Over at Sociological Images, Sociologist Lisa Wade reports on some data from Kathleen Gerson’s book The Unfinished Revolution:
“Here’s some great news. The vast majority of young people – about 80% of women and 70% of men across all races, classes, and family backgrounds — desire an egalitarian marriage in which both partners share breadwinning, housekeeping, and child rearing….
…Gerson asked her respondents what type of family they would like if, for whatever reason, they couldn’t sustain an equal partnership. She discovered that, while men’s and women’s ideals are very similar, their fallback positions deviate dramatically.
Men’s most common fallback position is to establish a neotraditional division of labor: 70% hope to convince their wives to de-prioritize their careers and focus on homemaking and raising children. Women? Faced with a husband who wants them to be a housewife or work part-time, almost three-quarters of women say they would choose divorce and raise their kids alone.”
Traditional gender narratives usually posit that men are naturally geared toward “breadwinning” while women are naturally geared toward child-rearing.
I wonder what people who believe in traditional gender narratives, theories of “gender complementarity,” and pseudo-scientific theories about “man’s preference for hunting and gathering while the woman stays home with the kids” think about these findings?
Are such people surprised that most women, too, express a preference for work rather than unpaid child-rearing? Do they believe women today have been “brainwashed” by feminism?
And what to make of men saying they desire an egalitarian marriage while falling back on non-egalitarian model? Have they been influenced by narratives telling them that the most authentic way to be a man is to be a provider for women and children?
These aren’t particularly new questions to ask.
Yet, I do think an interesting point is that data like this could suggest that many narratives about traditional heterosexual marriage, premised upon gender complementarity, often serve as the worst PR campaigns for marriage today.
Secondly, what I appreciate about being in a same-sex union is that the gender roles for my partner and I are not written in the way that they largely are with different-sex couples. In our vows, neither of us promised to “obey” the other and we did not have that historical baggage. No default position existed for whether or not I would (or should) take her name upon marriage. No default position exists for which of us will be more expected to continue (or stop) working when we have children.
Different-sex couples often can and do work out these issues in the context of their own relationships, but many people often still speak of the unspoken pressures and judgments that are made based upon their choices, pressures and judgments that exist precisely because people are not following the “proper” gender scripts. A benefit of same-sex marriage is, I believe, that it can serve as a model for negotiating some of these choices in relationships in a more gender-neutral way.
I also reckon that that’s not such a great PR campaign for same-sex marriage in some gender traditionalist crowds, though.
Categories: Marriage, Marriage and Money
Not only is it “not great PR”, from the point of view of those opposed to same-sex marriage, the fading of rigid gender roles is the main problem.
That said, I think it’s extremely unfortunate that the article you link to doesn’t provide any references; “men” and “women” are very large groups, and there’s a hint at the beginning of her blog post that the data she mentions (but doesn’t really cite) is about young men and women. It isn’t broken down by age, socioeconomic class, race, geography, faith or anything else.
It also doesn’t tell us how the questions were phrased. “What would you do if you could not, for whatever reason, sustain an equal partnership?” is not the same question as “What would be your response if, in the face of being unable to sustain an unequal partnership, your husband said he wanted you to quit your job and become a housewife?”
Mythago, Wade does cite Gerson book. But, yes, I would be interested in seeing the original study or data that Wade cites from that. Is this peer-reviewed work? Interviews Gerson conducted? It’s not clear.
I decided to post about it anyway because I thought it could be an interesting conversation point, especially regarding most women purportedly saying they’d choose divorce over homemaking.
the one with the milk
No default position exists for which of us will be more expected to continue (or stop) working when we have children.
Thanks for posting, Fannie. Lots of good stuff to think about. My first thoughts went to a piece that I read from Ruth David Konigsberg on division of household labor http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2084582,00.html
I know that she references some key studies in the article but the basic gist was that couples are tending to share domestic and professional duties at unprecedentedly high numbers. The division of labor in terms of hours and tasks is actually fairly equal. What I appreciated about the article was that she did highlight one finding that was that any couple raising a child or children under the age of four consistently perceive themselves as carrying more of a burden than their partner–even though the stats show that they are putting in equal hours. the takeaway being–raising young children is crazy stressful so the more support publicly and privately we can give these families DO IT!
My mind also went to a period of time when I was reading a great deal about transgendered individuals and reading about how chromosomes and hormones work to define gender that then of course mixes recipe-like with whatever particular cultural definitions of gender in which we are raised, helped me to think of gender on a continuum. It helped me think about my own expressions of masculinity and femininity in my life–and to assess what is me, what is learned, what is helpful, what is hurtful, etc.
Pondering…
I found the comments section interesting, and at times very revealing. One commenter alluded to the difficulties she and her husband were facing since she left work and became a “housewife”, not all of them merely financial. She said that her husband pays the bills and makes sure his student loan is paid; her student loans are being ignored, and she worries about this.
Like mythago, I think there are too many unanswered questions to put a whole lot of stock in this, but I do think it illustrates one thing loud and clear: men and. Women have wildly divergent experiences and observations with unequal marital relationships, so it should be no surprise that men would be more willing to “bite the bullet” and be the advantaged partner if an egalitarian arrangement was not an option (*my question: why on earth wouldn’t it?), while women would rather opt for divorce because it involves fewer disadvantages.
