Women, the Values Debate, and a New Liberal Politics
Harrington, Mona
November 2004: The election is over. The red states have prevailed. And a "values debate" has begun, as has a debate about the debate. Were values really a crucial factor in the Bush...
...MONA HARRINGTON, program director at the MIT Workplace Center, is the author of Care and Equality: Inventing a New Family Polities (Knopf, 1999...
...Don't talk about women and men...
...Liberals have not been worrying either because we have not looked beyond the category "individuals" to the category "women"—and so we have avoided the problem...
...This may seem an inexplicable claim to anyone who reads the Clinton record on domestic issues either as a conservative choice of fiscal discipline over social need or as a typically political course of expediency...
...This is the deep ground of the values debate that liberals are losing...
...For liberals now, admitting, accepting, and supporting care as a national value raises complex issues and calls for constructing the multiple solutions I have mentioned—these include tax-based supports contributing to the economic security of families, ways to organize work that allow time for care and assure that women and men taking care of families are not penalized for the time it takes, supports for neighborhood and community connections that help families carry out the daily routines of care and emergency demands...
...The language of the opinion was almost apologetic—"We sympathize with the difficulties of persons in the position of the plaintiff who face the challenge of reconciling parental responsibilities with the demands of employment," but the judges found no clear expression of policy requiring employers to take account of those responsibilities in organizing the workplace.' So what are liberals to do...
...This is a job for women...
...The aim is to avoid, perpetuating the automatic connection between women and care...
...There are only individuals...
...Policies related to women are typecast as not serious, low priority...
...Applying the usual liberal remedy for disadvantage— removing restrictions, protecting against unfairness—clearly does not work in this situation...
...However the responsibility is divided, the result has to include • an economic base for essential needs—housing, nutrition, health, education, and safety...
...The right-wing charge that liberals are the upholders of individual choice—including the choices that lead to gay rights, abortion, and single parenthood—is absolutely true...
...In the conventional wisdom, whatever it is you're seeking that involves women is best served by a generalized vocabulary in which women become parents, workers, caregivers, part-timers, or members of other non-sex-specific categories...
...They can also do other things outside the home, including paid work, but their ability to make families their first priority needs to be protected...
...Liberal political leaders, men and women, need to listen to these messages and make them their own...
...Liberals have struggled through most of American history to reduce the inequalities of economic power and the injuries of class...
...restrictions on various kinds of employment...
...And finally, what do the answers to these questions mean for Democrats, for liberals, for progressives who want to win elections and move a strong socioeconomic agenda into the center of the country's politics...
...And then we must confront conservatives with meaningful value choices for which all Americans—not just women—are responsible...
...and • the purposeful design of both public policy and private workplace practice to support fully equal economic opportunity for women and men who care for families and communities...
...If liberalism and "liberal values" are to have meaning, liberals need to construct new moral 88 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 ground with explicit support for families and care that coincides with explicit support for individual rights and equal opportunity...
...Conservatives condemn a valueless world of individual choice with its promiscuity, hoCopyright © 2005 Mona Harrington mosexuality, crass entertainment, serial di86 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 FAMILY POLITICS vorce, abortion, and licentiousness of every kind—and the dumping of its costs on the good people who lead straight lives...
...using often unwieldy means of transportation...
...We have focused instead on some of its consequences— the need for more child care, for remediation of various kinds for children whose parents have not been able to give them enough time, enough care...
...1. Stephen J. Rose and Heidi I. Hartmann, "Still a Man's Labor Market: the Long-Term Earnings Gap," Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2004...
...The social order seems broken...
...We need to remember that our ultimate security is in our social bonds—in families, neighborhoods, friends, and communities—and we need leaders who remind us that care is the crucial element in those bonds, time for care and resources for care...
...One is the Clinton persona, the exemplification of caring, the often ridiculed tearfulness that demonstrated a literal, personal, open caring as a proper attribute of a public person...
...The latest concern is finding support for elder care with the huge boomer generation heading into retirement...
...listening and responding to young people...
...on discrimination in hiring, promotion, and firing...
