Like Coontz, I sympathize with these women who yearn for supposedly simpler times. But it’s worth mentioning here that extensive studies have shown that working women today spend as much time in interactive child care—activities like reading to their children, helping with homework, and playing—as did the housewives of yesteryear, and today’s modern housewives are not necessarily happy. Marriage and family therapist Celeste Catania-Opris gave her practice the tongue-in-cheek name Therapy for the Modern Housewives of South Florida. Her clients don’t actually describe themselves as modern housewives, she notes, but “they’ll come in and say, ‘Sometimes, I feel like it’s all on me. I have to do this. I have to do that.’ They’ll discuss the issues without saying, ‘I’m a modern housewife.’ But I think the name appeals to them. It resonates.” Shortly after Catania-Opris got married, her best friend asked her, “What do you plan to do with your life now?” When Catania-Opris responded that she might have children—although she wasn’t sure—her friend responded with disgust, “You’re going to be a housewife.” At the time, she heard a lot of disparaging remarks about housewives, including from the women themselves. It was the “just-a” syndrome, as in: I’m just a mom, I’m just a housewife. “Meanwhile,” said Catania-Opris, “the jobs and the responsibilities of a modern housewife are to do it all.”
To her, a modern housewife is a mother who, whether she works outside the home or not, is caught in all the expectations of what she thinks she’s supposed to be. She feels guilty all the damn time. Because she feeds her daughter Cheetos. Because her son isn’t enrolled in enough extracurricular activities. Because. Because. Because. “I would define a modern housewife as someone who puts everyone else’s needs in front of herself. Your kids’ needs, your spouse’s needs, and then you put yourself at the end,” she told me. “Pressure is the key word in all of this. There’s so much pressure. And to live up to that standard.” Many of her clients, she added, come in depressed, anxious, and feeling inadequate. They think they’re the only ones. She validates those feelings. Yes, it is hard to work forty hours a week and come home to take care of your children. Yes, leaving your career to take care of your children can cause mixed feelings. Yes, it can feel lonely to be a stay-at-home mother. Once those feelings are normalized, she said, a lot of the anxiety can float away.
But one thing Catania-Opris said completely freaked me out. When I asked her if she had clients who had left the workforce, even though they loved their jobs, because they were conflicted about child care duties, she answered with an emphatic yes. “One of my recent clients said to me, ‘I worked so many years. And I’m not saying I don’t love my husband. I’m not saying I don’t love my children.’ But she said, ‘What’s my purpose? What am I supposed to do?’” The woman felt terrible for admitting her doubts, added Catania-Opris. Guilt gnawed at her, and she admitted that she’d never, not once, expressed those feelings out loud before. “She went to college. She worked very hard for so many years. Then she gave it up. She sacrificed. It’s a sacrifice that a lot of women make, and they sacrifice themselves as well.” Surely, women with children must have better options than to feel like they’re sacrificing their identities, throwing pieces of their internal selves overboard like flotsam and jetsam. No wonder so many of us feel like we’re adrift.
The idea of “having it all” can seem elusive. As I write this, I’m thirty-two and part of the nearly 50 percent of women in my age range who are childless. I am still woefully unsure whether I even want children. But I would be lying if I said I’d never thought about it: my internal pendulum swings to yes every time I see a friend’s chubby-cheeked child, and then back to no when I visualize that month’s deadlines and work obligations, which together are basically a fragile and always teetering tower. I’m afraid having a child would knock down that tower. Game Over. My point is that I’m anxious about doing motherhood right and I’m not even a mom. So I understand why many women want an easy guarantee. But blaming feminism for mucking it up obscures the real challenges with past family values and roles. Namely, that they never worked. The simple truth is that we can’t all do it all. If we wholesale embrace our fictional version of the past, we also embrace its very real problems, and we’re already busy struggling with that legacy.
Let me just say it here, so we can move on: I’m not in favor of anything that demonizes or undervalues women. Period. What worries me is the concept that feminism ends with the supposed choice to not work. Hooray! Thank you, Feminism, and happy retirement! Bring out the balloons and streamers! Make them pink because we can! Look, I appreciate that feminism is getting some ostensibly good vibes here, but let’s not kid ourselves (groan): this is its own brand of nostalgia, one that recalibrates the decision to opt out of the workforce as an empowering one and, also, feminism’s ultimate end goal. Yet feminists who fought for motherhood rights in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t ignore the constraints under which many women made those choices, and neither should we. It’s not a matter of pitting women’s experiences against each other—that forever recycled “good mom” versus “bad mom” battle. It’s a matter of reimagining gender roles and the family in a way that makes things better for everybody. But how on earth are we supposed to do that if we think feminism has already won, or, worse, that it’s gone too far?
