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If you both bring home the bacon, who fries it?
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Are SAHMs the next "cheap labor?"
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The Price of Motherhood
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In 2002 a woman named Martha Burk burst into our living rooms and challenged everyone to decide if private country/golf clubs that exclude women were discriminatory. Many responded with a quick no. They are private! was the largest chorus in the responses. Of course, our 15-second media didn’t allow for much discussion of why Burk thought that these clubs were discriminatory.
For her stance, Burk was harassed and threatened - The FBI were called out to ensure her safety when she protested outside the Augusta National Golf Club for not allowing women to be members during the 2003 Masters. Her suggestion that Tiger Woods should be taking a stand upset a lot of golf fans on top of criticizing one of golf’s most revered tournaments. I fielded a press call as a board member of a local NOW chapter with this quote:
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All the talk of whether or not the increase of teenage pregnancies in a Massachusetts town was a coincidence or a result of a formed pact between the teenagers got me thinking about a pact I made with a friend when my son was a baby and I was deciding whether or not to return to work.
My friend and I had our sons just one month apart. We lived within walking distance of each other and took maternity leave together. We both loved our careers and couldn’t imagine leaving the workforce to stay at home full time. Somehow, we both managed to wrangle flexible, part-time opportunities from our employers and worked the same three-day work week. Essentially, we made a pact to go back to work. We were working mother partners in crime.
But then, one day, she decided to quit to stay at home. And our pact was rendered null. As I said before, there’s safety in numbers. I think it’s much easier to work when all of your friends work, or stay home if all of your friends stay home.
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If any of us thought that the end of the Democratic primary meant the end of Hillary talk, woo, boy, were we wrong!
We have Michelle trying to woo Clinton supporters as well as Hillary & Barack to campaign together this week, and lastly the GOP is trying to woo them as well. For me, any woman who was supporting Hillary who even considers voting for McCain was never a good Hillary supporter to begin with. Just about everything that Hillary stood for McCain is against and Obama supports.
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I’m half of a very traditional, mother-does-most-everything-around the home marriage. I recently tabled my career because I wanted to stay at home and do the mommy-freelancing-volunteer thing. My husband, meanwhile toils away at the office working hard to support us. I do the lion’s share of cooking, cleaning, taking care of our son. I’m lucky that we were able to make such a decision, and now I see being a mom as my main job, with everything else that I’m supposed to get done as second fiddle. And that’s ok. I expected nothing less when I left the working world.
That’s why I was intrigued by the recent New York Times article about the “equally shared parenting” movement. For me, this concept is totally out of whack. The notion that my husband and I would make lists, and charts and color code our life seems absurd. It would never work for us. And it isn’t the arrangement of 99% of the people I know. While I’m not convinced that social norms have dictated the fact that I do more laundry and dishes, I can say that leaving my job was a lot easier since the majority of my friends don’t work. We’re all living the SAHM life together.
But what about those who sign up for the equal parenting thing? Admittedly, even though I know it wouldn’t work in my household, when I read about those families for whom this concept works I got a little twinge of jealousy. I can’t imagine having my husband always being on the hook for doing the “whites” or making playdates.
Although the mantra of equal parenting is out of whack for me, I like that those involved in the concept realize this and admit that it’s not for everyone. I admire that one of the movements’ founders tries to find ways to redesign our inflexible and antiquated workplaces. However, I see the coverage and resulting discussion about it as just another way to stir up the mommy wars pot and make mothers (and fathers) continually question and fear the decisions they make about the difficult choice between balancing career and family.
I am aunt to two beautiful, intelligent, and fabulous nephews who don’t have active fathers. Both of my parents were fatherless and not by the choice of my grandmothers. And I’m not African-American. While I know that Obama also used this sermon to reengage the Black church scene, I do wish he had given this in a non-church setting or a non-ethnic centric setting because I want his message of “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. It’s the courage to raise one.” to resonate across race lines to Latinos, Caucasians, and everyone else. I’m sure each of us of a different hue and background can think of one missing father.
Then I consider Amy Richards’ life story. In her recent book Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself, [buy at WCF, Powell's, Amazon] she mentions several times that she has never known her father. I recently saw her discussing her book and she talked about how her mother left her father and that he ended up being arrested a few times over the years for kidnapping young boys. She has made the leap from kidnapping to more nefarious activities and decided that she is actually better off not knowing him. Consider all the moms who leave their abusive husbands - The kids must be better off without their fathers.
