Choices

In yesterday's Times, Lisa Belkin writes about reactions to her famous (infamous) water-cooler article on the Opt-Out Moms. Prompted by Joan Williams's new study about press coverage of the work-life conflict, Belkin responds to many of her critics.

I remember when the article came out. I blogged about it. The article came out at the right time for me. I was wading into the work-life literature, because I had no clue how to raise two kids while making less money than my babysitter. I was overwhelmed with stress about money and time. I was giving lectures with two hours of sleep at a hostile university that underpaid me. I had never planned on being "just a mom" and it took a few years of deprogramming to get used to that concept. Belkin's article came out when I decided to stop adjuncting and to write at home while watching the kids.

Also, a lot of my friends at the time had made similar decisions. A good number of them weren't the wealthy suburban moms in the Belkin article, but were struggling in tiny rental apartments making sacrifices that most of you couldn't handle.

Was I pushed to stay at home or was I pulled by joys of afternoon hugs? Can I say both? Everybody has some external pressures on them which limit their options. My husband certainly didn't choose his career. My son would not be going to school, if I wasn't kicking him on the bus every morning. Hell, if given unlimited options, Jonah would be unbathed in his pajamas watching hours of cartoons. Probably, Steve would too, if we didn't have to pay a mortgage bill. So, it is impossible to imagine a world with no pressures or pushes.

When Belkin's article came out, it unleashed a tidal wave of fury. It was the most read article in the Times that year. Belkin responds to many of her critics.

I was always puzzled why that article ticked off so many people. Was it really about class-jealousy? Single people and double working families hated their jobs, so despised women who stopped working? Was it really about feminist whiplash? An older generation of women resented the unraveling of their movement? Was it about society-wide insecurity about family-work decisions? Nobody is entirely clear about their priorities and are deeply uncomfortable about others who do things differently?

Since that Belkin article came out, life changed quite a bit around here. We have financial security. The kids sleep through the night. One is in school full time and the other one is around the corner from that. The youngest one's speech problems continue to keep me up at night, but the babysteps of progress give us hope. And I have a job lined up for the spring.

I guess by some people's standards, opting out is forever. By taking these years off and reducing the geographic area for a job search, I have effectively taken myself out of the big leagues. Since my salary will never equal my husband's, I will always have to let some opportunities fly by. I guess I'm okay with that. As I get older, I don't enjoy stress as much as I used to. I also have a lot of time to write that great book. My dad just wrote one at age 69, so the game isn't over yet.

Belkin asks for commentary on her old article and on William's new study -- Belkin@nytimes.com. Tell her.

Comments

[jen]

I didn't like that article, and yes, it was the oblivious, upper middle classness of the women depicted. I still don't think Lisa Belkin gets it. it would have been better if she wrote about the incredible struggles of working class women who have to work. Or even one woman who got divorced as a cautionary tale I think most people can't feel sorry for Princeton and Duke graduates who leave their expensive careers after a couple years. L. Belkin still doesn't really address those women and I think her explanations are a little disingenuous.

I think having women as CEOs, Senators, etc. is very important, and most women can only get there by working full time. that is the truth.

But, Laura, I think you are right. Opt out is not forever. I do think it its important for everyone to realize that career fulfilment comes in many shapes and sizes. I hope in the future men and women can take parental leaves, work part time, and come back and be VPs, etc. I am coming to this point in my career now. Also: its much more important to do what is right than what you think should be right. Even though the personal is political.

[bj]

I also didn't like the opt-out article. But, I don't think it was "wrong" as Joan Williams argues. It described a highly priveleged class (who make a sufficiently large group in the readership of the NYT that such articles are common there). But, I think there's a real opt-out phenomenon going on in precisely this group of women (highly educated, high profile women, who are married to equally highly educated, high profile men). I found the article disturbing because I think the natural consequence of such opting out will be a gender segregated workforce, that filters down further into gender segregated classrooms, and disempowers women.