Let’s pause for a moment and discuss that awful, ubiquitous phrase “having it all.” Though the term is tethered to feminism, we can actually thank former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown for this particular devil (and for teaching us so many ways to please our man!). The term first appeared as a marketing pitch at the tail end of the 1970s, and then in 1980 in the title of a book that offered practical advice on managing a home and a career. But Brown’s 1982 book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even if You’re Starting with Nothing, and its prominent spot on the New York Times bestseller list, spat the phrase into the popular culture and the pages of aspirational women’s magazines. “There is, then, no small absurdity in the fact that Brown’s vision omitted children,” wrote Jennifer Szalai in a 2015 New York Times article about the term’s origins. It’s not that Brown didn’t care about children; it’s that she had none. Szalai also noted that Brown also detested her book’s title, pleading with the publisher to name it something that didn’t make the author sound like “a smartass all-the-time winner from the beginning.” (So maybe thank Brown for that effort instead.) Yet both the term and title have stuck. Conservatives have deliberately morphed “having it all” into a weapon to undermine those who step too far outside traditional roles and who advocate too loudly.
In fact, feminists who fought in the 1960s and ’70s wanted to improve all women’s lives. Second-wave feminists who rebelled against their socially mandated roles chanted “There are no individual solutions!” when they marched in the streets. Even Betty Friedan, the co-founder of the National Organization for Women who wrote in The Feminine Mystique about the “problem with no name,” wanted better treatment for housewives, not to abolish the role, as many anti-feminists claimed (and claim). That infamous quote from Simone de Beauvoir is the product of some serious tension between her and Friedan. In the introduction to their 1975 interview, Friedan wrote that she wanted a conversation with someone “older, wiser” about her “fears that the women’s movement was coming to a dead end.” She spoke with de Beauvoir in Paris, through interpreters, in a salon decorated with a cluttered “Bohemian elegance”: tapestries, porcelain cats, shawls, statues, pillows, pictures, and memorabilia of de Beauvoir’s travels all over the world. Her idol was more prim than Friedan had imagined.
Later, Friedan cautioned against meeting your heroes. “The comforts of the family, the decoration of one’s own home, fashion, marriage, motherhood—all these are women’s enemy, [de Beauvoir] says,” Friedan wrote retrospectively. “It is not even a question of giving women a choice—anything that encourages them to want to be mothers or gives them that choice is wrong. The family must be abolished, she says with absolute autho
rity. How then will we perpetuate the human race? There are too many people already, she says. Am I supposed to take this seriously?” It’s clear the two did not agree much on anything. Consider the exchange that prompted de Beauvoir’s oft-recycled quote:
FRIEDAN: But don’t you think that as long as women are going to do work in the home, especially when there are little children, the work should be valued at something?
DE BEAUVOIR: Why women? That’s the question! Should one consider that the women are doomed to stay at home?
FRIEDAN: I don’t think they should have to. The children should be the equal responsibility of both parents—and of society—but today a great many women have worked only in the home when their children were growing up, and this work has not been valued at even the minimum wage for purposes of social security, pensions, and division of property. There could be a voucher system which a woman who chooses to continue her profession or her education and have little children could use to pay for child care. But if she chooses to take care of her own children full time, she would earn the money herself.
Not exactly the stuff of feminist conspiracy, especially when you keep in mind that Friedan’s views guided the movement in America. Ruth Rosen, a feminist historian and journalist, tackled the rewriting of “having it all” in her 2012 essay “Who Said ‘We Could Have It All?’” Not feminists, she argued. “The belief that you could become a superwoman became a journalistic trope in the 1970s and has never vanished. By 1980, most women’s (self-help) magazines turned a feminist into a Superwoman, hair flying as she rushed around, an attaché case in one arm, a baby in the other. The Superwoman could have it all, but only if she did it all. And that was exactly what feminists had not wanted,” she wrote. “Millions of women cannot afford to care for the children they have, work dead-end jobs, and cannot begin to imagine living the life of a superwoman. These are the women that the radical women’s liberation movement addressed and for whom they sought decent jobs, sustainable wages, and government training, social services and child care. These are the women who are stuck on the sticky floor, not held back by a glass ceiling.”
We love to look at high-achieving women, those modern Super-women, and ask, If she can’t keep her shit together, who can? The back-down-the-ladder-and-into-the-kitchen conversation is so much sexier. Take Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the US State Department. Her 2012 Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” detailed her decision to leave government because of, as she put it, “my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.” It quickly became one of the Atlantic’s most read articles, ever, racking up close to three million hits online and spawning reaction pieces across the internet. Though Slaughter was arguing for better support and social policy, some interpreted her message as, Ladies, don’t even try to have both a time-consuming job and children. Marie Claire even asked Slaughter’s former boss, Hillary Clinton, what she thought about the article, and her response caused a mild uproar: “Some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs . . . Other women don’t break a sweat”—an upper-echelon conversation if ever there was one. But in her later book, Unfinished Business, Slaughter acknowledged the need to expand the conversation—a distinctly less grabby headline. Let’s all band together for equality? Pffft. Too much work.