Re: Not only is it “not great PR”, from the point of view of those opposed to same-sex marriage, the fading of rigid gender roles is the main problem.
I think this is pretty true right here. I do fear that same-sex marriage will harm heterosexual marriage by undermining gender roles, by introducing the idea that marriage (and relationships in general) should be gender neutral, and also that procreation and childrearing are choices rather than obligations.
That being said, I don’t oppose SSM as a legal matter, and I actually sort of welcome the challenge. I think my ideals about marriage and relationships are strong enough to withstand the challenges from SSM, and from modern liberal feminism as well. If women in complementarian households have more children, then that will contribute to increasing the influence of complementarian ideals in the long run.
Re: Do they believe women today have been “brainwashed” by feminism?
I would say that, in large part, yes. (So have men). I’d say we’ve been ‘brainwashed’ by a whole bunch of unfortunate ideological influences (capitalism, among the most important), and feminism is just another one of many. What we think or say we want is very often not a good guide to what we actually do want, or to what will make us happy.
Amy,
Interesting finding about both parents feeling like they’re carrying more of a burden than the other!
Also, I’ve had a similar experience as you recount when reading about the experiences of transgender people. I think gender can seem straightforward and self-evident to people who aren’t trans or who don’t read or think much about what goes into defining gender from different cultural, legal, and biological standpoints, but I think gender and gender identity are very complicated and, as I try to be mindful of my own gender identity and expression, I find it difficult to separate out the parts of my identity that are learned and the parts that are maybe inherent in me.
La Lubu,
That’s a really interesting point about the man who continued paying his student loans while his wife stayed home and let her loans remain unpaid.
In this interview with Gerson, her findings seem to be consistent with your observation that women choose divorce because they perceive fewer disadvantages. Gerson notes that the women in her sample wanted to be able to support themselves and their children “no matter what happens.”
Hector,
“I do fear that same-sex marriage will harm heterosexual marriage by undermining gender roles, by introducing the idea that marriage (and relationships in general) should be gender neutral, and also that procreation and childrearing are choices rather than obligations.”
I’m not sure what specifically you mean by gender neutral, but what if same-sex marriage just introduces the idea that marriage could be gender neutral?
I think this point gets back to the idea that marriage doesn’t have to be the same for all people everywhere. Some (actually lots) of people seem to want egalitarian marriages. Some want marriages where the spouses take on traditional, or complementarian, gender roles. And some want marriages that are more of a mix, or something else.
“If women in complementarian households have more children, then that will contribute to increasing the influence of complementarian ideals in the long run.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. There’s a saying among my friends and I that behind many a feminist woman is an anti-feminist father.
I envy my grandparents, since they seemed to have such a highly functional marriage. My grandfather worked, a school teacher and later administrator, and my grandmother stayed at home, tending to the needs of children and the house.
They recognized a division of labor on so many things. For instance, on money, my grandfather was tasked with earning it; my grandmother with managing it wisely. I think my grandmother would have laughed at the idea of getting a job outside the home. She would have seen it as encroaching on my grandfather’s turf, and violating the division of labor.
But times were different 50 years ago!
(I wonder what people who believe in traditional gender narratives, theories of “gender complementarity,” and pseudo-scientific theories about “man’s preference for hunting and gathering while the woman stays home with the kids” think about these findings)
Not sure if I fit into either of these categories, but I’ll play. I think the study looks terribly constructed, so the findings are only mildly interesting. I might use them for a conversation starter at the next cocktail party I attend. The last party I was at, I introduced the concept of hypergamy and everyone ate it up. People just love talking about the differences and similarities between men and women. Of course, the physical differences are almost never commented on because they are so obvious, thus pretty boring to discuss. Equality between the sexes seems to always be the conversational starting point and then we get to the juicy differences, which are usually of a psychological or sociological nature. I find it interesting that the conversation usually has this trajectory, from equality to differences. Maybe it’s because we’ve all gotten off of work and are transitioning to the more intimate nightlife sphere. As that one Mad Man put it, “What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”
(Are such people surprised that most women, too, express a preference for work rather than unpaid child-rearing? Do they believe women today have been “brainwashed” by feminism?)
Again, I don’t think I’m “such people” but that won’t stop me from commenting (Never!): I think most people seek fulfilling, dignified work, which may sometimes include child-rearing. I do find it interesting that some people distinguish between work and child-rearing, as if child-rearing doesn’t classify as real work. I think of some of the homeschooling mothers I know—women who work their tails off teaching their kids advanced calculus when they’re not bossing their husbands around. Seriously, the most dominant women I’ve known are either homeschooling mothers or daughters of homeschooling mothers. Interestingly, most of them aren’t egalitarians, though they’re probably not strict gender complementarians either. I remember one homeschooling mother who said this of feminism, paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche from The Antichrist, “Feminism makes a thousand promises but keeps none.” She intimidated me, so I didn’t disagree.
Interesting interview.
(Re: the woman with the unpaid student loans: she and her husband argue about her returning to work; she wants to, he doesn’t want her to—but in the meantime, won’t pat her loans either. In retrospect, she says that if she had to do it all over again, she would not have left work. I see a huge red flag with this, in that if she gets divorced he will not be responsible for paying her student loans. In any case, it’s a red flag for control issues on his part—being responsible with his finances and irresponsible with hers.)
