2 times more than I do.

I don't disagree with you that some women had choice. Don't you suppose though, that those women were the equivalent of our little Yalies? You're in the reality based community. What are the stats? Were they the rule or the exception? I'd say the exception, in O'Connor's (her being the first and all) case.?

It sounds like from your comment that you have in mind some level of choice that is "enough" and some percentage of the population that is "enough." Yes, my mom's generation had some choice, but I don't think as much as you imagine. Or maybe you think something about my background that isn't true. My mom lived in a trailer, and had a high school education. Her opportunities were pretty limited. She made it farther than my grandmother, who didn't go to school past the fifth grade and literally was adopted into servitude. Just because I am doing better than she, doesn't mean I wouldn't want my daughter (or more likely, niece) to be able to feel more free to choose what to do with her life.

Try as you will to paste your idea of "work at all costs" feminism on me, I'm not going to let you get away with it. It's oversimplified, and it's lazy. Especially if you are basing the assertion on the post I have written.

In my post I talked about how less affluent women have no choice but to work. On top of that, they are labeled as bad mothers for it. More and more the choice to stay out of the workforce is unavailable to women because of the economy. I wrote about the impacts on both men and women, and how it's important for everyone to have choice.

This is why I think you are bringing some baggage and assumptions about what I mean to be feminist choice. I don't know how else to say it besides what I have already said, twice. Until both men and women can find equivalent levels of support for 1) parenting, 2) working 3) both, then both men and women suffer for the restrictions that social constructions of appropriate gender activities place upon them. You talk about social programming as if there are not real consequences to the restrictions placed on people's lives. It's not like being "out of the mainstream" like it's being a cool rebel or something.

Everyone who works, and everyone who parents struggles with the choices they make. Everyone is judged on their performance. What happens to women is that they are not only judged on their performance, and the decisions they make, but the decisions they don't make. And along with the contraints on choices they share with men like the prestige of their degree, they also face the constraints that come with entrenched beliefs that they are simply not as good simply because they are women. Yes, there have been pioneers like Sandra Day O'Connor, and yes, there are affluent women being groomed for power at Yale, but even their choices and the expectations people have had about them have been seen through the gendered glass.

And you know, in a way, I do feel sorry for the Yale women, if they end up bitter and jaded and living through their children, or bitter and jaded and wishing they had taken the time for kids. I do feel more sorry for people who have more narrow options, but I feel sorry for every woman who feels like she's stuck with an either or choice, and that if she does one thing, that she can't possibly be taken seriously doing the other. That applies equally to women who parent and women who don't.

Posted by: binky at September 20, 2005 06:58 PM | PERMALINK

first, i'm too lazy to figure out why we're talking about salary, except to note that it is, i hope we can agree, more a function of profession than anything else. my salary is well outstripped by the two women working directly above me on the food chain, and quite possibly by one or more of our (female) secretaries, who've been doing this masterfully a long time.

that said, i recognize that you're acknowledging men face tough choices too, though i'm not sure what you really mean by this:

Everyone who works, and everyone who parents struggles with the choices they make. Everyone is judged on their performance. What happens to women is that they are not only judged on their performance, and the decisions they make, but the decisions they don't make.

or rather, i know what you're saying, i'm just not sure of the basis for it -- i'm not sure who constitutes the supreme council that has the prerogative to disregard the choices men don't make but attend to those women don't make as avidly as those they do, and whether they do -- or why in any case anyone cares what the council decides . . . and finally, why i should care that they care.

i care about the poor, but if you'll pardon me for saying, in the working class and below _everyone_'s getting pissed on, men and women alike, and nobody's given the room to parent well, as you appear to acknowledge, so the whole exercise of choice we're discussing becomes in that context so academic as not to merit discussion.

in my experience, anyway, the upwardly mobile professional class is a crappy place to be between 9 and 5, or rather between 8 and 8 (and on saturday), and it really doesn't matter what dangles from your body. better than the alternatives, mind you, because at least for being underappreciated, poorly utilized, and overworked, you are handsomely compensated.

