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The domestic wife: The problem with retro revival, the new motherhood, and the glamorization of pre-feminist gender roles
“America doesn’t value the caretaker,” Kerry Dolan, a mother of three, told me. In 2014, after her own experience re-entering the workforce, Dolan founded OptIn, a US-based organization that helps women return to work and also advocates for more women-friendly labor policies. While society may have drawn little heart doodles next to the idea of motherhood (as Ivanka Trump proclaimed in a campaign video for her father, “The most important job any woman can have is being a mother”), it has, in practice, done little to help women. Dolan characterized Trump’s six-week maternity leave campaign pledge, not yet enacted when we spoke, as “not enough”—not enough to stop women like her from feeling like they have to leave their jobs when they have children, not enough to eviscerate the guilt. She lamented that women have not “moved the needle at all” and, more than once, sadly asserted, “Women don’t support women.” Women must band together to change workplace culture and to advocate for flexible, progressive polices, she said, because “we don’t have time to go backwards.” She wanted her twin daughters to have better options than she did, to not have to choose. She believed once women saw the power in what they could accomplish together, many things would change. So I was surprised when she later hesitated and said, “I don’t see myself as a feminist,” in large part, it seemed, because she saw herself first as a mother.
In all the great women-on-women wars, none has more controversy power than Stay-At-Home Mom versus Working Mom. Or—if you really want to bring out the big nukes—Stay-At-Home Mom versus Childless Career Woman. Working Mom and Childless Career Woman are presumed to be on Team Feminist: the former is often characterized as frazzled, unavailable, miserable; the latter as frigid, secretly unfulfilled, mannish. Both are usually stereotyped as selfish. That neither may have ever uttered the f-word hardly matters.
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children,” feminist hero Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed in a 1975 interview with fellow feminist icon Betty Freidan. Since then, feminism’s detractors have commonly and unfairly depicted the women’s rights movement as both anti-mom and anti-housewife. So when New York magazine published its cover story “The Feminist Housewife” in March 2013, nearly forty years after de Beauvoir’s assertion, national conversation didn’t just spark, it exploded.
On the cover, the article’s main subject, Kelly Makino, wore a green polka dot apron, a purple T-shirt, high tops, and striped Capri leggings. She held up a feather duster, her arm cocked at a V, and underneath her straight-edged Bettie Page-esque bangs, she appeared to be smirking. Makino, a university-educated, thirty-three-year-old, married mother of a five- and a four-year-old, had chosen to opt out of the workforce and be a full-time mom. The magazine sold her choice as the trend of “feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home.” Makino, who told New York journalist Lisa Miller she was “a flaming liberal” and a feminist, spoke in pure click bait. “I want my daughter to be able to do anything she wants,” she said. “But I also want to say, ‘Have a career that you can walk away from at the drop of a hat.’” And this: “I’m really grateful that my husband and I have fallen into traditional gender roles without conflict.” Oh, and this: “Women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox,” a fact she attributed to young girls playing with dolls. Oh, be still in your grave, Simone.
Reaction was both heated and congratulatory. And there was a lot of it: more than four hundred responses online. Many of the comments were supportive: “Kelly Makino is very brave, along with the other stay-at-home moms, to go against what our society is viewing as normal today and to agree to stay at home.” Others were cautious: “There is no question that women pay a price for taking time off—even if they stay current in their field. I think women need to carefully think about the career-altering consequences of their choices.” And a few asked why the stay-at-home question was only posed to women and taught to daughters. “Furthermore, even if we don’t give this dung a good flush, why does Makino only want to tell her daughter [to have a career she can walk away from]?” one asked. “Why is her son not awaiting the same lecture?” Some even thanked the feminist movement for giving them the choice to stay home while simultaneously dismissing feminism as old fashioned: “We have achieved the right to live our lives to the best of our ability, whatever that may be. I do not feel the need to participate in the battle of the sexes until the bitter end.”
