Motherhood and the Liberated Woman

...Every morning my husband and I walk together to our jobs...

...Our world is not one of such toleration and selflessness that we can afford to do with even less...

...in46 of the 50 states, tenants with children can be discriminated against...

...W The Case for Children by James Fallows My wife and I are the same age as ---------------------------------to feed him lunch...

...But it gets mixed up with bitterness toward those who only wanted the same sacrifice for their daughters...

...The options begin to close down, and the decisions become more difficult...

...My vision of life with children doesn’t include station wagons and commuter trains...

...Without prompting, she starts talking about how difficult it is to find decent child care...

...At dusk, we would sweep past the station again and find that they had all returned...

...Suddenly we’re all talking about our mothers...

...Women like me, who have built our lives around avoidingthat trap in the first place, have gone largely unrecorded, but still we can identify with the tales of our slightly older sisters, the ones who made the “mistakes” we’ve steered clear of...

...And nowhere is that struggle more obvious than in our attitudes toward motherhood-the one issue about which the women’s movement has not yet come up with a convincing answer...

...I can’t wait to have children,” she said during a discussion the women in the oftice were having about their career goals...

...We feel smug about not having to fight traffic commuting into the city, and we like it here-we feel as if we have the best of all worlds...

...Wedrivetherest ofthe way in silence...

...I am talking instead about the satisfactions that grow out of the most difficult moments, the times when a parent understands why raising children has throughout history been the most consistent way that people have found of bringing meaning and richness and fulfillment to life...

...My mother told me to be a nurse, so I’d meet an eligible doctor.’* “My mother dropped out of med school when she got married...

...They led lives shaped according to our needs...

...So much was done in our name...

...but I think children might add tremendous richness to the lives of people like me without forcing us to recreate the world we grew up in...

...I don’t havetoaskwhatthepasttwo years have been like for her...

...I imagine I’ll be like my mother and never work again...

...Our mothers gave up their jobs in order to be with us while our fathers arranged their careers with the idea of achieving the financial security that raising a family demands...

...Then, as if by miracle, our heroine learns how wonderful it is to be freeuncommitted to anything or anyone but herself...

...He’s tired and disoriented and cries easily...

...1 am childless, as are practically all the other women I know of my generation and class...

...I remember my father at 7 a.m., crowded onto the platform at the train station with dozens of other men, all of th+:m carrying identical briefcases filled with important “work...

...But I keep looking to the future...

...The years go on...

...Would we move to a farm...

...Do I really want to commit myselfto an 18-year experiment...

...feedings and never being able tojust drop things and go out on the town...

...But these things meant nothing to me before I had a child, and can mean little to anyone until the child is his or her own...

...How can wetalk so callously of never marrying or never having children of our own...

...My friends Jan and Thomas are a handsome, creative couple, both with excellent, high-paying jobs and a savings account that will one day enable them to “retire” and write books, their lifelong ambition...

...My husband is committed to my liberation...

...Motherhood and the Liberated Woman by Deborah Baldwin Most of the spending money I had in high school I made by babysitting...

...The old mystique of American motherhood as abundantly reflected in popular images of aproned women clucking over their broods in suburban kitchens soon became a rallying point for the women’s movement...

...The movement saw to it that hiring discrimination was illegal, and that birth control, abortion, and day care were available, so that full-time motherhood wasn’t every woman’s inescapable fate...

...She says she’s jealous because I have a job...

...She laughs and pokes fun at her mother, who stayed at home while her father climbed the corporate ladder...

...I suspect a world in which we had children would haveto bea world where an extended family of spouses, friends, relatives, and, yes, babysitters all share the work in a spirit of community...

...Having children is unquestionably an enormous psychological and financialdrain, despite all its rewards...

...We talk about the years right after college, when each of us floundered in the painful search for an identity other than that of wife and mother...

...She wants the child, and so does her husband...

...There was almost no limit to the number of sitting assignments you could get in the suburban Connecticut town where1grewup;attheendofaday the average mother of three was so desperate for help that babysitting gave me not only a source of needed income but a genuine sense of serving the public good too...

...As a result, America has evolved from the child-centered society I grew up in to a society that’s at best indifferent and at worst outright hostile to children...

...The movement’s main focus has been on gaining freedom and respect for women, and women have consequently pushed asidethequestion of where and when and how to bringthe next ‘generation into the world...

...They are becoming doctors, professors, lawyers, engineerseveryt hing except full-time mothers...

...As a result, no longer do well-educated women set aside their college degrees and blithely accept the old role of motherhood...

...Obviously this makes women expect much more from the experience of being a mother than they can ever reasonably get from their children...