professional trends may track private ones here, too. i'm not sure one can fault companies, driven by short term profits for using an actuarial approach and finding, statistically, that women are way more likely to limit work upon the birth of children. most policies, at least nominally, grant men equal flexibility, but if men and women don't take advantage of it then companies will continue to "profile" based on hard data that is arguably entirely out of their control (i think seeking to effect social engineering through corporate conduct is a patently futile enterprise unless civic responsibility becomes a prerequisite to maintaining a corporate charter, and i'm not holding my breath on that).

how about this: how about these smart, good gene-pool women start marrying less blue-blooded bred-to-succeed-at-any-cost alpha males (the ones the upper class women, in turn, have been bred to pursue) and find men who are not so career-driven that it will be all but inevitable that the one who stays home is the woman. i think the fatalism of the women in the article reflects their resignation not to policy trends so much as to breeding trends in the rarefied air of their own social class. and -- forgive me -- boo hoo.

** for the record, if any attractive yalie wants a guy to stay home with kids, i'm listening. of course, i only have a degree from a state school and i neither own nor stand to inherit any cushy

Posted by: joshua at September 21, 2005 12:43 PM | PERMALINK

Hah, lazy. Touche.

It's not that we need to talk about your salary or mine, I was just using us (and yes our professions) as an example that shows that some people (lawyers) have more flexibility than others (teachers) just as Yalie women have more than the average woman. Again, it was a mechanism to show how the ease with which the more affluent can enact certain opinions (such as 1 parent staying home is better, etc) as opposed to those with less financial felxibility.

i'm not sure who constitutes the supreme council that has the prerogative to disregard the choices men don't make but attend to those women don't make as avidly as those they do

You'd be surprised.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 01:13 PM | PERMALINK

women already have all the power, get higher scores on the SAT, have higher GPAs, and make up a larger percentage of college graduates. i'd be a stay at home dad in a second if my family could live off my wife's salary. how could anybody assume that working for someone else (having a career) is more influential on society than working for your kids (being a stay at home mom/dad)? staying at home, parenting and shaping kids is the most empowering position you can hold in society. except for president and a handful of other positions. but there is only one president, where as there could be millions of stay ta home parents. i'll bet the aggregate empowerment of the stay at home parentign community is greater. i think as much as we need to debunk the myth that women should stay at home we should debunk the myth that they should have a career. its just as toxic. and ive heard people working at pawn shops do pretty well actually, better than my mom was a college professor

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 01:25 PM | PERMALINK

"i'd be a stay at home dad in a second if my family could live off my wife's salary"

And there it is. The big "if."

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 01:47 PM | PERMALINK

"and there it is"? so wait are we talking about gender or are we talking about class? and sure in the grand scheme of things both can applied to everybody. you can interconnect any range of topics to death if you want. but the NYtimes article seems to focus mainly on gender. maybe it focuses on the rich women. but some people are both women and rich. i think its a good article. obviously there might be some people who it doesnt apply to but as someone pointed out above i dont think the article has any pretense of applying to everybody.

so i repeat are we talking about women (even if its a subclass of women) or are we talking about people who are not rich? if we are alluding to the article we should be talking about women. it clearly analyzed the changes in attitudes towards a specific life decision in the lives of a certain group of people. and if rich women are the only ones who have that choice than it seems obvious that the only people included in an article about that choice are going to be rich people. and within that sub class of people the evidence from the article shows that the attitudes towards that decision are changing. much to the chagrin apparently of people who think women need to do everything men do in order to be equal. maybe those same people think women need to start using urinals too, or men should start sitting down to piss.

Posted by: guy who wrote comment 2 above at September 21, 2005 02:07 PM | PERMALINK

"women need to start using urinals too, or men should start sitting down to piss"

Why does it alwayshave to come back to the penis? Someone's beat you to it, anyway.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 03:12 PM | PERMALINK


"why does it always have to come back to the penis?"?


it isnt coming back to the penis anymore then its coming back to the vagina. you seem to just assume im trying to bring everything back to the penis. but really my metaphor went both ways. women could change OR men could change.

