Last week, we debated
choice: a woman’s right to choose domesticity and the life of a stay-at-home
mom. For many, the notion that
individual women do not truly have a “choice” was contentious, often citing how
staying at home for their own mothers really was the best choice for their
family. Repeatedly, during informal
discussions with my female friends and housemates, I heard claims that the
decision for a parent to stay at home, regardless
of gender, is so rooted in individual
circumstance that it is impossible to make sweeping claims about these
trends. I strongly disagree, however,
with the notion that a woman staying at home to raise children is really a “choice,”
regardless of individual perception. I
must side with Linda Hirshmann on this matter, but I would like to expand on
why, pulling from Marilyn Frye’s, Oppression.**
According to Frye:
“The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.”
It is important to note that
not all women or stay-at-home moms are oppressed,
but it is also important to note that the route to stay-at-home motherhood is
determined by a specific social construct of what it means to be, and
experience life as, a woman and a mother.
Frye explains her
theory via the birdcage analogy.
Visualize a birdcage. If you
examine one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires, and your
conception of the cage is constructed by this microscopic focus. You can even move from wire to wire and find nothing to explain why the bird is
inhibited from flying away. However,
when you take a more macroscopic view, you see that the wires collectively
constrain the bird.
It is easy to argue
that staying at home is an individual choice when you look at one “wire,” or in
this case, one individual family or a woman’s personal social network. But we must look beyond the individual wire
to examine the collective barriers that women face, and expanding upon Frye’s
analogy, we must also acknowledge that not all women’s birdcages are created in
equal shape or size; when the discussion moves away from a focus on wealthy
women with elite degrees to a more broad discussion of women who are poor, or
non-English speakers, or identify with any target identity, this macroscopic
view gains even more importance. Furthermore,
“one cannot see the meanings … if one’s focus is riveted upon the individual
event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual
man’s present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman’s
conscious perception of the event in the moment.”
A few examples of what
the “individual wires” may be in the discussion of the stay-at-home mother are
as follows:
Often the spouse who
earns less is the one who “chooses” to stay home; however, due to the genderpay gap, women earned seventy-seven cents** to a man’s dollar in 2011. Furthermore,
there continues to be a gender discrepancy in high paying fields such as math,
science, technology, and medicine, with women pursuing these fields at a
fraction of the rate of men.
It can also be useful
to examine language and the ways in which the framing of the working versus
stay-at-home parent is inherently gendered.
As an experiment, I took an excerpt from the American Academy of Pediatrics about working mothers, but I switched
the gendered words; mother became father, her became his, etc. The sentiments of the paragraph can be
found in countless articles around the web, but it becomes absurd when the
gendered norms and expectations are flipped, revealing the power of the
narrative.
“Some people still think that a “good father” is one who gives up work to stay home with his children…. A father who successfully manages both an outside job and parenthood provides a role model for his child. In most families with working fathers, each person plays a more active role in the household… The mother is more likely to help with household chores and child rearing as well as breadwinning. These positive outcomes are most likely when the working father feels valued and supported by family, friends, and coworkers.”
Collectively, when
the “wires” are viewed macroscopically, we discover that in 2013, 3.5 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, a statistic that has doubled since 2003. This incredible
discrepancy alone illustrates how the conversation between spouses about who
should stay home may seem personal, egalitarian, and logical, there is clearly
a greater underlying force.
--
** I highly recommend reading Marilyn Frye's piece, Oppression, in full.
**Note: this figure
changes depending on what survey you examine and does not disaggregate by race
or socioeconomic status.
Rachel’s birdcage analogy is an interesting consideration of the cultural and structural barriers that exist in the US. Even though mothers have the right to continue working fulltime, they have traditionally been encouraged to take time off in order to foster their children’s upbringing. As this is obviously a frustration for women employees, it should also be viewed as inefficiency to the employer.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most valuable assets to a corporate employer is the experience of its employees, which I will now refer to as intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is usually obtained by years of investment into a particular employee, who learns the ins and outs of an industry, operating his or her role as efficiently as possible. When a father or mother steps away from a company in order to stay at home with their children, years of employer investment is lost. It is not only in the best interest of women, who are more often the one’s taking time away from work, but also in the best interest of companies to do what they can to allow parents to remain in the work force.
Childcare is one way in which this problem can be approached. If office buildings committed a certain section of their building to childcare, parents would be enabled to work normal hours while ensuring that their children are in good hands. This could be a benefit offered by the company or something the company can take out of the employee’s paycheck. In addition to this, as discussed in class, some small countries have found success by providing free childcare to all working parents.
Another way to approach the problem of working parents is by creating highly customized jobs allowing a more flexible work structure that lets them choose where and when the job gets done. This type of position would need to leverage technology to allow individuals to work and collaborate with ease over distance and time.
To address the gender-bias problem, the playing field would need to be evened out for men and women. The assurance of part-time parity for both parents would enable both the father and mother to take some time off work in order to care for their children. They could even be supplemented by the aforementioned utilization of technology to work from home. Insurance benefits would have to adjust to accommodate part-time parity.
Women must also be incentivized to stay in the workforce by earning more money. In OECD countries, women make 17% less than men, and the perceived pay inequity has created a perception that women do not get as many chances for advancement, which deters participation. Also, if more women were influenced to enter science, engineering, technology and mathematic fields, they could break into some of the higher paying jobs in US industry and since STEM employees are in high demand but low supply, this would stimulate the US economy as a whole.
These are some different policy changes to consider that may help even the playing field between men and women. In addition to this, this problem could be solved more readily by perceiving it less as a gender-bias problem, and more of an inefficiency problem. Perceiving it this way may be more effective in encouraging the participation of employers and government.
I also very much agreed with Hirshmann's "choiceless choice" idea. I can picture myself taking a 6-12 year break from my teaching career to raise children when the time came, and I imagine that the choice would seem completely my own. I imagine I would believe that I had other options, but that I personally felt the right one for my family was to quit my job for about a decade. But really, what other "choice" could I make? I would like my children to be taken care of every day by one of their parents (so that they grow up secure and with good values), and, following custom, that parent would be the woman.
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it is that the career life has been the man's life, and this life has now been opened to women, but women are ALSO expected to take care of home life at the same time. There has not been a mirror push to nudge men into the home life to fill the necessary space to allow women out. So faced with the "choice" of taking care of their family or their career (because no one can do both full time), they "choose" to take care of their family. In our minds it seems like a personal decision, but the truth is that it just has to be done. The home, while I would not describe it as a cage because the life of a full-time parent can be fulfilling, is nonetheless still a burden that women are predominately expected to carry alone.
Most women are walking with the back-breaking load of home life and its corresponding responsibilities on their backs and childless feminists are pointing fingers, asking, 'Why don't you use that master's degree? Why won't you further our cause through being a workforce powerhouse?' And they're staring at them with exasperation and demanding in reply, "If we did, who the hell would raise the children?"