Elsewhere, feminist website Jezebel called the feature “such bullshit.” Slate called the headline “alarmist.” A contributor to Forbes unfavorably compared women like Makino to Phyllis Schlafly, organizer of the 1970s Stop ERA campaign, and warned of economic destruction: “‘Retro Wives’ can bring the American way of life to a grinding halt.” Lisa Miller was invited on CBS This Morning and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where she talked about the concept of leaning out—women who slow their careers and embrace domesticity. She called her story, at its heart, an economic one. “In a world where our financial futures are uncertain, and we don’t know what’s going to become of us, and you’re not making that much money, and you got two little kids, and your husband is working all the time,” Miller told the Morning Joe panel, “it makes sense to lean out and focus on the home sphere.”
But does it? In economically perilous times, is the best that we can really hope for a clumsy resurrection of tired old gender roles? I’m not saying that motherhood and feminism can’t coexist: they do, and we need to find better, more equitable solutions so that men and women can both achieve happier work-life balance. That’s pretty hard to do when we’re not only fighting zombified versions of old anti-feminist stereotypes but also pretending they’re the answer.
What’s worse: we’ve been here before; it really is the unkillable trend. A decade earlier, the New York Times provoked an uproar when it featured a young, chic, white woman on its cover. She was dressed smartly in a white shirt, sitting cross-legged with her baby in her lap. Her brunette hair fell in a curtain as she looked calmly off into the distance, ignoring the orange ladder behind her. She floated on the two-part headline, which asked “Why don’t more women get to the top?” and smugly answered, “They choose not to.” Indeed, the New York Times, America’s “paper of record,” is so infatuated with the opt-out storyline that in 2006 one TV journalist described the supposed trend as “the New York Times’ bizarre and suspiciously predetermined editorial effort to talk women out of working.” The deluge of coverage prompted Joan Williams, Jessica Manvell, and Stephanie Bornstein, researchers with the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, to analyze 119 print news stories published from 1980 to 2006 on women who leave the workplace. The resulting study, “‘Opt Out?’ or Pushed Out?: How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict,” found that the opt-out storyline dominated coverage with an overwhelming focus on “psychological or biological ‘pulls’ that lure women back into traditional roles, rather than workplace ‘pushes’ that drive them out.”
Meanwhile, Kelly Makino quietly re-entered the workforce shortly after becoming the poster mom for feminist housewives. She’s since called the New York article—the same one that many commenters said accurately reflected their lives, or at least their fantasy lives—“Disneyfied” and “edited to fit an agenda.” In an interview with OptIn, Makino remarked that having a job when her children were young was too expensive. After things like child care, dry cleaning, and take out, the profit margin on her $60,000 salary wasn’t more than $18,000, or $1,500 per month. So home she went. Of course, it wasn’t that easy, and she returned to work once her children were at school full time. She discovered, like many women, hurdles in the back-to-work path, including explaining the gap in her resumé to employers and a salary that, she said, will never recover. Why did she decide to re-enter the workforce? “I really psychologically needed
to be in the workforce and at the office,” she responded. A woman could want to be more than one thing! Who knew?
As the reigning queen of anti-feminism, Janet Bloomfield is emphatic that women don’t need to be mothers, and mothers shouldn’t be forced to stay at home. That’s ludicrous; to her, anti-feminism is about empowering women to make their own choices. But she does believe that, if the stigma of feminism were erased, most women would want to stay at home and be mothers, just like most men would want to work. The worst thing feminism has done, she told me, is to sell women the lie of “having it all” without following through. That’s because, according to her, it can’t. She’d likely agree with Carrie Lukas, the managing director of the conservative-leaning Independent Women’s Forum. In her book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Lukas wrote: “Feminist groups like to pretend that women can have it all without sacrificing time with their families. This is false and most women know it.” So: women + independence – family + work = . The chain of logic here—if you want to call it that—is that feminism pushed women out of the house and into the workforce and women are not happy in the work-force, ergo it is feminism’s fault that women are miserable.