...It means looking squarely at the fact that with their double duty—work and family— women's economic opportunities are unequal, their incomes are unequal, their advancement at work is unequal, their chances of holding positions of authority in business, government, religion, unions, schools, entertainment, medicine, science, law are unequal...
...In short, care enters the world of liberal politics when the lack of care becomes a policy problem, which then turns into a public support problem, a money problem...
...This is a language liberals do not speak, and we should learn to speak it—not just by using the word values and applying it to everything, but by bringing the word "women" into political dialogue in its full historical meaning and confronting its complications...
...To move forward, to move the value of care to a place of firm acceptance in the country's politics will take a determined and sustained campaign...
...And if so, what was at the heart of the red and blue divide...
...It does not extend to the values that age-old social custom assigns to women...
...All this is a challenge that calls for women's heroism...
...But mainly it is a challenge filled with shortfalls, compromises, and serious stress...
...Bringing women's responsibilities for families squarely DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 87 FAMILY POLITICS into political view would mean recognizing that this very responsibility is the main reason that women have yet to achieve a place in society equal to men...
...But at the heart of what they condemn and call immoral is a world in which the linchpin of security and comfort has been shaken loose—and that linchpin is the role of women as the organizers of a predictable social and personal order...
...No public consensus emerged, nor did the Clinton administration have an answer (except by avoidance—appointing an unmarried childless woman to head the Justice Department...
...To win, we need to create a space in American politics to debate the radical changes now taking place in the role of women in society, in the economy, in the national psyche, in the family, as caregivers, and as carriers of individual and social values...
...2. Joanna Upton vs...
...Its principles must be clear...
...So are thoughtful contributions of time to community institutions of care...
...There was unequaled openness to full participation of women in public decision making with the appointment of many women to prestigious cabinet posts and administrative offices, and a spectacular confrontation with the very issue that confounds attempt to bring good family care together with women's equality—the discovery that Clinton's first nominee for Attorney General, Zoe Baird, a high-placed, high-paid woman attorney with a young child, employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and did not pay Social Security taxes for her employee...
...It is to the great credit of liberals that we have firmly maintained protections for the individual conscience and individual rights...
...His decision making was famously open and messy, letting many voices and issues in, not out of sheer carelessness but in recognition of the complexity and many-sidedness of the needs of the country and the diversity of interests involved in any major question...
...And the conservative challenge, with all of its misunderstandings and exaggerations, identifies the place where we need to look...
...It recognizes the sustenance of families as the key to a healthy society and makes the values that women have traditionally carried, and the caring work they have traditionally done, the responsibility of all...
...We have not constructed a place for these values in our new moral universe...
...My answer: yes, yes, and yes—but not just as a strategic response to the 2004 Republican victories...
...The other indirect but extremely important lesson from the Clinton years for builders of a new family politics is Bill Clinton's approach to governance...
...Reforming the arcane doctrine of employee-at-will is not the point—although it might be a nice project along the way to a better family politics...
...JWP Businessland, 425 Mass...
...Liberal elites in the blue states have championed change in the old rules defining correct behavior for women, legitimizing personal and sexual freedom and thereby changing everything: the meaning of femininity and masculinity, the relations of women and men, the rules of marriage, and the solidity of the family...
...The health of women, the health of children, the reading level of children, the relational stability of parents are all under great pressure...
...Liberals need to make clear that when we speak about values, we know what we are talking about and we really mean it...
...But how...
...However, the more important reasons for turning back to look at the Clinton presidency as a starting place for a new politics of the family are less obvious...
...This is what "family values" means in conservative language and that meaning, so far, dominates the debate...
...In the case in question, a woman was fired for refusing to work changed hours that severely compromised care for her young child, and the court found that the firing did not violate the state's public policy...
...It is a question of building new systems that actively support care and do not block those who provide it from equal roles in workplaces and equal participation in the life of the country—a task possible only through an openness to complexity, multiple voices, and optimism about outcomes...
...Giving care to elders and others who need it is important...
...Ordinary, daily, non-emergency feeding, cleaning, listening, helping, and remembering are important...
...We need to add the issues of sex to the liberal political agenda...
