The rhetoric of social inequity
Let me just say that I am not a victim. I am a neurotic, obsessive worrywart who likes to borrow trouble, but I am not a victim. The fact that I have been posting a great deal, or talking a great deal, or thinking a great deal about the short shrift women, and particularly mothers, get in American society does not mean that I feel personally victimized. I probably make close to the male dollar (not that there are many men in my profession at my level), and I am gainfully employed with excellent benefits, no harrassment, and no prospect of termination. My partner plans to take an equal role in the childrearing insofar as our company leave policies and respective biology make it possible to do so, and I feel fairly confident that family and friends would support (if not understand) any choices I made in terms of a career/mothering time allocation. The fact that I'm passionately interested in these larger social inequities right now is not an indication that I am personally suffering from them.
Conversely, and I think this is the corollary that many social conservatives fail to take into account, the fact that I am not personally suffering from these larger social inequities right now does not mean that they do not exist. It is perhaps to my shame that I am only really noticing and reading up on them now that they may personally affect me - the curse of the liberal bourgeousie, that we give lip service only until things fall in our laps.
Put more simply, and this is one of those core truths that seem obvious once stated baldly but that confuse many discussions on social policy:
That said, a few more links from my recent reading:
Conversely, and I think this is the corollary that many social conservatives fail to take into account, the fact that I am not personally suffering from these larger social inequities right now does not mean that they do not exist. It is perhaps to my shame that I am only really noticing and reading up on them now that they may personally affect me - the curse of the liberal bourgeousie, that we give lip service only until things fall in our laps.
Put more simply, and this is one of those core truths that seem obvious once stated baldly but that confuse many discussions on social policy:
Social trends do not dictate individual behavior or circumstance, but neither does individual experience disprove larger social trends.I'm really tired of people trying to use anecdotal information to counter statistical arguments. Statistics are clumsy tools for estimating existent conditions and probability, but they're the best tools social science has. Every social statistic has a flip side, has outliers, has more complex explanations behind every individual who checks a box or clicks a button or answers a telephone survey; it's a given, not a negating factor.
That said, a few more links from my recent reading:
- Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? - the .pdf of the white paper on which the article I cited earlier this week was based, for those of you who like to read the actual study instead of newspaper summaries.
- Pregnant women preport growing discrimination - a gloss piece from USA today, not particularly recent, but chilling nonetheless.
- Homeward Bound - the Linda Hirshman article on "choice feminism" that sparked a lot of my own explorations into the phenomenon of what are known as "The Mommy Wars." This article is anecdotal, condescending, and judgemental of individual women's choices to stay home - it's not a neutral piece. It is, however, interesting (if inflammatory) reading. It's also another part of the discussion on statistics versus individual behavior, one I don't have such coherent thoughts about at the moment - the idea of "blame" in social trends, where the onus of social change is placed on the individuals making up X or Y side of the statistical split.
- My radical feminist married manifesto - Bitch, Ph.D.'s response to the article. I also dislike this post in various ways - it's strident and dictatorial - but I cite it here mainly because of an observation she makes which I'm sure is not new:
In fact, I believe that this is the single most irretrievably gendered division-of-labor issue for couples who want to be, or think they are, equals: the person whose job it is to monitor that equality is the person who has the least power ... if you're going to have to monitor your marriage to make sure that it's an equal partnership, then that is in and of itself part of the labor of the relationship.
That part makes a lot of sense to me, within the context of personal relationships but also in a wider political sense, and I found it quite illuminating. - The 'Wage Gap' series, from Alas (a blog) - a fascinating series of posts, links, and general commentary on the gender wage gap - I havent' read all of this yet, but what I have is well-reasoned and excellently put together.
- Myth & Reality: Forget all the talk of equal opportunity. European women can have a job—but not a career - a recent Newsweek article on the actual impact of more progressive social programs on women's advancement in the European workplace. An excellent thought-provoker for those of us who tend to look to social policy as an equalizing force in this arena.
posted by The Stute Fish at 12:02
7 Comments:
That Linda Hirshman piece drove me up a wall. A friend (LH's step-daughter) sent it to me with a "hey, look what my step-mom wrote" note). Hirshman seems not to notice or care that women who aren't in the top tier socio-economically aren't helped at all by her ideas. Plus, what if I don't want an mba? bleh. It was so "capitalism is the answer" I could puke. (and I think she's wrong about where feminism has failed. My husband is great, my old job, not so much.)