I bristle at the way “gender” was being used in the interview, though. The 1950s version of “feminine” was an aberration, not the historical standard. (Btw, seldom is the dramatic change the industrial revolution made to the way men’s roles changed in regard to family life referred to as a “gender revolution”. It should be.)
Totally agree. Great point.
Hector_St_Clare said:
“I do fear that same-sex marriage will harm heterosexual marriage by undermining gender roles, by introducing the idea that marriage (and relationships in general) should be gender neutral, and also that procreation and childrearing are choices rather than obligations.
I think we all tend to idealize, romanticize, and mythologize the ‘good old days’. If men and women 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago had our technology, birth control of whatever sort, the goods we have … they would be doing the exact same stuff we are. We’re not so unique in our responses to technology, economic/political environs.
Procreation and childrearing were a necessity only because there wasn’t choice. In my opinion, the people of ages ago were not high-minded, spiritual whizzes, who just embraced a sacrificial life because of their virtue. They behaved as they did, because they had to … no choice.
We behave as we do, because we have choice. And, those that choose more traditional gender roles now, aren’t really embracing what went on in the ‘good old days’. It’s a fabrication built upon an illusory vision of what that looked like … and, all to our liking.
Believe me, these modern day traditional marriages/choices usually use all the modern conveniences, modern transportation, modern health options that available. Few, in any, suffer the life and sacrifices that our forbears bore; nor, would we want to willing embrace that life. No one, anywhere, has been unaffected by what our world is going through now. Even the most ‘traditional’ idealists are swimming in the soup of modernism. None of us are untainted.
Re: child-rearing as work: of course it’s work, it just isn’t regarded as work by the people who will read one’s future resume. Let’s be honest about the extreme vulnerability that homemakers (regardless of gender) deal with. Let’s be honest about the brutal impact that decision will have on one’s future options should one’s life situation change. Homemaking doesn’t come with a pension, insurance, raises, titles or promotions—nothing that can be translated into income should one’s needs change. It is a higher-order of vulnerability than one will experience in the workforce.
Yes, child-rearing is work.
I’m not sure it’s all that interesting a debate over whether, from a definitional standpoint, child-rearing (and I would add housework, because it’s often included in these conversations) constitute work. Of course, they’re work.
The issue is that work that’s often characterized as “women’s work”- unwaged housework and child-rearing- is often simultaneously thought of as existing outside the economy even as this work often sustains and supports people whose work earns them incomes, benefits, and 401ks.
And, for those who do earn wages for this type of work, legal protections often do not apply to them to the extent that they apply to workers in non-domestic occupations.
More relevant conversations include the extent to which workplaces, the government, and/or the economy support people to perform this work; and the extent to which people can take time off to perform this work unwaged while still being able to secure future gainful employment to support their families.
I know I’ve talked about this before but one positive baby step I see happening is with the folks at the Center for American Progress who are researching and lobbying for PAID FMLA http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2012/11/02/43651/the-many-benefits-of-paid-family-and-medical-leave/
The stats they share concerning the loss of cumulative retirement savings that occur when a woman or man take time off to care for a child or vulnerable loved on at any age is staggering. We are on the cusp of an age that will be defined by living longer with prolonged disability. We are not a culture that celebrates caregiving or devotion to those who are vulnerable. We will be choking on our own bootstraps!
The “But Child Rearing is Work!” isn’t really a good argument, since it’s using a different meaning for the word “work” than the rest of the article
meaning 1- work = labor
meaning 2- work = income producing activity
asides from which, child care is only full time labor when kids are quite small
(homeschooling aside)
Fannie thank-you I had not seen this without you.
Women have very little interest in supporting men who cannot contribute to them or their children economically.
We can bemoan this and try to change it but we are facing fierce headwinds.
Some deeply committed women will do this. Most men in this position respond really badly as well. (Men who are unemployed do less housework than full time executives).
We are dealing with a deeply gendered problem, can we agree to that at least before we go to solutions?
The title of this post is “Most Women Prefer Working.” The study that’s referenced within this blogpost contrasts women who would prefer to have a paid job and those who would prefer full-time child rearing/housekeeping. I’m not a fan of the concept of microaggression, but could this be an instance of it in your view? The title of the post emplies that those who choose child rearing/housekeeping prefer NOT working. Nothing could be further from the truth. Might I suggest a change in the title to better reflect what you are getting at?
I agree with La Lubu and Fannie that we need to be creative in financially rewarding those who engage in unpaid, but crucially necessary, labor. I especially like how Fannie put it: “The issue is that work that’s often characterized as “women’s work”- unwaged housework and child-rearing- is often simultaneously thought of as existing outside the economy even as this work often sustains and supports people whose work earns them incomes, benefits, and 401ks.” Bingo. Child rearing not only supports the current economy, but is vital for tomorrow’s economy.
I like Ross Douthat’s view on this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-cratchit-tax-credit.html?_r=0
Maggie,
I can agree that this conversation has to include the gender nuances. I don’t think it would shed much light, in fact, to not talk about gender when it comes to this issue.
As I said to Amy, I think gender is incredibly complex and, in this conversation, it can be difficult to unravel what aspects of gender are inherent in women (or men) and which are socially conditioned. I think that’s true with respect to your observations as well regarding gender.
Would you agree?
Amy,
“We are not a culture that celebrates caregiving or devotion to those who are vulnerable. We will be choking on our own bootstraps!”
