White-Collar Quandary, Blue-Collar Purgatory?
Since the early 1990s, stories about career women who have “seen the light” and chucked it all for junior have sprung like mushrooms after the rain. So it’s hardly surprising that yet another one of these articles surfaced in the mainstream media – this time in The New York Times Magazine under the appellation “The Opt-Out Revolution.” In the article, journalist Lisa Belkin profiles a group of upper-middle class women who have relinquished high-flying careers for full-time motherhood, a decision she attributes to a “post-feminist revolution.” While indicative of a personal crisis many women face in the course of their lives – career versus motherhood – do articles like Belkin’s assume a privilege of choice at the expense of those mothers who must work out of economic necessity?
Belkin’s scenario conjures an idyllic portrait of ladies who lunch. It goes something like this: fathers jump into their cars for a 10-12 hour shift with lovely wives and gurgling toddlers wave goodbye. We are shown smartly furnished homes complete with family pictures on the mantle and a dog curled up by the fire. At lunch, yoga-bodied moms congregate to discuss imminent birthday parties while chasing errant youngsters around the living room.
But these particular women bear advanced degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and the like, and before babies, they donned the armor of shoulder-padded suits and marched off to conquer the corporate world. Early on they postponed marriage and children because heading to work was a moral imperative and the fast track to stardom, exhilarating.
Indeed, if proto-feminists were able to peek decades ahead to this scene of accomplished, working women, would they feel triumphant? Of course! Perhaps until they heard Katherine utter: “I don’t want to be on the fast track leading to a partnership at a prestigious law firm.” Or “Maternity provides an escape hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and convenient exit.” Or, as Rebecca, a former personnel trainer declares in a Boston Glob article entitled “Stay-at-Home Mothers Find They Are Not Alone,” “We are doing it our way.”
The abundance of Belkin-esque features in the media overlooks the fact that this was not the brand of feminism earlier pioneers envisioned. This is far from the enlightened, egalitarian version of “having it all” they imagined. If you look past the Ann Taylor outfits and the cell phones, these scenes could very well be plucked out of the 1950s. It’s no secret that these women are able to turn away from careers because they’re married to men with substantial salaries and hefty health coverage. As Susan Douglas sardonically writes in her articles “Post-Feminist Swill Redux,” “the women represented in these samples are married to men whose salaries are equal to the operating budget of Wal-Mart.” Indeed, we are tempted to ask, what about the rest of us? What about the families who have to live on the income of two parents because one paycheck is insufficient? What about single mothers, student mothers, poor mothers, immigrant mothers? What about women who defy the cookie-cutter cultural imperative altogether and choose never to bear children? What about the people who simply do not have a choice?
Staying at home is a luxury unavailable to at least sixty percent of white women, and sixty-six percent of African-American women living in the United States. “The majority of women who work are motivated by need, not preference,” writes Jennifer Johnson, author of Getting by on the Minimum. The “opt-out” reality described in articles like Belkin’s stems from an inherent position of privilege. “It is neither a phenomenon nor a trend,” complains Bee Lavender, editor of Hip Mama, “because it affects a limited number of women married to high-powered men with sufficient economic resources to make rational choices.” When it comes to managing the conflict of family and career affluent married couples can afford to throw off the shackles of work, but for most single parents and double-income families, foregoing one parent’s wages in the interest of “putting family first” is not a realistic option.
As we stand today, two in three working mothers, or sixty-six percent, work forty or more hours per week. By comparison, only sixty percent of American women sans children work forty or more hours a week. According to the Employment Characteristic of Families Summary, issued on July 9, 2003, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71.8 percent of women with children eighteen or younger are in the labor force.
The fact is, more women are working today than they did in previous decades, and more women than ever fill the role of both primary breadwinner and caregiver. In 2002, 12.8 million families were headed by women, representing 17.8 percent of all families in America, compared with 5.6 million (10.8 percent of all families) in 1970. In the final analysis, nearly two-thirds of working women – sixty-four percent – reported that they provide about half or more of their household income.
If one were to listen to less privileged mothers than those Belkin presents as barometers of normality, one would find a very different reality. Women describe strain from work and mommy overload as they struggle to manage rising childcare costs, increasingly demanding schedules, and inflexible working hours. Many feel pulled in two directions, and some said they were unable to take time off from work to see a school game or play, or even tend to a sick child.
Judy, a stately, vibrant woman in her mid-forties, works as a copy-cataloger at a university library in Washington, D.C. During the school year, she wakes up at 4:30 A.M. to get ready, prepare the kids’ lunches, and arrive at work by 7:30 A.M. Her husband’s schedule is comparatively more flexible, allowing him to drop the twins off at school. But during the school year, Judy needs to leave work by 4:00 P.M. to pick them up. And her duties continue from there: dinner, household chores, and homework. Once the kids are fast asleep, she collapses into bed at 11:00 P.M., simply to begin the cycle again in the morning.
