http://nyti.ms/1XJkSeP
from domestic prisons. But work is a prison, too.
Judith Shulevitz JUNE 10, 2016
HILLARY CLINTON’S securing of the Democratic nomination doesn’t just put a woman in range of the White House; it puts a mother there. And that’s momentous. Over the past half-century, unmarried childless women have overcome every barrier to opportunity you can think of, and now earn 96 percent of what men do. Mothers, on the other hand, aren’t doing nearly as well: Married mothers are paid 76 cents on the dollar.
To me, Mrs. Clinton’s sheer professional survival is as inspiring as any of her other accomplishments. A woman with a small child can easily lose faith that she’ll ever do anything else again. God knows I did. For the first five years of my child-rearing life, I was supposed to be writing a book, but mostly I dodged my editor’s calls. The 3-year-old had separation anxiety, so I waited it out on one of the nursery school’s kid-size chairs. I lacked the heart to say no to play dates, so I shut my computer and attended to juice boxes.
Then there was Ladies’ Night, when the mothers on my cul-de-sac got together to drink too much wine. Fun, sure, but really: “Ladies’ Night”? The fact that I went every week proved that my professional viability was fast disappearing, or so I thought at the time.
How did Mrs. Clinton hold on to hers? How did she rebound from the years in which she was raising a daughter, pursuing a law career and serving as first lady of Arkansas? She has a steely will, as everyone knows. But another answer is that it was in many ways easier to be a working mother in 1980, when Chelsea Clinton was born, than it is today.
Between the ’80s and the aughts, when I had my children, a cloud of economic anxiety descended on parents, tightening what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called “the time bind.” The workweek of salaried professionals ballooned from 40 hours to 50 hours or more, not counting the email catch-up done after the kids’ bedtime. Union protections, predictable schedules and benefits vanished for vast numbers of blue-collar workers. Their jobs in the service or on-demand economies now pay so little, and child care costs so much (168 percent more than it did a quarter-century ago) that parents have to stitch together multiple jobs. Meanwhile, terrified that their offspring will sink even lower, parents siphon off time and money to hand-raise children who can compete in a global economy.
Women like me who scale back in the face of impossible expectations feel themselves morphing into caricatures: attachment freaks, helicopter moms, concerted cultivators, neo-traditionalists. These stereotypes are just plain sexist, but I don’t know many mothers whose careers, paychecks and sense of self-worth haven’t been eroded by all the compromises they’ve had to make. Our worlds have narrowed; our bank accounts have dipped below the minimum balance; and our power within the family and the world has dwindled. We’d be quick to tell you that we wouldn’t have done it any differently. Still.
What if the world was set up in such a way that we could really believe — not just pretend to — that having spent a period of time concentrating on raising children at the expense of future earnings would bring us respect? And what if that could be as true for men as it is for women?
We live in an age rich in feminisms. One celebrates our multiplicity of identities: black, lesbian, transgender. Another has effectively anathematized sexual violence. Yet another — I think of it as C-suite feminism — chips away at the glass ceiling that keeps women out of the most powerful jobs, such as, say, the presidency.
But we need another feminism — and it needs a name that has nothing to do with gender. Let’s call it, for lack of a better term, “caregiverism.” It would demand dignity and economic justice for parents dissatisfied with a few weeks of unpaid parental leave, and strive to mitigate the sacrifices made by adult children responsible for aging parents.
Mrs. Clinton could be a champion of caregiverism. She has been blunter this electoral season about family-friendly policies than she has ever been before. She emphasized paid family leave when she began her campaign and again in the opening statements of the first Democratic presidential debate. In May, she said she’d cap the cost of child care at 10 percent of a household’s income, down from what, for a household supported by minimum-wage workers, can now be more than 30 percent.
But she needs to go further. Her focus is on wage-earners; what about the people who want to get out of the workplace, at least for a while? Mrs. Clinton should talk to Representative Nita Lowey of New York, who last year introduced a bill that would give Social Security credits to caregivers who left the labor market or cut back on hours — a public nod to the reality that care is work and caregivers merit the same benefits as other workers.
Mrs. Clinton belongs to an earlier generation, one whose objective was to free women from the prison of domesticity — at least the middle-class women who didn’t already have jobs — and send them marching into the work force to demand equality there. But true equality will take more than equal pay and better working conditions. It will require something more radical, a “transvaluation of all values,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.
