FEMINISM AND FAMILY: Working Moms under Attack

...Perhaps these cases do not represent the employment pool from which American families draw their FEMINISM AND FAMILY household workers...

...IN THE "OLD DAYS"—the bad old days— American women usually lost their jobs when they married and certainly when they had children...

...In other areas, the market did better...

...They and their husbands or partners and kids play games or watch games played with balls made by third world factory workers...

...Of course, the critics hope that husbands will share the work, but this "solution" does not acknowledge the work demands that husbands also face...

...Men's obligations are barely on the table, and in all likelihood their participation can't be the solution...

...There was no response or support from government, and the market provided few and insufficient resources for child care: unregulated neighborhood caretakers and some commercial centers...

...So, let the name-calling stop and the constructive collective responses begin...

...Further, the society is generally resistant to unionization...

...Many of them face pressures at work that prevent them from being household and child-care partners, no matter what their ideology...

...Time magazine recently reported there has been a considerable brain drain at the top of the female labor force (among women making more than $55,000 a year)—and, of course, women at the top are few to begin with...

...Even the media critics who once judged all women with "careers" beyond the acceptable 9-to-5 jobs as selfish, unfulfilled, and unhappy, didn't accuse them of oppressing others...

...Immigrant workers who come to the United States in the hope of improving their lives and those of their families face severe problems...

...The women's movement caught fire because women tied to the home, and women already in the workforce but employed in low-level occupations, wanted and needed to move up in the occupational structure...

...working women exploit these immigrants is misguided (and, as I will show, factually wrong...

...They were able to build on their accumulating legal rights and subsequent developing educational and workplace opportunities...

...At home, their carpets may be made by Pakistani or Indian children...

...Within a decade the slowbaked casserole and the homemade layer cake disappeared along with the starched party dress, and no one seemed to miss them...

...It is curious that writers concerned with the perils faced by immigrant workers focus on household labor—particularly child care— when only about 3 percent of child care is done by "nannies" in the United States, and only a small percentage of these nannies are immigrants...

...And although they faced residual sexism, harassment, and blocked promotions, they were managing to climb ladders once absolutely denied to them...

...Indeed, the solutions are regarded as another set of problems...

...The solutions that individual families find to these difficulties fall short of the ideals set by the culture...

...Why shouldn't they have a genuine option, as the men in their lives do, to delegate household and child care and plunge themselves into their work...

...Under such conditions, exploitation and subjugation were and are common...

...Yet a look at current debates about women's careers in the press, even at the arguments of liberal writers, shows clearly that professionally trained women are subjected to a barrage of attacks undermining their achievement and fostering a sense of guilt—particularly with regard to their choice to work outside the home and be mothers at the same time...

...Attacks on working mothers are an aspect of a cultural control system designed to keep women in "their place," which means, out of the centers of authority and decision makFEMINISM AND FAMILY ing in the society...

...Studies of time use at the Urban Institute and elsewhere find that mothers are spending more hours with their children, not less, than in the past...

...Whew...

...As for the "harm" done to children not cared for by their biological mothers, current research reported in academic circles (but not in the news magazines) by Kathleen Gerson, Ellen Galinsky, and Rosalind Barnett—to name a few—shows no correlation between mothers' working and a variety of psychological problems...

...We have all read articles about women who choose suicide over the slavery imposed in some traditional families...

...But the accusation that U.S...

...They are working for the "wrong reasons"— consumption, greed, ambition...

...She should not try to work very hard at her craft or exploit her talent— and she certainly should not engage in demanding work that can't be fitted into a "normal" work day or the time her children are in school...

...But the old forms of child care are missed (and mythologized)—hence the contemporary debate...

...And they are doing this by exploiting women immigrants from the third world who have left their own children in order to work under harsh conditions in the households of American wage-earning women...