When asked whether she could afford not to work, Judy responds with a resounding “no.” There’s the mortgage to pay, the bills, and the savings for the children’s college. Could she work fewer hours? Not really, she says. “Now would be the time to do it,” she confesses,” because it is now that my kids need me by their side. I know I’ll be able to do it in twenty years, but my kids will not need me then. The time is now, and I can’t.” I ask Judy about her opinion on the opt-out revolution theory: would she like to quit her job, provided that her husband earned a nice salary? “Hey, that sounds like a nice idea to me!” An uproarious laughter bellows forth at the impossibility.
At least school occupies the kids. Summer vacation means finding something for them to do during the long hours Judy and her husband are working. “Sending them to camp for the whole summer would cost around $3,000. Last summer we found something for $75 each, but it ran only from 9:30 A.M. until 3:30 P.M., and I had to be there right on time to pick them up.” She doesn’t have the option of resorting to family members for help: all of her sisters live in South Carolina.
Elisa is luckier in this regard. She works as a cleaning lady for $8.60 an hour at an elite university. She arrived in the U.S. seven years ago from Honduras, where she ran a small business with her mother. “I have been working all my life,” she said, asserting that she would not quit working, even if her husband earned enough for two.
To the question of whether she can afford to quit her job to spend more time with her three kids, including her ten-month-old toddler, she responds, “No, I don’t think so. I have to work to feed my children, to buy them essentials. If I stopped working, the family would not have enough money for rent, bills, and all the other expenses.”
She doesn’t need a nanny, she says, because her sister takes care of her toddler while she is at work, and her husband’s more flexible schedule allows him to drop off and pick up the older kids. What would happen if her sister wasn’t there for her? Elisa shrugs, “I don’t know. I guess I would have to quit.”
How to we deny the existence of these women who not only work the day shift, but then come home to do what sociologist Arlie Hochschil aptly terms the “second shift”? Emphasizing the rhetoric of choice and pretending that real choice exists in America is a way of mythologizing freedom. It also de-emphasizes the plight of millions of women in the United States. It’s a smokescreen. A fallacious existence. And the media perpetuates this deception. The mainstream media posits choice as something widely available, thus assuming a “post-feminist” condition. But whether you bow out of a career, or are terminally subjected to first and second shifts, working motherhood is the thing, the quandary, women can’t see to reconcile in feminist camps.
Despite the headlines professing the liberation of third-wave feminists, the ladies who lunch tell a darker tale. What we learn when we peek inside the lives of many “opt-out” ladies, is that they had to confront the fast-paced, frenetic work weeks, up to seventy-five hours a week for some, while ministering to their children. Two of the five women interviewed stated they requested normal forty-hour weeks to no avail. If employers considered such a request unreasonable, some women asked for part-time positions, although many women suspected they’d have to forego decent salaries and real opportunities for upward mobility.
Such suspicions proved true: the response was generally a dismissive “all or nothing” attitude from bosses. Choice, in these cases, was to either maintain these punishing schedules or call it quits. And quit they did. As one of the women admits, “I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career, but I wore myself out trying to do both jobs well.”
Some writers have observed that the exodus of professional women from the workforce is not about motherhood at all. It is, in fact, about work – the growing inhumanity of workplaces whose workaholic cultures are destructive toward employees. Several women profiled in Belkin’s article openly admitted that their departure from the workforce was precipitated by their employer’s unwillingness to negotiate flexible schedules. Even for women contemplating an out from less powerful jobs, motherhood played only a minor role in the decision to leave.
As Americans go forth into the twenty-first century, new technology allows us to work smarter – but we are also working harder. Ask most Americans how things are really going and you are bound to hear stories of burnout and desperation. We don’t hear much about that, with the national PR machine breathlessly trumpeting the message that “we are living in the wealthiest country on earth.” But behind the door of every apartment, town home, brownstone, or studio of the people fueling this economy, there is a different story, one of exhaustion and foreboding, a story about the lives, family, and leisure time usurped by a continuous workload that has no end in sight.
In fact, Americans have now surpassed Japan as the most overworked people in post-industrialized society. In total hours annually, we work two weeks longer than the Japanese and nearly two months longer than most Western Europeans. On top of that, while most Italians, German, French and Scandinavians are able to relieve the grind with four to six weeks of paid vacation each year guaranteed by law, Americans – including those in high-powered positions – average a paltry nine days off after the first year on the job, an example of unrestrained, unchecked turbo-capitalism.
This time crunch affects everyone, not just new mothers. Within most large companies, turbo-capitalist culture permeates every aspect of our lives, and stress levels run high. “People are incredibly burnt-out,” says Mindy Fried of the Center for Work and Family at Boston College. Fried recently released a study showing that flexible hours on the job can help to take, as she describes it, some of “the steam out of the kettle.”
The average workweek has crept up to almost forty-eight hours for professionals; and even so-called part-time work is now galloping up to thirty-five or forty-hours. It always surprises people from European countries that “wealthy,” autonomous Americans get pushed around by the talking heads of corporate interest. “The gap between Europe and America seems to be growing,” says a baffled Orvar Logfre, a professor at Lund University in Sweden. “I am a bit amazed at this, because Americans love leisure.”
