Money Matters
A depressing work of staggering ignorance
6
Oh, the epic screed I could write about this article in the New York Times.
First, the good news: a major newspaper put an article about mothers in the workforce in the Economy section, not Life & Style or the Moms Like Me! section, where most news items about women go to die.
But before David Leonhardt and his sub-editors go patting themselves on the back too hard, I’d like to point out the major flaws in the story. Lord knows I’d like to point out all the minor ones too, but I haven’t got time for that tedious process today.
First, Leonhardt assumes that the three female Supreme Court nominees he holds up as examples of women being forced to choose between family and career actually wanted children. Unless he’s been privy to private conversations with these women on their reproductive choices, I’m afraid this is what one would call Lazy Journalism. Man, I hate that! It’s why I decided against a full-on career in journalism in the end — I’m way too slothful for all that fact-finding and high-energy truthfulness. But at $2 a pop, I expect the New York Times to put down its $4 single scoop of ice cream, get up off the sofa and actually, I don’t know, write articles based on something besides gender stereotypes. Is it just me?
Anyway.
Here’s where Leonhardt’s article simultaneously caught my attention and pissed me off: the ol’ It’s All Feminism’s Fault™ trick, number 323,982 in an infinite series.
The fact that the job market has evolved in this way is no accident. It’s a result of policy choices. As Jane Waldfogel, a Columbia University professor who studies families and work, says, “American feminists made a conscious choice to emphasize equal rights and equal opportunities, but not to talk about policies that would address family responsibilities.”
In many ways, the choice was shrewd. The feminist movement has been fabulously successful fighting for antidiscrimination laws that require men and women to be treated equally. These laws have not eliminated the blatant sexism of past decades — think “Mad Men” — but they have beaten back much of it.
As a result, outright sexism is no longer the main barrier to gender equality. The main barrier is the harsh price most workers pay for pursuing anything other than the old-fashioned career path.“Women do almost as well as men today,” Ms. Waldfogel said, “as long as they don’t have children.”
Did you hear that, “shrewd” feminists of yore? You screwed up because when you demanded equality in the workplace, you didn’t also make the correct “policy choices” to ensure that mothers wouldn’t get the shaft. IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!
Wait, what? You say that you weren’t in positions of power to make economic or social policies and that you did talk about these issues but were summarily ignored before resentfully being given the crappiest office in the building when you, as a senior manager, were finally removed from the typing pool where The Girls all sat? I think we all know that was a conscious choice on your part, Janet. [Note: Janet is the name of the 2nd wave feminist who participates in technically fictional but historically accurate role play situations in my head]
And was there any mention of the role men and their hundreds-years-old policies have played in women’s inability to break the glass ceiling? Was there anything in there about how if fathers took on more of the childcare and housework, women would be less likely to be pushed out of the labor force in staggering numbers? Was there even a smattering of meaningful analysis of gender roles, social pressure, paltry maternity leave, patriarchal attitudes and, yes, good ol’ workplace sexism?
Oh Janet, you were always a dreamer, weren’t you! I think it’s cute.
The cleaner, the baker, the child care-taker
3
We pay a lot of lip service to those who work with children, don’t we? Moulding young minds, shaping the future, the most difficult (but rewarding!) job in the world (after motherhood, of course)…blah, blah, blah. Yes, so rewarding and important and indispensable that we can justify paying teachers, and particularly early years child care workers, a pittance. Some argue that teachers have shorter days and a shorter working year than most, with more holidays and job security. Therefore, they don’t need/deserve as much. Some people, like a man on BBC London’s call-in radio show this morning, say teachers aren’t paid that well, no, but they can take on extra jobs after school hours and in the summer holidays to supplement their incomes.
Correction: male teachers, the currently able-bodied and well-connected, and those without school-age children can take on temporary, part-time jobs as it suits their schedule (but only if they can find one — they’ll be in fierce competition with teens looking for summer jobs and the unskilled unemployed during a recession). Many teachers, however, are women with school-age children themselves and who are the primary carers, or primary child care arrangers, for their families. If a teacher is not teaching, her children aren’t in school either. What, pray tell, would this male caller propose she do with her children while she shuffles off to a part-time job, perhaps in retail, caring or tutoring, one that is unlikely to even cover the costs of paying someone to look after them? I’m guessing the caller’s wife took care of all that, leaving him free to take on the building and courier jobs that supplemented his below-average income. Well bully for him. Must be nice living in a bubble of privilege where child care is sourced and performed by the Child Care Faeries.