...It is not helpful, useful, or progressive for a cadre of sisters to suggest that we should discourage individuals from employing the household labor they need to meet the demands of their careers or to suggest that household workers should return to their own homes in the third world, or that American women should do all their housework and child care themselves...

...On the left, it conveys a message that ambitious women internalize a "male model" of greed and insensitivity at some cost to children and society...

...Our society's romance with child-care perfectionism, its absurd focus on producing "designer children," not only creates pressure on working mothers to reduce their hours in the paid labor force and downscale their hopes for achievement, but may also have poor effects on their children...

...But if this were true, it would be wise to limit contact with grandparents and loving nursery school teachers...

...Although the terms are becoming interchangeable, nannies usually work for a salary for the same family and often live on the premises...

...Babysitters are usually hourly employees who may work for different families...

...And the notion that child care can not and should not be shared by other DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 51 FEMINISM AND FAMILY women (or men) with less education than the children's mothers is an insult to decent workingclass women who have much to offer in the way of compassion, nurturance, and instruction...

...It didn't matter that they needed the work or that not having an income meant they had little independence and power in the home...

...48 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 This perspective suggests that an energetic and educated woman should not be able to choose the life pattern of men of similar temperament and ability...

...So are the women who work for them...

...And there are also the Bad Nannies: the nannies who kill the children in their care (a most unlikely event according to Barry Glassner in his book Fear) or who just watch television instead of supervising their play...

...And now they are accused of being oppressors...

...Rightists exhibit a general distaste for women in leadership positions...

...But how do their situations compare with the other opportunities open to them...

...Some women come to the United States to join a husband who has immigrated before them or they are working to bring their husbands here...

...Fast food, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, and even synthetic fabrics were responses to what became the norm—dualearner families...

...We do not address care-work as a social priority...

...it keeps women "in their place...

...leftists exhibit the same distaste for women leaders in this (individualist, materialist) society...

...or, they are selfishly "fulfilling themselves...

...They were begrudged adequate staffs at work (many women secretaries still prefer working for men), and adequate help in their homes...

...The writers bemoaning their condition may have stopped eating grapes when Cesar Chavez organized the United Farm Workers' boycott two decades ago, but today they no doubt eat fruit and vegetables picked by workers in Mexico or Nicaragua, or by migrant families in the United States...

...If this means that their children will be cared for in their homes by surrogates for a period of time, why isn't that a plausible option...

...Possibly, immigrants face less exploitation in the homes of high-wage professional women than in other workplaces...

...they wear sneakers made by those same workers...

...I'm sure they wear clothing sewn by women working in factories along the Mexican-U.S...

...it is important to locate the sources of these problems and try to deal with them...

...n DISSENT I Fall 2004...

...These writers assert that women in highdemand careers are shortchanging their children...

...Slowly, a small percentage of women got really good jobs...

...Anecdotes about enslaved nannies, whose passports have been taken, are often descriptions of servants employed by wealthy foreigners who bring them from their own countries (and who rarely permit the lady of the household to work in the paid labor force...

...Women moving to the top of their work worlds are bombarded with critical messages condemning them for not putting motherhood first...

...glass ceilings are mostly still in place, limiting women to a fraction of jobs as senior partners in law and accounting firms, as chief executive officers in corporations, or as full professors in elite universities...

...It is aimed instead at women who hire other women as household help and child-care surrogates, so that the mothers are free to pursue demanding professional and managerial careers...

...Unlike men, women always can go home again, without too much, if any, criticism from kin or friends...

...Flanagan suggests that children might grow to love their caretakers, endangering ties to their working biological moms...

...But the reports on the conditions of their employment are also questionable...

...they don't mean to raise their own food or return to the yellow pad and pencil...

...Flanagan picks up this theme in her Atlantic article to argue that "so many middle-class American women went from not wanting to oppress other women to viewing that oppression as a central part of their own liberation...