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 04:22 PM | PERMALINK

"you seem to just assume im trying to bring everything back to the penis"

Um, how is "women need to start using urinals too, or men should start sitting down to piss" not related to the penis? Assumptions usually require making conjectures based on missing information. You talking about pissing, well, there's no missing penis there. If there's any sentence on this thread that's about the penis, that's the one.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 04:42 PM | PERMALINK


and i think your assrtion that women are held to a higher standard (the way you speak about it makes it sound almost absurdly universially accepted that this higher standard for women exists)is created out of think air. first off i dont know if you are male or female but if you are female i dont think you can reasonably claim to know what kind of standards men hold themselves to.

i dont think women are expected to excel as parents and as professionals anymore then men are. i think men were expected to excel more out of the home because women were deemed better or more able to be parents. its just that at one point, somewhere, some women got the idea that excelling in the home did not make her as worthly as her husband who was excelling at work. what supportd this idea? nothing that cant be equally undermined by a countervailing argument. so some women decided to try to both excel at work and excel at home but no one ever EXPECTED them to do it (except for, of course, those women themselves who first thought the working mom thing was a great idea and started pushing it on younger generation of women like it was the only way they could be self-respecting).

and come one its a little ridiculous to even use the word women's rights in this country anymore. its not so much rights that are sought as advantages. if the free choice to decide when to have a surgical operation on one's own body that has the consequences of terminating the ongoing development of a human life form is a "right" then the meaning of "rights" is diluted in my mind. and mind you, i think abortion should be legal. but not because i think its a "right". once you start overreaching the philosophical merit of a claim, you really do it more a disservice more than anything else.
if some women can take causes specific to their gender that are merely practically advantageous to them and start asserting them as "rights" then im going to write up a list of things that would be practically advantageous to me as a man and start a "mens' rights" movement.

my first complaint will be college have to accept equal amount of men and women.

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 04:48 PM | PERMALINK



your assumption was NOT that i was envoking the penis. your assumption WAS that i was envoking the penis TO THE EXCLUSION of the vagina--"why does it always have to come back to the penis [as opposed to the vagina]". when my metaphor "refered back" to both of them. it was in every sense an equal opportunity metaphor.

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 04:57 PM | PERMALINK


in other words, a person could just as easily claim my metaphor went back to the vagina (but they would need the requisite bias, the same bias you showed--perhaps in jest--in the oppsite direction). and when there are two claims in either direction that are equally justifiable its better just to drop both claims.

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 05:00 PM | PERMALINK

"Regret is insight that comes a [comment] too late"

when my metaphor "refered back" to both of them

Hmm, yes, talking about women standing up to pee has noting to do with accusations of penis envy. Nothing at all! Especially not the kind ofthings that would provoke someone into two aditional self-justifying anonymous responses.

claim to know what kind of standards men hold themselves to

I didn't. And if you read closely, I suggest that men and women likely hold themselves to similar standards. It's the additional external judgment that was the main focus.

so some women decided to try to both excel at work and excel at home but no one ever EXPECTED them to do it

Precisely. And often they were expected to fail simply because they were women. Would you like your boss or your teacher to look at you, and judging by your skin color, your breasts, or your religious symbols, decided based on those things alone, that you were just simply not expected to succeed? Or, on the first day of class, "OK, everyone with a Dave Matthews band T-shirt? We know you're all getting Fs because you're just a bunch of pot-smoking losers anyway." You can take off the t-shirt, but you can't stop being a woman (putting aside for a moment the question of transgender issues)

if some women can take causes specific to their gender that are merely practically advantageous to them and start asserting them as "rights" then im going to write up a list of things that would be practically advantageous to me as a man and start a "mens' rights" movement.

This opinion is the result of extensive study on the women's movement, no doubt. How is it that women having the access to the same rights as men is somehow unfair and "practically advantageous."

