Women in Comparative
Societies
The Price of Motherhood:
Part One (Intro-Chpt. 4)
Reading:
Crittenden, Anne. 2001. The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important
Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued. New York: Henry Holt
and Company (an Owl Book).
Introduction:
“The very
definition of a mother is selfless service to another” (1).
Do you
agree with this definition? How do you define a mother? What are
her core traits and skills?
Motherhood as a
symbol in American political culture and public policy. Motherhood is as
American as apple pie, no institution is more sacrosanct, no figure more
praised (1).
The irony is
that motherhood is lauded in speeches, romanticized as “a labor of love”, yet
also a professional liability, something you need to hide if you are a
professional woman, can’t put on your resume
Bill Gates and
Steve Ballmer give Harvard $29 mln for new computer science and electrical
engineering facility; name it the Maxwell Dworkin Center in honor of their
mothers’ maiden names (i.e. their grandfathers’ names). Note the irony
here that the money is going to educate more men like them, not to help women
who are mothers.
Crittenden’s
argument: That unpaid female care-giving is the heart of the economy (8).
That mothers
generate wealth by raising productive, well-behaved, well-reasoning citizens
AND that they are economically, professionally and socially penalized for doing
it.
Economically,
in that they are not paid for their labors; professionally, in that they are
seen as less committed, unreliable for taking their responsibilities as mothers
seriously; socially, in that people, even other women, see what their doing as
“doing nothing,” unimportant, easy, invisible, and uninteresting.
Chapter
1: We haven’t come very far, baby
Popular
myth that American women have ‘made it,’ that second wave feminism succeeded in
getting them into law school, grad school, med school, etc.
Media stories
about the number of women working warned that no one was at home with the
children anymore.
They provoked a
national crisis over ‘family values’ and ‘quality time.’
They prompted
social conservatives to argue that ‘women’s liberation’ created a host of
problems and imbalances in our families and that these, in turn, had horrible
consequences for our society (increased divorce, juvenile delinquency, drug
abuse, violent crime, etc.)
Are these
trends and fears real, according to Crittenden’s research?
What counter
trends does her research uncover?
1.
That women are not primarily engaged in the formal economy and only secondarily
as caregivers.
In fact, 28.4 %
of all women 25-54 are not in the labor force at all (17). Another 20% of
American women with children under 18 is employed only part-time (18). In
other words, about half of all mothers are mothers first, and paid laborers
second.
Only
Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have a smaller percentage of
female college graduates working for pay (17).
Is this a good
or a bad thing? Is the economic calculus confronting women in those
countries the same as in the U.S.?
2.
That some men are doing some parenting, but that the majority of the
responsibility for child rearing and for housework still falls on women,
especially, those with infants and young children.
a. 27% of America’s children are being raised by their mothers
alone (23); only 1.5% of children under 5 have their fathers as their primary
guardian. In most homes where ‘single fathers’ have custody of their
children, there are girlfriends, grandmothers, etc., who help them (26)
b. mothers of babies/toddlers devote four times as many hours as
fathers to their children (25)
c. men rarely had primary responsibility for any one child-rearing
duty; and in NO household is the father responsible for all child-rearing tasks
(25)
d. mothers run errands; men go to bars and restaurants (26)
e. 1994: 73%-80% said taking care of the kids, cooking,
doing laundry, housecleaning, dishes were women’s responsibility (26)
3.
That women haven’t “made it” professionally. That women can’t have it
all, i.e., have a good career and a family. They are forced to choose
between career and family.
4.
That women are not spending less time with their children because they are
working, but that the more educated a woman, the more time she spends with her
children. Instead, women are having fewer children and investing more
time in each one by forgoing housework, leisure and sleep (20-22).
5.
That fathers are the parents truly in short supply (23). Children say
fathers frequently miss sporting events, etc., that they would like to have
more time with them. In 1996, fathers spent an average of 2,132 hors
working compared to 1,197 for women (18).
This is a tough
pill to swallow for feminists who argued that gender roles are socially
constructed and that, therefore, women’s liberation involved simply redefining
fatherhood, parenthood, getting men to embrace parenting.
But it’s not
really happening ‘ why not???
Why are so
many well-qualified women leaving the workplace?
’Turbo-capitalism’
American
work cultures that expect ‘your soul’
Sixty-plus
hours-per-week
e.g. a
survey of chief financial officers at American corporations found that 80% of them
were men with stay-at-home wives; another found that 64% of male
executives with children under 13 had nonworking spouses (18)
*Thus, ‘the
presence of a wife at home to care for family and personal matters is almost as
much of a requirement for success in business as it was a generation ago’ (18)
2005 NPR
Interview on Why so Few Women CEOs
Chapter
2: The Conspiracy of Silence
What is the
conspiracy of silence Crittenden describes?
[covering up
the mass exodus of well-trained women from the workplace because the workplace
demands your soul]
expectation of
long work hours; no interruptions by one’s family life
**the American
work culture assumes the availability of unpaid domestic labor/child-rearing
Impossible to
succeed with a family unless you have a wife
Expect women to
‘be a man’
The
problem with women was that they weren’t men (29).
Mothers
are the least likely to think like ‘we’ do, because ‘we’ are men who see their
children a few minutes a day’ (29).
To succeed, men
and women must be perceived as being committed to the ‘unencumbered life’
Note: much of this was
revealed in an article for Harvard Business Review by Claudia Schwartz, who
found that women were more expensive to hire than men because of the
interruptions in their career, flexible schedules, etc., that would enable them
to balance work and family responsibilities (31).
She hoped this
would inspire changes in the workplace because she also found that IT IS MORE
EXPENSIVE TO LOSE THESE TALENTED WOMEN THAN TO ACCOMMODATE THEIR NEEDS (31);
instead it reified men’s assumptions about women being ‘less committed’, on the
‘mommy track’ etc. So much for feminist research!
A great example
of how women and men ‘similarly situated’ are perceived differently:
women took off their wedding rings to go on job interviews; men borrowed them
to look more responsible (31)
Some
interviewers even asked women if they would have an abortion if they got
pregnant!
Why are women
and employers uncomfortable about talking about these facts of work world?
1) it
reveals that women won’t succeed at the same rates of men, no matter how smart,
well-educated, hard-working they are unless they choose to remain childless
and/or unmarried
2) it
reveals that corporations’ ‘add women and stir’ approach has been a total
failure
3) it
reveals that workplace norms for worker availability, hours, etc., are
responsible for keeping children from their parents, and that many women have
chosen (at their own professional and economic expense) to ‘just say no’ to
career
Patterns of
Work and Family for Women
Note the
different patterns of work/family for college-educated American women over past
generations (33)
1910s
graduates must choose: career or family
1930s
graduates: job then family
1950s
graduates: family then job
1960s/70s
graduates try to “have it all” career and family
What happens to
them? What are their stories?
1980s/90s
graduates career then family
What will
happen to your generation of graduates 2000-2010?? What kind of job/career/family
pattern or balance will you have??
Chapters 3 “How
Mothers’ Work Was Disappeared” and 4: Truly Invisible Hands
These
chapters show how the assumptions and values of male economists have warped
economic theory, made women’s work invisible and valueless, unquantifiable
How/why did
women’s work in the home become valueless/unquantifiable ?
What ECONOMIC
CHANGES DROVE THIS CHANGE?
‘economic man’
homo economicus’
Who is he,
how does he behave? What do economists assume about ‘human nature’?
How does
‘femina economica’ behave? How do women defy these assumptions?
Are mothers
‘irrational’ for choosing to mother over having a successful career?