Men’s Rights groups and their brother Father’s Rights groups would like to bundle all feminists as being anti-father. What else could we be when we demand that men pay child support that actually supports the child? What I think confuses them is the fact that feminists see both sides. We see the value of a dad in a heterosexual household - IF IT BENEFITS THE CHILD. We also know that, like Amy Richards, having dad kicked to the curb isn’t always something to cry about. Of course there are same-sex couples. Yeah, we support them too because well, we’d rather focus on having love in a home than different genders. And logically this means that if we support lesbian families we hate fathers. *eye roll* Not to mention our support of single women choosing to become mothers via sperm donation.
Here me now and believe me later…Feminists want loving families. That’s it.
This feminist has an awesome guy in her life who is “the bestest dad in the whole world!” as our daughter told him several times on Father’s Day. My wish is that every dad who is in the home be an active dad. The days of just bringing home the bacon are over. My wish is that every time a child is born that a great father is as well. I wish all the single moms, whether by chance or choice, a Happy Father’s Day for filling both roles. And to the lucky moms who also have “bestest fathers” as your partners in this crazy thing called parenting, I hope our luck keeps up!
I know this is a site for working moms, but since Father’s Day is this weekend, I thought we could turn our attention to our (mostly) better halves. I’ve always found it interesting that in all the debates about mommy wars and mommy guilt, little has been said or discussed about how dads feel about working and family. This week, however, I did run across this survey put out by CareerBuilder.com which states an interesting fact about dads surveyed.
More than a third of working dads (37 percent) said they would leave their job if their spouse or significant other’s income could comfortably support the entire family, similar to last year’s findings.
Wow, who knew? Some dads want to stay home too? I’m only being half-serious here. Some people may be surprised by these results, but I’m not. Almost on a weekly basis my husband tells me he’d happily stay at home with our son if I was willing to work and support our family. Sometimes, I think he should be the one to stay at home full time. His instincts are flawless when it comes to taking care of our son.
But I so don’t have what it takes to be a full-time working mom with a high-pressure career that brings fulfillment and the bacon.
Well it’s another Monday…or is it? Saturday brought the official end to the Hillary Clinton campaign for President. Many pundits and wannabes had been talking of this day for months. Some have hypothesized that it might take another generation before women get this close to breaking that “ultimate glass ceiling.” Instead I offer this ray of hope - If Saturday was the ending to one chapter, today is the first Monday in a new era.
I am fresh from spending the weekend with some of the smartest women in this country at the National Council for Research on Women. The unwritten theme was the Clinton campaign, what it means to women and where do we go from here? It was not a funeral, despite some depressing statistics. Rather I learned a lot from the amazing women I spent time with. Instead of mourning what could had been, we should relish in that fact that we know that men will vote for a woman to be President. We should rejoice that a woman can run for office without being called too weak for the position.
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I’m coming to terms with the fact that Hillary Clinton will not be our nation’s Democratic candidate for president. It’s as clear as day - Obama’s it. But I can see why Hillary has not fully conceded yet. For any working mom, especially those who are of a different generation, one that had to overcome gender barriers and issues that my generation will never know, it must be difficult to throw in the towel.
As much as I wanted it and needed it, it was difficult for me to give up the corporate world for a freer, more flexible lifestyle. And I’d only been working for 10 years. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have been the first student to have given the commencement address for her class at Wellesley, or been the first female partner at a big law firm. I’m sure Ms. Clinton gave up a lot in her life to get where she’s at today, and so why should she be asked to give up more now, on somone else’s terms, after fighting so hard?
We’d like to think that we live in a more enlightened age. Or even that the threat of legal action keeps people in line, but in reality sexual harassment is still something that women and girls have to deal with on a daily basis. My personal experience with harassment ended when I left high school. O…M…G…was high school a gauntlet of harassment! Yet I was totally unprepared to deal with it. Honestly I don’t think I knew that I could deal with it. I graduated high school in 1993, a mere one year after Anita Hill brought the topic to the forefront. Even more honestly, the only framework I had for harassment was an episode of “Three’s Company” when Chrissy’s boss kept chasing her around a desk!
Which is why it utterly saddens me that almost two decades after Anita Hill and a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court said schools could be held liable our girls are still unprepared to deal with harassment.
Participants (600) were asked about experiences with sexual harassment and any discouraging comments they received in traditionally male-dominated areas such as math, science, computers and sports.
*Ninety percent of girls reported experiencing sexual harassment at least once.
* 67 percent of girls reported receiving unwanted romantic attention
* 62 percent were exposed to demeaning gender-related comments
* 58 percent were teased because of their appearance
* 52 percent received unwanted physical contact
* 25 percent were bullied or threatened with harm by a male
* 52 percent of girls also reported receiving discouraging gender-based comments on the math, science and computer abilities, usually from male peers
* 76 percent of girls reported sexist comments on their athletic abilities, again predominantly from male peers