The Women's Movement and Conservative Attacks

...But is it really, as she says, women's "privilege and responsibility" to bear children for the sake of "our collective future...

...Schlafly hates unions and precisely those political groups that Hewlett says feminists should ally themselves with...

...And as the hostility of writers who wrote for Playboy, and others, was mainly directed at women who expected to be supported by their husbands "and were doing nothing," the hostility of the child-rearing experts was directed, as Hewlett notes elsewhere, at the working mother...

...Unless she allies with the feminists whom she now disdains, Hewlett will not get far with her complaints...

...If material reality permits women to become effective wives and mothers and [emphasis in the original] productive workers in the world beyond the home, then and only then [emphasis mine] can they develop their consciousness and fullfill their human potential...

...Here is how Hewlett interprets "equal treatment": "After all, anyone can have a skiing accident, but only women can have babies, so if you apply the principle of equal treatment, skiing accidents qualify and childbirth doesn't...

...Like Susan, Hewlett simply accepts the fact that, in the case of middle-aged and older women, employers decide that an interruption in their work lowers the value of their performance whether or not it actually does...

...I shall not dwell on her perfunctory treatment of Freud—not once quoting him, or any scholarly source, for it is indeed possible to trace a watered-down type of psychoanalytically influenced psychology to some of Freud's writings superficially understood...

...Not that sexism is dead...

...Could one not envisage that employers could be convinced, or forced, to stop discriminating by hiring women on their merit rather than on the basis of their life cycle...

...Hewlett neglects the notion that change does not come only from above and that even those who are powerless can make things happen...

...It is not true, as Hewlett claims, that the period of the 1950s was extraordinary in keeping women at home, devoted to domesticity...

...But the reverse statement is equally true, namely that individuals, especially if they are embedded in a social movement, help shape reality...

...But she has not examined some eminent critics of this theory (for example, Mark Granovetter) who show that to the extent that the wage gap can be accounted for by interruptions in women's careers, it is largely due to discrimination by employers.' As a matter of fact the case Hewlett uses to illustrate the Human Capital theory is precisely an example of such discrimination...

...In every corner of America women have been getting together to fight for exactly what she stands for—equal pay, parental leave, child care centers—and achieve piecemeal local results, even if not as fundamental as she (and I) would wish...

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...IN HER MAIN MESSAGE, namely her advocacy of laws protecting women, there is a serious misrepresentation related to the Garland case...

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...Has Hewlett ever wondered what Schlafly would think of Hewlett's opinion that the best thing for American women would be to organize in trade unions...

...Her implicit belief that change can come only from above blinds her to activities at the grassroots...

...Couldn't our collective future be served better by restricting childbearing, by opposing the pronatalist coercion (as Judith Blake calls it) of our culture, with its glorification of motherhood and its stigmatizing of single and infertile women...

...Hewlett ignores activities of women at the local level...

...However, her trouble started as soon as she convened her panel, and continued...

...That's fine with me, hypocrisy being the tribute that vice pays to virtue...

...The case of Susan is again instructive here: When she was first offered the job at the National Security Council, she felt she could not accept it because she was having her second child and the family was living in a suburb...

...So MUCH FOR THE GOOD NEWS...

...She did not get any maternity leave at Barnard where she was teaching...

...Who is being hostile...

...HEWLETT ENGAGES IN THE FAMILIAR device of scapegoating by blaming those who are powerless, namely feminists, and making them seem all-powerful in neglecting the issue of parenting...

...Polarizing the issues is a characteristic of her thinking...

...The opening of the case resulted in repeal of the law by a federal court...

...WHILE POP MAGAZINES AND SOME PSYCHOLOGISTS, psychiatrists, social workers, and sociologists extolled the virtues of domesticity, women were quietly going back to work...

...For it is exactly in the 1950s, even as pop magazines and many a social scientist extolled the virtues of motherhood, that jobs for women opened...

...Alice Rossi's writing on the subject is a memorable exception...

...The implication here is that material reality determines consciousness—not such a novel idea, and true enough...

...This is sheer sophistry...

...I understand that Barnard has just established a parental leave policy—one better than Hewlett's proposal for maternal leave only...

...In fact, Piaget's theory states the opposite, namely that all children develop in well-specified stages that cannot be skipped...

...Since California law entitled women to up to four months unpaid leave for childbirth, she challenged her employer's refusal to reinstate her...

...Why is it wrong for feminists to state that anyone, man or woman, could be incapacitated for some time, and should be guaranteed a job upon return...

...As Valerie Oppenheimer has shown in her painstaking demographic analysis, this was the time when the demand for women workers increased at the same time that the traditional supply of women—young unmarrieds—had fallen off.2 The latter trend was due to the low birthrate during the 1930s and to women's longer years in school...

...This is, I believe, a dogmatic stance, as if one were not able to do both...

...Notes 1 Patricia Cayo Sexton, "Women Debate the Equal Rights Amendment," Dissent (1, 1971), pp...

...An example of sloppy scholarship is her criticism of Freud and Piaget, whom she holds responsible for keeping women close to home and hearth in the 1950s...

