Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (13 page)

This isn’t to say that women aren’t ever making the decision to stay home and raise families—they are. But given the economy and a host of other factors, it’s just not as common as some people would like you to think. And when women
do
stay home, they have a whole new set of worries.

Unfortunately, but not exactly shockingly, women do the majority of the work in the household. You know, all the fun stuff like cleaning toilets and doing laundry. And this isn’t just women who don’t have jobs outside the home—it’s all married women. A recent Department of Labor study showed that women spend twice as much time as men on household chores and taking care of kids. That’s in addition to their paying jobs. Fun, huh? In fact, in July 2006
The New York Times
reported that unemployed men do less work around the house than women who have full-time jobs.
¹⁶
Yeah, that sounds fair.

When it comes to moms who don’t work outside the home, their work (shockingly) is ridiculously underappreciated. A recent study by
Salary.com
actually showed that if
a full-time stay-at-home mom was paid for all of the work she does, she’d be getting $134,121 a year.
¹⁷
Now that’s some money.

The stay-at-home-mom stuff is talked about a lot in feminist circles—especially since all this “opt out” nonsense started. Some women say that the whole idea behind feminism is that we exercise our choices—and that if some women want to stay at home rather than work, we should respect that. Others, like author Linda Hirshman, say that not working is just a bad idea all around. Hirshman makes the case in her book
Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World
that women are selling themselves short if they “opt out,” and that being engaged in the world at large—rather than just the one at home—is necessary.
¹⁸
She especially hates the old saying that moms are “doing the most important job” in the world by raising kids:

You have to admit she has a point. But don’t get your panties in a bunch; Hirshman is being deliberately controversial in order to get the conversation started. Because I have to agree that once we start talking about how wonderful it is that smart gals with PhDs are cleaning up poopie all day, something is a little off.

So let’s say you want to go the mommy route. Considering all the social and political forces telling you that all women are good for is popping out babies, you would think that those same forces would make taking care of those kids easier. Guess again. Not only is the United States one of only two industrialized nations that doesn’t provide paid leave for new parents, Americans are sometimes paying up to 50 percent of their salary for childcare.
²⁰
That is some ridiculous shit.

According to childcare advocacy project The Family Initiative, 63 percent of all kids under six years old in the United States receive some kind of childcare or education from someone other than their parent.
²¹
The group did a study on the average yearly cost to provide a one-year-old with childcare: It ranged from more than $12,000 in Boston to more than $3,000 in Knoxville. That’s a lot of money for anyone, but for families and parents who are lower income,
that’s an incredible burden. The study also found that 60 percent of low-income families (who earn less than $1,200 a month) pay out 37 percent of their income toward childcare.
²²
Nuts.

The kicker? The same politicians who are voting against legislation to ease childcare costs for poor parents are scamming money for their own kids! A
Washington Post
editorial pointed out that some members of Congress are using campaign funds to pay for their childcare. Republican Representative John T. Doolittle from California, for example, who received the lowest possible score from the Children’s Defense Fund for his votes on funding for childcare, Head Start, and after-school programs, had his campaign reelection committee and his leadership political action committee pay more than $5,000 in childcare costs for his daughter.
²³
And you can bet he’s not the only one.

All I’m saying is that for a government that seems to want us to have babies, they’re sure unhelpful once the kids are
outside
the uterus. Where are our government-funded preschools? Other countries have them. Shit, if they want us to be moms so badly, the least they could do is give us a little incentive.

So seriously, when we think about issues like reproductive rights, we should be thinking childcare, too! It’s easy to get caught up in fights like violence against women and repro rights because they’re so in your face. But something like childcare has a huge and lasting effect on women’s lives; it’s just not as evident.

I’m all for having babies, but just keep this in mind: Research shows that for every year a woman in her twenties waits to have children, her lifetime earnings increase by 10 percent. Just saying.

It’s pretty messed up, but women are more likely to be poor in a trend some feminists call the “feminization of poverty.” Basically, this means women are more likely to have jobs that pay less, like in the service industry (think waitress, teacher, secretary). The question a lot of feminists ask is: Are these jobs low-paying because they’re jobs associated with women? Like, if droves of men wanted to be teachers, would teaching all of a sudden become a high-paying profession? Just something to think about.

This seeming obsession with women being happy little wifeys goes beyond the media and pop culture. It’s actually keeping women poor. The powers that be would actually rather that women were poor than unmarried. Serious.

American women are 40 percent more likely than men to be poor. In fact, 90 percent of welfare recipients are women. But instead of spending money on things like education and job-training programs, the government is pouring all sorts of cash into—get this—marriage-promotion programs.

In March 2006, President Bush committed $100 million a year for the next five years to a “Healthy Marriage Initiative,” as part of a welfare bill. This money, which would have been used for education, childcare, and job training, is now allocated to religious-based programs that tell women that getting married is the best way out of poverty. (Who needs a job when you have a man?!)