But ‘regular’ teachers’ pay isn’t even the issue here. The actual topic of discussion on this radio show was whether it was fair for a head teacher of a state school in Lonodn, which is publicly funded, to be earning more than £230,000 a year while the teachers themselves faced pay freezes under new government budget slashing, and the cleaners at the same school earn £10,000 per year, which is not even a living wage. Many callers thought he earned this high salary because, at the end of the day (the most overused expression in Britain), he takes full responsibility for the school’s performance. Oh, the weight on his shoulders is heavy alright — earning 20 times as much as some of your staff must be quite a gold-plated burden indeed. Pulling up in the Jag, sliding into that Reserved spot, clutching your lambskin briefcase and Starbucks coffee as you wave to the cleaning crew straggling in off the public buses after being up since 5am getting their own children dressed, fed and off to school across town before coming into work to mop floors and scrub toilets for below the minimum wage…what a chore! So worth the ridiculous salary, that.
As is often the case, even in female-dominated sectors like schools, the people at the top get all the credit and pay with little regard for the machine, as it were, as a whole. Instead of looking at employment structure as a pyramid, with one person on top and the rest of the underlings trickling down en masse, it would be helpful to consider it as a cog with interlocking teeth. All the parts have to work perfectly and in harmony to make things run smoothly. If even one small bit breaks down, the whole machine comes grinding to a halt. That includes the cleaners, cooks and teaching assistants at a school.
But after all, as one caller said, pushing a mop around or serving spaghetti isn’t exactly rocket science. Neither is changing nappies, caring for babies or running a pre-school, apparently. It’s not until you get to the prestigious job of shaping those young minds and filling them with information (or propaganda and biases, if you’re not a fan of education with a capital E) that it becomes real work worthy of a high salary and oodles of respect. Funnily enough, these top jobs are more often than not filled by men, even though the vast majority of those working within the state school system are women. Why might that be? Let me scratch my chin for a bit here. I’m thinking it starts with P and ends in -archy.
It’s the same reason why women are cooks but men are chefs. It’s why stay-at-home mums aren’t given a second thought but stay-at-home dads are fawned over and patted on the back. It’s why even in mummy blogging, dads come out top. It’s why men working in unskilled jobs (grave diggers, bin men, street cleaners, etc..) for Birmingham Council were given ‘bonuses’ to supplement their paltry base pay while women working similarly-skilled jobs (cleaners, teaching assistants, carers, etc..) were kept in the dark about this practice and remained on the base salary.
Until roles traditionally performed by women are given the respect and remuneration they deserve and until our disgusting, capitalist ‘winner takes all’ system is turned on its head or gotten rid of altogether, we will continue to see men in tweed jackets and business suits growing rich and fat on the backs of women, the poor and the disadvantaged.
Reply turned post: What is ‘work’?
21
I left this rather long comment on Catherine Redfern’s post on The F-Word, which was about the Conservatives’ proposed tax break for married couples but quickly turned into a bit of commentary on whether the ideal of one parent at home with the children is harmful to women. In the post, Catherine included a poster from a 1947 magazine encouraging women to “try to free yourself for work” to help the economy and wondered if, with the idolisation of motherhood, the reverse would soon be true — posters extolling us to stay at home where we belong.
While I understand and agree with Catherine’s dislike of the tax break for married couples, which, as she rightly says, would be largely irrelevant and, even worse, ignores the diversity and complexity of modern families, I do take issue with the idea that one parent (usually the mother) being at home with the children is undesirable, unattainable or even unnecessary. Is it, as it stands, an unfair and flawed system that puts women at a disadvantage? Yes. But I don’t think the answer is simply making working outside the home unavoidable and staying at home some kind of insult to the sisterhood (not that this is what Catherine insinuated; this is what many stay-at-home mothers have told me it feels like).
It’s such a complex issue and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been reading this fascinating analysis of the value of ‘women’s work’ in economic journalist Ann Crittenden’s 2001 book The Price of Motherhood: Why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. I’m only halfway through and it has already challenged and altered the way I’d been approaching the solution for the modern mother’s dilemma of combining work and family. I still have lots more reading and thinking to do on the subject but I’m seeing things from a slightly different angle for the first time in ages and it is wholly refreshing. I’ll be doing a review of the book once I’m finished with it.
My comment on The F-Word post is below [altered slightly for clarity].
