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.
