A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (29 page)

While Friedan’s housewives were often haunted by the sense that they were not doing anything meaningful, the mothers Warner interviewed were convinced that every decision they made and every detail they controlled was incredibly meaningful, both for their children’s future and their own standing as good mothers. If 1950s housewives obsessed about the cleanliness of their kitchen and the whiteness of their laundry, these women obsessed over what snacks to take to school, where to hold a child’s birthday party, and what clothes and toys to buy for their children.

Still, the kind of obsessive mothering Warner describes is confined to a minority of mothers. And although the presence of even one such mom in a classroom or play circle can trigger immediate guilt in the rest of the mothers, there are signs of a growing reaction against overparenting.

A more insidious problem facing American women today is the tendency to pit stay-at-home moms against working moms as if the two groups had incompatible values and priorities—the “mommy-wars mystique.” Its premise is that mothers who stay home and mothers who work for pay are divided into two hostile camps, and we must take sides about which group is “right.”

Some pundits encourage women to opt out of the workforce to raise their children. Others, in the titles of two recent books, urge mothers to “Get to Work,” warning that if they quit work or downgrade their hours they are falling prey to “the Feminine Mistake.” But arguing about what choices a mother should make to resolve the caregiving crisis in contemporary America disregards the shared dilemmas all mothers face. It also misses the opportunity to make common cause with fathers on an issue that concerns them as well.

The mommy-wars mystique ignores the women who don’t have a choice either way. Some would like to opt out or cut back on work hours but cannot, either because their families need the money, or because in
the United States the long-term financial and career penalties for part-time work are prohibitively large—often far out of proportion to the actual reduction in hours. Other women, whose families need the money even more, would like to get a job but cannot opt in because they don’t have access to affordable child care or cannot earn a wage that would cover their child care and transportation.

Paradoxically, the only group in which stay-at-home mothers outnumber those who combine paid work with parenting is women married to the most poorly paid men in the country. Of the women whose husbands’ earnings are in the bottom 25 percent of the income distribution, 52 percent are outside the paid labor force.

The second highest percentage of stay-at-home moms is found in families where the husband is in the top 5 percent of earners, making more than $120,000 a year. But even in this group, 60 percent of mothers work outside the home. Among wives whose husbands’ earnings are in the middle range, 80 percent work outside the home.

Another misconception promoted by the mommy-wars mystique is that educated professional mothers are abandoning work to stay home with their kids. In fact, highly educated women are more likely to combine work with motherhood than less-educated women, and less likely to take extended time off after childbirth. And such women are
less
likely to drop out of work after becoming mothers today than were their counterparts back in the 1960s and 1970s.

But educated women are the most likely to read the newspapers and magazines that repeat the myth that educated mothers like themselves are leaving the labor force in droves. This creates the impression that there is something deviant in their decision to continue working, which can make them, like their middle-class counterparts in the 1950s, feel guiltier about their choice to work than their working-class sisters.

The biggest problem with the mommy-wars mystique is that most women want the same basic things from work and family life. Only a minority of moms who work outside the home really want to return to full-time schedules as soon as they have exhausted their maternity leave, and
an even smaller percentage of so-called opt-out mothers really want to leave paid employment completely.

For many working mothers who end up leaving their jobs, a more accurate description of their actions is that they were
pushed
out, says Joan Williams, director of work/life law at the University of California’s Hastings Law School. Williams’s claim is supported by sociologist Pamela Stone’s in-depth interviews with educated, professional women who quit work to stay home with their children. Stone found that in most cases, beneath the wistful assurance that this was “my choice,” the decision to quit work was usually taken as a last resort, after a woman’s employer rejected her request for more flexible hours or part-time work, or after her husband refused to adjust his own work schedule and household commitments so she could continue to work. Only 16 percent of the women Stone interviewed reported that their first preference had been to stay home with the children full-time.

The rigid work policies and practices that push some women out of their jobs when they become mothers also penalize women who freely leave work because they want to be with their children full-time. Most women who leave their jobs for family reasons plan to return to work within a few years. But in one recent study, more than a quarter of mothers who wanted to reenter the workforce were unable to do so, and many others had to take part-time jobs even though they wanted to work full-time.

Mothers pay a high price for whatever choices they make—or are forced to make. Working mothers find it hard to negotiate flex time or are looked down upon for doing so, and often run themselves ragged trying to juggle competing demands on their time. Women who temporarily opt out discover that their work as mothers counts for nothing when they try to find a new job. And full-time homemakers may find themselves dismissed by people they meet at parties or other events as “just a housewife.” Meanwhile, their husbands often put in longer work hours to make up for the loss of two incomes, cutting into the shared parenting time most modern couples hoped for when the baby was on the way.

These problems all have a common source. Despite the rhetorical reverence our society accords motherhood and fatherhood, in reality the everyday work of parenting garners little social respect and even less practical support.

Mirra Komarovsky pointed to this contradiction back in 1953, at the height of the feminine mystique, commenting on the oft-repeated assurance that motherhood was the most important and difficult job in the world. If society actually believed this, she remarked, “a nursery school teacher would rate a salary at least equal to the beginning salary of a street cleaner, and the curtailment of social services to children would not be the first economies that politicians feel safe to propose in a period of retrenchment.” Not much has changed since then in America’s real, rather than rhetorical, social priorities.