Here’s a sampling of what Bloomfield had to say about feminism and motherhood: “I don’t want to be defined as a wholly independent person,” she wrote in a May 2015 post defending the so-called “wife bonus”—a year-end chunk of cash given if a woman excels at performing her wifely duties. “I am a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, an aunt, a niece, a neighbor, a writer, a blogger, a citizen . . . Only feminists are foolish enough to believe that being free from all obligations and responsibilities towards others constitutes ‘freedom.’ It constitutes annihilation.” In a post about stay-at-home mothers, she wrote: “Obviously that is the best possible gift a husband can give his wife: the opportunity to fulfill her most basic obligations as a mother.” Similar sentiments to Lukas’s and Bloomfield’s are abundant, especially on the site Women Against Feminism. From one smiling young woman in a garden: “I don’t need feminism because I don’t want to be judged for my choices and hear that a career is more important than raising kids and making a man happy.” Another young woman, with a penchant for capital letters, holds an adorable baby: “I Don’t Need Feminism because…MY DAUGHTER IS A PRIVILEGE; NOT A CHOICE.” And this woman with her cutie-pie kid: “I don’t need feminism because being a stay-at-home mom is better than having someone else raise my child.”
You get the point. If we’re being simplistic, we might boil down the anti-feminist message to: Don’t tell me to get out of the kitchen, woman! If we’re being really dopey, we might even mutter something about Stockholm syndrome. I encourage us to think past both knee-jerk reactions. Much of what these women express (inflammatory as it may be) dovetails with wider ambivalence about the role of mothers and work. In 2014 the Pew Research Center reported that the number of stay-at-home mothers in the US had risen to 29 percent—a number that represented a soft rise over the past dozen years, after decades of decline. Roughly two-thirds of those 10.4 million women were women like Bloomfield: married moms with breadwinner husbands. “The recent turnaround,” wrote the report’s authors, “appears to be driven by a mix of demographic, economic and societal factors, including rising immigration as well as a downturn in women’s labor force participation, and is set against a backdrop of continued public ambivalence about the impact of working mothers on young children.” Essentially, we still can’t seem to make up our minds about where women belong.
At nearly 80 percent, the vast majority of Americans—thankfully—say they reject the idea of women returning to traditional roles. Yet when you get down to the nitty-gritty of what that means in practice, their views don’t always square. In another Pew report, nearly three-quarters of survey respondents said women’s gains in the workplace made it harder to raise children; fully half said women at work made it harder for marriages to be successful; and, counterintuitively, more than a quarter said it made it harder for families to earn enough to live comfortably. Dig deeper, and you’ll discover that though more than 70 percent of people believe a working mother can establish “just as warm and secure a relationship with her children” as one who stays home, more than half of the Pew respondents also believed children were better off if mothers, specifically, stayed home. Only 34 percent agreed children would fare as well with a working mother, though it’s also worth mentioning almost 75 percent said it made no difference if fathers worked. So, no, we don’t want women to go back to traditional roles, except for all the ways we kind of do. Talk about having it all.
Things aren’t nearly as clear-cut as we’d like to believe. It’s misleading to attribute the uptick in stay-at-home moms to simple choice—i.e., that moms are choosing to slot themselves into traditional family structures. The recession in 2008 contributed to a growing number of stay-at-home mothers (6 percent in 2012, compared to a scant 1 percent in 2000) who say they haven’t opted out of the workforce; they can’t find a job. Moreover, theorized Pew researchers, with incomes so stagnant for those who aren’t college educated (the same women who make up the bulk of stay-at-home mothers), the cost of child care weighed against low wages likely factors heavily into the decision to stay home. In their report, “‘Opt Out?’ or Pushed Out?,” the WorkLife Law authors noted that the predominant opt-out theme reassures everybody that nothing needs to change. “Perhaps the most damaging part of the Opt Out story-line is that it excuses gender discrimination under the rubric of ‘choice,’” they wrote. “There is another story to be told, far different from that of educated women blithely ‘choosing’ to stay home: that women are not pulled out of the workforce by their biological need to care for their children but are often pushed out by maternal wall bias and discrimination against mothers at work.”