I'll have to check out the BItch piece. No doubt it will get me all riled too, but hey, what else do I have to irritate me these days?
The Bitch piece isn't the same sort of RAR, though you may have similar issues with it - Bitch has a SAHH, so her perspective can (should?) be a bit more forgiving. However, she makes a lot of assumptions about which gender roles need to be fought and how that I found distasteful. Usually I like her stuff - the world needs angry feminists - but that was a bit over-the-top for me.
The Hirshman piece - eh. When are people going to let go of this stupid divide-and-conquer catfighting mommy wars shit? Judging other women's choices isn't productive or helpful and it takes attention and focus away from the larger social causes of the problem.
I'd disagree, though, that she's wrong about where feminism has failed. Your husband is GREAT, this we know! Mine's pretty darn awesome too. But I don't think they're typical, and it's a difficult battle in any case - change is much easier to effect when the onus of change and the desire/impetus for change are ... incumbent? present? urgent? I need two different words for those two things ... dealing with the same population. And in this case, it's not women who need to change, but it's women who need change to happen.
I don't know. I agree about ending the mommywars, but I thought Hirshman had a point, despite some of the flaws in how it was presented. The point being: if we overemphasize the importance of "choice," regardless of what the choice is, we lose track of one of the initial, and still important, aims of feminism: supporting women's ability to participate fully in the public world, be that in business, government, whatever -- but the world of work-outside-the-home, certainly. at any rate I question the validity of the observations in all those articles trumpeting women choosing to stay home when that choice is made in the context of a society that gives so little support to parents trying to combine family life and meaningful work.
I also think she's right that every human being should live a life that puts him/her in the position of being able to support him/herself -- economic dependency is a tricky thing indeed, no matter how wonderful the particular person upon whom you are dependent is.
Finally, I would just say, sadly and a little darkly -- wait until you've been a mother working outside the home and then see if you still feel you don't personally suffer from this stuff.
I think Hirshman has a point...I just think that it gets lost in her rhetoric about the choices others make: "We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society." It casts those who are victims (albeit fairly willing victims - sheep to the slaughter) of this sort of massive gender inequity as the perpetrators. And while there is something to be said for the complicity of the complacent, I'm not sure this issue is so black and white that I think that's applicable. I don't like that the focus is so much on what women need to do (more more more) to fix this. I mean, I know that that's the way things work, like I was saying to Nora above, the population that wants the change is usually the population that has to effect it - but I like her early point, that she starts with but seems to abandon later in the article: "...feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men." Until men start taking a more active role in family life (as a group - I know some seriously excellent and equitable individual menfolk) then asking women to consistently choose to work is asking them to take on the lion's share of the work of the family AND a career.
Of course, I'm not leaving my job, and what you say about being able to support self and family is the single piece of advice my Grammy ever gave me, after raising five children with a husband who controlled all the money - I've never forgotten it, and I never will. I have very strong personal feelings about all of this that are well in line with Hirshman's, without as much of the anger about "choice". As a "choice" feminist in other areas, I frequently don't understand or particularly support the choices other women make - but I'm not about to deny they've got the right to make them. Does that make sense?
And it's not that this stuff doesn't affect me, precisely - I can see hints of it already in the way people relate to me professionally around the pregnancy, in my problems applying for a job in the last few months when the job I wanted opened up, in the fact that my partner gets no paid leave and can only take a week and a half off (using all his vacation to do so), in the way my MIL is worrying about childcare being bad for the baby - but it doesn't affect me the way it does someone who doesn't have a cushion and a strong resume and a supportive partner and a relatively understanding employer. Yet.
As you say, it may come to that at some point, but it would be disingenuous to say that I'm feeling any kind of overt or severe mama prejudice now.
Oh, and Kathy, I'd still love to read your reviews on parenting books - wanna be "guest blogger" since you don't keep a blog of your own?
Hm. I could just start a blog here -- how does guest blogging work?. Or go back to LiveJournal -- but you don't have an account there anymore, right? so I couldn't do friends only.
Hmmm, I dunno, my friend M was talking some reviews of pregnancy books herself, and asked if she could just send it to me to post - you could introduce yourself and do a little intro and we'd just stick it on this blog, is what I was thinking...
Or you could start a blog ;-) and I'd link to it!
I read your LJ, but you don't post anymore...I miss the locking capabilities we had there, and they just added tagging, too, but I'm too lazy to switch back - I'd have to transfer a million entries and re-do a layout using their complicated CSS stuff and bleh.
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