How political and economic institutions lag behind our desire for more egalitarian relationships, and why ‘work and family balance’ is key to the next step in Western feminism – this is a great article by Stephanie Coontz from The New York Times. And essential reading particularly for Americans. But for me, the big banging thought to think more about is this one:
The sociologist Pamela Stone studied a group of mothers who had made these decisions. Typically, she found, they phrased their decision in terms of a preference. But when they explained their “decision-making process,” it became clear that most had made the “choice” to quit work only as a last resort — when they could not get the flexible hours or part-time work they wanted, when their husbands would not or could not cut back their hours, and when they began to feel that their employers were hostile to their concerns. Under those conditions, Professor Stone notes, what was really a workplace problem for families became a private problem for women.
This is where the political gets really personal. When people are forced to behave in ways that contradict their ideals, they often undergo what sociologists call a “values stretch” — watering down their original expectations and goals to accommodate the things they have to do to get by. This behavior is especially likely if holding on to the original values would exacerbate tensions in the relationships they depend on.
In their years of helping couples make the transition from partners to parents, the psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan have found that tensions increase when a couple backslide into more traditional roles than they originally desired. The woman resents that she is not getting the shared child care she expected and envies her husband’s social networks outside the home. The husband feels hurt that his wife isn’t more grateful for the sacrifices he is making by working more hours so she can stay home. When you can’t change what’s bothering you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn’t actually bother you. So couples often create a family myth about why they made these choices, why it has turned out for the best, and why they are still equal in their hearts even if they are not sharing the kind of life they first envisioned.
Under present conditions, the intense consciousness raising about the “rightness” of personal choices that worked so well in the early days of the women’s movement will end up escalating the divisive finger-pointing that stands in the way of political reform.
Very interesting piece. I think that the relationship between individual choices and larger social change is a really important thing to think through and one that is complicated in my own life. For me, making the circumscribed “choice” to spend quite a lot of my time raising my young children has been double-edged, as far as my feminism goes. On one hand, I see how I have fallen into certain traditionally female roles, such as primary caregiver, and primary keeper of the home. And my (male) partner and I both struggle with how to accept this into our lives. At the same time, my experience of this work has had some really important feminist components for me, especially insofar as it seems to reduce the amount of alienation I experience from my work. For example: when I cook breakfast for my kids from scratch, from local ingredients that it took time to find or grow, I see that I am doing privatized, gendered work. But I also feel that I am living more true to my values, including my feminist values, and demonstrating the willingness to live by my beliefs. So my question at the end of Coontz’s article was: what if the individual choices that can undermine social change are not (or not only) coping mechanisms but also have substantive value? How does this change where we need to go next. I think further examination of (my) privilege is part of this ongoing project.
BRB examining all my life choices.
haha me too Mindy!
I have long wondered if this has happened to some of my friends who have had kids, but didn’t know how to articulate it nicely – didn’t want to sound judemental. But this does it well.
For sure, I see why the narrative becomes one of “choice” – I could easily say that I chose to stay home with my children when the truth is that circumstances forced me to quit my job and become a sahp. Framing it as a choice I made makes it easier to deal with, gives me some sort of agency and semblance of control. I don’t do that precisely because I don’t want to give people, myself included, that sort of illusion: no, I stayed home because when the chips were down my partner’s job made more money and we were strapped for cash. My staying home meant that we didn’t need to find a way to put two kids through daycare (with all that entails).
And I can see too how this plays into the “slacker mum” stuff, because if you make mothering your work and you want to be good at it, you might try to do All The Things, or at least feel like you have to, because that’s what the gold standard of mothering is. And then along come the slacker parents to shake that up because it’s unrealistic perfectionism that can seriously wear and tear at the soul, particularly if you’re a parent who can’t do All The Things.
Vicious, vicious cycles, y’all.
Yes, yes. A thousand times, yes! This article articulates all the outside forces that bring such tensions in my relationship to my partner and inner conflicts with not having a full time career.