Of course, the gov folks swear up and down that the programs are just common sense. Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says that marriage promotion helps “couples who choose marriage for themselves gain greater access, on a voluntary basis, to services where they can develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.”
²⁴

But what they really mean when they say a “healthy” marriage is a “traditional” one. And for the guys in power now, a traditional marriage is one in which women don’t work.

Just check out what these programs
actually
do. In 2004, one of the first marriage-promotion programs was charged with sex discrimination. The Family Formation and Development Project in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a twelve-week marriage education course for unmarried couples with children, offered employment services as part of the program—but only to men.
²⁵
Nice, huh? Another program, the biblically based Marriage Savers, makes the case for marriage using logic that sounds like it came from a 1950s home ec textbook: “The married man won’t go to work hungover,
exhausted, or tardy because of fewer bachelor habits, and because he eats better and sees the doctor sooner, thanks to his wife. She is also a good adviser on career decisions, and relieves him of chores, so he can do a better job.”
²⁶

You got that, gals? Men should be the breadwinners, and women should be dependent on them. The government wants happy housewives. More than they want financially secure women.

Something kind of funny: When I was working with NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, a women’s legal rights organization, a lot of the work I did concerned women working in nontraditional jobs—like construction work, mechanics, and firefighting. These kinds of jobs have proven to be awesome ways for low-income women and women without a college education to make more money. The hours are flexible (a must for women with children), the money is great, and there’s amazing potential for career growth.

And while any job training is preferable to pushing tired sexist stereotypes about poverty and marriage, nontraditional jobs are much better paying than “pink collar”
professions (again, service industry stuff). In 1996, for example, the average weekly earnings for cashiers, waitresses, and hairdressers ranged from $200 to $300, whereas women rail workers and women electricians earned $700 and $800, respectively.
²⁷
But even though jobs like these have proven to be a good way to get women out of poverty, you won’t see the government funding any nontraditional employment programs—at least not significantly. Because god forbid a woman is in a hard hat with cash in her pocket, rather than at home, broke.

I know this seems all over the place: money, kids, work. And there’s a lot more where that came from that I didn’t get into—god knows there’s a ton of stuff to cover. But the point I want to make is that all of these things are interrelated—in a scary way.

A great example: As I was finishing this chapter,
Forbes
magazine—supposedly a reputable business publication—put out an article called “Don’t Marry Career Women.”
²⁸
Yeah, I know.

The author, Michael Noer (who, incidentally, also wrote an article comparing the economic viability of wives versus hookers), says that if you marry a woman with a career, you’re in for a lifetime of pain. He cites all the bullshit articles and studies I’ve talked about, and argues that if a man marries a woman who works, he’s in for all kinds of problems: She’ll cheat; divorce is more likely; the couple is less
likely to have kids and more likely to have a dirty house(!). And the list goes on and on.

Though
Forbes
eventually apologized for the article, this kind of nonsense is the perfect example of just how common these types of arguments are becoming. The thing to remember about all of this—the media messages, the stats, everything—is that it’s part of a larger agenda to reinforce traditional gender roles. And it’s true that not everyone wants to reclaim traditional gender roles, but a lot of the people in power do. (And I’m betting they read
Forbes,
natch.) And the folks who are trying to convince you that it’s cool to stay home and not work are the same ones who are screwing women over when it comes to the wage gap, childcare, and poverty. So don’t fall for their shit.

The truth? Discrimination still exists in the workplace, there’s a significant pay gap between men and women, women are
not
choosing to stay at home, and we’re facing a crisis when it comes to women and poverty.

But of course, instead of focusing on real issues of discrimination and work/life conflicts, society is busy feeding women distractions so that we don’t focus on them, either.

There’s something terrifying about the way relationship fever takes over women, or at least about how it’s expected to take us over. We’re expected to go from boy crazy when we’re little (remember, lesbians don’t exist) to bridezillas as adults. Landing a man is assumed to be our main goal in life, trumping any other desires. And while a little romance never hurt anybody, the idea that women are supposed to be obsessively focused on all things love- and relationship-oriented serves a strategic, anti-feminist purpose. Because if all we’re thinking about is how to get a guy, then maybe we won’t pay such close attention to the fact that we’re getting paid less at work or having our reproductive rights stripped away.

Now you’re saying to yourself,
See, I knew feminists were just a bunch of anti-male killjoys!
Slow your roll. This isn’t a diatribe against all things romantic. Shit, I’m as much a sucker for flowers as the next girl. Everyone likes being in love. Unless, of course, your object of desire is an asshole or doesn’t like you back—but that’s a problem for another book. The issue isn’t love and sex. It’s the expectation that this is
all
women should care about. And don’t even try to tell me that that’s not the case. What is the focus of pretty much
all
women’s magazines? TV shows? According to pop culture, women are either searching for a man, with a man, or getting over one.