...One of the most affecting examples of the new genre is An Unmarried Woman, which stars JillClayburghas a 35-ish housewife with a part-time job who is about to be divorced and stranded in mid-Manhattan with her 15-year-old daughter...

...The organization we work for, a small environmental lobbying group, is made up predominantly of women in their 20s...

...My childless friends, as they go off to their Caribbean vacations and cocktail parties and tennis games, no doubt feel that the joke’s on my wife and me, whose every move depends on the availability of a babysitter...

...Sure, I’m worried that I may never marry or have children...

...Women stayed at home and had babies...

...A woman unwittingly liberated when her husband walks out on her, Clayburgh is at first disoriented...

...What mother could love a child who-like my brother-would share a bedroom only if every single thing in it were divided equally, including the door...

...We have a few more years to decide...

...But in what ways it must change...

...That’s supposed to make me realize how irrational they really are...

...Baby as ultimate fulfillment comes to mean that you have very limited possibilities for satisfaction once past childbearing...

...What about thesheer drudgerythe diapers and the 2 a.m...

...AttheotherextremeisMary,26, who is our efficient, well-loved office administrator...

...Exhausted and cranky, David climbs into the car, stepping among the toys piled on the floor...

...We shudder with guilt as we talk about how “selfish” we’ve become...

...my friends ask...

...She doesn’t look convinced...

...The returns are great, but the relationship is not an equal bargain...

...So we’re going to wait...

...What if I leave my job for a year and never go back...

...Taking the kids to the ballgaille on Sunday afternoon doesn’t do it aliymore...

...After you have done the required and realized your ambitions, what is left...

...She travels and takes classes and does all the things we don’t have the time or money to do right now...

...But in the morning they were going to the city t o d o something mysterious and significant, leaving all the children and women behind...

...Jane apologizes when he refuses to get off her lap so she can drive safely...

...But my husband thinks I should have a career...

...But since then the women’s movement has made having children a matter of choice, not inevitability...

...At 3 1, Jan unexpectedly became pregnant, and in an unusual burst of spontaneity, they decided to go ahead and have the child...

...Now everybody has a career and a lot of personal freedom...

...But obviously it hasn’t been easy...

...In an age where self fulfillment is the guiding muse, raising children is one of the few situations in which unselfish love is required...

...Jane and I stop on the way at a day care center to pick up David, her two-year-old son...

...Eachyearis better thanthelast...

...So every morning before work she leaves David at theday care center (one of the few in the city she can afford) and at 6 p.m...

...Among couples, there’s a reluctance on both husband’s and wife’s part to give up anything in order to have children...

...Suddenly some of my friends are 30 or 31 years old, and the abstractions ofthe debate are reduced to very concrete terms: doctors tell them that each year childbirth is deferred makes pregnancy that much more difficult, sometimes impossible...

...My hope is that we will find a way to blend childrearing and work more wisely...

...In California, 70 per cent of the rental housing is for adults only...

...I know there has to be some reason we’re on earth besides work,” she says...

...my husband and Idon’t exactly know...

...A quiet, unassuming woman in her mid20s, Jane is struggling to stretch a small salary to cover the needs of two (her husband, seeking his own kind of freedom, left shortly after the baby was born...

...A Few More Years to Decide The other evening, after my husband and I had washed the dishes and talked over our respective days in the office, we began again our endless discussion of where we would he two, three, or four years from now...

...Many of us have taken great pains to free ourselves from the sticky bindings of family, but the bindings of a career are ones we have eagerly assumed...

...I don’t know if it can survive...

...Our generation’s parents made great sacrifices for us...

...And at about this time, remarkably enough, her daughter seems to recede from the forefront of her life...

...Men worked...

...I’d trade places with her tomorrow...

...It’s really up to you,” he said...

...I think this whole work thing is highly overrated...

...I can see the child-proof homes, cluttered with Creative Playthings and buckets of soaking diapers, the TV droning in the background, and the can of FrancoAmerican spaghetti on the kitchen counter, saved as a bribe for When the Sitter Gets Here...

...I get anxiety attacks...

...I want to have the freedom some day to move out iftherelationship doesn’t work...

...And on and on...

...she asked...

...Her salary is too large for financial aid and too small for a housekeeper...

...We talk affectionately about the ones who sacrificed other goals in order to stay at home...

...Exhausted and Cranky It is a fine spring day and the women have decided to get together to prepare the food for the huge outdoor party our organization has each year...

...Another I remember had to be strapped into his crib with a makeshift seat belt or he would arise at 4 a.m., let himself out of the locked house, and wander in the direction of the nearest street light...

...I happened to walk Deborah Baldwin is an editor of Environmental Action...

...But I’m mixed up about it too...

...each child is totally dependent on its parents’ protection, their sacrifice, their love...