The devaluation of motherhood and fatherhood is part of what may be the biggest contemporary mystique of all: what sociologists Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling label the “career mystique.” This is the idea that a successful career requires people to commit all their time and energy throughout their prime years to their jobs, delegating all caregiving responsibilities to someone else.

The feminine mystique defined the ideal wife as having no interests or obligations outside the home. The career mystique defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work.

The career mystique is not the inevitable or the only way to organize work and family. Through most of history, workers didn’t balance work and family. They combined the two, integrating responsibilities rather than juggling them. Men and women worked together on farms and in household businesses where the rhythms of labor had to take into account the rhythms of birth, child rearing, illness, death, and neighborly obligations. Even during the early period of industrialization, workers often labored alongside other family members or lived close enough to work to come home for lunch.

When middle-class careers first developed in the last third of the nineteenth century, what made them more desirable than working-class
occupations was not just their larger salaries but their shorter hours. A hundred years ago, the most prestigious and remunerative careers were those that required the least amount of time away from home. In those days, blue-collar workers envied the “bankers’ hours” that allowed managers and professionals to arrive at work later and leave earlier than less-well-paid employees.

The middle-class career mystique developed hand in hand with the middle-class feminine mystique over the course of the twentieth century. Both were based on new assumptions about the nature of work and the nature of the family.

The assumption about work was that if a man displayed company loyalty, he could earn a wage adequate to support a family, steadily move up the job ladder, and eventually retire with a pension. The assumption about family was that each ideal employee came with a wife who would take care of the house, do the shopping, raise the children, care for ill family members, and have dinner waiting when he came home.

But the assumptions of the career mystique are out of touch with the further evolution of both family life and work life. Today few workers have the luxury of a full-time caregiver at home, even though obligations to children last longer than in the past and many have responsibilities to aging parents as well. Seventy percent of American children live in households where every adult is employed.

And few workers have the security of a lifetime job or guaranteed pension plan any longer. For all families except those in the top quarter of the income distribution, male wages have stagnated over the past twenty-five years, so that most families have been able to achieve upward income mobility only by adding a second income. The young male high school graduates who made the most dramatic earnings gains in the 1950s have experienced the greatest losses in real wages and job security.

Meanwhile, employees who
do
earn enough to support a family, especially professionals and managers, are often forced to work more hours than they really need or want and to be almost constantly available by e-mail or cell phone even while at home. For example, in the legal profession
a forty-hour workweek is widely viewed as part-time, and a person who drops back to that level often takes a pay cut of 20 percent per hour, magnifying the income loss associated with reducing one’s hours.

This too-much-or-nothing approach to hours and income is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Almost one-quarter of all American men spend fifty hours or more on the job each week, compared to only 7.3 percent of Swedish men and 3.5 percent of men in the Netherlands. U.S. workers also get less vacation time than Europeans, who typically get three to six paid weeks per year. The United States, unlike 134 other countries, has no laws limiting the maximum length of the workweek. And the United States stands nearly alone among the major industrial powers in not mandating subsidized parental leaves. Only about half of all American workers qualify for the twelve weeks of unpaid parental leave provided for by the Family Medical Leave Act.

We are beginning to see a wave of dissatisfaction with the career mystique, much as we did against the feminine mystique in the 1950s. And this dissatisfaction is now widely felt by men as well as women.

The Families and Work Institute first began measuring workers’ reports of work-family conflict in 1977, when 41 percent of mothers and 35 percent of fathers in dual-earner households with children under eighteen reported either some or a lot of work-family conflict. By 2008, there had been a slight rise in the percentage of mothers reporting such conflict, from 41 percent to 45 percent, but the number of fathers complaining about it had soared to 59 percent.

As men’s dissatisfaction with the demands of the career mystique has grown, so has their willingness to challenge it. In 1977, only 12 percent of fathers in dual-earner couples reported having taken time off from work to care for their child. Today almost one-third of fathers say they have done so, even though they recognize that supervisors typically view fathers who take parental leave as less committed workers.

Of the men who work more than fifty hours a week, 80 percent say they would prefer shorter hours. Even hard-charging executives are changing their priorities. In a
Fortune
poll of male executives, 64 percent said
they would choose more free time over money and 71 percent said they would choose time over advancement. Such sentiments are even stronger among younger male workers.

Men’s growing discontent is a positive thing. As so many women who read Betty Friedan’s book in the 1960s can attest, people can begin to change their lives only after they identify their discontent and recognize its causes. So we must get beyond the notion that resolving work-family tensions is a women’s issue, a notion that threatens to perpetuate or even revive the old feminine mystique. As long as women continue to make all the compromises needed for families to coexist with the career mystique, we deny children the benefits of involved fathers, we deny men the rewards of shared parenting, we reinforce gender inequalities in pay and work opportunities that have been largely eliminated for childless women, and we risk once more forcing women to choose between love and work.

Oscar Wilde once remarked that it’s a sorry map of the world that contains no island of Utopia. And it’s a sorry map of our human relationships that cannot envision a better way to meet our work and caregiving commitments than by continuing to accommodate the false choices the career mystique imposes on us.

Betty Friedan asked us to imagine a world where men and women can both find meaningful, socially useful work and also participate in the essential activities of love and caregiving for children, partners, parents, friends, and neighbors. Today that goal is even more relevant than when she wrote
The Feminine Mystique
.