But radically changing the way we view domestic and employed work helps everybody, including men and other people who are not mothers. The way mothers and fathers spend their average week has drastically changed since the 1960s, according to the 2013 Pew Center study “Modern Parenthood,” an analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey that focused on how couples with children under eighteen spend their time. Though neither mothers nor fathers have surpassed each other in the so-called traditional realms, mothers now spend twenty-one hours, on average, working outside the home (as compared to eight hours in 1965), and fathers now spend seventeen hours a week engaged in housework and child care (compared to a scant 6.5 hours in 1965). What’s more, a Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) 2015 report discovered that, before children, working men and women who cohabitate share household responsibilities equally while also working roughly the same hours each week (men worked three hours more).
After the birth of a child, however, during the critical transition to parenthood (before babies reach twelve months), women added twenty-two hours of child care to their work week while doing the same amount of housework and paid work as they did before, extending their total workload from fifty-six to seventy-seven hours each week. Men added fourteen hours of child care to their work week but did less housework, extending their workload to sixty-nine hours each week, a disparity that, researchers warned, could lead some women to leave the labor force. If they do, the scale could tip even more: men’s work hours tend to rise once women stay home, and 90 percent of men who end up working fifty hours or more report they wish they could work less. About 50 percent of both working men and women say they have a difficult time juggling work-life balance, and nearly half of fathers worry they don’t spend enough time with their children.
Interestingly, and contrary to what you might guess, childless single men and women do not report spending equal amounts of time on housework. Single women sans children spend twice as much time cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry than do kiddie-free single men. Clearly, such women are not beholden to men; I’m not sure that was ever the right argument. It’s our own unshakable interpretations of what femininity means that has trapped us, held in check with a force-fed steady diet of mass media and anti-feminist sentiment. In her briefing for the CCF explaining the complexities of interpreting changing household patterns, Liana Sayer wrote of all the single ladies who were not up in the club but at home doing laundry. “It underscores the ways that ‘doing gender’ structures identities, as well as interactional dynamics in couples, social norms about femininity and masculinity, and institutions,” she wrote. “In other words, some of the differences in men’s and women’s household activities may not stem from unfair interpersonal power dynamics but from entrenched individual and cultural beliefs about ‘essential’ qualities of being a woman versus being a man.”
You don’t have to be a feminist to see how breaking down those gender norms might benefit all of us. But it probably helps.
Kate Reddy is a married finance executive with two young children. She loves her job, even if it means she’s still awake at three am, making to-do lists in her head; her daughter is resentful and won’t hug her when she returns from a business trip; and her two-year-old son’s first words were (of course!) “Bye-bye, Mama”; even if she’s judged by her in-laws, her bosses, and the stay-at-home mothers who, presumably, spend six hours at the gym every day and are “perfect.” If this sounds like a clumsy Hollywood take on our fretful obsession over modern work-life balance, well, that’s because it is. Based on the novel of the same name, 2011’s I Don’t Know How She Does It stars Sarah Jessica Parker trying to check off all the boxes of “having it all.” A quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes reveals the flick was universally panned, with critics and audiences both giving it two thumbs way, way down. People hated it both for having a “feminist” agenda and for its “hopelessly outdated viewpoint on gender.”
Having dug deep into the research, though, I had to wonder if both were wrong. Despite its hokey Hollywood makeover, a high-powered career woman in a rigidly traditional workplace, being unable to successfully juggle all her work-home obligations (and desires!) seemed pretty spot-on. It was the movie’s treatment of Kate that bothered me. In the end, she demands a more flexible work schedule and is immediately granted it, which is truly the stuff of Disney fairy tales, and then she runs through the newly falling snow to meet her husband at her daughter’s school, interrupting a conversation about how she’s never there, to apologize profusely for her work schedule. “I kn
ow I drive you crazy,” she says. “I am so sorry about everything.” The movie ends with her hubby promising to do a little more, but not before we get a very Sex and the City monologue, in which Kate tells us “somehow, some way, some day things have to change” (heavy-handed, but eff yes, they sure do, Kate!) and also “trying to be a man is a waste of a woman.” (Noooo, Kate! Abort! Abort! Step away from the stereotypes!)
In an especially ill-considered form of self-torture, that same night I also watched 2016’s Bad Moms. In this one, the exhausted, do-it-all protagonist, Amy, has put so much pressure on herself to be a good mom that she’s cracking. Indeed, one 2012 Families and Work Institute Study showed that (non-fictional) women are often stressed for time because they have unrealistic expectations of how much they can get done in a day and feel squeamish about delegating. The predictable plot includes an outrageous battle for the PTA presidency, a self-correcting narrative when Amy goes too far into “selfish” territory (her kids angrily abandon her to stay with their childish father), and, given that, a slightly contradictory lesson at the end that affirms mothers should loosen up on all the judgy judginess and cut themselves, and each other, some slack—but not too much. “Moms don’t quit!” one of Amy’s friends tells her at a low point. “Quitting’s for dads!” another retorts. Excuse me if I don’t laugh as this retrograde joke further undermines any progressive messaging the movie hoped to project.
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