Many Europeans also express amazement at the fact that roughly 5-7 million American children are left unattended at home every day. Why? Because parents don’t have the right to take a day off if their kids are not in school. It takes just a cough or a snowstorm for parents to have to make a choice between staying home, paying a nanny, or taking a day off. In countries such as Sweden, parents can opt to work a six-hour day until their children are eight years old rather than “opt-out” completely. In the Netherlands, the official workweek is thirty-six hours, and workers can choose to work a four-day week. The legal workweek in France was reduced from thirty-nine to thirty-five hours in 2000, and the rest of the continent is sure to follow suit.
But of course, when the real story is about capitalism gone mad, it is common to turn it into a story about social hardships or lost causes. According to Anne Crittenden, change lies in educating women about the inner workings of our social structure. As Crittenden argues, if women became aware of the intricacies of the structure that has ostensibly failed them, rather than thinking opting-out is a viable solution, they would press for structural changes.
Women’s choices, after all, are not made in a vacuum. Since women’s voices have been historically limited in the halls of Congress and State governments, their opportunities are usually determined by the unintended consequences of other policies (i.e. immigration, labor, economic policies). Consider how for decades Congress and the federal government have refused to provide equality programs for paid maternity leave or dependable after school programs.
Other than some efforts to secure workers’ rights for parental and medical leave, alleviating the strain society puts on parents is not a political urgency. In fact, as Dr. Sheila Kamerman of the Clearinghouse of International Development of Child, Youth and Family Policies at Columbia University explains, the U.S. sends “mixed messages about how to balance work and family life. We believe it is in the best interest of children to be with their mothers when they are young… yet we continue to hold back from putting policies in place that will allow working parents to succeed in both the workplace and home life.”
Although a 1998 survey found that eighty-two percent of women and seventy-five percent of men favored the idea of implementing a program that would provide families some income when a worker takes medical or family leave, the U.S. is only one of two nations (the other is Australia) in the post-industrialized world that fails to fund parental leave. The twelve-week paid leave guaranteed to American workers under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is out-and-out miserly compared to the array of benefits available to our European counterparts.
Many Western European countries encourage women to contribute to the workplace by implementing generous governmental programs. In Sweden, as far back as the 1970s, social policies offered mothers generous maternity benefits and the right to work on an eighty percent schedule as long as a pre-school child is present in the home. Despite severe budget cuts in every European country in recent years, not a single government has curbed its maternity benefits. In recent elections, French and Norwegian politicians competed over how to advance further support for families.
Additionally, couples are taxed separately, enabling the wife to keep more of her earnings in the event that her income is less. In France, every mother receives free health care, a cash allowance for each child, and a year-long maternity. Many researchers argue that as a result of these policies, the proportion of women quitting their jobs after childbirth fell to less than ten percent, and among university educated Swedish men and women, the rates of participation in the workforce are now virtually the same. But perhaps the most telling of all statistics is the fact that the child poverty rate in most European countries hovers around six percent, in sharp contrast to seventeen percent in the U.S.
Can we expect the U.S. to step up and offer an acceptable solution to the problem anytime soon? As Crittenden observes, “conservatives are not willing to put their money where their mouths are. Their eyes grow moist over family values, but they are loath to implement family friendly social programs,” thus hemorrhaging the workforce of some of its best-trained people. Corporate lobbyists have had a tremendous influence on politicians, who have vehemently opposed the most minimal paid parental or family leaves. The excuse? That the cost would bankrupt American businesses. If they could only prove what they so steadfastly defend! The truth is, generous paid parental leave is a basic right in every other post-industrialized nation – and their economies have not financially stagnated.
Reevaluating our priorities as a nation, and consequently our policies, will not be an easy task. Our cultural identity is so wrapped up in the ideals of individualism and freedom that people tend to forget the essential point: looming socio-cultural and political forces frequently dictate our choices.
Indeed, it is exceedingly hard to create positive change if the beneficiaries themselves do not see the relationship between the larger social structure and their individual choices – or even believe that their cause is worth fighting for. And perhaps this, more than anything else, explains why women’s potential strength still lies dormant in the U.S. Many women do not even seem to believe that they deserve a fairer deal than they are getting in society. I am almost tempted to conclude that American mothers are their own worst enemies.
Many mothers of young children are too preoccupied, too hard-pressed, too frenzied, and perhaps too tired to have time to support women’s causes, to be political, or even to exercise the right that early feminists so earnestly fought for: their right to vote. But by opting out of the workforce, or even remaining silent on simple advocacy, women sabotage their own opportunities. I suspect that The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt is right. Women must put their lives in a broader structure and “organize a new, muscular, inclusive women’s movement that would fight for a fairer deal for working mothers in their jobs, at home, and in government policy.” Of course, as Pollitt jests, “such advocacy “would be feminism, the dreaded and despised.” But it might just work.