Am I calling for a counterrevolution? I don’t think so. Feminists have not always seen work as the answer to women’s problems. Many who put in sweatshop hours in the textile industry or open-ended days in domestic service fought for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour workweek. Working women “were not just organizable; they were the best constituency for struggle over the working day,” write David Roediger and Philip Foner in “Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day.”
There is also a venerable tradition in feminist history of trying to overturn a status quo that esteems professionals and wage-earners while demeaning those who do the unpaid or low-paid work of emotional sustenance and physical upkeep. In the 1960s, the largely African-American National Welfare Rights Organization demanded welfare payments that would maintain a decent standard of living, partly on the grounds that these mothers were working already, raising future workers, and partly because they couldn’t find jobs that would support them. “I am 45 years old; I have raised six children,” wrote the group’s chairwoman, Johnnie Tillmon, in 1972. “A job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some 10 million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one.”
Around the same time, the Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James began a campaign called Wages for Housework that called for the overthrow of a capitalist order subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of homemaking and, yes, sexual services. This did not mean that women should necessarily go out and find jobs. “Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work,” they wrote. “Slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.”
Liberal feminists accused them of wanting to push women back into domestic drudgery, but they denied it. “We have worked enough,” they wrote. “We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines.” So what did they want? I asked Silvia Federici, a founder of the New York chapter of Wages for Housework who writes prolifically on these questions. Actual wages for housework aside, she said, the movement wanted to make people ask themselves, “Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?”
The expectation that all mothers will work has been especially hard on single mothers. When Franklin D. Roosevelt established the welfare program Aid to Dependent Children in 1935 it was a given that poor single mothers would tend to their young (poor single white mothers, I should say, because black women were expected to hold jobs). By the 1970s, that presumption having vanished, Ronald Reagan could argue that welfare mothers were “lazy parasites” and “pigs at the trough,” laying the groundwork for welfare reform.
The program put in place by Bill Clinton in 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, cuts off benefits after five years or less; forces women to hold or look for jobs, whether or not there are any to be had; and allows states to shunt welfare funds into other programs. And so, from 1996 to 2011, the number of families living in extreme poverty — on $2 per person a day or less — more than doubled. A majority of those households were headed by single mothers.
IN an important new book, “Finding Time,” the economist Heather Boushey argues that the failure of government and businesses to replace the services provided by “America’s silent partner” — the stay-at-home wife — is dampening productivity and checking long-term economic growth. A company that withholds family leave may drive away a hard-to-replace executive. Overstressed parents lack the time and patience to help children develop the skills they need to succeed. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s work force,” Ms. Boushey writes. “What happens inside families is just as important to making the economy hum along as what happens inside firms.”
Knowing that motherhood can derail a career, women are waiting longer and longer to have children. In the United States, first-time mothers have aged nearly five years since 1970 — as of 2014, they were 26.3 as opposed to 21.4. Some 40 percent of women with bachelor’s degrees have their first child at 30 or older. Fathers are waiting along with the mothers — what else can they do?
I had my children at 39 and 40. (Mrs. Clinton was 32.) My 12-year-old daughter is already calculating how soon she’ll have to have children if I’m going to be strong enough to lift them. Younger than I was, I tell her. But she’s bright and ambitious. I could see her going to graduate school.
I recently got into an argument with a professor friend about the plausibility of restructuring higher education and the professions so that women — and men — wouldn’t have to hustle for positions like partner or associate professor just as they reach peak fertility. Many universities, I said, now stop the tenure clock for a year when assistant professors have children. My friend laughed. A year is nothing when it comes to a baby, she said. She’d never have won tenure if she’d had her son first.
I didn’t know what to say. At least she had a child, unlike friends who waited until too late.
Here’s a fantasy my daughter and I entertain: What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft? Both sexes would be expected to chip in, and the state would support young parents the way it now supports veterans. This is more or less what Scandinavian countries already do. A mother might take five years off, then focus on her career, at which point the father could put his on pause. Or vice versa.
Vice versa was the deal struck by characters on the Danish TV series “Borgen,” a member of Parliament and her husband. He’d schlep and clean for five years; then she’d do the same. (As it turned out, she became prime minister and their marriage went to hell. But that’s a problem few of us would ever have to face.)