...Item: She finds the Human Capital theory "convincing" since it argues "that the wage gap can be largely explained by the interruptions that mark women's work lives...

...Hewlett has nothing stronger to say about this tragic blow to the lives of women and children than that it was "unfortunate...

...And so should those men who cannot lift heavy objects either...

...She describes how she felt about having to rush back to her teaching job after a short ten days, and how she lacked support from her colleagues, who even criticized her for bringing her baby to school...

...Item: Hewlett criticizes consciousness-raising groups within the women's movement because, she says, these focus on interpersonal relationships and personal experiences rather than on external reality and political action...

...as we know, the office grows faster than the factory...

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...And it also encouraged her to work actively for what she believes in, as when she set up a Family Policy Panel at the Economic Policy Council...

...I do not believe, as Hewlett does, that this rebellion is an attack on the domesticity of the 1950s...

...All workers need protection on the job...

...Hewlett's story is gripping indeed...

...I completely share—and so would all feministsHewlett's indignation about the lack of child care centers in our country...

...Hewlett advocates protective laws because women are different since they bear children, and children, she says, are our "most important national resource...

...The women's movement—so the author asserts—has neglected the issue of the burden that women face in regard to childbearing and childrearing...

...It is possible to agree with Hewlett that the defeat of the ERA was due (I would add...

...True, in a footnote she admits that Piaget did not advocate any speedup in learning, but most readers do not turn to footnotes at the end of the book, and are therefore left with Hewlett's conclusion that Piaget advocated such "weighty and time-consuming responsibilities" to be shouldered by the modern mother...

...In her best chapter, Hewlett recounts her own experience, describing the humiliations she suffered in the hospital and at her job after her return...

...No sooner had they quit their jobs to make room for "the boys who came back from the war," than they returned to jobs...

...For, compared with the venom she pours on feminists, her criticism of our national leaders is mild indeed...

...Item: While she minces no words in criticizing feminists for neglecting women and children, the men go scot-free...

...But it is incomprehensible to me that she should blame feminists for "hostility toward women and children...

...The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women filed briefs supporting the court's decision, as they favored equal treatment of men and women...

...As evidence she offers a ridiculous example of a mother who brought her nine-month-old baby to something called the "Better Baby Institute" in Philadelphia for a course entitled "How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence," a "course aimed at teaching mothers how to train their babies to speak and read many languages, doing mathematics, horseback-riding and playing the violin by age two...

...Feminists in general, she says, are only interested in careers for women, but not in the real problems of women...

...Women responded to the demand, and for the first time in American history, married women and women with children took jobs in industry and commerce on a large scale...

...Mark Granovetter, "Toward a Sociological Theory of Income Differences, in Ivan Berg, ed., Sociological Perspectives on Labor Markets (Orlando, Ha.: Academic Press, 1981...

...Schlafly believed that the Republican party was, in her own words, taken over by a "small group of secret kingmakers using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques" to advance the interests of "the Red Empire...

...The equality for which NOW and the ACLU stand does not refer to the reason for incapacitation, but to the fact itself, no matter what its cause...

...Together with other women they fought for child care centers, and obtained at least some...

...As to "privilege," many mothers would be better off not having children, and for many children it would be better not to be born...

...Hewlett's scholarship on a number of issues leaves much to be desired...

...True, many women cannot lift heavy objects, and certainly not when they are pregnant...

...This traumatic experience seems to have been fruitful...

...It was, after all, Nixon and not NOW who vetoed the Child Development Act, which would have established child care centers all over the country...

...She seems to accept the fact that only 6 percent of fathers participate in child care 261 and household work, and leaves it at that, not expecting that men can change their ways...

...The modern women's movement . . . has been profoundly anti-children and anti-motherhood" is one of her many outrageous statements...

...Her call for better family policy seems to have gotten some hearings...

...She has a short chapter on what she calls the male rebellion, reminiscent of, if milder than, Barbara Ehrenreich's chapter on that subject in The Hearts of Men, which she doesn't mention...

...Those slots are strictly for the up-and-coming thirty-year-olds...

...Is there nothing women and men can do to effect change in their own reality, in addition to fighting for a better national policy...

...2 Valerie Oppenheimer, "Demographic Influence on Female Employment and the Status of Women," American Journal of Sociology, 78 (1979), pp...

...Patricia Cayo Sexton has shown that such laws can be used to keep women down by making it possible to specify the jobs in such a way as to exclude them legally.' What I learn from Sexton is that if some women should be assured their jobs after childbirth, so should men after serious illness...

...Even if the numerical change is small, the culture has changed...

...I hope she has a change of heart...

...Here, with the fanaticism of the convert, she argues with a stridency that is about to land her in the camp of the opponents of women's rights...

...Now for the bad...

...in her advocacy of laws protecting women, and her acceptance of Phyllis Schlafly's appeal to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, she talks herself into a frenzy, proceeds by exaggeration, and ignores contrary evidence...