On another blog, this same article started a discussion about the ability of people to put themselves in each other's shoes. And I think our discussion here has been less clear about it, but equally tied to that issue (especially in the way Joshua and I were pushing on each other's ideas about class). One of the main problems with the previous quote is that it presumes that 1) men and women are already equal and 2) the business of rights is a zero-sum game. In that way any improvement for women must surely come at the expense of men, and would project women over men. Neither of those things are true. Has an individual man ever lost a job to an individual woman? Sure. I'll bet a guy with a high school degree would lose to one of those Yale women any time. However this little scenario does not describe the overall picture (which can be found all over the web...happy googling). This is why I thought it was so interesting to see how the most powerful, most privileged women still have issues reconciling what they've worked for and what's expected of them.

It's pretty clear from Anonymous's comment that there is an assumption of equality (and zero-sum-ity) underlying it. I think it's very difficult to overcome those assumptions, especially if the holder is unwilling to try to think about the debate from being "in the shoes of" the other side. It's much easier to (using Margaret Atwood's words) call a feminist a "large unpleasant person who'll shout at you" than to think about how both women and men are constrained by gender roles in the choices they make.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 05:28 PM | PERMALINK


back to the penis envy thing, no, what i said has no implications whatsoever on penis envy at all (other than the ones you projected on it). none what so ever. no more than vagina envy since a man sitting down to piss would suggest the same thing, that is if you bothered to analyze that part of the metaphor as thoroughly (and unnecesarrily) as the part of a women standing up to piss. and--do men have to defend themselves for everything these days :)--i wrote so many replies in a short period of time because at first i thought you honestly were confused and needed clearification. but now i understand you're just choosing to ignore the obvious doubled sided nature of my metaphor. thats fine, if i had known that from outset i would have dropped the matter instead of trying to clarify it for you.

i hate to say it but it seems like you are one who has some kind of fixation on the penis, or skeeing out instances in which the penis is used as a metaphor to subjegate women. i envoke both using a penis to urinate and a vagina to urniate but you fixated on the penis.

as far as the you responses about expectation. here again you misread my point. i said "no one ever expected women to do it [raising kids and working]". what i was saying was that was no one expected women to WANT to do both, because it seemed like an unreasonable burden to ask one person to do both (whether that person be a man or a women). at no point in time was this duty to be "perfect"--in your words--both raising kids and having a career placed on women by men--only by a sub group of women themselves who probably fall under the category feminists. I did not intend the meaning that you imparted on "expected", which was that people did not think women WERE CAPABLE of having a job and raising kids. "expectation" in my argument spoke to the PEROGATIVE of the woman to take on the hurcuelian task of double duty, not a woman's CAPABILITY. and in misreading my critique of your original discussion of the "higher standards we hold women to" you have almost nicely succeded in having it both ways--both complaining about the "higher standards" we hold women to and just now complaining about how woman are expected to fail. so men expect more of women but also expext them to fail? have i got that right?

also i have much respect for the history of the women's movement. i love women. i think if the world were perfect women would rule. but just as the republican party of today has little or nothing to do with the republican party of the 19th century, pointing to the history of the women's rights campaign does little (in and of itself) to impart value on the women's "rights" movement of today. look again at how i started off that paragraph, "its a little ridiculous to even use the word women's rights in this country ANYMORE". i am not assuming that rights for men or women are a zero-sum game--as long as rights are what are really being advocated. the fight for women's right for most of our country's history has NOT been a zero sum game, because they were focused on what can legitimately be called "rights". once people start taking things that are not "rights" and demanding them on the grounds that they are then yes at that point things become a zero sum game.

and by the way my posts are anonymous because... what would be the point of telling you my name anyway?. trust me, it has nothing to do with the shame attached to self-justification that you claim it does. if there is one thing im impressed by its your ability to parce revelations about the deep depths of my pysche from a couple lines of logical argumentation.