I agree completely, and it’s really unfortunate.
Some of the criticism I sometimes see about women entering the workforce includes statements suggesting that the workplace is becoming “feminized” because women are expecting or demanding “special rights” to have more of a work-life balance (read: women have more caregiving responsibilities and expectations than their male partners so they can’t or don’t want to work overtime hours).
This view seems to posit that the only two options are to keep women out of the workforce or to allow women into these jobs while not changing workplace cultures. And, I just find that outlook really uninspired- and also telling, as rarely do these critical conversations discuss how men could adapt. It seems like it’s often women having to have “work-life balance” conversations.
Re: I wouldn’t be so sure of that. There’s a saying among my friends and I that behind many a feminist woman is an anti-feminist father.
Possibly. It seems as though attitudes towards gender roles are at least partly hereditary and genetically influenced, though.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/beware_heritabl.html
Re: Seriously, the most dominant women I’ve known are either homeschooling mothers or daughters of homeschooling mothers. Interestingly, most of them aren’t egalitarians, though they’re probably not strict gender complementarians either.
I’m actually not a big fan of full-time homemaking or homeschooling parents, either (except temporarily when kids are small). I think the ideal is both parents working and taking some part in child care, but where one (usually the man) prioritizes working/breadwinning and the other prioritizes caregiving. That said, I think lots of people are going to have different marriage/relationship arrangements, and that’s OK.
Re: Some (actually lots) of people seem to want egalitarian marriages. Some want marriages where the spouses take on traditional, or complementarian, gender roles. And some want marriages that are more of a mix, or something else.
Sure, I have no problem with other people figuring out that other models work for them, and I don’t think the law needs to make one model mandatory for everyone. I believe that my ideal is the best, but of course I’d assume other people think differently.
Re: The last party I was at, I introduced the concept of hypergamy and everyone ate it up. People just love talking about the differences and similarities between men and women. Of course, the physical differences are almost never commented on because they are so obvious, thus pretty boring to discuss. Equality between the sexes seems to always be the conversational starting point and then we get to the juicy differences, which are usually of a psychological or sociological nature. I find it interesting that the conversation usually has this trajectory, from equality to differences. Maybe it’s because we’ve all gotten off of work and are transitioning to the more intimate nightlife sphere. As that one Mad Man put it, “What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”
Yea, I think this is so true. Hypergamy and gender differences are something very very easy to see in the social sphere, not so much in the working world.
Wow, great conversation.
So, here’s my first reaction to Gerson’s book:
She was probably interviewing women who didn’t have any kids.
And, in fact, from what I can tell from reviews of her books, Gerson was interviewing young women and men who had not yet had children. Do they have any idea what they are talking about?
I mean, seriously, if your husband doesn’t split things 50-50, divorce him? That’s kind of a nuclear option if you have a baby.
Though, honestly, I remember many years ago talking to a co-worker whose husband refused to do housework. I couldn’t see why she would put up with it. In hindsight, she had a preschool-aged kid. If she stayed married, she did all the housework and most of the child care, but they had two incomes and her husband did the outdoor work and some of the child care. Splitting up would have just meant that she did more work and had less money, even if the current arrangement wasn’t completely fair. Plus she would have had to worry about the effects on her kid and step-families, etc.
But mostly, I think that before people have kids, they really don’t understand how much work it is. Many people I have known who believed that things should be 50-50 didn’t end up doing things that way – and they didn’t walk out either.
From what I can tell, Gerson does address some of the important issues that make it hard to do things 50-50. Paid work is not set up in a way that makes it easy to have two part-time workers.
It sounds like she misses one thing, though. Many women after they have children find that they want to be with their children more than they want to do their paid work. (And some women find the opposite.)
In short, I have a hard time believing a group of young women who say that they are going to do things 50-50 or else dump the guy. It’s just not that easy a thing to do.
So, Fanny, to address some of your questions.
I think when it comes to what women want to do, the studies support different conclusions, depending on how you look at the results. Both these statements are true:
Most mothers want to do wage-earning work,
and
Most mothers don’t want to work full-time.
That’s because mothers are divided into a group that wants to do full-time child rearing, a group that wants to go full-speed ahead with paid work, and a group that wants to do part-time wage earning. No group is in the majority, but the group that wants to do part-time wage earning is the biggest.
So you can say most moms prefer working, because if you add together the women who want full-time work with the ones who want part-time work, you get most moms.
Or you can say, most moms don’t want to have full-time careers/be the breadwinner because if you add together the women who want to be child caregivers with the women who want part-time work/part-time child care, you get most moms.
I think the blog you quote is being misleading. We have good, big polls of large, representative groups of people of all ages. We know that most moms actually prefer both working and not being the breadwinner.
[They] “desire an egalitarian marriage in which both partners share breadwinning, housekeeping, and child rearing….” can also be interpreted different ways as some of the comments suggest.
I am an at-home mom in an egalitarian marriage. And we share many responsibilities.
So I’m not surprised that most people want an egalitarian marriage. The question is, does that have to mean each partner does 50% of the child care and 50% of the breadwinning efforts?
More specifically:
I don’t know if it’s hard-wired or not, but it does seem to be true that women are more likely to want to be the one who stays home with the kids, once there are kids. Fewer men seem to be pulled in that direction. There are plenty of social factor that could cause this, but it’s possible that hormones are playing a role.
