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.
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 to21.4. 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.
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