What really makes the “Borgen” model a mismatch for the United States is that American families, particularly low-income families, can’t do without a double income, given wage stagnation and the cost of children in a country that won’t help parents raise them. But having to work should not be confused with wanting to work, at least not without some stops along the way. “It takes 20 years, not 12 weeks, to raise a child,” as the feminist legal scholar Joan Williams has written.
Those 20 years are what made Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to women to “lean in,” or work extra hard, before and after they started families, seem so ludicrous. (Ms. Sandberg has softened her stance since her husband’s death last May. “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home,” she recently wrote.) When Marissa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, reported that when she was in Google’s employ, she slept under her desk, one disgusted feminist, Sarah Leonard, wrote, “If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it.”
But what should feminism mean instead? One thing it should not mean is a politics of the possible. We’re fighting for 12 weeks of leave when we need to rethink the basic chronology of our lives. We live longer than we used to. A caregiverist agenda should include stretching career paths across that longer life span, making it easier for parents of both sexes to drop in and out of the work force as the need arises. Automation may eliminate jobs in all sorts of fields. Perhaps we should lobby for a six-hour workday, yielding both more jobs and more time for family.
It’s a little late for me, if not, thank goodness, for my daughter. I fled my cul-de-sac before I should have, in part because I convinced myself that it was becoming a lovely, leafy, azalea-pink prison. City life is great, thank you, but I have regrets. I should have gone on longer rambles with the babies; blown more deadlines; been quicker to heed my son’s demand to “see train” at the nearby station. The articles could have waited; the sight of a little boy clapping as a train squealed to a stop could not. As for Ladies’ Night, it took me a long time to assemble a coterie of mothers as genial and supportive. If I’m ashamed of anything now, it’s how little I appreciated them then.
Judith Shulevitz will be answering questions via live video on our Facebook page on Tuesday, June 14, at 4:30 EST. Post a question here or on our Facebook page.
She is on Twitter (@JudithShulevitz). She is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 12, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Fix Feminism.
http://nyti.ms/1XJkSeP
How to Fix Feminism
Hillary Clinton’s generation aimed to free womenfrom domestic prisons. But work is a prison, too.
Judith Shulevitz JUNE 10, 2016
HILLARY CLINTON’S securing of the Democratic nomination doesn’t just put a woman in range of the White House; it puts a mother there. And that’s momentous. Over the past half-century, unmarried childless women have overcome every barrier to opportunity you can think of, and now earn 96 percent of what men do. Mothers, on the other hand, aren’t doing nearly as well: Married mothers are paid 76 cents on the dollar.
To me, Mrs. Clinton’s sheer professional survival is as inspiring as any of her other accomplishments. A woman with a small child can easily lose faith that she’ll ever do anything else again. God knows I did. For the first five years of my child-rearing life, I was supposed to be writing a book, but mostly I dodged my editor’s calls. The 3-year-old had separation anxiety, so I waited it out on one of the nursery school’s kid-size chairs. I lacked the heart to say no to play dates, so I shut my computer and attended to juice boxes.
Then there was Ladies’ Night, when the mothers on my cul-de-sac got together to drink too much wine. Fun, sure, but really: “Ladies’ Night”? The fact that I went every week proved that my professional viability was fast disappearing, or so I thought at the time.
How did Mrs. Clinton hold on to hers? How did she rebound from the years in which she was raising a daughter, pursuing a law career and serving as first lady of Arkansas? She has a steely will, as everyone knows. But another answer is that it was in many ways easier to be a working mother in 1980, when Chelsea Clinton was born, than it is today.
Between the ’80s and the aughts, when I had my children, a cloud of economic anxiety descended on parents, tightening what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called “the time bind.” The workweek of salaried professionals ballooned from 40 hours to 50 hours or more, not counting the email catch-up done after the kids’ bedtime. Union protections, predictable schedules and benefits vanished for vast numbers of blue-collar workers. Their jobs in the service or on-demand economies now pay so little, and child care costs so much (168 percent more than it did a quarter-century ago) that parents have to stitch together multiple jobs. Meanwhile, terrified that their offspring will sink even lower, parents siphon off time and money to hand-raise children who can compete in a global economy.