I would go beyond just whether or not a woman stays home and does full-time child care, though. For many women the desire to do more of the child care may mean working part-time, changing hours, working from home, not taking the most demanding job, etc. The difference I see is that mothers want to do this more than fathers do.
I am not at all surprised that most women want paid work. Our society (and this was true long before feminism) values wage-earning more than caring for children. Housewives are looked down on.
For some women, paid work is interesting and rewarding. (Again, I wonder who exactly Gerson interviewed.)
On top of all that, most of us can expect to have two children who go to school full-time when they are six. So very few women who do stay home with children are going to be able to make a life-time career out of it – or particularly want to.
And our society does not protect the rights of moms who stay at home as well as it should.
@ki sarita – for many of us child-rearing people, it’s very important to call what we do work.
The word has two meanings, so I think when we want to talk about earning money, we should call it that, instead of “work” contrasted to “staying home.”
The terminology is a throwback to a time when men were in charge of the family. What men did was important and got called work and breadwinning and supporting the family. What women did got called being a housewife, and when the men came home from their tiring day, the women were supposed to take care of them.
It’s a small thing, but talking in this way can go a long way towards making at-home parents feel respected.
@Amy Z – I got something different out of the Time article than you did.
“The division of labor in terms of hours and tasks is actually fairly equal.”
1. The article talks about labor division between married couples with children under 18 where they both worked full-time. That leaves out the majority of married couples with children under 18 – many mothers are at home or work part-time.
That way of looking at things is also likely to minimize the differences between moms and dads because teenagers need almost no time compared to pre-schoolers. Once your kids are in school full-time, it is much easier to divide chore equally.
And, despite, all that, she says “No, men were not doing the same amount of housework as women, but neither were women pulling the same number of hours at the office as men.”
So since she’s talking about total work done – work for pay and at home, she gets men doing almost as much work as women.
Finally, although the time difference in total work done is just 20 minutes/day, that is a large amount when you look at time-studies.
Hi Diane,
Thanks for your comments, I’m still thinking about what you say and I agree with a lot of it. In answer to your question regarding egalitarian marriages, and I don’t think the definition is set in stone, but it seems like such marriage don’t necessarily have to have a 50/50 split on childrearing and breadwinning responsibilities (and I don’t think that would be realistic for perhaps most people, given actual people’s interests, occupations, and salaries).
To me, it would be something along the lines of both partners contributing in a fair and respectful way to the relationship, housework, family income, decisions, and child-rearing (if applicable), and in which neither partner is dominant over the other (with no one-sided promises to “obey”).
I also want to once again make the observation that it’s interesting that these conversations about work-life balance seem to mostly involve women and revolve around women. Do men have these conversations? Or, is it largely assumed that their number one priority is breadwinning rather than child-rearing?
What I’m getting at is that I wonder how these narratives might also contribute to the notion that fathers, certainly relative to mothers, are not that important to child-rearing.
It seems like same-sex marriage and feminism get blamed a lot for purportedly sending a message to men that they’re “unnecessary” to child-rearing, but I think it’s worth looking at how traditional and complementarian narratives on gender might also be an influence here.
Diane;
Cultures in which women take care of men, the women are expected to take care of the men whether or not the men have been working hard themselves, and generally in addition to whatever work they are doing.
Diane;
Cultures in which women take care of men, the women are expected to take care of the men whether or not the men have been working hard themselves, and generally in addition to whatever work they are doing.
Historically I recall reading that the most egalitarian (shared power) societies are those in which women do approximately 60 percent of the work. Wish I could remember the source. More than that, women are usually exploited by men for their labor. Less than that, their economic clout isn’t superior enough to obtain equal rights.
(Work includes child care, food preparation and so forth). Sorry can’t remember the source! I’d love to look it up again.
@Fannie – Many discussions that I’ve seen of the egalitarian issue will say that the split of the work doesn’t matter. What matters is more about how the couple interacts (equal power, respect, etc.).
But then – well, then the discussion often goes on to talk about how great it is to do a 50-50 split. So, for example, you get a blog along the lines of the “good news” is that women want to work (for wages) and split all the chores. There’s often a suggestion that the superior, more feminist way to do it, is to both do the same amount of wage-earning and the same amount of child-care and chores.
Do men have these conversations? Well, my observation is not with each other. I think they do often have these concerns, but are much less likely to talk about them. Although, to some extent, I think many men are less concerned. They are doing much more than their fathers did and often they just don’t feel conflicted about it. (Drives me mad.)
In terms of whether or not fathers are important, the traditional narrative said that they were critical because otherwise there was no money. Changing roles made this less clear.
Now, in fact, two parents are still needed, however you divide up the roles. There is just too much work involved, including wage-earning and child rearing and everything else. (The NYTimes piece really did a good job of showing how this could work.)
Anyhow, I don’t want to try to blame feminism or complementarianism for people seeing fathers as unneeded. I’d rather try to figure out what to do now to strengthen marriages in a modern era.
Recently WB Wilcox posted a piece here on research on how important fathers are. The piece emphasized how fathers mattered for their hands on roles in child rearing, not their wage-earning. I actually thought it went to far but not even mentioning wage-earning and the possibility that mothers being more able to spend time with their children is one of the ways fathers contribute to the family.
