The WWPD take on Anne-Marie Slaughter's already-picked-apart Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." In three parts. Scroll to the third if digression's not your thing.
1) Second-after-Sartre
If your complaint is that you had to curtail your ambitions, and what this leaves you with is, "I teach a full course load [at Princeton]; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book," and if your decision just happens to allow you to hold onto tenure, then what you've got is a Second-to-Sartre problem, as when Simone de Beauvoir based a feminist theory around her experiences as (poorly-treated lover of and, more to the point) second fiddle to the better-known Existentialist, and more specifically, in reference to some philosophy exam on which he placed first, she second, but it was unfair for sexism reasons the details of which I've since forgotten. A SAS problem is not a first-world problem, an UMC-white-person problem, a college-educated-woman problem. It's the incredibly narrow subset of feminist concerns specific to female geniuses and hyper-achievers.
If we fault feminism for conflating the concerns of relatively wealthy, often white women with those of all womankind, we must also question attempts to project Second After Sartre onto women who are simply upper-middle-class. Even if limiting the discussion to straight, married women with advanced degrees and "choices," those for whom the fallback is anything approaching tenure at an Ivy and the life of a public intellectual are few and far between. Think glorified secretarial jobs in the town where the main bread-earner (husband) has a job. Think freelance-writing, or selling crafts on the Internet. Think 'more time for yoga and volunteering.' I say this not to disparage these pursuits, but rather to illustrate what the options are, realistically, for a woman who doesn't need to apply at Walmart, but whose husband's career comes first, and someone has to keep track of those kids.
I understand that there's less zing in pointing out that Slaughter's out-of-touch with an upper-middle-class demographic than in noting that she doesn't deal with the concerns of the mom who's a cashier at Walmart (which she admits!), but this does seem a key detail. And it's not a 'privilege' issue, because this isn't about unearned status, or haves vs. have-nots. Just that the difference between Slaughter's story and that of 'ordinary' female professionals couldn't be greater.
Slaughter explains that "genuine superwomen" "cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure." If that's the case, why is she pitching her altogether exceptional story at "highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place"? Why must the hook, the lede, be her life, if it doesn't illustrate the point she's trying to make, and if anything detracts from it? Is it because "Atlantic cover story about women" suggests a confessional approach?
We as a society should care if the absolute most brilliant and hard-working women are held back, even if that leaves them with fulfilling careers and, of course, material comforts. But should this be feminism's first priority? Slaughter appears to think so: "Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women." There are a few problems with this approach, most obviously that women publishing treatises about work-life balance in the Atlantic are biased in favor of a solution that begins at the top and trickles down.
2) Leave the kids alone!
After many of my female (and some male) Facebook friends had long since shared this, after I thought I knew what the gist might be, my mother asked me if I'd seen the thing, and noticed how the author talks about her son. I had to check it out, and, indeed:
3) The substance of the article
This is what I read: Women are held back not so much by discrimination against women as by discrimination against a more flexible, low-key, dare-I-say-Continental approach to work. Women, even hyper-achieving geniuses, feel primarily responsible for the children's well-being; men, even super-evolved, 50%-or-more-of-the-household-tasks ones, do not. Women feel selfish putting work first. "To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish." While this might give the impression (and does, to so many employers) that men/fathers make better employees than women/mothers, in fact we'd all be better-off with a gentler work environment. The 70-hour workweek to which the serious professional must aspire is, in practice, a whole lot of wasted time. All achievements great and small could, in principle, be compatible with going to your kids' recitals.
And I find some of it convincing, some not.
If we took as a given that women want different things than men, that women not merely give birth (and experience pregnancy as well as possible physical and psychological repercussions) but wish to spend more time with their kids, this quite simply would leave mothers, all things equal, with fewer hours in the week, and make mothers less appealing as employees in many fields than men, fathers or not, or women without children, and this would be totally fair.
My own sense, however, is that of the parents with this desire, at least at this point in time, more are mothers than are fathers, but it's not absolute, not (necessarily) innate. A more just approach would be to say that parents who are the primary caregiver should expect less, career-wise, than their childless or not-primary-caregiver equivalents.