Women like me who scale back in the face of impossible expectations feel themselves morphing into caricatures: attachment freaks, helicopter moms, concerted cultivators, neo-traditionalists. These stereotypes are just plain sexist, but I don’t know many mothers whose careers, paychecks and sense of self-worth haven’t been eroded by all the compromises they’ve had to make. Our worlds have narrowed; our bank accounts have dipped below the minimum balance; and our power within the family and the world has dwindled. We’d be quick to tell you that we wouldn’t have done it any differently. Still.
What if the world was set up in such a way that we could really believe — not just pretend to — that having spent a period of time concentrating on raising children at the expense of future earnings would bring us respect? And what if that could be as true for men as it is for women?
We live in an age rich in feminisms. One celebrates our multiplicity of identities: black, lesbian, transgender. Another has effectively anathematized sexual violence. Yet another — I think of it as C-suite feminism — chips away at the glass ceiling that keeps women out of the most powerful jobs, such as, say, the presidency.
But we need another feminism — and it needs a name that has nothing to do with gender. Let’s call it, for lack of a better term, “caregiverism.” It would demand dignity and economic justice for parents dissatisfied with a few weeks of unpaid parental leave, and strive to mitigate the sacrifices made by adult children responsible for aging parents.
Mrs. Clinton could be a champion of caregiverism. She has been blunter this electoral season about family-friendly policies than she has ever been before. She emphasized paid family leave when she began her campaign and again in the opening statements of the first Democratic presidential debate. In May, she said she’d cap the cost of child care at 10 percent of a household’s income, down from what, for a household supported by minimum-wage workers, can now be more than 30 percent.
But she needs to go further. Her focus is on wage-earners; what about the people who want to get out of the workplace, at least for a while? Mrs. Clinton should talk to Representative Nita Lowey of New York, who last year introduced a bill that would give Social Security credits to caregivers who left the labor market or cut back on hours — a public nod to the reality that care is work and caregivers merit the same benefits as other workers.
Mrs. Clinton belongs to an earlier generation, one whose objective was to free women from the prison of domesticity — at least the middle-class women who didn’t already have jobs — and send them marching into the work force to demand equality there. But true equality will take more than equal pay and better working conditions. It will require something more radical, a “transvaluation of all values,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.
Am I calling for a counterrevolution? I don’t think so. Feminists have not always seen work as the answer to women’s problems. Many who put in sweatshop hours in the textile industry or open-ended days in domestic service fought for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour workweek. Working women “were not just organizable; they were the best constituency for struggle over the working day,” write David Roediger and Philip Foner in “Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day.”
There is also a venerable tradition in feminist history of trying to overturn a status quo that esteems professionals and wage-earners while demeaning those who do the unpaid or low-paid work of emotional sustenance and physical upkeep. In the 1960s, the largely African-American National Welfare Rights Organization demanded welfare payments that would maintain a decent standard of living, partly on the grounds that these mothers were working already, raising future workers, and partly because they couldn’t find jobs that would support them. “I am 45 years old; I have raised six children,” wrote the group’s chairwoman, Johnnie Tillmon, in 1972. “A job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some 10 million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one.”
Around the same time, the Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James began a campaign called Wages for Housework that called for the overthrow of a capitalist order subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of homemaking and, yes, sexual services. This did not mean that women should necessarily go out and find jobs. “Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work,” they wrote. “Slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.”
Liberal feminists accused them of wanting to push women back into domestic drudgery, but they denied it. “We have worked enough,” they wrote. “We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines.” So what did they want? I asked Silvia Federici, a founder of the New York chapter of Wages for Housework who writes prolifically on these questions. Actual wages for housework aside, she said, the movement wanted to make people ask themselves, “Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?”
The expectation that all mothers will work has been especially hard on single mothers. When Franklin D. Roosevelt established the welfare program Aid to Dependent Children in 1935 it was a given that poor single mothers would tend to their young (poor single white mothers, I should say, because black women were expected to hold jobs). By the 1970s, that presumption having vanished, Ronald Reagan could argue that welfare mothers were “lazy parasites” and “pigs at the trough,” laying the groundwork for welfare reform.