Me and my husband got together very young, 19. We’re 40 now, two kids, 5 and 2. We’ve always shared everything – household and relationship maintenance is a team job. While our kids are still little, both of us have chosen to work part – time, I work two days, he works 3. The thing is, in discussions with colleagues and friends, sometimes there are undercurrents that my husband is not a real man, because a real man would be out there providing! If ever, I express any concern about something being expensive, someone will say, “oh well, I suppose your husband could always get a full time job.” Or the other day when I mentioned that I was a little worried about the job cuts at work, a young lawyer in her 30s told me that I shouldn’t worry because my husband can always go back to being full time. The other reaction I get is, “you are lucky you can afford it”. Which is true, of course, but we can afford it for two reasons, because we are lucky we both have decent jobs, and because we live simply. I’ve got two boys, and I want to raise them to expect to be contributing to the maintenance of their household in more ways than just doing the earning, but I wonder if their partners, or society in general, will be OK with that.
OMG that sound so INFURIATING! Yeesh! HOW DARE YOU NOT BE ABLE TO AFFORD A MASERATI IF ONLY YOUR HUSBAND WAS A REAL MAN HE WOULD WORK HARDER AND BUY YOU ONE.
(rolls eyes)
Well I think it’s wonderful that you both have managed to organise your work like this. It’s not great that you are feeling the judgement of others, but in making this work you are hopefully part of that incremental revolution (is that an oxymoron?) that will see more people following your example. I applaud you!
holy shit that quote sent shivers down my spine. She is writing about my life.
Sorry for the swearing. Been back in New Zealand too long.
This is such a great conversation to be having, and I loved what PhD in Parenting added to the conversation
(http://www.phdinparenting.com/blog/2013/2/19/choice-were-doing-it-wrong.html)
I’ve been exploring and writing about this in regards to “self-care” and mothers lately (http://motheringourselves.com/2013/02/20/how-self-care-hurts-mothers/). This is a difficult topic for me because a lot of my work is connected to helping mothers care for their own needs, and lose a bit of the martyrdom that comes with motherhood (by “choice” or not). I’m starting to notice the elephant trampling through the room of how our culture (myself included) is treating a mother’s self-care like it’s a “choice”, and the assumptions it makes about freedom and independence. I work with many mothers who do not consider themselves feminists, who do not consider the impossibilities of their lives to be social problems to be solved, but rather personal lifestyles to be managed better by working harder. I’m only just starting to introduce to my audience the idea that the deck may be strategically stacked against them. This is old news to a feminist audience, but women who don’t consider themselves feminists are struggling and suffering regardless of what they call it. I’m curious how this conversation, which I believe to be the root of the public relations problem that feminism suffers right now, will play out across a broader, less “pure” audience.
Let us know how it goes? Please, I’d be interested
I was thinking about the way the rhetoric of “choice” creeps into family life in another way yesterday:
I do not think it’s an accident that the more the (political, economic) structure of American life circumscribes possibilities for most families, the more we invest in the mythology of “choices” as the basis of our identities.
Yes, exactly. It’s pernicious, and it completely ends every conversation about inequality and injustice, whether we’re talking about increasing breastfeeding support or why women earn less. It depresses me x1000 to see feminists using the language of choice to berate other women – for example, women ‘choosing’ to stay home and wondering whether or not this is a betrayal of sisterhood. I have a friend with a special needs child and a depressed husband and is in debt and underwater on her mortgage. She wants nothing more than to quit her job, not because she wants to stay at home but because she’s so overwhelmed she feels like she’s going to lose her mind. And then someone comes along and says, a good feminist wouldn’t choose to stay home! It’s disgusting.
“I do not think it’s an accident that the more the (political, economic) structure of American life circumscribes possibilities for most families, the more we invest in the mythology of “choices” as the basis of our identities.”
This seemed extreme the first time I read it, but has been on my mind ever since. It rang true in how the pro-choice movement is moving away from the word ‘choice’ in large part because ‘choosing’ an abortion almost never involves access to a full range of stigma-free options.
And i thought of it again when I read the NY Times piece about the design and marketing of junk food (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&😉
Society pushes a message of ‘personal health choices’ (including bullshit notions of ‘willpower’ and fatness being a personal failure) that bears little resemblance to reality.
The cult of individualism and ‘personal choice’ is hard to confront–are my choices not my own? But I’ve been led to believe they’re what makes me ME! It’s so much easier to believe my life is a series of good choices I made and to judge people who ‘chose’ differently than to examine what forces lead us to our ‘choices’.
That obnoxious winky face formed on its own. Disregard.