As much as it's appealing to think that the time a mother spends nurturing/bonding with her kids is time a male coworker of hers is off skiing, Facebooking, or observing obscure Jewish holidays, the perhaps disappointing fact is that there are some people who work constantly, efficiently and constantly, who effectively put their lives on hold either forever or until reaching a point in their career at which the future is more or less guaranteed. And that's who gets the most done. There are also some who aren't that talented, or are slow workers, and who end up at the same place as others who work better but less and do have lives outside the office. An employer might unfairly conflate having no life outside work with being incredibly productive, but even if that were addressed, this would still leave the reality of those few workers who accomplish the most precisely because the only balance in their lives is devotion to all the myriad responsibilities of their job.
Although 'no outside life' isn't entirely accurate. It's OK to have an outside life if it consists of a spouse whose entire job is to support you and your career. Something above and beyond 'being supportive.' If somewhere along the line, you landed someone who makes sure you never need to bother yourself with petty things like going to the supermarket, you're able to work as much as the non-partnered hyper-achiever who will at least need to pick up frozen pizzas every so often. While men and women alike can and do go the monastic frozen-pizza route, a man is far more likely than a woman to have that kind of spouse.
After many of my female (and some male) Facebook friends had long since shared this, after I thought I knew what the gist might be, my mother asked me if I'd seen the thing, and noticed how the author talks about her son. I had to check it out, and, indeed:
But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me.Parents! Do not do this! Not even if you're a woman who didn't take her husband's name, and thus your children are slightly less readily identifiable! (Of course, if you provide your husband's full name, as Slaughter does, there's not much mystery.) Your adolescent-and-younger children can't consent to this kind of thing (living under your roof and all that), even if you've asked, but almost definitely don't want their lowest points or mediocrity used as fodder for their parents' high-profile think pieces. (And yes, I have my mother's permission to credit her to pointing me to this. Also, she, unlike Slaughter's son, is not 14, nor am I embarrassing her.) Find some other way to illustrate your points.
3) The substance of the article
This is what I read: Women are held back not so much by discrimination against women as by discrimination against a more flexible, low-key, dare-I-say-Continental approach to work. Women, even hyper-achieving geniuses, feel primarily responsible for the children's well-being; men, even super-evolved, 50%-or-more-of-the-household-tasks ones, do not. Women feel selfish putting work first. "To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish." While this might give the impression (and does, to so many employers) that men/fathers make better employees than women/mothers, in fact we'd all be better-off with a gentler work environment. The 70-hour workweek to which the serious professional must aspire is, in practice, a whole lot of wasted time. All achievements great and small could, in principle, be compatible with going to your kids' recitals.
And I find some of it convincing, some not.
If we took as a given that women want different things than men, that women not merely give birth (and experience pregnancy as well as possible physical and psychological repercussions) but wish to spend more time with their kids, this quite simply would leave mothers, all things equal, with fewer hours in the week, and make mothers less appealing as employees in many fields than men, fathers or not, or women without children, and this would be totally fair.
My own sense, however, is that of the parents with this desire, at least at this point in time, more are mothers than are fathers, but it's not absolute, not (necessarily) innate. A more just approach would be to say that parents who are the primary caregiver should expect less, career-wise, than their childless or not-primary-caregiver equivalents.
As much as it's appealing to think that the time a mother spends nurturing/bonding with her kids is time a male coworker of hers is off skiing, Facebooking, or observing obscure Jewish holidays, the perhaps disappointing fact is that there are some people who work constantly, efficiently and constantly, who effectively put their lives on hold either forever or until reaching a point in their career at which the future is more or less guaranteed. And that's who gets the most done. There are also some who aren't that talented, or are slow workers, and who end up at the same place as others who work better but less and do have lives outside the office. An employer might unfairly conflate having no life outside work with being incredibly productive, but even if that were addressed, this would still leave the reality of those few workers who accomplish the most precisely because the only balance in their lives is devotion to all the myriad responsibilities of their job.
But not all that likely, in this day and age. Women don't want to do that, and men, at the end of the day, don't want that done for them. More relevant is that assumptions persist even in the absence of that type of marriage. When a man mentions he has a wife, this makes him sound mature, responsible, able to commit. Few will think, 'uh oh, that means he has a life outside work.' Some will think, even if they won't articulate this, 'oh good, that means someone's picking up his dry-cleaning so he can stay past 7.' Meanwhile a woman who mentions a husband is implying, unless she specifies otherwise or her boss happens to be a really evolved, feminist sort, that hers is not the main career in her household, and that any minute now she might leave to have kids, never to return.
The one bit of the piece I thought was relatable, and quite powerful, despite referring to the 0.001% in terms of achievement and ambition, was this: "Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children."
0 comments:
Post a Comment