I have to say, it can be a bit tiresome hearing all about how incredibly privileged and wealthy those who stay home, even part of the time, must be — I stay home with my children and work a part-time job from home (as do many of the working and middle class women in my area who can’t afford full-time child care but must work to some extent, though not many are able to do their jobs from home and instead work nights or weekends) and while there are undoubtedly some privileges in that, they certainly aren’t economic. My caring labour is worth absolutely nothing in economic or social terms because what I do is supposed to be a ‘labour of love,’ not worthy of compensation. There’s an awful lot of talk about how important raising children is and how motherhood is so great, blah blah blah, but talk is cheap when actions belie the opposite.
When I do re-enter the ‘proper’ workforce my skills will be considered outdated, unpolished and worth even less than they were before. I will earn much less over my lifetime than a man, a woman without children and those mothers who returned to work when their paid maternity leaves (if they got one) were up. I’ll be more at risk for poverty when I’m retirement age as my pension will have suffered greatly in the years when I was ‘not contributing’. While I might be privileged in staying home with my children now, I am paying a ‘mummy tax’ that will have a knock-on effect for the rest of my life. Again, that’s not to say I’ve got it rough because lord knows I’ve got it easy compared to so many women working their fingers to the bone night and day, but merely to point out that even those of us ‘privileged’ enough to stay at home are paying for it one way or another.
One can’t put raising children or managing a household on one’s CV as it is seen as irrelevant. And it will continue to be seen as irrelevant, even undesirable, as long as only labour that falls outside of the domestic sphere is treated as “real” work. Women who stay at home ARE working. It’s just that our contributions to society aren’t counted in economic terms, even though they are great.
Saying that a child would be better off with one-to-one or small group care (which doesn’t have to be a parent) isn’t judgmental, it’s a pretty indisputable fact. That so many families are forced to put their children into cheap, large-group care where they aren’t given the individual attention they deserve (even though the care may be adequate for its purposes) is not acceptable or at least desirable. If women are expected to be proficient consumers and workers as well as primary caregivers, we need much better caring systems, heavily subsidised by the state, and with much better-paid and trained workers, along with more flexible working options for both parents. Don’t forget that one of the demands of the second wave movement was free 24/7 child care. We seem to have let that one fall by the wayside, leaving individual mothers in the lurch to fight that battle on their own.
Counting on men to step up the plate and start doing an equal amount of childrearing and housework hasn’t worked so far and, short of an economic and social revolution, doesn’t look likely any time soon, no matter how many baby steps have been made. Men are also constrained by long-established economic pressures and gender stereotypes. I fear that placing all of our hopes for change on fathers’ ability to break though rigid societal structures is going to leave us, and our children, waiting in the wings for a very long time. We can and should work towards a more equitable division of household and caring labour, not to mention an overhaul of gender stereotypes, but it has proven to be a slow, arduous process. In the meantime and in concert with those efforts, we should be working to value (both societally and economically) women’s work as primary caregivers and essential parts of our communities. We should make it easier for women to work, yes, but we should also make it easier for them (or their partners) to stay at home when their children are young if that’s what they want. And there’s nothing ’1950s housewife’ (read: derisory) about that.
Economic independence and the happy housewife
3
I had an interesting conversation with my husband last night about economic independence (and its sometimes-evil cousin, dependence) and what it means for women, particularly those in relationships in which their partner is abusive or adulterous. As you will know if you’ve been anywhere near a newspaper stand, television or computer, there have been two big ‘he cheated’ scandals in the media lately — golf star Tiger Woods on wife Elin Nordegren, and footballer Ashley Cole on wife and popstar Cheryl Cole (nee Tweedy). While Cheryl has reportedly dumped her philandering husband, Elin appears to be ‘standing by her man.’
What my husband wondered is whether Cheryl’s economic independence and social status as a star in her own right had anything to do with why she finally felt able to dump her cheating partner and if Elin’s significantly lesser status and economic wealth (in comparison to Tiger’s — she was a retail clerk, nanny and sometimes-model before they met) may have contributed to her willingness to give him another chance. My feeling? Yes and no. Aren’t I helpful? But hear me out.
I do think that Elin’s greater economic dependence on Tiger may have played a part in her decision, whereas Cheryl, who has largely created her own wealth and cemented her status as the (supposed) ‘Nation’s Sweetheart’ through her own actions, not her husband’s, was undoubtedly less concerned with what she would do and how she would get by if she were to leave Ashley. That said, there is a big difference between the two couples that has to be taken into consideration as well; the Woods had children and the Coles didn’t. Subsequently, it becomes a much, much tougher decision to make. The upheaval and trauma is a lot for any child to take on and no mother wants to subject her children to that unless it’s absolutely necessary for her own emotional health. Considering the added pressure of going through divorce in the very public eye and what that could do to her children, Elin may have made the choice that was right for her them, not her.
