Wait, wasn’t this book a bestseller?

E.J. Graff at the Columbia Journalism Review has an article about the “opt-out revolution” and how it’s a myth. Basically, the “opt-out revolution” is a patriarchal myth headily promoted in places like the NY Times, where readers are relegated with wishful stories about the supposed majority of female Ivy League graduates and other high paid professional types who want nothing more than to get married and give up their careers to be support systems and full time stay-at-home wives for their oh-so-much-more-important husbands. Basically, conservative upper middle class types are still pissed off about The Feminine Mystique and will spend a lot of money trying to demonstrate that women really, truly have no other aspirations than being full time moms, which means full time wives, since your time spent as an active wife ideally lasts a lot longer than when your children are small and need attention 24/7.

Graff’s story is mostly built around some research done by Joan Williams, who examined 119 stories published between 1980 and 2006, most to all trying to create the illusion that upper middle class women are really sorry they ever said there was an ounce of truth to The Feminine Mystique. The sheer number of these “wishing makes it true” stories alone makes me sad, but sadder still is how many of these stories have journalists ignoring or burying the evidence that women may not actuallly be making an utterly free choice to give up their careers to stay home. Graff details it out: There’s no evidence that women are beating feet in large numbers back home. There is evidence that many women who go home do so under duress.

For instance, Belkin’s prime example of someone who “chose” to stay home, Katherine Brokaw, was a high-flying lawyer until she had a child. Soon after her maternity leave, she exhausted herself working around the clock to prepare for a trial—a trial that, at the last minute, was canceled so the judge could go fishing. After her firm refused even to consider giving her “part-time” hours—forty hours now being considered part-time for high-end lawyers—she “chose” to quit.

The stories gloss over the fact that many of these women will have to negotiate a divorce situation later and then re-enter the workplace competing with people that have as much work experience and are 15 years younger. The stories neglected to mention the open discrimination against mothers in the workplace. They come in with the assumption that men simply can’t be asked to do their half of the childcare. The stories uphold the incorrect notion that the absolute best childcare situation is one where a woman gives her undivided attention to children for 18 years, night and day. The stories gloss over the fact that the women who “chose” to go home often report being bored or depressed with their “choice”.

I especially liked the part where Graff points out how these stories end up making it easier for politicians to uphold family unfriendly policies, because they frame these issues as nothing but a matter of personal “choice”, as if the environment that created the “choice” was irrelevant to the situation.

By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what Williams calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Jody Heymann, who teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and McGill University, the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?

The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”

What I really loathe about these stories is there is so much blatant disregard for the well-being of women. Rarely if ever is it noted that being a housewife is a financially perilous situation and that women are wedged out of their paying careers and making their marriage their “career”. And marriage is scary as a career, since you can get “fired” no matter how good an “employee” you are. There aren’t performance reviews and goals set. If your husband decides one day he doesn’t like you anymore, then your investment in your career is over. For basic human rights reasons, we can’t extend basic worker protections to dependent wives; men should not be required to stay in a romantic relationship they don’t want any longer than they don’t want it. But it does create this problem, and all the glowing profiles of the women “revolting” by embracing traditional roles under a great deal of conservative pressure to embrace conservative roles can’t make that problem go away.

For all the women who stay home and are about to get angry, I don’t think you’re in the wrong or anything to stay home. In fact, the opposite—I think that women who make the decision to stay home because there aren’t any other realistic choices for them are simply being human. You’re right to do what’s good for you. This is an issue of discrimination and a social situation where women don’t feel free to keep on working if they want to, and where men very rarely have this quandary that so many professional women have.

full article | source | | | | | 317 reads