i dont think anything i've said has 'offended' you as much as you have 'taken offense'. 'taken offense' implying (this implication is obvious from an anylsis of the conrete words at issus) a pro-active process on the part of the person who thinks they have been slighted to FEEL slighted. so sure in a world with so many conflciting beliefs and ideals if you actively seek out offense, you'll probably find it. and when you find it it does not means its a grounds for anything other than throwing a pity party.

and i have no notions of feminists being fat nor loud nor shouting at me, if the views you've expressed are typical of feminists i'd simply think feminists are bizarrely indignant and in many ways counter productive and generally they miss the point.

and im totally open about talking about gender roles that effect both men and women. since u are obviously very interested in talking about gender roles that oppress women i'd be interested to know about the gender rols that you think effect men. and what "rights" are there left for the women's "rights" movement to champion?
.

Posted by: at September 21, 2005 08:01 PM | PERMALINK

"and in misreading my critique"

Your point was abundantly clear, just not adequate in extension to its logical conclusion. Your assumptions were also clear. My response was an illustration of how those assumptions become something else entirely, a limit, rather than largesse bestowed.

If you read closely, nowhere does the post say anything about "both raising kids and having a career placed on women by men." This is why I brought up Atwoods large obnoxious person. From the amount of hostility emanating in the comments, it must be some big scary bogey-feminist that is so scary. Th rest of her quote, by the way, fixes her definition: "someone who believes women are human beings." I, of course, would add, as are men.

As to "know about the gender rols that you think effect men (sic)" check the original post. There's some there.

It's interesting the focus on body parts, and feminism, really. The original post did not even discuss feminism beyond a brief cite of the critique "feminism gets blamed" when in fact, I chose an alternative hypothesis (declining economic situation). The post was simply about how women and men today, even the most powerful and educated, feel constrained by the roles expected of their gender. How is that so provocative?

Perhaps it's the part about how working women are judged more harshly on their parenting? I suppose you don't have kids, and aren't actively involved in their school lives, and don't get to see attitudes towards working moms that don't apply to working dads? Or perhaps, you don't work in an office or attend school in a department where women who have kids get written off as being too distracted where the same isn't true of men? I don't belong to any of those categories, but I can empathize. Why is that so hard? What is so offensive about supporting a dad who wants to be a full-time parent?

And thanks for "bizarrely indignant." That will go to Cafe Press with the "coldly analytical." The endless projection about naming, you can keep.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 09:00 PM | PERMALINK

And a small p.s.

There is some discussion going on over at feministe on this same topic. Also at Alas ,a blog and Echidne of the Snakes.

Posted by: binky at September 21, 2005 09:20 PM | PERMALINK

also, a propos the underlying survey, here and the links found therein.

Posted by: joshua at September 22, 2005 09:58 AM | PERMALINK

Kevin Drum had some similar links. The proportion doesn't seem to have changed all that much. Which tells us... ah, hell. No time for that today.

Thanks for the links, though.

Posted by: binky at September 22, 2005 10:29 AM | PERMALINK

why is it so hard (to empathize)? its not, i empathize.

what is so hard about supporting a dad who wants to be a full time parent? is this a question for me?

i think a dad being a full time parent would be great. in fact i think my first or second post said i wouldnt mind being one myself

and there is no hostility in my comments, just dissapointment.


and i dont know what you're refering to at all in the first parapgraph of your last extended post.

the focus on body parts is funny (disturbing actually). the funny thing is you are the first person to bring it up. (see above "why does it always have to come back to the penis?")