...In the Philippines, for example, labor migration is encouraged by the federal government and according to sociologist Gina Mission, some 34 percent to 54 percent of the Filipino population is sustained by remittances from migrant workers, two-thirds of whom are women...

...In time, some of those workers get an education, and as their language skills improve, they go on to work in other sectors...

...Nor are these critics suggesting that we 50 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 stop eating fruit or buying basketballs and computers...

...She focused on a small group of friends who had formed a support group to convince each other that they had done the right thing...

...Going home was their fallback, rationalized as a "choice...

...Again, wage-earning women are in a no-win situation...

...One wouldn't have known from the magazine's cover banner—"Q: Why Don't More Women Get to the Top...

...Somehow they find the time, sacrificing their own leisure hours or losing sleep...

...Some mature women of the left, as well as a younger generation of highly educated women who have opted out of the 9-to-5 (or 6 or 7) rat race, have supported this idea: that women professionals and executives break through the glass ceiling only at the peril of the women they employ at home (and of their own children...

...Her employment of surrogates in the household is reprehensible...

...ASKED WHY women are getting off the track to top jobs, commentators often answer that this is their "choice...

...In New York City alone, sixty thousand immigrant workers are employed in the garment industry...

...But this "choice" may be only face-sayDISSENT / Fall 2004 n 49 FEMINISM AND FAMILY ing, or it may be a way for them to free themselves of the guilt that comes from daring to choose an unconventional lifestyle—that is, for women, a top job...

...For example, according to a report by Catalyst, an organization that monitors women's progress in high level positions, one in three women MBAs are not working full time...

...The 1950s model of Mom at home with her kids in a tract house represented a unique moment in history...

...For example, single mothers at all income levels, who have no choice about working, lag behind married mothers in their hours of full-time year-round employment...

...For these women, the quest for good child-care workers (their husbands invariably delegate the responsibility to them) means offering handsome enough pay packages to compete with other offers, often with benefits and paid vacations, access to cars, and payment for courses to improve the caretakers' skills or language abilities...

...border, far from their homes, subject to dangerous conditions...

...In their own countries, employment opportunities are often nonexistent...

...They are also accused of failing their children...

...Responsible for child care in their families, they have had to seek help from their own mothers, sisters, and most often their older children...

...I agree that many families face an excess of time pressures in the modern 24/7 economy and that the workplace generally is not flexible enough in considering the needs of dualworker families...

...BECAUSE MOST writers who object to the use of child-care surrogates in the home rely on their own experiences and report on their personal ambivalence about not being full-time moms, I offer another picture, drawing on my observations in Manhattan playgrounds, on dinner party chatter, and also on interviews I have done with women working in top law firms in New York City and San Francisco...

...ideally, they should be brought into the fold...

...And many working mothers are quite creative in connecting with their children in profound and meaningful ways (even if these are not to the taste of their critics...

...The new attack is not like that of the 1950s and 1960s, which faulted stay-at-home mothers for "smother love," "momism," and schizophrenogenic behavior that turned their sons psychotic...

...The jobs open to them outside the home are all at the bottom of the economic ladder...

...Burdened with child care, but without the supportive kin structure or community life of other societies, they could only find independent solutions to integrating work and home responsibilities...

...In any case, we don't have any data on this...

...Most female care workers who come from other countries do so with the expectation of improving their lives and the lives of the families their wages help support...

...The upper classes in many countries follow this pattern, and their children do about as well or poorly as ours do...

...If these social critics hold conventional jobs (many are freelance writers working at home), they are probably sitting in offices cleaned by unseen janitors—men and women—toiling at night...

...Any delegation of mothering responsibilities is regarded as detrimental to all the people touched by it...

...Moreover, it reflects or endorses a cultural bias against middle-class women's entering the professional and managerial workplace—and a bias also for what Sharon Hays has identified as "intensive mothering...

...I don't suggest that home-child-care workers are always well paid, and it is certainly true that a good proportion do not have safety nets...

...On the right, this preference serves an ideological position...