This is absolutely right. Much of the discussion is about staying home versus employment. I work full time, but I am probably underemployed. My earning potential and job satisfaction would be higher elsewhere, but my current job security and benefits are excellent. My husband earns much more than I do and doesn’t have access to paid sick leave (only PTO). I feel I should stay home when the kid is sick since I can use sick leave and since I earn so much less. I also feel I should stay at this job since I have amassed enough sick leave to cover any potential maternity leave.
If paid sick leave and maternity leave were the norm, who knows where I might have had the courage to be right now. For so long I have thought I was making a smart choice, but I’m starting to think I am actually stuck here.
Coontz article is one of the most well reasoned and informed articles on this topoc I’ve read, for like ages. Too often, the more nuanced aspects of how women and men navigate marriage and kids gets lost in the shouting and shaming that passes for discourse these days. Like most women, I didn’t really “choose” to stop working and stay home with my kids full time, the decision was based on a total lack of options that would have enabled me to balance both work and parenting demands equally.
As I navigate returning to work after nine years out, this article is very telling. I know my husband worries about the impact on us all (of me returning), but ultimately I will most probably not be able to find the work I desire part time (engineering) anyway. I feel trapped right now. And yet I feel for those women who absolutely must work to survive so perhaps I’m not to say anything at all.
I do see very clearly now though, that any choice of part time work, life balance etc must be available to both men and women for any reason that is important to THEM, or else change will be slow and limited.
Having given up my job (and quite possibly my career – we’ll have to see) to care for our small now-3-year-old son, the rhetoric of choice is something that has been on my mind recently. It’s not so much the investment of time in our offspring which bothers me, more the manner of acquiring it – it fell to me because my partner/husband’s employer would simply not explore him taking part time work, or even consider compressed hours (which may be illegal considering the age of said son, but that’s another story). These are some of my thoughts on the subject of choice.
Those earlier waves of feminism which focused on choice were so important, because they gave women the right to vote, to choose not to leave their jobs when they married or became mothers; and of course women wanted to have what men had because they saw men had more rights, more freedom and, yes, more choice. But where I feel feminism had a blind spot was value. We didn’t – and still don’t – value what was traditionally women’s work. And mainly, even if they do have jobs and careers and other responsibilities, it falls to women to do those household and caring jobs. Sometimes unpaid, sometimes for insulting pay, but usually under-appreciated because the work is undervalued. I might have made this “choice” but, oh, how I long for my work to be appreciated more by society, particularly as it was not an easy decision. I can’t help wondering if we valued that work more, whether it would be more equally shared. I would hope that if “women’s work” were valued, at the very least women wouldn’t be so financially penalised for taking on those un- or low paid caring roles. And of course all men should not have to do these things, as that could be as wrong as all women having to stay at home and producing children, but, as others have pointed out, balance must be available to everyone. If we valued “women’s” caring work more, I can’t helping feeling that maybe, just maybe, choice would really truly be a choice – supported, appreciated, valued, and more equally shared.
(Really enjoy your thought provoking blog, have done for a while, Blue Milk, and this post inspired me for to be brave enough to comment for the first time. Thank you.)
Another fantastically interesting article. And great comments!
I felt a particular resonance with the last paragraph:
Even before I had kids myself, I felt that this wasn’t particularly well covered in debates around these issues. I remember going to an event where Anne Summers was talking about her book The End of Equality, and all the talk was about work-family policy for women: better childcare, more flexible hours etc, important issues certainly, but still entirely focused on women, assuming that the goal for women should be full-time work, saying nothing about whether male work practice norms should change. So, both parents working full-time, even with very young children. It did not sound like something that would be palatable to most of the people I knew. I even put up my hand and put this question to Anne Summers, which she pretty much dismissed by saying, “oh well if you want to choose not to work full time, then do that.” It just felt so inadequate.
Yes Nat that is exactly right- I feel like so much of feminist writing is about finding a way that I- a stay at home mom – could go to work full time, and all I want to do is find a way that both myself and my husband could stay home full time with our kids.
I really liked the Coontz article. The one thing I wished she’d spent a little more time on, though, is the way that the plain, old-fashioned sexism that a lot of us still confront in our work lives plays into the choices we make once we have kids. I continued working after having kids, and I am happy with that lifestyle and fully confident it is right for me. But then I run smack into some sexist nonsense at work and I can totally see the temptation to just walk away from that and go be at home with my kids instead. A voice in my head says “I’m soooo tired of dealing with this stuff, let’s go do something else instead, and hey! I could stay home with the kids.” And that is tempting even to me, a mother who really, really does not think full time stay at home motherhood would be a good fit for me. I imagine (but obviously do not know) that this sort of thing plays into some women’s decisions.
