When Everything Changed (51 page)

The problem, it seemed, was buried deep in the issue of gender. Husbands who did more around the house than their fathers had done felt they were contributing a great deal, even if it amounted to less than half the time their wives were putting in. Couples struggling to change seemed to do best if they lived in neighborhoods where sharing the housework was more common. As one expert explained, the most important factor in predicting how much a husband would do was how equal a couple’s friends’ relationships were.

V
ICKI COHN POLLARD’S DAUGHTER,
Tanya, was horrified when she read the essay her mother wrote about the days of communal life in Baltimore and her theory that “the more responsibility any one person bears for raising a child, the more anger that person will have for the child.” And Vicki, who had moved to Maine and become an accomplished acupuncturist, had reservations, too. “If I were to do it over again, I would be more present for her. I think she feels like it hurt her. I think it, too. But who knows? She’s a pretty amazing little being.”

Tanya got her PhD from Yale and became a college professor, specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. When she married and had children, she certainly had no plans for communal child rearing. “It’s not just that I’m domestic. I’m also private, I guess. I like my own space,” she said. But she hardly returned to the stay-at-home pattern of the ’50s. When her first daughter, Isabella, was a baby, Tanya and her husband, Will, who is also an academic, shared the responsibilities. “I’d teach two days a week and he’d teach two days a week,” she said. “There were a couple of times when Will had to be at Columbia when I was at meetings, and sometimes I’d miss the meeting and sometimes he would. A couple of times I brought Isabella to campus and had a student of mine wheel her around.”

Their neighborhood, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is an epicenter of the evolved American couple. All of Tanya’s female friends share the parenting and housekeeping duties with their husbands. They talk in scandalized whispers about the employer who tried to make a man come in to work on a weekend when his baby was a newborn. “Everybody takes it for granted it’s the husband’s job as much as the wife’s to be around,” said Tanya. When Tanya and Will had a second daughter in 2007, instead of presents her friends took turns cooking for them, “which basically means that we got a hot meal brought to us once a week.” While Tanya’s friends don’t often take care of her children, she feels secure in the knowledge that “there are a lot of people who I feel I can call on for things like that, which is really, really nice.” In some ways, Tanya mused, it wasn’t far from that old Baltimore neighborhood after all. “It’s funny—my mother regarded it as radical, but I think it’s old-fashioned.”

“W
E MEN MAY NOT BE PREPARED TO BECOME
O
ZZIES
.”

Belkin, who had a gift
for picking subjects that would fascinate and infuriate her female readers, once wrote an article that began with a book club in Atlanta, made up of women who had gone to an Ivy League college and then to top law schools such as Harvard and Columbia: “A roomful of Princeton women each trained as well as any man. Of the ten members, half are not working at all; one is in business with her husband; one works part-time; two freelance; and the only one with a full-time job has no children.” They were emblematic, Belkin said, of many high-achieving young American women who had claimed their share of the seats in good schools and professional training. “They start strong out of the gate. And then, suddenly, they stop.”

Before most of these accomplished, ambitious women got to the top of the ladder—or even near it—they were leaving work to care for their children, Belkin wrote. A survey of women from the Harvard Business School classes of 1981, 1985, and 1991, she reported, “found that only 38 percent were working full-time.” While the older generation felt like failures if they missed having “it all,” the younger women were guilt-free. “I’ve had people tell me that it’s women like me that are ruining the workplace because it makes employers suspicious. I don’t want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight a fight for some sister who really isn’t my sister because I don’t know her,” said Vicky McElhaney Benedict, who graduated from Princeton in 1991, got a law degree, and was, within a few years, a full-time mother with two children.

In some ways, it was the mommy-track fight all over again. The response to Belkin’s piece was “a tsunami,” she said. “Everybody knew women were leaving. I just wrote about it in the
New York Times.”
For a while, she was getting one or two hundred e-mails an hour. “I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back there were sixty more messages.”

Was it possible that the women who were educated to be the leaders of their generation were going to opt out? In the early ’90s,
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard
economist, had taken a look at statistics on the work and childbearing history of college women who graduated between 1966 and 1979, and found that only 13 to 18 percent had both children and a career by age 40, even when “career” was defined only as having been working, mostly full-time, for the last three years. A surprisingly large group—28 percent—had not yet had any children, even though the oldest were reaching the end of their potential fertility. The rest had, in the main, focused on children and perhaps intermittent work. Goldin resisted the idea that she had unearthed bad news.
A follow-up study
, she said, showed that women who graduated in the 1980s had somewhat more success.
And another study of graduates
of Harvard/Radcliffe found that the amount of time those women took off from work had declined over the years. “There’s no indication of ‘opting out,’ ” she said.

Nevertheless, some young, well-educated women in the latest generation made it clear that opting out was already in their plan.
In September 2005
, the
Times
ran a front-page article, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” that roiled the waters all over again. Louise Story, a young reporter who had done extensive research among the freshmen and senior women in two of Yale’s residential colleges, led off with Cynthia Liu, a brilliant, high-achieving sophomore who planned to go to law school—and then become a stay-at-home mom by the time she was 30. Interviews with 138 Yale women, Story said, “found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely.”