I haven’t seen/heard any of those discussions (*smile*). Every discussion I’ve seen/heard emphasizes exactly how much an equal split of the work matters, because time and space are still a reality (i.e.: if one partner slacks, the other partner must necessarily pick up the slack—yet has difficulty doing so because of conflicting demands on his or her time and the continuing inability to break the laws of physics by (a) being in two places at once, (b) stopping time or (c) reversing time). That’s the whole source of the conflict: the work must get done, and there are multiple demands on time. As a single person, I meticulously plan ahead (and always have my calendar with me) to maximize my time use/balance multiple (and sometimes conflicting) needs in a way that adds to (rather than subtracts from) my enjoyment of life….so it’s doable, but I imagine less so for a person who is doing all that juggling while watching a partner who isn’t carrying his or her half of the load.
Or so I hear—and yes, from men too. In the world of the unionized building trades, in my geographic area, the families are two-income families (at least, for those folks born after or even around the time the Civil Rights Act went into effect). I’ve heard plenty of break table conversations from both sides of the coin: either “what’s the big deal? I do enough!” or “my partner is slacking and it’s pissing me off!” And remember—these are 40-hour-a-week jobs, not executive positions with umpteen hours.
I think there are a lot of factors playing into the time crunch: higher standards for parenting (my parents never attended any school events—it just wasn’t common in those days; these days you’re a slug if you don’t make every one); the impact of the “superwoman” stereotype along with an industry built on Perfect Homemaking (Martha Stewart, et.al.), longer working commutes (constricting economy, gentrification, urban sprawl), urban sprawl’s impact on goods and services (translation: far from home—longer drives to run simple errands that used to be neighborhood-based), schools shifting more costs to parents (extracurriculars, transportation), fewer “open access” children’s recreation in communities (more privatization, more need for parents to provide transportation) along with more street violence in urban neighborhoods (no more playing unsupervised), aging population and the “sandwich generation”, atomized communities with little neighborhood or extended family support…..all kinds of little things that add up and snowball. Some of this can be dealt with by changing expectations (ex.: complain about my housecleaning and I’ll show you where the cleaning products are while telling you to hop to it)….but a lot of ‘em are non-negotiables.
Yeah, men are definitely having these conversations in my area (working class ones, anyway). They all grew up with working mothers, and some of ‘em with single mothers. It’s not a foreign concept.
@LaLubu – Those aren’t exactly the discussions I was thinking of. I was thinking more of books and articles on the issue of the importance of egalitarian marriage.
“I haven’t seen/heard any of those discussions (*smile*). Every discussion I’ve seen/heard emphasizes exactly how much an equal split of the work matters, because time and space are still a reality”
In that context, you’ll find people like Pepper Shwartz who wrote a book on the importance of peer marriage. She specifically says that you can have a peer or equal marriage with an at-home parent.
Articles on the subject often say that you can be equal or egalitarian and not do things 50-50. At the same time, there is a stress on the idea that working for pay is a better choice (good news, women don’t want to stay home – why is that good news?).
There are a lot of article out there asking, why aren’t things 50-50? Why do we end up with so many moms choosing to be at-home moms or part-time moms? My sense is that there are three groups of women wondering this – childless women, women who have careers that pay a lot, and women who are really dedicated to the idea that it should be 50-50 and willing to work hard at doing that, even if it means less money.
“higher standards for parenting (my parents never attended any school events—it just wasn’t common in those days; these days you’re a slug if you don’t make every one); the impact of the “superwoman” stereotype along with an industry built on Perfect Homemaking (Martha Stewart, et.al.),”
I think one of the reasons we have this is that we don’t give enough respect to at-home moms. At-home moms are put on the spot because they aren’t “working” or having a career. They feel they need to prove something. Then it just turns into a race.
A lot of the other factors – urban sprawl, etc. always seem so crazy to me. We create a world where women work for wages outside the home – yet we still want large homes in the suburbs that require upkeep instead of living in communities that could support each other. You would think that having women work outside the home would create a demand for better customer service, but instead we have less than ever.
I don’t know….I think the push for stay-at-home mothers “proving” themselves started long before due to labor-saving technology and mass-produced goods. Homemakers responded to the de-skilling of their jobs by re-skilling them (instead of the strategy adopted by industrialized workers and tradespeople—unionizing! Perhaps if homemakers organized, there would be Social Security credit for homemaking; disability payments for ill or injured homemakers, etc.).
I think also that it isn’t just homemakers re-skilling this work, but dissatisfied people who work outside the home in uncreative and/or micromanaged and/or deskilled workplaces who seek creative outlets and recognition for skills. It isn’t just homemakers that could drive this industry for things like….oh, the foodie movement, the gardening/urban farming movement, the rise of crafters making their own clothes or jewelry or knitting and such. Or for that matter, DIY home improvement. Older people abandoned by the marketplace (laid off before they are old enough to retire) and displaced workers are driving it too (saw a film, “Urban Roots” about Detroit’s urban farming movement last week; one farmer talked frankly about being a displaced autoworker and doing much lower paid work. What he got out of farming wasn’t just affordable food on reduced wages, but pride in having people tell him how delicious his greens and tomatoes are).
The economic landscape has changed massively in the past thirty to forty years; the workplace and public policy has not. The only way out of that that I can see is organizing—mass movement, not individualized solutions. People are collapsing under the inability to work out individualized solutions in a political and economic landscape that has the power to abandon large swathes of people; whole regional areas. Individuals can’t effectively counter that kind of power.
