Unfinished Business (10 page)

I
HAVE BEEN CRITICIZED FOR
being a privileged, wealthy, liberal white woman who cannot imagine the lives of the vast majority of women across the United States. Feminist scholar Catherine Rottenberg, for instance, argues that the whole idea of “balance” is a privileged preserve. “
From Private Woman through the New Woman and Superwoman,” she writes, “it has finally become possible to speak about the Balanced Woman,” a narrative “predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women.” Rottenberg believes we place far too much emphasis on happiness and positive affect, and far too little emphasis on “
equal rights, justice, or emancipation as the end goals for…feminism.”

Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize winner and author of feminist classics like
Backlash
and
Stiffed
, believes that books like
Lean In
and articles like my piece in
The Atlantic
are evidence that we've abandoned the collective struggle for women's liberation to focus on the individual advancement of the already privileged and that we've fully bought into a corrupt system. “
It's been more than forty years since ‘Dress for Success' and ‘Having It All' (neither, by the way, coined by actual feminists) were enshrined in the liberatory lexicon and crowded out the authentic feminist dream of transforming human society,” Faludi writes. “Four decades later,
we are seeing the sad fruits of that failure of will. We have redefined feminism as women's right to be owned by the system, to be owned as much as men have been owned.”

I am sympathetic to the view that contemporary feminism no longer unites women in its original quest for broader social transformation. I knew and acknowledged that I was writing my article for a relatively wealthy and educated audience. Yet many women who wrote to me from less privileged backgrounds told me that my experiences and perspectives spoke to them as well.

Tanya Sockol Harrington, who works with firefighters, was one example. She lamented that she could not get the college degree she needed to advance in her career. “
As a mother to four, one of whom has medical issues, married to a man with a full-time career of his own there is simply no way I can attain this level of education,” she wrote me. “I have my high school diploma and the classes I took for the fire service at our local community college. While my husband is a nice person the reality is that the bulk of the home responsibilities fall on my shoulders.”

The question of how to fit caregiving together with our goals for ourselves is common to both Tanya and me. To deny this unity of experience is to deny equality of purpose to women in lower income brackets. We all have aspirations in the realms of education and in our professional lives, but we want to be there for our loved ones as well. Catherine Rottenberg and others are right, however, to highlight the ways in which focusing on work-life balance speaks primarily to women with professional careers. “Balance” is a luxury. Equality is a necessity.

When we stop talking about work-life balance and start talking about discrimination against care and caregiving, we see the world differently. We see a link between a post-maternity leave flextime mother who gets less interesting assignments for less important
clients and an employer's refusal to provide sick days, personal days, or any flexibility to a working mother (or working father) in the first place. In both instances the workplace is discriminating in favor of workers who can outsource caregiving to someone else. And in both cases employers are assuming that it is impossible to be both a committed caregiver and a good worker. But why should that be? The least we can do is to force employers to justify that assumption.

Similarly, we see a common discriminatory assumption embedded in our view of a woman's caregiving years spent out of the paid workforce as a yawning gap on her résumé and our failure to include the
hundred million–plus hours of unpaid care work done in households across the country every year in our national GDP. In both cases we assume that care work is not work that really matters, even though it is essential to the dignity and the wellbeing of the elderly and the sick and to the very brain formation and growth of the young. Nor do we assume that it can in any way benefit the caregiver in ways that are individually valuable and desirable in other contexts.

At the low end, the motherhood penalty becomes something much more dire: what economist Nancy Folbre called, back in 1985, the “
the pauperization of motherhood.” Three decades later,
in a 2012 volume on care provision and policies in the United States published by the prestigious Russell Sage Foundation, Folbre and her co-authors note all the ways that low-income families are affected by the relatively sparse public subsidies for care provision. They typically have more children than higher-income families, meaning that they simultaneously have greater caregiving demands and a greater need for paid income. At the same time, “with low wages and little savings” they have a much harder time navigating the special demands of aging or ill family
members. And while mothers are paid less up and down the income ladder,
that difference has a far greater impact on families who have little to begin with.

In our new vocabulary, the motherhood penalty is a prime example of discrimination against caregiving, a bias that operates up and down the income scale. Though the consequences are far worse for poor women, still, in relative terms, the pauperization of motherhood at the bottom parallels the penalization of motherhood at the top. If we truly valued caregiving—thought that it was not only necessary but important and valuable and hard—we would make every effort to accommodate and support it and judge workers based not on our assumptions but on their results.

T
HE LIVES OF MIDDLE
-
CLASS WOMEN
in the United States are increasingly shaped by the tug-of-war between competition and care, but in two sharply different ways. On the one hand, the substitution of two breadwinners for one breadwinner and one caregiver has made those families far less resilient. Warren and Tyagi document the ravages of the “two-income trap” among American middle-class families, showing the ways in which women's entry into the workforce over the past four decades has meant losing the safety net that once allowed traditional single-breadwinner families to ride out financial reverses. “
A stay-at-home mother served as the family's ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability”: insurance because if Dad lost his job, Mom could still go to work and keep the family afloat. But with both parents working and the family depending on dual incomes as a baseline, the safety net of Mom getting a job if she has to disappears.

Warren and Tyagi's point is not to put mothers back in the
home: these mothers are working because it takes both parents to provide for their families. It is to highlight the ways in which a stay-at-home parent provides substantial economic value to a society, as insurer and also back-up caregiver, able to step into the breach when a family member falls sick or an elderly relative requires help driving to the doctor or balancing a checkbook. As a society, the ways in which we value breadwinning over caregiving have made us blind to these costs: we miss the ways in which more money cannot actually substitute for care.