There was so much outcry that Story felt constrained to publish a special note explaining her research methods. Even
suggesting
that high-achieving college graduates might be choosing not to work seemed to be surrender. How would women achieve equal power in the public world if that world saw their best and brightest as potential dropouts? What if less-privileged younger women took these upper-income stay-at-home moms as a new model and failed to prepare for a career? What if the academic hierarchy began to wonder if educating women was a waste of resources? “
It really does raise
this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of undergraduate admissions for Harvard, told Story.

Nicholas Kulish, a 30-year-old
editorial writer for the
Times,
responded with alarm on behalf of the men of his generation. “Well, some of you may want to be Harriets again, but we men may not be prepared to become Ozzies,” he wrote. “Returning to the 1950s just doesn’t look appealing. For one thing, the way you have us dressing these days, we would get beaten up. More important, though, we may not be able to afford it.” These days, Kulish concluded, the heroes of the old situation comedies such as
Ozzie and Harriet
and
Leave It to Beaver
could never support their upper-middle-class families on one paycheck. “Ward Cleaver wouldn’t be able to afford a house in the suburbs or Beaver’s tuition—unless June went to work, too.”

“T
HE COST OF WOMEN LEAVING
…”

The whole “opting out” controversy was, in truth, rather irrelevant to the future of American womanhood. If a small sliver of mothers did not have the economic need to work, they had every right to take advantage of the chance to spend extra time with their children, volunteer at the local schools, work for a favored political candidate, or get serious about painting or cooking or yoga or whatever other avocation tugged at their hearts. Many men would choose that sort of life for themselves if they had the chance. In fact, some stay-at-home husbands were doing just that.

But any idea that large numbers of women were going to retire permanently to their homes when they began to have families was buried in the economic meltdown of 2008. Women were going to work throughout their lives. The question was no longer whether they would have jobs but whether they would be able to stick with them consistently enough to make real progress when it came to paychecks and work satisfaction.

Unlike people in many other developed countries, Americans were not, in general, responding to work stress by opting not to have children.
In 2006 the United States
reached a 2.1 fertility rate—or just over two children per woman—for the first time in thirty-five years. That’s almost precisely what demographers regard as replacement level, and it was far higher than in nations such as Italy and Spain.
A study at the University of Turin
theorized that Italian women’s reluctance to have children had to do with the traditional nature of Italian men. Dutch women, whose husbands were much more likely to help with child care and housework, had outside jobs more often than Italian women but still had, on average, more children. French and Scandinavian women, who had access to federally funded child care, also appeared more eager to have families.

But none of those countries matched America’s fertility rate. Part of the reason was the increasing number of Hispanic Americans, who tended to have larger families. But even non-Hispanic whites were having babies at rates higher than most of their European peers. Russell Shorto, who examined the issue for the
New York Times,
suggested that the critical factor might actually be employer flexibility—not in offering child care but in being more open to women leaving and reentering the workforce, or agreeing to flexible schedules for those who want to continue working while taking care of small children.

The feminists had worried that if women who were educated in the top colleges dropped out to take care of their kids, the top colleges would stop admitting women, and the top law firms would be reluctant to hire them. But it was conceivable that it might work the other way around. If half of the lawyers and accountants and MBAs were potential mothers, employers might feel compelled to make concessions in order to keep them on the job. “
The cost of women
leaving and the cost of turnover—and the fact that the majority of accounting graduates were women—were strong drivers of our initiatives,” said Wendy C. Schmidt, a principal in the giant accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche in New York, which was a leader in offering flexible schedules and generous sabbatical programs while raising the number of women partners.
Lisa Belkin, writing about
law firms’ growing willingness to reexamine their policies, noted that one “hard-driving white-shoe firm” had successfully petitioned a New York judge to reschedule a hearing set for December 2007 because “these dates are smack in the middle of our children’s winter breaks.”

“T
HE CHIEF SOURCE OF IDENTITY AND MEANING
.”

There were other changes in the way women structured their lives that were both more sweeping and more clearly permanent than any opting-out trend among the most privileged. While the vast majority of Americans still got married, they were spending a larger and larger part of their lives single. At any given point in time,
slightly over half of adult
American women were either divorced, widowed, or never married.
The percentage of women ages
20 to 24 who had never been married jumped to 69 percent in the 2000 census. For ages 30 to 34, the never-married proportion tripled to 22 percent. On all parts of the economic scale, matrimony was being seen less as the start of life and more as a culmination of the achievements of young adulthood. On the upper-economic end, women expected to finish their education, begin careers, and amass either some wealth or money-making capacity before they committed themselves to a husband and children. Poorer women very often saw their path as one that would begin with having children, perhaps move on to a job and savings, and then finish with marriage as the capstone.

While in 1950 only one in twenty American children were born to single women, by 2007 the proportion reached 40 percent. Some of them were the well-planned progenies of lesbian couples or single career women who had concluded that a husband was not going to come along before the biological alarm clock went off. (
Of the fifty thousand
children who were adopted in the United States in 2001, a third went to single women.) “
I can’t count
how many young women have told me if they don’t meet the right man by their early to middle thirties, they’ll either adopt or make a trip to the sperm bank and pursue motherhood on their own,” wrote Laura Sessions Stepp.
But for the most part
, the unwed mothers were poor—only 3 percent of children born to college-educated women were out of wedlock, compared to 40 percent of those whose mothers were high school dropouts. While most of those women would get married eventually, fewer than one in six would marry the father of their baby.