Having said that, I’m not one who thinks that a couple should necessarily split up when cheating has occurred. Every person, no matter their economic dependence on or independence from their partners and regardless of their parental or social status, will have a different reaction to being cheated on from the next person. There are women who are completely economically dependent on their partners and who have children with that person who still walk right out the door at the first hint of unfaithfulness, while many woman of their own financial means and without children will stay with cheating partners in the hopes that he or she will change and that they can put the affair(s) behind them. Some of the ones who stay go on to have happy, fulfilling relationships. Others aren’t able to. Some women who leave don’t regret their decision for a second while others wonder if they should have granted their partner a second chance. There is no easy, ready-made answer. And that’s just when we’re talking about already middle-class, relatively privileged people! When you look at women from economically and socially deprived areas and those in truly abusive relationships, not just adulterous ones, the stakes change entirely.
This put me in mind of an article I recently read in the Guardian (h/t to Brinkster) that wondered ‘Why do women want to be Wags?’ (Wives And Girlfriends (of footballers), for the uninitiated). In the piece, women who actively pursue marriage to footballers as a lifestyle or career move (and some of whom have been successful at this) were interviewed to find out if the publicly-held assumption of Wags as ‘gold-diggers’, ‘slappers’ and shamelessly self-absorbed Barbie dolls trading on their husbands’ hard work is true. I could pick apart the article piece by piece but, really, my response to it could be formulated having only read the title. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that there’s anyone out there who doesn’t already know why women from disadvantaged backgrounds actively ‘chase’ men of wealth and status. Does the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid” ring any bells?
Instead of taking a long, hard look at why so many girls and young women feel their only hope of ever lifting themselves out of poverty is by capitalising on their looks and being completely reliant on male approval and the security a wealthy male can provide, the public seems bent on making these women look slightly sad and pathetic, and more than a little lazy. The question should not be ‘Why do women want to be Wags?’ but ‘Why is a woman’s perceived sexuality a commodity?’
There’s also a large element of class snobbery at play here — a large swathe of the middle and upper classes seem to think it’s only ‘those’ (read: ‘chavvy’ or ‘trashy’) girls who do this kind of thing and, therefore, are safe to mock and belittle. Refusing to recognise the lack of educational and employment options for these young women as their chief motivator in seeking fame and fortune and instead putting it down to some kind of innate character flaw of the poor and misguided is absolutely abhorrent, not to mention ignorant. These are undoubtedly the same people who complain of people ‘sponging’ off the government and some of whom sneer at women who stay at home looking after their children, claiming they have it easy in comparison to their poor, hen-pecked, worked-to-the-bone husbands.
And indeed, not that many people consider being a housewife or a stay-at-home mum ‘work’. Oh, sure, we get lip service about how we’re (cue the violins) doing the hardest, most important job in the world and how amazing and selfless we are, and all the rest of it, but when it comes to trying to secure a longer, better paid maternity leave to give more women that opportunity, we’re suddenly whiny, entitled breeders who should have saved up for our squawking brats if we wanted them or be prepared to work to support them from the day they’re born. No taxpayer money will be spent on the fruit of your womb, madam, regardless of how much you earn or have paid into the system yourself or been denied opportunities based on arbitrary things like skin colour or postcode.
Thinking about things like this makes me look at my own economic dependence on my husband and shudder with fear. While I absolutely love and trust him, know that our marriage is solid and that he considers my contribution to the household just as valid as his, I am undoubtedly at his mercy. If I found out he cheated on me today, would I be able to just pack up my things and leave, with only my principles and dignity to guide me? Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. I would have to think about where to go, how I would live, what I would do for money, how I would provide shelter and food for my children, how I would get my daughter to school and wash her uniform, not to mention the intense emotional fallout for both myself and my kids. Would it make me think more carefully about whether I should stay in the marriage and try to forgive him, because I am dependent on him? Definitely. Does that scare the hell out of me? Undoubtedly.
Our dependence on men and their control over numerous aspects of our lives has been conditioned into us and is indeed a reality many women face. While women still earn 17% less than men for doing the same job, while they continue to be the ones to sacrifice their educations and careers to be carers, while they are told that it’s more important to be pretty than to be smart, it’s not a surprise and not something that will be easily fixed. It’s a complex issue and one which I am glad the feminists of the second-wave took up and made great strides in. That far greater numbers of women in the Western world are able to make decisions about relationships based on their feelings and personal ambitions rather than worries over their financial security is indeed a blessing. But we still have a long way to go before our independence (and that of women in less developed areas of the world) is a real option and a real choice, not a matter of luck or circumstance.