...Lillian Garland lost her job at the California Federal Savings and Loan Association in Los Angeles after taking two months off for the birth of her child...

...After Wylie's Generation of Vipers, the anti-mom complex grew in the 1940s and 1950s with slurs such as "the overprotective mother" and "the domineering mother" (a household term in American psychiatry), and reached its height in the 1960s with Dan Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother...

...I have always wondered why, until recently, there has been so little protest about the way childbearing mothers are treated in some hospitals—an utter lack of sympathy, often with hostile nurses, and one's own physician not even showing up during the many hours of labor...

...But to realize this does not justify her "great sympathy for the Schlafly campaign...

...Women were needed for office work as well as for the expanding service industries, and for tending the booming babies...

...In fact, men in general take on more responsibilities than in the past, and could be induced to do more...

...The Human Capital theory is clearly a conservative one, based on the present state of discriminatory practice...

...Like all scapegoaters, she resorts to name-calling: she speaks of the "chic, liberal women of NOW" (I know Hewlett to be not exactly dowdy herself), and when referring to the young women who started out in the civil rights movement and discovered that even there they were discriminated against, she says: "They were through being menial servants and unpaid prostitutes to left-wing men...

...What I don't quite understand about Hewlett is that she would make herself the enemy of those whose goals she shares, namely feminists, to embrace the cause of someone who is hostile to everything Hewlett herself stands for...

...Nor does she indict as "profoundly anti-children and anti-motherhood" such misogynistic publications as Playboy, which directly attack family life 260 by protesting against men having to support women and children...

...Neither the men, nor the few women whom she had invited, took much interest in the problems she presented...

...Its main thrust is a call for a national policy that would support women as mothers...

...Linked to this is the notion that women are special, because bearing children is their "privilege and responsibility...

...And a bill has been introduced in the House, the "Parental and Medical Leave Act of 1986," which would give men and women up to eighteen months of unpaid leave and job guarantees when their children are born...

...She exempts from responsibility this mass-media appeal to millions of American men to abandon wives and children...

...Unfortunately, she overstates her point...

...They will do nothing much for women unless their eardrums are ready to burst from the noise that women all over the country make with their rightful claims...

...She tells of Susan, whose career was permanently stalled because she knew that "No one wants a gray-haired lady on the staff of the National Security Council...

...And that she would criticize only mildly the conservative administration that is responsible for the lack of an insightful family policy Hewlett advocates...

...What Hewlett has to say about Piaget is sheer 259 misrepresentation...

...As a matter of fact, while women might be criticized for bringing a child to work, men who do so are being congratulated for being so generous as to "help out...

...I can agree with some conservatives on some issues...

...As authorities on the subject she quotes the Wall Street Journal and Burton White (not referenced)—a psychologist who is an outspoken opponent of child care centers (the scarcity of which is one of Hewlett's main peeves...

...Our national leaders, or the "prominent men" whom Hewlett called on, will not move—as she found out—because one person, no matter how clever, asks them to do so...

...Had Susan's consciousness been raised, she might have persuaded her husband to move to the city...

...Feminists did not only fight for the ERA as Hewlett believes...

...Playboy was started in 1953, too early for such a response...

...It seems to me that, some of her contradictory intentions notwithstanding, Sylvia Hewlett is consistently conservative...

...The antimom complex was a war and immediate post-war response to the emancipation of women during the war, when they got good jobs and good pay, and liked it...

...The statistics about the change in women's roles speak a different story...

...in some small measure yet to be identified) to the fact that Schlafly's demagogic campaign convinced many American women that the ERA would undermine women's privileges as wives and mothers...

...She misleads the reader by implying that Piaget is responsible for encouraging the mothers of the 1950s to speed up the cognitive development of their children...

...I might point out that the attack on women was already articulated in 1942 by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers...

...Not only did it induce her to write this book, but she got an important position at the Economic Policy Council...

...The rise in demand arose in large part from an increase in administration, which followed the introduction of automation and industrial expansion...

...My point is not that Schlafly is a conservative, as Hewlett tells us...

...Nor would Schlafly have any sympathy for Hewlett's criticism of the wage gap and her call for equal wages...

...Although I don't object to such tactical maneuvers, I find it both morally and politically insensitive that she "never thought it appropriate to involve a large contingent from the women's movement...

...But, as Barbara Ehrenreich shows in great detail, Schlafly was, if not a member, at least close to the Birchites, which Hewlett does not tell us...

...A social movement gains its strength from the consciousness of its members...

...Item: When setting up her Family Panel at the Economic Policy Council, she found it "important to include . . . prominent men in this work...

...Although Hewlett briefly acknowledges that protective laws can be abused, she passes over the seriousness of the problem...

...The worst part of Hewlett's book is, I believe, the chapter denouncing the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment...

...If and when they cannot, they should be given another type of work, and not a lower pay...

...The few who were committed had to work extremely hard to formulate a family policy, which they finally did...

...Women were damned if they did and damned if they did not go out to work...

...The author shows that the United States hardly has any such policy and in this respect differs sharply from other industrialized countries...