Feminism Marches On: Having It All
The battle is on. In one corner, you have the career and in the other—the family. Did second-wave feminists give women more respect and ambitions in the workplace, only to leave millions of women high-and-dry on how to balance career and family?
It appears that someone told women they could do it all and have it all. But can anyone? We are, after all, human beings, not mutants with superpowers. Of course, there are plenty of people out there who are trying to make “doing it all” a reality with friendly-family workplaces, tax breaks, and pro-child programs. Some feminist groups, as well as politicians and business owners, allow and encourage parent-entitlement.
The recent push for family-friendly workplaces has not met with backlash from just the childfree. Empty nesters and the childless often do not agree with such policies as well.
In the book, Women vs. Women: The Uncivil Business War, author Tara Roth Madden writes about a 40-something female manager and her perspective on new working mothers:
These professional mothers—not mothers who are professionals—are driving me crazy….I’d probably be further along in my career if I hadn’t juggled my daughter and her schedule with my husband and chores at home. Many a time I gave up lunch to run errands and many a time my husband fit a dance class car pool into his day. I consider myself a feminist, although I don’t belong to any group. They did inspire me to maintain a level of credibility at the office and move up the corporate ladder just like my husband did.
Now a young woman on our floor keeps badgering our bosses about every benefit in the book to make her life as a mommy easier. Well, I don’t need it and I don’t like it. She doesn’t know, or care to know, what a feeling of equality means or the fight some of us had to sustain it. I want management to see me as totally dedicated. I am. I don’t want my interests and perks to even be seen as bundled with hers.
Mothers in the workforce are at the forefront of women’s issues today.
Most women will become mothers at some point. However, simply because more than 50% of women are mothers does not mean their demands for office perks should be met without serious consideration on how these demands affect the workforce as a whole. Giving mothers more time off or giving them less demanding schedules only because they are mothers creates a backlash among the male, childless, childfree, and empty nest employees. The upshot is that Human Resources managers may try to avoid hiring women, especially if the female interviewee lets slip she has children or plans to have them in the future. Many mothers cost employers more than other employees due to their demands for things like lactations rooms, on-site daycare, and flexible schedules. Other women bear the brunt of the backlash — once bitten, twice shy, as they say. Employers who have been raked over the coals by mothers scrutinize all female employees as possible money pits, whether the women have requested any special benefits or not.
The question is: did feminists do this? For nearly two hundred years, feminists have helped women gain control their own minds, bodies, and lives, but apparently even those feminists felt that motherhood made women somehow special. “Most suffragists were ga-ga about motherhood, convinced that it elevated women above mortal men,” writes Elinor Burkett in The Baby Boon. She goes on to say that, “Few of those first women’s rights activists foresaw the conflicts that would be generated when that fervent commitment to motherhood sought to accommodate their equally ardent commitment to women’s work outside the home.” Even the unmarried and childless Susan B. Anthony enjoyed handling children, and considered motherhood to be one of the greatest functions of humanity.
Burkett also writes about how feminist organizations today seek out privileges for mothers, “By the late 1990s, the National Organization for Women, which [Betty] Friedan helped found, was as much a mothers’ lobby as a feminist liberation brigade. Leaders of the group still talked about the Equal Rights Amendment, sexual harassment, and abortion. But among key issues they were pushing in Washington was a law mandating that employers provide women with time and space to pump breast milk at work and increased funding for daycare.”
Politicians are also known to give mothers special privileges. Current presidential candidates push the “for the children” routine, and one even insists that it really does take a village to raise a child. These politicians, and others who simply agree with them, see women deferring child-bearing to focus on work—and they think it’s tragic. And to help alleviate the pressures of motherhood, they give parents benefits and breaks.
Salary.com divvied up a list of “jobs” mothers do, such as being a janitor, psychologist, and CEO of a household. However, no one gets paid to be a CEO and a janitor, and a psychologist, etc. Claiming that mothers should be paid over $130,000 per year, mostly for doing jobs everyone else also does for free (like cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning house, maintaining a car) was a sugary-sweet, but ultimately empty, attempt to show that moms who stay home are worth more than anyone else, even if they don’t get a paycheck. Fortunately, few buy that argument, even among mothers. One mother wrote in her blog that her dog was also worth that much money, since he was quite busy being her security guard and touch therapist.
These days, many want to make life easier on moms, but no one else, and newspaper articles and advertisements glorify motherhood in every way one can possibly imagine. At least some see through the rather thinly disguised pressure to get women back at home making babies, just like their mamas and grandmas did in the 1950s.
Next month:
What do men have to say about the special privileges afforded to mothers and issues dealing with family?
Copyright A. Anderson. Published 1 June 2007 in Features.
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