...A Society Hostile to Children There was a time when a woman’s sole raison d’etre was to raise children...

...Would we have one child, or two, or three...

...There’s a new wave of books and movies that show heroic women casting off the bonds of housewifedom and striking out on their own...

...Fulfillment’ seems a poor substitute for a life that is full...

...The debate over the pros and cons of childrearing never went beyond a certain point in those times...

...Most of the kids were nice enough, although several s t o o d o u t as exceptions...

...We’d have to move out of the city for thesake ofthechildren, and I like the city...

...This was good news, but it wasn’t always completely convincing...

...But clearly, it’s notjust up to me-it’s up to both of us-and for him that should mean more than simply acceding to my becoming a mother...

...Today, like many of my friends, I live in an apartment in downtown Washington...

...But men, for the most part, haven’t made any transition of their own to parallel women’s...

...They moved to quiet towns where the air was clean and the schools were decent...

...He fought forand won-jurisdiction over the knob...

...We are t o d a y ’s w o men - p e r s eve r i ng 1 y independent, mobile, our own best friends...

...I didn’t work at all until I was 26,”says Pat, now a 32-year-old lobbyist...

...I know she is luckier than most, because her job is flexible and because she lives with four other adults who provide companionship and support...

...But when I think about children, I sometimes think about how shallowthe satisfactions of a job and an apartment can be...

...One imagines that she, too, is off somewhere dwelling in selfrealization and discovering that the only good man is the man you can love and leave...

...It would have to be okay for either spouse to continue working full time while the other stayed home, but this would have to be a world where such an arrangement could take place without any sense of resentment or lost opportunity on either side...

...I don’t know if I should stop working altogether and stay at home for a year or two or fight to keep my job...

...They are bright, warm, articulate...

...Would we leave our much-loved apartment for a house with a big backyard...

...My therapist tells me to write all my fears down on a piece of paper and then read them back...

...into the room one day as he was attempting to strangle his younger brother with a necktie...

...If women’s liberation is to mean anything for people who have children or want to have them, it must mean that fathers are in this too...

...she picks him up...

...Angela Barron McBride, in a 1973 book called The Growth and Development of Mothers, summed up the feeling women began to express a decade ago as the terrible inequities of the conventional sexual roles became evident...

...that men and women equally will be willing to give up a few years of career for their children, realizing that they’re really sacrificing nothing, and that it’s not so hard to pick up one’s work where one left off...

...We’re safe...

...My own mother anticipated the negative impact such experiences might have on me and attempted to counter them by repeatedly pointing out that one’s own children never seem as awful as everyone else’s...

...Now that I am at the childbearing age myself I find my feelings about motherhood deeply colored by memories of those evenings...

...Questions like these are always sliding in and out of conversations among the women in my office...

...What if children stop us fromdoing the things we want to do, like dropping out for a year to travel...

...Masters of our own destiny, we gazed attheoptions...

...I am 28 years old and work in a whitecollar professional job...

...As I walk down the street, I often marvel that every person I see had a set of parents who cared for their child as we now care for ours, Few of us are so naturally led toward sainthood that we c a n i g n o r e t h o s e r a r e opportunities to bring out our better sides...

...She passes through a series of horrible social rites, and for the first half of the movie one of the few things holding her up is her precocious teenage daughter...

...It would have to be a world where husbands and wives would share childrearing responsiblities, not the way my brother shared his doorformally splitting things down the middle-but in a loving, informal way...

...and, for the most part, they are childless...

...How can we bring more children into a world that’s tottering on the brink of selfdestruction...

...That is why I am concerned that so many people would decide that in the name of “freedom,” “avoiding commitments,” and keeping all “options” open, they should separate themselves from one of the constants of mankind...

...The tremendous popularity of this movie says a lot about what’s on the minds of many liberated women these days, as they struggle to balance their hard-won freedoms against the basic human desire to depend on others...

...There was the five-year-old from the lovely home around the corner, for example...

...They are in the cities competing with men and succeeding...

...She should be pleased I’m 27 and single...

...Would we try to find new jobs that are less demanding and allow us more time at home...

...I know they’re wrong...

...My mother sent my brother to law school and told meto taketyping lessons...

...But sheisn’t...

...In her fourth month of pregnancy, however, she is still torn with ambivalence...

...Having ch’ildren will completely change our marriage...

...Our conversation drifted off, to be resumed some other time...

...People in my generation don’t think the suburbs provide the sense of community we long for, but many of us suspect that families might...

...An 18-Year Experiment Maybe that’s a wild distortion of priorities, but it’s nevertheless true that many women like me-newly established in jobs our mothers were never able to have and confronted with choices never before thought possibleare racked with indecision when confronted with children...