Justice for mothers
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy JUSTICE FOR MOTHERS REFLECTIONS FOR THE ANNUAL SPRING RITUAL I AM the mother of the four best children in America. Like all other mothers of best children I...
...23 May 1980: 297 Things are not that good for mothers in this society of ours...
...The great majority of the very poor are mothers and their children...
...She has been educated, formally or informally, as the report implies, to have lower expectations for her job life and her place in the community...
...Things are not good for young mothers...
...But in a decade of lecturing I have found that pointing out this fact and questioning the possibility of the ideal almost inevitably evokes hostility from audiences, especially church audiences, and most especially from audiences at the universities which were once all male...
...I simply did not see the mothers of my classmates who went out to cook and clean, who worked in the button factory and the cleaning works, clerked in stores, acted as telephone operators—to say nothing of those who milked cows, shocked wheat, dug potatoes and did all the drudgery necessary on a subsistence farm...
...In a society which does not consider homemaking or unsalaried work part of the gross national product even a lifetime of such labor does not necessarily establish a claim to property...
...Men's attitude to women working changed only, he says, when "it became more convenient for them to have women work...
...They are the very poorest of the poor...
...Chances are that none of these will be hers if her husband dies...
...In a country in which motherhood is the subject of song and story, in a church in which motherhood is extolled in preaching and tradition, why is there so little concern for the plight of mothers...
...And studies show that they come home after work to do the major share of cooking, cleaning and child care...
...This "sickening disparity," economist Sylvia Porter calls it, reflects not only the pay inequities of her working life but the penalty she pays for having taken time out to bear and care for children...
...the average woman faces a work life of up to twentyfive years...
...The tangible honors for motherhood are few...
...Because the working mother does not see herself as part of the many she accepts the conditions the report also describes— "that women still face discriminatory barriers to employment opportunities, are steered into lower-paying positions, fate barriers to advancement...
...The systemic level is obscured by people who do not want to see the truth," says Harris, "We have things in our lives in society that we don't want to know...
...pity the widow who has worked long hours in the family business or on the family farm...
...But I would be breaking faith with my daughters if I did not note that the annual national celebration of motherhood is pretty much a matter of lip service...
...That means that she is struggling to survive in this inflated economy on perhaps three hundred dollars a month—often less...
...Pity the working mother whose social security payments are 40 percent less than those of a man retiring at the same time...
...In part because the women suffering these injustices themselves see their situation as a departure from the norm...
...One thing we don't want to know is that the ideal of mother "queen of the home" as Chesterton pictured her has never been attainable except for privileged women...
...Like all other mothers of best children I tend to think that there is no experience comparable to motherhood...
...Pity also the widowed homemaker who has scrimped and saved, sewed, painted, and gardened to improve the family home...
...I am proud and glad to be a mother...
...That figure has not changed in forty years despite a decade of intense crusading for justice on the part of feminists...
...Except for the convinced philosophical feminists— still a minority—each working mother tends to see her own situation as the result of unusual economic or personal circumstances and, often, as temporary...
...This, in the face of the current statistics—half of the mothers of minor children are in the work force now and more will be so in the future...
...Whatever the job, it will pay them less than the men who work beside them—only three-fifths as much...
...In a two-paycheck economy most of them must seek jobs in order to help their husbands pay for homes and the education of their children—in many cases to help them pay for the more basic necessities of food and clothing...
...Even worse, more and . more young mothers are being left alone to head young families and a third of these families live below the poverty level...
...Things are not good for old mothers, either...
...Our inheritance laws and inequities in the private pension system as well as in social security may well mean that she will lose them...
...Even feminists may be deceived about the actual situation, thinks Columbia anthropologist Marvin Harris...
...And to see that they could have had little time to be the teacher-mothers of the dream...
...Even when he was describing this queenmother another had probably left her home to char in his and polish his brasses—and all over the world women were leaving their homes to work the whole day long in silk mills and on rubber plantations, in sweat shops and in stoop labor in the fields...
...I am at once the unpopular messenger who bears bad news—and this, although I freely admit that I, too, was blind when I first read Chesterton and heard those mission sermons of old on saintly mothers...
...Poor women have always worked...
...She thinks of herself, if at home, as supported not as a contributor to family net worth...
...If we can bring ourselves to stop confusing the ideal with the reality, we may finally come to honor mothers with justice, and better yet, with a challenge to the structures which seem to make injustice inevitable...
...The recent report of the Labor Department predicts up to 70 percent of all women will be part of the work force by 1985...
...Married women were moving into the work force because of need long before the current wave of feminism crested in the '70s, and they were able to do so because the need to intensify production to maintain the living standards of a whole society made "this untapped reservoir of cheap, docile labor" attractive...
...ABIGAIL McCARTHY Commonweal: 298...
...Not only are our children our joy but they are our bridge to the future and the affirmation of our pasts...
...Another source suggests that the executives and boards of conglomerates are making women presidents of subsidiary companies—a fact celebrated this year on many a financial page—because they find women more malleable than men...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