Posted by: at September 22, 2005 12:33 PM | PERMALINK

binky, i think you're handling ano fine, but something a few posts up did jump out at me:

you responded in effect to his use of scare quotes around the word "rights" as follows: "One of the main problems with the previous quote is that it presumes that 1) men and women are already equal and 2) the business of rights is a zero-sum game."

i don't think either necessarily was implicit to what Ano was writing, and while i have some trouble parsing Ano's points i do think he makes a legitimate point when he questions the panoply of things various women's movements (and this is true of movements generally) style "rights."

is it a right to be seen by the people around you as something other than a baby-making machine? not by any definition of "right" i know or use. it's certainly an aspiration, and i think -- under the United States Constitution -- it is a woman's right not to be disadvantaged by that perception in any tangible way (as with all rights, enforcement's a bitch). but that's something different.

i don't think it's anyone's "right" to have more or fewer options, or to have decisions be easy, or to be relieved of the burden of sacrifice and the fact that opening one door -- for men and women alike -- so often closes others. that our doors may differ is, for now, an inexorable part of American life. whether that's something to be concerned about, a matter of "right," i don't know.

i can't recall ever hearing a feminist complain (and i'm sure someone has, but it's less than pervasive, let's just say) that it's an insult to women and a reification of the deleterious perception of them as mothers first and everything else second that they persistently are granted greater custody than their male counterparts in court adjudications of same, or that a woman is far more likely, even controlling for the income disparities (that ought to control on a gender-blind basis), to be found entitled to alimony than a man.

nor do i fault women for declining to address those things philosophically symmetrical with their other positions but sure, if successful, to derogate from such power as they have; women have the ability to turn screws in certain areas, and custody as one. but let's not kid ourselves: that's a gender-based edge, and to those who care about the abstract issues, it should go, too. sort of like Justice Thomas, to demonstrate his principled aversion to affirmative action, ought to step down from his position as a matter of principle, since absent de jure affirmative action he'd very likely never have risen to such prominence, and absent de facto affirmative action would never have been tapped by Bush I in favor of eminently more qualified conservative jurists without sexual pecadilloes to explain.

in any event, however, i also don't think it's a "right" that i have the same statistical probability to gain custody of any children subject to some future divorce. and indeed, because i so cherish the rights i do possess, rights shared in every respect by women, i would not let the term be denigrated by overuse.

one would like to be treated in a gender-neutral way, and in some contexts one has a right to gender-neutral treatment. in other areas it's an aspiration, and a laudable one, but to call it a right is to build a bridge too far. furthermore, it undermines legitimate claims of right in the strong sense for women as well, since diluting the impact of that word constitutes a falling tide that drops all boats.

Posted by: joshua at September 22, 2005 01:35 PM | PERMALINK


in re-reading your first post the only gender role i see that effects men is not being encouraged to be a stay at home dad. look if men want to be stay at home dads they should do it. people make their own decisions not society.

society will always put expectations on people and if people choose to cow under those expectations thats unfortunate. its funny because people who want to change gender roles actually seem ironically un-independent, or are training a new generation to be dependent on societal views. if societal expectations are not important then dont try to change them, just ignore them!

gender roles are like tenets of freudian pyschology, they only exist and constrain in so far as you believe in them.

Posted by: at September 22, 2005 01:45 PM | PERMALINK


i dont think the majority of people see women as baby making machines anymore than they see men as money making machines. but either way niether men or women have a "right" to not be viewed in this way. and i dont think its that much of a problem. unless you put it under a magnifying glass.

Posted by: at September 22, 2005 02:02 PM | PERMALINK

i can't recall ever hearing a feminist complain (and i'm sure someone has, but it's less than pervasive, let's just say) that it's an insult to women and a reification of the deleterious perception of them as mothers first and everything else second that they persistently are granted greater custody than their male counterparts in court adjudications of same, or that a woman is far more likely, even controlling for the income disparities (that ought to control on a gender-blind basis), to be found entitled to alimony than a man.