...They need to hear that the caring values that women are putting into practice daily should be the country's values, backed by action— by governments, by employers, by communities...
...FAMILY POLITICS so MUCH FOR a starting point...
...Women in public office, women as corporate executives, women as union leaders, women as advocates, women in the media, women writers and pundits, women community leaders, and women voters—must put issues of family care onto agendas, talk about them, organize around them, bargain about them, and vote on them...
...Paradoxically, not talking about it creates the effect one wants to avoid...
...Most women are in the paid workforce: constructing days that meet workplace schedules...
...Liberals must declare that a decent society places value on, and provides a sustaining base for, what is important...
...that is, almost everyone) for any reason or no reason, unless the firing violates the public policy of the state...
...The absence of such a value was recognized in a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in 1997...
...Taking good care of children is important...
...There is also the concern of immediate, practical politics...
...conservatives more generally...
...There was the dilemma...
...There was the early triumphant signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act and the massive, if failed, attempts at universal health care, but later the acceptance of welfare reform on terms that would predictably put single mothers in low-paid jobs without adequate child care...
...It produces war stories of incredible triumphs (organizing a search for a missing child on one phone while giving seemingly full attention to an angry client on the other), amazing ingenuity (FedExing breast milk), and skillful manipulation (organize one big project for your secondgrader's class and the other mothers will owe you all year...
...time for care—complementary workplace arrangements in the private sector and programs in the public sector that allow working parents of young children, adult children of elderly parents, couples sharing lives, and neighbors sharing support the kind of time that is needed for care both daily and episodically (when illness strikes, for example...
...Conservatives do not have to worry about the conflict between women's equality and their responsibility for families because in their hierarchy, family comes first...
...on service in the armed forces...
...A framework of values should become part of the Democratic vocabulary because it adds a missing piece to the American liberal vision...
...But they are positions in which the underlying value is not clearly expressed...
...A liberal family politics must recognize care as a national value, along with liberty and equality...
...doing the shopping, laundry, and cooking, the multitudinous errands, the checking on an elderly parent or neighbor, not to mention the episodic dealing with emergencies and illnesses...
...See also the thorough reporting of Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood, 2001...
...Caring relationships of intimacy, love, trust, and loyalty are important...
...But all of this was and is in the name of individual rights...
...All of these things are vital to the care of families, necessary parts of an economic base for care...
...The aim was to turn women into individuals—to open the way for them to enter society, economy, and politics as rights-bearing individuals...
...In recognizing women as individuals and admitting them as such into the wider society, liberals have not recognized that women, in their traditional social roles as organizers of families and communities and as caregivers to the inhabitants of these spaces, carried and practiced values crucial to the society...
...They do recognize the importance of relational values in families and communities, and their translation of these into politics is simple: women should retain their traditional social roles and take the main responsibility for organizing families and for caregiving...
...and so they confine women within their traditional places, just as conservatives aim to do...
...Or if it is expressed, it is in terms of survival—of children not contracting diseases because of neglect, or of elders not left alone, not having to choose between medication and food...
...Do we have to cast our ideas and programs in a vocabulary of moral values...
...No conventional social value requires employers to make time for family care a normal part of their operation...
...Certainly it is everybody's issue, but it affects women most profoundly, and it is women who most need change...
...But the pitfall Clinton encountered was a measure of how far he had 90 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 pushed the equality issue and how clearly, if inadvertently, he had moved deeper questions to the surface...
...Women as the mainstay of families, the caregiver, the builder and sustainer of relations in networks of relatives, friends, and neighbors— these images seem to many to suggest that care and sustenance involve capacities natural to women and not to men...
...But there is no social value in place that supports the care of families if women do not provide it...
...756, 1997...
...How are women to enter all fields and advance in their work on the same terms as men while holding primary responsibility for families, which most men do not...
...We celebrate women's ability to follow individually chosen paths...
...This is the assumption that liberals must explicitly and forcefully contest with language placing family care at the center of public as well as private values, public as well as private responsibilities—and with policies putting these beliefs into practice...
...Use sex-neutral language and generalized nouns...
