Another disturbing set of interactions from the discussions of child-care policy here on Daily Kos.
Some ask what benefit it is to send women to work in order to put their children are in daycare... and the only reply has to do with the efficiencies of caring for one child rather than many. Another commenter offers that children don't stay small forever, and, "a career can wait."
Is awareness really so low, even at a Democratic site? Has the feminist movement really accomplished so little? Or is it that we have regressed so far?
Forget the economic consequences of women staying home with small children for years: the loss of income, the years of zeroes being added in to their average yearly income for Social Security purposes, setting up for old age poverty. Forget the research that suggests that children whose mothers go back to work after they are a year old actually do better.
Motherhood is so mythologized in this culture that what I am about to say is taboo: spending one's days wiping poop, cleaning up vomit, and spending a half hour to get a half cup of food painstakingly into a small mouth is not necessarily the most rewarding job in the world. (Fathers can also do this work, and some do, but the propaganda is not directed at them.) Yes, child care requires intelligence and patience, and we should value (and remunerate) it far more highly than we do. But being a stay-at-home parent, or what used to be called a homemaker, can be tedious, isolating, and thankless. This is not recent, cutting edge insight: we are in the realm of The Feminine Mystique, here.
And yet, any mother who would rather be doing something else with much of her time is still, in many places, made to question her fitness as a parent, her love for her children, and even her sanity. I recently read a page of confessions from women who 'love [their] children, but hate being a mother.' As a woman who is child-free, I could see myself responding the same way to parenthood, regardless of division of labor or child care arrangements: I do not want to be a parent. Period. But what was so heartbreaking about reading that page was how the women seemed to accept that the drudgery and sacrifices of child-rearing would be theirs alone, with their husbands (who sometimes badgered them into reproducing) credited with being good guys if they helped out a bit.
Then there is the matter of careers. Clearly the Kossack who said, "a career can wait," never read much Ms. Magazine. Even back in the tech boom years of the 1990s, career women who took five years off to stay home with small children, even if that was what they wanted to do, found themselves irrelevant to potential new employers, let alone women who took off a decade or more. Even women who went back to work almost immediately after giving birth could find themselves consigned to the "Mommy Track", passed over for assignments and promotions (and raises) on the basis that work was not their first priority. Of course, fathers were not and are not pushed onto a "Daddy Track".
And that was before the Bush Recession. How many articles have you read since 2008 about the plight of the long-term unemployed? Blithely telling anyone to take a few years off is flat irresponsible. Companies don't favor a candidate who's been out of the workforce for years over new graduates and the currently employed, regardless of whether she happens to be a mother.
But the problem with declaring that a career can wait goes far deeper than the practicalities of whether a given career actually can. Such a statement is profoundly disrespectful of women's capabilities, of our intellect, of our full and diverse humanity. It is something that would almost never be said to a man. Men are not presumed to have no higher purpose in life than procreating and parenting. Generation after generation of men have not been asked or forced to set aside their own ambitions for the good of their children, each generation a sacrifice for the advancement of (only half of) the next.
And it ignores the contributions that women have and will make to society as a whole. It ignores all the female scientists and activists working to save the planet, the female doctors working to save lives, the female artists working to enlighten and entertain, the female journalists and lawyers working to bring clarity and justice, the female politicians working for our rights and freedoms. It dismisses as replaceable the female teacher who may awaken in your child a love of math or a belief in herself. It ignores that the brilliant researcher whose work might wind up saving your life could be a woman and a mother.
But oh, I'm sure that cancer or that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can wait five years.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want women like Amy Goodman, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Harris-Perry, Darcy Burner, Elizabeth Warren, Jessica Valenti, the late Georgia Little Shield, or climate researcher Makiko Sato, to put their careers on hold for a half decade or more. (Some of them may have done so in the past; others, who knows if we would have heard of them if they had.) Even if some of these women are beyond the age where they might be asked to sacrifice career for family, their successors, and millions of non-famous women doing vital work, are not. And consider that having mothers who work outside the home may actually be good for children. Especially for girls.
But wait, you say, what about the single mothers who are forced to work minimum wage (or lower) jobs, leaving their kids alone almost all their waking hours? That can't be so great for the children.
Well, that is a separate problem. Several, actually, involving for a start living wages, affordable childcare, and welfare policy. But even there, we must look deeper, to the structural inequalities that keep poor women, especially women of color, shut out of opportunities for educational and career advancement.
The game-changing answer to, "Her only options are to stay home and care for her kids, or to wait tables for twelve hours a day while they fend for themselves," isn't, "Well, then, pay her and let her stay home with the kids." The game-changing answer is, "How do we make it so that those are not her only options?"
© cai