Today, “full time” in professional and managerial jobs means working upward of fifty hours (and often more) a week. Such hours are not exactly conducive to being home for dinner, taking your sick kid to the doctor’s office, or the multitude other demands of home and child care. Studies show a “two-person career” is required to succeed in such workplaces: the ability to have one spouse stay at home who can take care of every other aspect of life. Usually, that stay-at-home spouse is the wife. Yet careers among college-educated women—those most often painted as opting out—are often nonlinear. Several studies have shown that highly educated women only take off 2.2 years, on average, to care for their children.
Unfortunately, that belies a more depressing reality, which is that a non-linear career path can often mean self-limiting opportunities—what the report’s authors call trading in a good job for a bad one. According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s report “The Hidden Brain Drain: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps in Women’s Careers,” published in the Harvard Business Review, nearly 40 percent of women said they took a job that had few responsibilities and a lower salary than they were qualified for so they could achieve a work-life balance. Hewlett, who is the co-director of the Women’s Leadership Program at Columbia Business School, also found that 36 percent of women elected to shift to part-time work, 25 percent reduced their hours within their full-time jobs, and 16 percent declined promotions. Of the 93 percent of women who want to return to work after veering off the career ramp, less than three-quarters succeed, and much less than half of them return to full-time, mainstream jobs.
What’s worse is that these opt-out stories largely feature white, affluent women with secure, high-powered jobs. They’re a small slice of the demographic pie at 8 percent and an odd place from which to draw conclusions about an entire, diverse segment of the population. Consider also that women with higher education and thus more economic opportunity are actually more likely to remain in the workforce because they have the support. Entirely erased are the experiences of women of color, gay and transgender women, non-college-educated women, shift workers, single parents—and it goes on and on. Those in precarious jobs often cannot afford daycare at a
ll, and many are one sick child away from being fired. When that happens, they are pushed out into untenable situations that may mimic the newly vaunted traditional family structures but are in no way desirable. How can we possibly begin to remodel our workplace policies if their stories remain silent?
Rather than signaling a total return to traditional values, the “‘Opt Out?’ or Pushed Out?” authors concluded that the decision to leave the workforce reflects “a clash between newly intensified ideals of motherhood and newly intensified ideals of a worker, all-or-nothing standards that have only taken shape in the past few decades.” In other words, so long as work culture reflects an amped-up breadwinner model and mothers are pressured to “know best,” women will find themselves pushed into their corresponding stay-at-home role, even if it doesn’t quite fit. And while choice and the effects of workplace discrimination are not mutually exclusive, acknowledged the authors, one big problem remains: this complexity is not at all reflected in media. What emerges instead, argued Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela Stone, in their own 2008 study of opt-out coverage in the media, is a new kind of feminine mystique. “In this new mystique, as our results illustrate, the role of mother has displaced that of wife,” they wrote, “and the decision to stay at home is distinguished from the old version by being couched in a discourse of choice and feminism.”
We’ll get to more on how discrimination at work operates, and how violently it’s entrenched, in the next chapter, but here’s what you need to know for now: research shows that this new framework of choice creates a vicious cycle in which discrimination against women at work is consistently underplayed and, therefore, maintained. In a 2011 paper published in Psychological Science called “Opting Out or Denying Discrimination?” researchers discovered that many of the women they interviewed favored a “choice framework” to describe their reasons for leaving the workforce. No surprise there. Slightly more disturbing: those who used the choice framework were also more likely to report increased personal well-being (good for them!) but less likely to recognize the structural barriers and discrimination that limit women’s advancement at work (ugh). Mega disturbing: even a subtle exposure to choice narratives in the media increased respondents’ belief that workplace equality is a done deal. To test this, researchers had respondents fill out a survey about “social issues” that included questions about women in the workplace. Each participant sat in a cubicle in which one of two mock posters advertised a book written about mothers who’d left the workforce. The images used in each poster were identical: a smiling mom seated at her work desk, laptop open in front of her, a phone in one hand, and her little munchkin in the other. One said: “Women at home: Women’s experiences away from the workforce.” The other: “Choosing to leave: Women’s experiences away from the workforce.”
F-Bomb Page 11