...This is a confusing proposition for liberals, because in the historical lexicon of liberal values, there are no sexes or, better, no differentiation of people by sex...
...on entry into professional schools...
...To a lesser extent, they have fought against racial inequality and disadvantage...
...This would be a politics that recognizes the social role that women have always played and still play and puts the value defining that role at its center...
...Was the dividing line a matter of moral values, questions of sexual morality, or more general, fuzzy cultural values...
...On the contrary, it seems wholly reasonable for employers to provide family support programs that, while helpful, are actually designed to keep employees at work for unrestricted hours—sick-child day care, various menus of concierge services, resource and referral services for family care, organizing and coping seminars, and so forth...
...If you want to argue for a change in any kind of policy or practice— whether in the public or private sector—there are reasons not to link the change to women...
...He was not looking for simple solutions...
...And the economic costs to women and families are well documented.' Our society operates on confused moral ground...
...It morphs into thinking about job security, income security, protections for contingent workers, benefit and pension portability, the financing of health care...
...The point for liberals to see in that court decision, and in workplace policies encouraging if not requiring long work hours, and in the paucity of public support for families (universal health DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 89 FAMILY POLITICS care, pre-school, paid family leaves, twelve- to eighteen-month leaves for the birth/adoption of a child—all available in many less wealthy countries and opposed by most U.S...
...conservatives), is the lurking, lingering assumption that families and those who take care of them are outside the realm of public responsibility...
...SMALL CORNERSTONES for building a new liberal family politics were laid in the Clinton administration—in moments signaling departures from the past and in early indications of a national valuing of care...
...BUT HERE IS the problem for the values debate: individual rights, individual choice, liberation from age-old social restrictions— this is as far as the moral ground of current American liberalism extends...
...Can we...
...It must recognize that giving and receiving care are goods, that they are indispensable elements of individual wholeness and social connectedness...
...It is now socially sanctioned for a woman to be anyone, go anywhere, do anything...
...Worse, no social value forbids firing employees explicitly on the basis of family responsibilities...
...It is not a question of removing irritants or abuses or dangers from currently operating systems...
...Many feminists are wary of any public linking of women and caring roles for fear of encouraging essentialist thinking...
...Should we...
...Are we to remove families, regard them as restrictions, as burdens instead of as the place where people receive the care they need as babies, as adolescents, as adults, as elders, as the place that nurtures moral connections to others...
...Whose values were most powerfully in play—evangelical Christians...
...HAT FOLLOWS then is a roster of responsibility for the society generally— for government, for the private sector, for communities, for the citizenry...
...Or did the election actually turn on very specific social issues such as gay marriage and abortion...
...But to achieve it, we must seek it deliberately, insistently, persistently...
...We need to recall this stance now at a moment when we are unnerved by terrorism and in thrall to signals of strength in leaders, toughness, identification with the military, assurances of safety...
...It doesn't extend to the structures and intricacies of relations among individuals— sexual relations, family relations, connections of responsibility and caring within neighborhoods and communities...
...It is also to the credit of liberals that we have recognized and fought to overcome the barriers to the realization of individual freedom and equality—the fullest development of individual capacities and talents, equal opportunity to pursue a chosen occupation, unfettered choice to live where and with whom one wants, equal rights as citizens, and equal claim to places of leadership and power...
...We will get nowhere by continuing to deny—out of fear or idealism—that care is, in a compelling way, a women's issue...
...Were values really a crucial factor in the Bush majority...
...And this is a good thing—far better than the confinements and dangers of non-individuality...
...We have also, more recently, turned to the disadvantages based on sex: the recognition and removal of barriers to women's advancement...
...conservative Christians...
...FAMILY POLITICS Constructing such a politics is not without its dangers...
...Like most states, Massachusetts operates under some version of the ancient common law by which employers can fire employees-at-will (those without a formal contract...
...It requires that they become deliberate prime movers in multiple venues, at all levels, in a campaign for care—because it is mainly women who live the issues of care, know firsthand what the needs are, and want change...
...Conservatives have...
...restrictions on jury service (remember that...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
