Archive for May 13th, 2009

My review of Megan Basham’s Beside Every Sucessful Man was recently linked to by the Mama Bee blog. I’m glad it was, because the blog also linked to Linda Hirshman’s 2005 piece called Homeward Bound at the American Prospect. Duly nudged by the link, I finally gave the piece a read, and have been thinking about it much of the day.

For starters, I deeply disagree with Hirshman (author of that manifesto Get to Work) on the idea that having just one child is the key to having it all. I’m profiling several high-flying women (and men!) with big families in my new book, 168 Hours. However, her survey of brides profiled in The New York Times Sunday Styles section over three weekends in 1996 is just fascinating. The vast majority of American moms are in the workforce, including the majority of moms married to men earning over $120,000 a year. But the Sunday Styles section gives an insight into a very elite slice of America (well, at least sort of elite — Michael and I were written up in there in 2004, and there’s the old joke about not wanting to be in any club that would have you as a member…) The New York Times brides are often very expensively educated, often with professional degrees, and working in fields such as medicine, law, business, etc., when they get married.

Hirshman was able to interview 32 of the 41 Times brides eight years after their weddings. Of the 32 she interviewed, 30 had children. Of these, 5 were working full time. Ten were working part-time, but often not in something related to what they’d trained for. Half were not in the workforce at all. You can talk a lot about inflexible workplaces pushing moms out of the labor force, or the lure of adorable babies pulling them home, but what’s most interesting is that a reasonable number of these Times brides made anti-career choices — up to and including quitting — before they had children.

In other words, these women, despite their expensive educations and early career preparations, were not really attached to the workforce. When a handful of high-earning men gave these women the chance to shrug off the adult responsibility of earning a living to support themselves and their families, they took it. One suspects that children provided social cover (indeed, I have now met a number of very affluent women who are not in the workforce and have nannies. Go figure!).

It’s a mindset I don’t particularly understand, but I was never into the Cinderella story. I’m very attached to my professional identity.

But that raises the question: why am I so attached to the idea of earning money and trying to get somewhere in my career, when many other women with similar family situations — perhaps smarter and even more expensively educated than me — are not?

Hirshman isn’t entirely sure either, though she has a few ideas. One is that those opting out have a “self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence.” Unfortunately, “there’s no such thing as a perfect job,” but rather than get on with it and do the hard work of creating the right job, these women engage in “solving their job problems with marriage.” There may be something to that, though I certainly think it’s important to do work that you love. Many of the Times grooms, she found, were itching for Monday, so there’s not necessarily any contradiction between liking your work and getting paid well. Every career has ups and downs, and perhaps the difference betweenTimes grooms and Times brides is that the women just decided to chuck it all on the downs. After all, there’s no real social pressure not to, whereas there’s lots of social pressure working against men making similar choices.

The solution, she thinks, is for feminist groups (and, I would add, moms) to work more at training young women in the idea that they should be able to support their families. Young women need to learn to “prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a  position of unequal resources when you marry.” I’m not exactly sure how one imparts that wisdom as a practical matter, though she has her tips: marry a much older man, for instance, or else a much younger one or a starving artist or a liberal who will feel squeamish about undermining your career. Don’t switch jobs too often, and don’t invest too much meaning in the tasks of household work. Simply refuse to always be the party who notices you’re out of milk.