So, they’re left with arguing about the work at home since they can’t negotiate accommodations in the workplace, and they can’t or won’t abandon the workplace (*raises hand*) because of the extreme vulnerability of doing so. Anger at a broken system gets re-sourced to the home.
(side note re: “large suburban homes”. In the rust belt, we have the opposite problem, the hollowing out of cities. It isn’t that the goods and services are in the cities and people have to drive to them; all the goods and services are on the outskirts by the highway interchanges and expensive subdivisions, so the masses of people have to drive from the affordable housing of the inner city or small town to get to where say, the groceries are. Lots of small towns in Illinois don’t have any household services besides a convenience store/gas station; the inner city is the same way except we have package liquors and more fast-food outlets too.)
Also, let’s be frank about the role of institutionalized racism in disrespecting the work of homemaking and child-raising. Mothers on welfare (always majority white in reality, but portrayed as majority black with the ugliest of racist stereotypes) were recast as “welfare queens” who were doing nothing/contributing nothing of value and therefore needed to “go to work”.
(And any real discussion on welfare is incomplete without a frank discussion of surplus labor and its role in the economy—how *by design* people are left out in the cold)
LaLubu – I agree with you 100% about the attacks on poor moms hurting all at-home moms. And I think that the de-valuing of the at-home mom role also contributed to making it easier to attack poor moms. At the time of the Clinton welfare reform, one of the arguments specifically used was that the system had been set up to allow women to stay home and that wasn’t necessary anymore.
I think the push for at-home parents to prove their worth is stronger than ever before. The 1950s mom had less work to do and figured out ways to do more – this seems to be a strange thing about technology. We have computers and so we set ever higher standards instead of saving time.
But moms in the 1950s and 1970s were supposed to stay home. They didn’t have to justify the expense. So they could let kids go play outside. They knew they had something to do and they didn’t have to go to watch a soccer game.
It’s a theory and not something you could prove, but I do think that as women left the home, the role of being at-home became more demanding. On the one hand, there were arguments from other women that it wasn’t really necessary to be there, it was just washing the sheets over and over again. (Linda Hirshman is a current writer who put it at its most extreme and nasty.) On the other hand, there was the family’s need for money and sometimes a husband who now wanted his wife to earn money.
Nobody consciously decided that we need to justify being at home, so we will make the job of parenting more full-time than ever, but somehow it happened.
I see this as a sign that there are moms who really do want to be home with their children, at least when they are small. But they feel the need to justify it, so they make the job even harder and more important than it needs to be.
Then, in response, moms who want to work for pay, feel they have to keep up. And women who have to work for pay come to believe that this is what parenting needs to look like.
Anyhow, I agree that we need to have collective action to get workplaces that work for women.
First, though, I think we need to figure out what the action we want is.
My goal is not to get 100% of women wanting to work full-time or wanting a 50-50 split. I wouldn’t see that as good news.
My goal is to value the traditional women’s work of child-rearing so that it is acceptable to take the time to do it full-time or part-time. Then to value it enough to make it easy for parents who’ve been doing child care to re-enter the paid labor force without having to pay for it. And to value it in financial ways, too.
Guess once again I come from a different world than you. I’m used to women working because they have to, all the while complaining how they would love to be home.
Now that I have the unusual opportunity to be home, I feel like I have to, because without financial necessity I have no excuse to go to work.
Re: I think the blog you quote is being misleading. We have good, big polls of large, representative groups of people of all ages. We know that most moms actually prefer both working and not being the breadwinner.
Diane M,
Yes, exactly. This is key right here. Most women (for obvious, evolutionary reasons) *don’t* want to be the primary (or even a coequal) breadwinner for their household, and *don’t* want to work full time once they have kids.
That doesn’t seem like they are buying into the cultural-liberal, feminist model of marriage wholesale.
I mean, seriously, if your husband doesn’t split things 50-50, divorce him?
Diane M., I don’t know where you’re getting this from. The women who said they would divorce did not say “if he doesn’t split things 50-50″, but if their husband wanted them to quit work or at least cut back to part-time.
Most people don’t want to work full time; men or women.
These discussions about work usually translate “work” as a high level interesting privileged position. That’s not the reality for most people.
They work cuz the alternative is worse.
Define “part-time”. The last survey I saw that mentioned actual hours showed that BOTH men and women had a strong preference for a 35 hour work week, although the percentage for women was higher. Somehow, that got reified into “part-time” workweek. Go figure.
In the “upper working class”/lower middle class (tradespeople, public employees, nurses and other medical staff, teachers, etc) definitely do not want to spend long periods out of the workforce. The AFL-CIO’s “Ask A Working Woman” surveys have consistently (as in these surveys have been going on for about a decade and a half) shown a preference for paid family leave, affordable universal daycare, school hours that match work hours, and flextime. But no one wants to listen to us.
La Lubu, I think this article deals with that issue: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/do-working-moms-really-prefer-part-time-jobs/
Also, it’s interesting to note that women typically earn more than men in part-time jobs. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/in-part-time-jobs-women-out-earn-men/
Bregalad, I think the first article you link to is a good example of someone trying really hard to prove that women really want what I think of as the same-old, same-old agenda for women’s rights. (And I think the same-old, same-old aspect of it is one reason feminism is stalled.)