I'm starting hear rumblings of people (immediate managers, honestly, not bad people, just ones who need to get a job done, and by that I mean partners at law firms, department chairs in small departments, editors at journals, PI's of laboratories) worrying about hiring women, because they are worried that women are going to be less productive, not because of ability, but because of lack of committment.

All of the high profile jobs described in the "Opt out revolution" are ones that require a great deal of investment on the part of the employer (and society) before they pay off. For example, tenure-track faculty members in the sciences cost 500K on top of their salary, and are often given teaching breaks. They pay for themselves once they set up productive research labs, but they cost a lot up front. I hear that law firms think the first 5 years of an associate's work is a loss to the firm, in terms of salary & training.

And, society also invests in this subgroup of folks. I for example, calculated that the government (that means you, the american taxpayer) has invested over a million dollars in direct costs in training me (and I'm talking about money that actually came into my hands in some way -- not money used to support the institutions that trained me).

So, if opt-out becomes a real phenomenon (is it already? I think it is, and I think Joan Williams is an advocate, not an analyst), I think it will contribute to further gendering of our workplace, and thus to the decrease in women's power in the world. I see women opting (being pushed?) to make themselves dependent on men (again?) and that scares me.

bj
PS: Jen -- the NYT did profile a woman who divorced after staying home, and in fact, she had been someone who had written a book on the fulfillment of being a "homemaker" It was quite sad, but no one sees divorce (or death) happening to them.

[jen]

bj-I remember that...it was a personal essay in the style section and a bit of a different tone. but you are right: it was sad and a cautionary tale. But not quite the same as providing that point of view in the Opt Out article in the Magazine section.

[Laura]

Yes, Belkin writes about upper middle class women, but every life style article in the Times is from that perspective. The Style Section might as well be renamed "I Love Rich People Section." So, why pick on this article in particular? Belkin wasn't preachy in her tone. It wasn't ideological.

I think what ticked people off was that she wrote about women who left the workforce for a variety of reasons and were happy with their domestic lives. Belkin wasn't preaching that women should be happy as housewives. She interviewed real women who liked staying home full time and being with their kids. They preferred family life to work. Different people want different things. Shrug.

Women who stay out of the workforce permanently are at risk. I've written about that before. It's just that the risk of divorce is much less for this group of women. Some women make a calculated decision to structure their lives in a traditional manner, because their odds of divorce are small.

And, bj, the women who opt out do affect the women who keep working, just as the women who keep working affect the women who opt out. Not sure what to do about that, except to look for commonalties and seek change on those areas.

[jen]

Laura, different Jen here wondering if you can talk a bit about how women who work affect women who opt out? We've heard so much about opting out and its impact on the workplace, and the phenomenon of schools organizing themselves around stay-home parent schedules. What's the flip side, in your opinion?

[Amy P]

Jen II,

How about:

1. The classic "so what do you do?" followed by immediate diversion into baby/kid topics, with no attempt at general conversation. By the way, in my one-woman crusade to save general conversation, I recently had made up an SAHM "business card" for myself. It's got my name, the kids' names and ages, a picture of a cute yellow duckling, my telephone number, e-mail, and a list of my interests: "DC schools, child development, books, blogs, film, Catholic thought."

2. In certain areas, the prevalence of working moms means that an SAHM might have few or no "colleagues."

3. In a semi-sketchy neighborhood, if everyone is at work or school during the day, the neighborhood as a whole is more vulnerable to daytime crime.

[Laura]

"... wondering if you can talk a bit about how women who work affect women who opt out? We've heard so much about opting out and its impact on the workplace, and the phenomenon of schools organizing themselves around stay-home parent schedules. What's the flip side, in your opinion?"