...immigrants make up a small minority...

...They send money home for their children or they save money in order to bring their children here at a later date...

...The preference for full-time or near full-time mothering undermines the options of our most educated women—and also makes working-class mothers who must work feel that they are failing their children...

...Just as we have no meaningful collective policies for providing child care or elder care, so we have no effective policies for enforcing minimum wages, decent benefits, and limited work hours...

...The success of the attacks and chastisements may be measured in part by the movement of well-trained women out of top jobs, although not out of the workforce...

...Last fall, the New York Times Magazine the highlighted an article by Lisa Belkin arguing that there was a movement of highly trained women leaving their careers to stay home with children...

...Without wives at home like many of their co-workers, and without the support and admiration of their communities, women had to do more with fewer resources than men...

...Women's access to good jobs at the recruitment level has not translated into top jobs...

...Caitlin Flanagan, for example, writing in the March 2004 Atlantic, maintains that middle-class women have moved from the steno pool to corner offices on the backs of women who live in "serfdom" as their household helpers...

...Other negative narratives about the consequences of women's employment of household workers have to do with the risks of employing child-care workers in the home...

...The critics describe cases of exploitation of low-wage immigrant workers by professional and managerial women and argue that these women ought to be doing their housework themselves...

...in all known societies women have worked inside and outside the home at economically productive labor...

...No doubt, it would be difficult to organize household workers, but the effort should be made...

...It might just be the case that for many working-class women—immigrant or native—taking care of children in a working couple's middle-class home is preferable to working in a meatpacking plant or cleaning multiple homes in the assembly line process Barbara Ehrenreich described so vividly in her book Nickel and Dimed, or working in sweatshops sewing a thousand zippers on blue jeans every working day...

...These working moms have been denounced as the new exploiters...

...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN is Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York, and president-elect of the American Sociological Association...

...These working women see it in their interest to treat nannies well, and, of course, it is...

...Too many families do not have enough work to support them in a comfortable lifestyle...

...Many women also face brutal exploitation in their families in third world countries, where patriarchy dominates and household labor is treated harshly...

...That meant they had to be "on" at work, more like the men in their lives...

...This reasoning clearly presses middle-class women to return to the home— if not full time, at least for enough of the time to retain their role as primary caretakers...

...Recent research by sociologists Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs finds that most childcare workers are U.S.-born...

...A: They Choose Not To"—that this was a very small group, and that some of them had retreated from their careers because they faced discrimination on the job...

...We don't know yet, but the professionalization of mothering to include constant attention and involvement (from Mozart in the womb to attendance at every sports event and the review of every homework assignment) may not even produce the desired high-quality children...

...An edited volume by the respected social commentators Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild lumps together Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers, claiming that they face similar exploitation...

...And the leftists who chastise women for employing household help unwittingly reinforce this system...

...In any case, when women workers in any society are paid independently, not through the males in their families, they acquire power they never had in the patriarchal systems from which they escaped...

...Indeed, it may produce cohorts of narcissistic young people who demand constant attention and never develop the skills of independence...

...It is difficult for all working families to rear their children in a society that does not support them with publicly provided or subsidized preschool and after-school programs...

...On the job, they face the same escalation of work hours that men do, and they also must deal with another escalation—of childcare norms that require even more obsessive "hands-on" mothering than in the child-centered Spockian 1950s...

...The computers on which they write their attacks are probably assembled by women workers...

...Yet they are caught in a no-win situation, where they are deemed to be inadequate mothers if they work and inadequate workers if they limit their hours at work...

...If a middle-class woman worker employs a nanny and treats her well, she might face the danger of the nanny who is "too good...

...Although they face exploitation in the homes of some families, who pay them unfairly and deprive them of the benefits they should have, a good number regard their jobs as attractive, given the limitations they face in the job market because of lack of skills...

...To be sure, many immigrant workers are undocumented, so we can't be certain about their number...