The blogger is arguing that women want to work 35 hours or less because they can’t get things that would make it easier to work more hours. So, in their view, if you had “available, affordable child care, health care, safe housing and even healthy school meal programs…the need for shorter hours wanes.”*
Now there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Women have been asked in polls if they would prefer to work part-time and they have said yes. We don’t know that they would change their mind if only they could find high-quality day care.
The percentage of moms who want to work part-time is particularly high for moms of small children. An equally likely possibility is that moms of small children want to work part-time because they want to be with their children and take care of them. In fact, we have polls showing that most moms believe it’s best for kids to be home with parents, so this seems more likely than the speculation that if women had high-quality day care, they would gladly work longer hours for pay.
And none of that takes into account the work that families have to do even if they have after-school care and a safe neighborhood – things like laundry, lawn care, cooking dinner, etc. It adds up.
Anyhow, I think we (feminists and anyone concerned about women) need to just move past the idea that the solution is to get more and more paid day care or after school care so that mothers can all be in the work force, devoting as much time and energy to their careers as men.
We need a new model that accepts that balancing work and family sometimes means working less for pay for a time in your life. Rather than trying to push women to want to work for pay, we should figure out how to change society so that women or men who take time for their family aren’t punished for it.
As Sylvia Hewlett puts it, we need on-ramps and off-ramps to careers. We need to make part-time work respectable and something where you can get benefits. We need credit for moms who want to work at home. We need to help moms who want to be home be able to afford that.
As the article points out: “And if you’d prefer to work “part time” but find yourself instead working “full time,” then women, especially, are significantly more likely to be unhappy with their marriage (and presumably with life in general).”
Also, women who have to work for pay when they’d rather be doing child care have kids with lower self-esteem (just as when women who want to work for pay are forced to be at home).
The article itself plays into looking down on part-time workers.
“Thirty-four hours or less” doesn’t really represent a desire for part-time work, with its overtones of secondary and lesser roles. It represents a desire for something “other.”
If we could just get a new feminist agenda that included all moms and all the choices they want to make, instead of trying to prove that women must want something other than what they are saying they want.
*In my experience, if we had universal health care, some moms would be able to stay home or work part-time and would be glad they didn’t have to do a paid job to get health insurance for their family.
@mythago – “Diane M., I don’t know where you’re getting this from. The women who said they would divorce did not say “if he doesn’t split things 50-50″, but if their husband wanted them to quit work or at least cut back to part-time.”
Good point. I was reading this as, they were asked what they would do if they couldn’t split things 50-50 and then the fall-back position was a) ask my wife to work less, for men, and b) divorce my husband.
I think the article is a little confusing, but you’re right the actual question was if your husband wanted you to quit work. In which case, divorce still seems like the nuclear option, because all you have to do is say no.
Perhaps the idea, though, is that the husband is refusing to cut back himself and trying to get you to cut back, so part of it is that he’s not doing 50-50?
@LaLubu – The Bureau of Labor defines part-time work as under 35 hours and full-time work as 35 hours or more.
I actually think that’s crazy from the other angle. It lumps together people who might think they are working part-time with people who are working way more than 40 hours/week.
And for married moms, the ones who work full-time are on average working very close to 35 hours/week while the married dads are working 40 hours/week. So even the “full-time working moms” are probably cutting back, particularly when the kids are under six.
Diane,
I totally agree with you. I linked to the article because it answered La Lubu’s question on what was meant by “part-time.” I especially agree with you about giving credit to women who want to work at home with their children. The article I linked to didn’t give stay at home parents the respect they deserve; neither does the title of this very blogpost.
To the moderator: One of my posts has been removed. Why? What particular aspect of it was objectionable? Did it violate the civility policy? For the life of me, I can’t see how. I’ve saved a copy of my post if you need to look at it again in case you accidentally deleted it.
Bregalad,
I’m not a moderator here, but I’m going to request that you no longer comment on my posts. It’s a boundary I’m setting due to a pattern of behavior that I find problematic on your part.
Your previous comment was deleted because it was dishonest, rude, condescending, and a violation of my stated wishes regarding what topics I wanted to engage in this comment thread following a post I wrote.
I don’t expect you to agree with my decision, but I’m going to ask you to respect this boundary I’m setting. In fact, a few weeks ago you expressed a similar sentiment that you and I should maybe avoid each other here. I agree that that’s a good course of action.
Thanks.
Bregalad,
I’m sorry that my comment was apparently the cause of this little tiff. For the record, I’d just like to throw out that I think you have interesting things to say, and to invite you to comment over at Rod Dreher’s blog? It’s one of the more interesting blogs to discuss culture, marriage, feminism and other issues, and I think your thoughts would be appreciated there.
Bregalad,
Please do not be discouraged and please continue to comment on FSB. Your voice is desperately needed here, respected by others and very appreciated.
And let’s just bring this thread to a close.
I just want to say that I know a lot of young women who are looking for men who are willing to be full-time househusbands. These women are highly ambitious and they know it will be easier to be a leader in society if their husbands are doing all the household management.
As long as women do most of the housework and childcare, men will rule the world. And pundits will say that women are less likely to be geniuses, to take risks, to make breakthroughs that help society advance. In other words, they will say that men are superior to women. We all know the cliche, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Sorry, but it isn’t true.