You might not be reading widely enough. And I would be careful, too, about conflating women with feminists with feminist philosophers in this sense. We could get into this more, but I am truly pressed for time today. For now, let me note two points. First, that there is a great deal of support for the idea that both men and women are restricted (as I have repeated as nauseum) by gender expectations, and that a corollary follows which reject the displacement of one oppression for another. Not being a serious feminist scholar, I can't rattle off a list for you, but if you are really interested, could find some places to direct you. It has been some years since Baltar and I participated in the feminist theory reading group - with some professionals of your ilk, by the way - at the fine institution we attended for grad school. The second point would also require some debate and leverage of demographic and economic data, but the part about controlling for income on a gender-blind basis... you are aware of the data that show a pretty clear salary penalty for women with children (especially those who leave the work force and return, which is I presume a large part of the population you are talking about) that does not show correspondence in the male population? I'm not sure anybody really explicitly accounts for that in the awarding of alimony, but that may be an implicit factor. That is to say, I would agree with you on the blindness, assuming equal earning potential but I am not sure that is possible. Like I said, I'd need to dig in Dept of Labor stats and I just don't have time today.

gender roles...only exist and constrain in so far as you believe in them

Even if you don't, and everyone else does?

And last but not least, a question for Joshua (and anyone else who wants in). Seriously, really. Do you consider "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to be rights? Why or why not?

Posted by: binky at September 22, 2005 02:07 PM | PERMALINK

life and liberty are, of course, precisely the sorts of rights i believe are hallowed, given their enshrinement -- not once but twice -- in the united states constitution.

the pursuit of happiness . . . there are various dangers in reading the declaration of independence into the constitution. while a liberal intentionalist constitutional scholar of some sort might consider the declaration as worthy of consideration in historical analyses of the constitution as the federal papers, it's certainly not a foregone conclusion.

ultimately, i think the pursuit of happiness guff is more rhetorical flourish. it's hopelessly vague, and one's pursuit of happiness is another's oppression.

what's entailed in rights to life and liberty is, of course, an open question subject to furious debate both in academe and at the ground level, but where i fall in that debate isn't as important to my points on this issue as is my observation that the more granular the "right" asserted to be embedded in life and liberty the more devalued the larger philosophical import of those terms become. is life or liberty at stake when employers, as noted supra eons ago, find from an actuarial analysis that women who take off for the first child tend never to return to levels of productivity that men who take similar time off do (and i'm postulating this basis of decision, not asserting it as fact)?

a question in response: is it incumbent on employers, either morally or by legislative fiat, to takes responsibility for considering more than the profit motive when making employment decisions (excluding for purposes of discussion the most egregious and palpable sorts of chauvinism which, on the rare occasion that they are demonstrated, are remedied by law)?

is it just me, or have we largely exhausted discussion on this. i am curious, binky, to hear your answer on this last question, as it's one i imposed either tacitly or explicitly a while back, but i think i've said all i have to say on this stuff.

gender discrimination = bad.

but not every slight that befalls disprortionately on women = gender discrimination in the strong sense.

Posted by: joshua at September 22, 2005 02:39 PM | PERMALINK

General agreement, with an important caveat. Really, I'm not trying to weasel out of it. However. What is "a slight?" If you mean that women disproportionately suffer from the outrageous imposition of underwires, yes, that seems to be a slight.

As we both know, not everyone sees a slight in the same way, and there's a lot of "I don't know what you girls are getting so hysterical about" that goes on in which - sometimes, sometimes not - well-meaning individuals dismiss legitmate concerns. Check the whole Kos-and-single-issue-voters business, if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Posted by: binky at September 22, 2005 02:54 PM | PERMALINK


" 'gender roles...only exist and constrain in so far as you believe in them'

Even if you don't, and everyone else does? "

