LJ Correspondent Harping on Gender Roles Again

[akujunkan]

Oh dear. The NYT is writing about gender again.

The main thrust of the article seems to be that, See? Even smart, successful Harvard women want to give up their careers for motherhood.

Fine. Maybe they do. But one of the really freaking obvious points the article fails to raise until the second page (and raise sufficiently, period) is that women who go to Harvard have the financial resources to enable them to become stay-at-home moms. What about women who didn't go to top-tier colleges and are headed for a double working household to make ends meet? What about the women who might want to give up their 'careers' in assembly line work or the food service industry to focus on their children? If you're only making $2.50 an hour plus tips, the decision to "put aside [your] career in favor of raising children" as the article puts it, is an entirely different proposition.

The article could have dealt with tough issues like how class and socioeconomic status restrict opportunities for everyone. Instead it offers pabulum - look, rich, educated, privileged post-first wave feminist women want to be stay-at-home mommies! - without questioning what poor, uneducated, underpriveleged women are supposed to do if they don't want to work after childbirth, or even how these issues might shape women's pre-motherhood expectations in the first place.

Then there's the problem of discourse. It's all about how you frame the discourse. What if this survey had been given to men as opposed to women? What do you think the gut reaction of Mr. or Ms. Average Public would be to results such as "roughly 90% [of men] said that when they had children, they had no plans to cut back on work or stop working entirely"? Or perhaps, "roughly 90% of men said they had no plans to give up their careers to help raise their children"?

Is that common knowledge? Yes, but doesn't it sound a whole lot more selfish when stated explicitly? The only problem is that men aren't the ones being surveyed with tripe like this and aren't being asked to verbalise their intentions to place their careers over their children. "Men really aren't put in that position," the article states. So why not start doing it?

Of course, issues of class and wealth, and reality versus the ideal all come into play here as well - most men are not career drones and do spend time with their children, despite what common wisdom says to the contrary, just as most women who might wish to be stay-at-home mothers aren't afforded the economic chance to do so.

I just wonder what all those Harvard undergrads with their glowing visions of Motherhood First are going to feel in ten or twenty years, when they're facing the reality of being the primary 24-7 caregiver in a society which does not offer support for child-raising individuals, or after their children head out to university, and they're too old and have been out of the workforce for too long to get anything but a wageslave job.


That will be all.

Comments

[bran420-7.livejournal.com]

That just goes to show you how the US media chooses to ignore the lower middle class and poor to produce statistics that are written to represent us. I want to be a stay-at-home mother and the sacrifice is how much my children might miss out on because of lack of funds. I find it sad that one income cannot support a family, so I'm either a bad parent for not giving my child every opportunity to find themselves, or because I'm never home because I work instead. How can you win when either way you're depicted as bad? Until forward thinking people like ourselves are paid to do the research, we will not be represented in the "facts".

[dark-waterlily.livejournal.com]

Media always act that way... here, we, women that belong to the middle and lower class must work... even when we don't have children; and usually we prefer career to motherhood since it is better one hungry and homeless human being than two, isn't it? and believe it or not, high class (and those who have a 'good' career) women don't want to be mommies, even when thay have more or less that possibility... reality stinks, here and there I guess =(