I also suspect the way that the subtle sexism that pervades some fields undermines women’s professional confidence also factors into the decisions. If your confidence is already weakened, then the accommodations you’d ideally want your job to make for you as a mother can be that much harder to ask for. I have a pretty good life as a working mother, but a lot of that is because I have a shifted schedule, and a lot of flexibility, and the ability to “catch up” at home if I had to leave early for something at my daughter’s school, etc., etc. I think that if I hadn’t had the confidence to ask for those things (or just take them) with the belief that my professional standing would be OK, I’d be a lot less happy with my status of working mom. And that is ignoring the fact that a lot of women just don’t have the option to ask for accommodations, no matter how confident they are.
But of course, one article can’t cover everything, and I thought this article did a really good job with what it did cover.
Thanks for the nice comments Tinfoil Hattie and Nat! Thankfully, most people are positive about what my family is trying to do.
A few people have expressed it beautifully here, for the world to be fair for women it needs to change for men too. I have found that the stuff that women have traditionally done in the home is just not that valued, whether it’s a man or a woman doing it! The other thing is, once you go part time, it’s more than likely your career will take a dive… and again, this applies whether you’re a man or a woman. The thing is, I don’t see a lot of men willing to take that dive, and a lot of women don’t have a choice. And of course there’s the financial consideration, not many households are able to take such a significant drop in income, which will happen if both the grown-ups are working part time.
This is such an important conversation and one that I struggle with daily. Even though I have studied sociology during my entire adult life (I’m now a doctoral candidate), even though I am a feminist, even though I understand how structural conditions constrain women’s opportunities, I still find myself constantly trying to justify my “choices” constantly in terms of the personal. I find myself even rationalizing to myself that husband’s and my division of household labor and career paths are simply due to personality different, not structural conditions. I do think think this is one of the most important feminist issues of our time and one that is not at all being addressed in mainstream culture. It’s just too easy to fall into our cultural scripts of personal choice and personal responsibility.
when I read the third page of Coontz’s article I almost jumped at the realization of how seldom I read such straight-spoken reflections outside dedicated academic works.
and I saw my own experience and the emotional swamp I’m in in my own daily cogitations about going back to work all neatly covered by those horrific stats about the odds of a professional women going back to work after children when her partner works 60 hours or more (if I remember them right; they were so startling that maybe I already don’t).
and I totally agree: the feminist fight needs to be fought on social grounds, too (as social feminism showed); some would even say on social grounds most of all (myself included).
so I wonder, with many other, if this is not precisely the pitfall of so many misunderstandings and even ‘wars’ about the ‘choice’ frame: that it becomes more and more of an obstacle or a tool for inner wars and further divisions within feminism than an empowering principle or move as it is less and less seen and used simply as a shortcut to name a particular act that is meaningful (both to the woman and to the feminist that performs or judges it) only insofar it acknowledges the social necessities that made it the ‘right’ choice in that particular situation, and only at the extent that it immediately puts to use the political implications of it.
that is, for example, since so many women (and men) experience such a level of unsolvable contradictions between work-life and family-life (particularly with children), the obvious next move would be to make it a political issue, and organize widely to obtain new rights. So, why is there a blank there? why is there no transversal agreement about the defence of parental rights, for one, as a necessary requirement of ANY political movement?
Writing from europe, I have mostly the usa in mind when I ask this question, but it applies in varying ways and degrees to many other so-called first-world countries, west-european included.
I mean, there is an obvious mismatch between the relevance and the urgency of this question and the political work that engages with it, even in those political and professional organizations that could and should put it on the forefront of their fight, in their own best interests.
Why is that? What is hindering the explosive emergence of this issue in the political arena? Any thoughts?
Anyway, thank you Blue Milk for this and for so many other suggestions. I’ve been reading your blog for about one year now, but never dared to join in, also because English is the weakest of my main languages, and not one that I’m used to speak when I talk of such things.
You gave me a good reason to try though; really, thanks.
Oh I love it when lurkers de-lurk here. X
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