In those middle-class families with two parents that are still surviving on a single wage, it's still more likely to be coming from Dad than from Mom.
I asked Pew Research to crunch the numbers, and Richard Fry, a senior researcher, discovered that among middle-income couples where only one spouse was employed, 70 percent of those breadwinners were men. But those numbers are slowly shifting, as jobs in traditionally female sectors are expanding just as jobs in traditionally male sectors have contracted.

In communities across the country where manufacturing jobs for men have disappeared, the decent jobs that have remained are overwhelmingly in “eds and meds”: education and healthcare. These are care jobs—work that involves the nurturing and support of the young, the sick, and the old. They are jobs that we have traditionally valued less and paid less than jobs in the competitive sector of the economy; indeed, most schools and hospitals are not-for-profit, taking the competition out of the sector. They are women's jobs.

That pattern is set to continue. As I noted in
chapter 2
, books such as Hanna Rosin's
The End of Men
and Liza Mundy's
The Richer Sex
document the ways in which the economic shift from industry toward service and information is advantaging
traditionally “feminine” skills such as social intelligence, open communication, and even the ability to sit still. Rosin examines the thirty
professions projected to add the most jobs over the next decade and concludes that “
women dominate twenty, including nursing, accounting, home health assistance, childcare, and food preparation.”

I had a personal experience with this phenomenon several summers ago, when Andy suddenly fell sick in London and he checked into a central London hospital. As he was moved onto the ward, I looked at the nursing chart and thought to myself that it looked exactly like a corporate board chart in reverse. Of some twenty-five nurses, all were women except for three or four men (and none of them appeared to be British-born). My recent encounters with the U.S. healthcare system have revealed similar patterns. Only about
9 percent of nurses in the United States are men, which works out to about 330,000 male nurses compared to 3.2 million female nurses. Yet we have a chronic nursing shortage.

These statistics make it all too clear that the middle-class map has been redrawn by women leaving their traditional caregiving roles due to the economic necessity of having two breadwinners to support a middle-class family, and men losing their traditional breadwinning jobs and being unprepared, unwilling, or unable to take on work in the caring sectors of the economy. Valuing care—and paying for it—could make care jobs more attractive to men and help bolster the middle class.

F
OCUSING ON CARE AS EQUAL
to competition also holds out the possibility that white women, particularly upper-class white women, will hear the voices of many women of color differently. For generations of African American women, caregiving and
breadwinning have been the same thing; they have earned their living and supported or helped support their own families by caring for other people's families. As Lonnae O'Neal Parker writes, “
There has never been a national effort to keep black women at home, caring sweetly for their children. They have always worked, and their work has never been a separate thing from their mothering.”

No single African American thinker or writer can speak for African American women as a whole, of course, but Taigi Smith, a writer and network news producer, offers a powerful critique that further emphasizes Alison Wolf's claim that feminism for elite women has deepened “gender segregation” for women as a whole:

I declared myself a womanist when I realized that white women's feminism really didn't speak to my needs as the daughter of a black, single, domestic worker. I felt that, historically, white women were working hard to liberate themselves from housework and childcare, while women of color got stuck cleaning their kitchens and raising their babies. When I realized that feminism largely liberated white women at the economic and social expense of women of color, I knew I was fundamentally unable to call myself a feminist.

From this perspective, being able to stay home and raise your own children is a different kind of liberation. Indeed, the writings of many African American feminists offer a strong, positive, affirming vision of motherhood. They describe motherhood as a source of power, not penalty, providing a way to push back against negative stereotypes rather than to confirm them. Black women writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Marita Golden, and Alice Walker
all describe the ways that a child connects the mother “
to some power in herself, some power to speak, to be heard, to articulate feelings.”

Walker makes this point in her driving and rhythmic prose:

It is not my child who tells me: I have no femaleness white women must affirm. Not my child who says: I have no rights black men must respect. It is not my child who has purged my face from history and herstory, and left mystory just that, a mystery; my child loves my face and would have it on every page, if she could, as I have loved my own parents' faces above all others….We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.

Caring here is a source of power, growth, and personal fulfillment for the caregiver as well as the person being cared for. The child gives the parent dignity and purpose; the parent gives the child hopes of a better future.

I certainly cannot claim to speak for women of color; I can only try to hear them. Many come from cultures that emphasize the bonds of family far more than white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture does. As the United States becomes plurality Hispanic, for instance, the care networks of extended families that are a strong part of Hispanic culture should become a much more evident part of American culture. African American culture has also long placed a greater emphasis on caring for all relatives, not just members of the nuclear family, than white culture does.

Starting from the perspective of care would place a much higher value on the work that women of color have traditionally done and open the door to many new conversations. They will
not be uniform, of course. But at the very least, they help us escape the assumption that the experience of white well-off women in the United States is the feminist benchmark.

S
INGLE PEOPLE NEED BALANCE TOO
. As Kate Bolick, author of
Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own
, noted on
The Atlantic
's website, when you work in an office, regardless of marital or parental status or gender, “
You get home way too late, you don't exercise enough, you blow too much money on mediocre lunch options, you die a slow death in each long, pointless meeting.” Another former student of mine who is single and in the Foreign Service observed that his married counterparts fought tooth and nail not to get assigned to hardship, dangerous, or unaccompanied posts. “
Granted, single people don't have the demands of a family, but it doesn't mean that we make any less of a sacrifice or that we enjoy such posts either,” he wrote to me.