The program put in place by Bill Clinton in 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, cuts off benefits after five years or less; forces women to hold or look for jobs, whether or not there are any to be had; and allows states to shunt welfare funds into other programs. And so, from 1996 to 2011, the number of families living in extreme poverty — on $2 per person a day or less — more than doubled. A majority of those households were headed by single mothers.
IN an important new book, “Finding Time,” the economist Heather Boushey argues that the failure of government and businesses to replace the services provided by “America’s silent partner” — the stay-at-home wife — is dampening productivity and checking long-term economic growth. A company that withholds family leave may drive away a hard-to-replace executive. Overstressed parents lack the time and patience to help children develop the skills they need to succeed. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s work force,” Ms. Boushey writes. “What happens inside families is just as important to making the economy hum along as what happens inside firms.”
Knowing that motherhood can derail a career, women are waiting longer and longer to have children. In the United States, first-time mothers have aged nearly five years since 1970 — as of 2014, they were 26.3 as opposed to 21.4. Some 40 percent of women with bachelor’s degrees have their first child at 30 or older. Fathers are waiting along with the mothers — what else can they do?
I had my children at 39 and 40. (Mrs. Clinton was 32.) My 12-year-old daughter is already calculating how soon she’ll have to have children if I’m going to be strong enough to lift them. Younger than I was, I tell her. But she’s bright and ambitious. I could see her going to graduate school.
I recently got into an argument with a professor friend about the plausibility of restructuring higher education and the professions so that women — and men — wouldn’t have to hustle for positions like partner or associate professor just as they reach peak fertility. Many universities, I said, now stop the tenure clock for a year when assistant professors have children. My friend laughed. A year is nothing when it comes to a baby, she said. She’d never have won tenure if she’d had her son first.
I didn’t know what to say. At least she had a child, unlike friends who waited until too late.
Here’s a fantasy my daughter and I entertain: What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft? Both sexes would be expected to chip in, and the state would support young parents the way it now supports veterans. This is more or less what Scandinavian countries already do. A mother might take five years off, then focus on her career, at which point the father could put his on pause. Or vice versa.
Vice versa was the deal struck by characters on the Danish TV series “Borgen,” a member of Parliament and her husband. He’d schlep and clean for five years; then she’d do the same. (As it turned out, she became prime minister and their marriage went to hell. But that’s a problem few of us would ever have to face.)
What really makes the “Borgen” model a mismatch for the United States is that American families, particularly low-income families, can’t do without a double income, given wage stagnation and the cost of children in a country that won’t help parents raise them. But having to work should not be confused with wanting to work, at least not without some stops along the way. “It takes 20 years, not 12 weeks, to raise a child,” as the feminist legal scholar Joan Williams has written.
Those 20 years are what made Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to women to “lean in,” or work extra hard, before and after they started families, seem so ludicrous. (Ms. Sandberg has softened her stance since her husband’s death last May. “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home,” she recently wrote.) When Marissa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, reported that when she was in Google’s employ, she slept under her desk, one disgusted feminist, Sarah Leonard, wrote, “If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it.”
But what should feminism mean instead? One thing it should not mean is a politics of the possible. We’re fighting for 12 weeks of leave when we need to rethink the basic chronology of our lives. We live longer than we used to. A caregiverist agenda should include stretching career paths across that longer life span, making it easier for parents of both sexes to drop in and out of the work force as the need arises. Automation may eliminate jobs in all sorts of fields. Perhaps we should lobby for a six-hour workday, yielding both more jobs and more time for family.
It’s a little late for me, if not, thank goodness, for my daughter. I fled my cul-de-sac before I should have, in part because I convinced myself that it was becoming a lovely, leafy, azalea-pink prison. City life is great, thank you, but I have regrets. I should have gone on longer rambles with the babies; blown more deadlines; been quicker to heed my son’s demand to “see train” at the nearby station. The articles could have waited; the sight of a little boy clapping as a train squealed to a stop could not. As for Ladies’ Night, it took me a long time to assemble a coterie of mothers as genial and supportive. If I’m ashamed of anything now, it’s how little I appreciated them then.
Judith Shulevitz will be answering questions via live video on our Facebook page on Tuesday, June 14, at 4:30 EST. Post a question here or on our Facebook page.
She is on Twitter (@JudithShulevitz). She is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 12, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Fix Feminism.
http://nyti.ms/1XJkSeP