they dont exist for me, i suppose they do exist for whoever believes in them. I would be more than happy to be a stay at home dad because i dont believe that as a man there is a specific role for more. my mom raised three kids while getting a masters and a phd (she then entered academia) not because she was obssesed with obliterating gender roles but because she did not even bother to give them the time of day. and by the way my mom is also opposed to abortion (i am not). she does not take a backseat to anyody of any gender but she also does not believe she has the "right" to terminate a pregnancy or beyond that even should terminate a pregnancy. im not trying to start a debate on abortion because we are probably all on the same side of it (although we may not all use the same rhetoric). and that rhetoric is what i take issue with, the rhetoric of abortion being a matter of the constitutional right to privacy or the "right" to choose. i think its practically advantageous for society for a women not to have a baby until she is ready and i think this is really the only grounds you can advocate legal abortion on--it is however a completely sufficient argument. when you bring "rights" into the argument then you're only doing the cause a disservice because people start thinking about the issue on a philosophical level. and philosophically for me (and im no religious nut) conception is the first time any of us were "on the radar", you can argue all day about when during pregnancy or at birth any one of us became a "person" with legal rights, but i think we can all agree that conception is when we for the first time became more than a piece of star dust. now it is philosophically appetizing to take a fetus "off the radar" by having an abortion? i dont think so and i dont a lot of people find it appetizing philosophically. so why bring the discussion to that level? why bring "rights" into it? because as rights go i think its a pretty flimsy right. i think a society (through a representative law making body or through popular referendum) can outlaw abortion without depriving anyone of human rights. does that mean that country wont suffer from the practical disadvantages from not allowing abortions? no. so keep the dicussion on that level because i think people both undermine their own argument and do a disservice to actual "rights" that are more central to our "pursuit of happiness".

and i do think "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are fundamental rights. i would make a distinction, however, between pursuit and attainment, not to be a kill-joy. and like many other rights, your right to persue happiness may conflict with other peoples' right to persue happiness.

Posted by: at September 22, 2005 03:03 PM | PERMALINK

A regular reader sent this to me by email. I have edited out identifying information.

Anonymous doesn't seem to have much inkling about the tradeoffs that real people make every day in the real world.

Here's a brief (well, not so brief) summary of yesterday:

Morning: Got kids off to school (Spouse typically leaves for work before 7), and got to work on important service (EDIT) and teaching (prepared handout, read some student papers) activities. What?? No research? Afternoon: Continued that work, and also did laundry and bills. Child1 arrived home with a friend. Chatted with them, tried to get some sense of how much trouble they were going to get themselves into. Called Child2's school to talk to Child2’s teacher, since we were having trouble figuring out which work Child2'd been bringing home was daily homework and which was (less urgent) back work from the week Child2 missed with chicken pox (when Child2’s parents took turns staying home with Child2). Child2 arrived home, helped Child2 to sort that out. Made dinner for 4 (two different meals, since Child2 won't eat many things--probably bad parenting). Spouse, who'd been in an all-day meeting (but probably lost points for ducking out a few minutes early), arrived home just as dinner was ready. Still didn't do any research! Evening: We gulped down dinner, and I took Child2 to soccer practice. Meanwhile, Spouse did the dishes, made a grocery list, and got Child1 going on Child1’s homework. When I dropped Child2 off at soccer practice, I talked to the mom of one of Child2’s teammates. She'd been a stay-at-home mom, but she recently went to work as a bank teller (needed the money). She talked about how tired she was. Went home, took over homework supervision (which included quizzing Child1 on social studies work in preparation for a test today) while Spouse left for Curriculum night at Child2's school. Back to get Child2 at practice, where I found the newly-working mom being harangued by a PTA honcho who wanted her to "volunteer" for something. Back home, rode herd on Child1 to finish homework (again, if Child1 had better parenting, Child1'd be self-motivated), got kids to take showers and/or baths, all while writing a referee report on a piece for a journal (still no research of my own). Put kids to bed, finished review just as Spouse returned from post-Curriculum night trip to the grocery store (we needed some food since we've got dinner guests tonight; a friend who is a single mom, plus her two kids--I don't have any inkling of how she gets by). Then, Spouse and I had a romantic moment together making Child2's lunch for today (the other reason Spouse needed to go to the grocery store), exchanged info about the evening events and today's appointments, and went to sleep.

On second thought, maybe the Yale women are right; it's impossible to be the best worker and the best mom (parent). The reality is that tens of millions of people have no choice but to juggle those responsibilities every day.

Posted by: binky at September 23, 2005 01:26 PM | PERMALINK
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