Well, I don't really like this kind of us versus them type of arguing. I think it ends up pitting women against women while the patriarchy sits back and has a good laugh. But since you asked.... There have been several books on how the dual working families have had big impact on women who don't work. There's the Warren book, The Two Income Trap. There's also Home Alone America. Eberstadt and others have argued that with more women working, the stay at home moms are more isolated, have a bigger burden in the community and schools, and are treated with disrespect. Some say that if more women opted out, then business and government would be forced to make changes.

But I'm not a big fan of this type of discussion. Women shouldn't feel pressured to make themselves miserable, because of impact on the larger good. It's too hard to predict these large scale cause and effect. It's best to just do the right thing, whatever that is, for yourself and your family. Let the chips fall where they may.

[bj]

The "two income trap" is not a function of _women_ working. It's a trap of two incomes (to the extent that one thinks that's a trap). That's what bugs me most strongly about the "opting out" and other phenom, the "gendering" of those choices. The gendering is what I was actually trying to point out in my comment (not the impact on my own choices).

and, Laura, I disagree quite strongly to the characterization that people were ticked off about the "opting out" article, because "she wrote about women who left the workforce for a variety of reasons and were happy with their domestic lives. " Joan Williams, in particular, is a strong advocate of valuing "women's work" and actually spends much of her time trying to put a money value on it so that women will not be economically harmed by doing work that needs to get done at home.
I think many of us understand the call of home. What _I_ don't understand is why this call should be answered at the expense of decreasing the male parent's involvement at home, the flip side of the gendered division of labor.

In addition, if done respectfully, I think it's important to discuss how other people's choices affect our own, and think deeply about what rationale form our gut reactions (like my dislike of Belkin's "Opt out" article). It's important to have these discussions because they inform our political choices -- for example, I think that we have stalled on "family friendly" policies because different subgroups of people have very different ideas of what policies are "family friendly", not because the forces of corporate america oppose them.

bj

[Miranda]

I was angry at the Times article, but it wasn't because the women were happy at home. It was because it _seemed_ (I recognize that the reporter may not have completely delved into their psyches) like the women didn't have any angst at all over their choice to stay at home or realize that others may not have the choices that they do. This attitude is completely congruent with the Style section's focus on the entitled rich who display no awareness of their entitlement whatsoever. The whole thing reminded me too much of my Ivy League students who felt that they didn't need feminism (or that feminism was "over")because they could do anything they wanted and almost perfect equality had been achieved. I always presumed that over time, reality would change their opinions (nothing opened my eyes up to feminism and inequality like actually having and taking care of a child!), but the article suggested to me that this hadn't happened, and that made me sad.

So perhaps my reaction was too much driven by my personal experiences, but I think that the "mommy wars" coverage in general suffers from this--we all read the articles and because we are all dealing with so much of this in our personal lives, we react to them very personally.

[laura]

I like Joan Williams, so I don't feel like publicly bashing this report, but there are a lot of problems with it. I guess I expect more from an academic paper than a lifestyle piece in the Times, so I don't really fault Belkin for not addressing bigger issues, like why these decisions always fall on the shoulders of women.

I know a lot of women who've dropped out of the work force, some for the short term and others permanently. Some were pushed out (I probably fit in that camp). Williams and others do a good job dealing with that crowd. Others were pulled out. They honestly love being with their kids and really hated their jobs. Some even made huge financial sacrifices in order to stay home. I like that someone told their story. That's all I expect from a newspaper article -- reportage, not philosophy.

We might not like that women are taking time off, and we should definitely talk about that. As social scientists, I think it is great to stand back and objectively guess about the long term impact. Didn't mean to take issues off the table. However, Miranda is right. It is difficult to be an objective academic, when these matters are so personal.

[maddy]

I thought Belkin's article dealt with a lot of relevant issues. (Though I am always irked by privilege and money and reading about people who have a lot of these things!) I "opted out" but was absolutely influenced by a very family-unfriendly environment in my workplace.
I guess I am saying that I was also puzzled why so many people hated Belkin's article. I like Joan Williams' work a lot. I do think these issues are important, but it seems difficult to talk about them without igniting a flame war.