A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine published an article initially called "The Feminist Housewife" (and later changed, it seems, to "The Retro Wife"). The subtitle reads "feminists who say they're having it all - by choosing to stay home" and the article features the story of Kelly Makino, a mom who decided to stay at home full time.
What's wrong with that, you may ask? In my opinion, choosing to stay home has pros and cons. I would never judge anyone for their decision, one way or another. So Kelly's choice didn't rub me the wrong way, per se, but the article certainly did.
Let me give you a few examples...
She believes that every household needs one primary caretaker, that women are, broadly speaking, better at that job than men...Women, she believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums; "women," she says, "keep it together better than guys do."
Regular readers of my blog will know that this type of gender stereotyping bothers me. It is opinions like these that make it more difficult for women to achieve equality in the workplace, in society, and at home. If women are better at all these things, then obviously it makes sense for them to stay home instead of the men. And if it is okay to stereotype women and men this way as it relates to child rearing, what is to stop us from saying something similar about how men are simply better suited to corporate jobs than women (oh wait, people do say that all the time and we're trying to show that it isn't true.
..just as stay at home dads or couples where parenting is shared equally are trying to show that women aren't naturally better parents than men).Then there is what she wants for her daughter. The article explains:
Kelly calls herself “a flaming liberal” and a feminist, too. “I want my daughter to be able to do anything she wants,” she says. “But I also want to say, ‘Have a career that you can walk away from at the drop of a hat.’ ”
But wait...Kelly and Alvin have a son too. There is no mention of him needing to have a career he can walk away from at the drop of a hat. Even the photo used for the article not only emphasizes the gender roles that Kelly and Alvin have chosen for themselves, but also shows their daughter playing with a (albeit headless) Barbie while her son wears a cape and plays with a soccer ball.
Those are some of the words and opinions of Kelly, but there are also those of the article's author, Lisa Miller.
But what if all the fighting is just too much? That is, what if a woman isn’t earning Facebook money but the salary of a social worker? Or what if her husband works 80 hours a week, and her kid is acting out at school, and she’s sick of the perpetual disarray in the closets and the endless battles over who’s going to buy the milk and oversee the homework? Maybe most important, what if a woman doesn’t have Sandberg-Slaughter-Mayer-level ambition but a more modest amount that neither drives nor defines her?
What if we replaced woman with man, husband with wife, and Sandberg-Slaughter-Mayer with Gates-Page-Zuckerberg?
In the example of another family given in the article, the author writes: "Her husband's part of the arrangement is to go to work and deposit his paycheck in the joint account." While I recognize that in some families one parent may work more than the other, reducing a father to nothing more than a paycheque (and a sperm donor, I guess?) seems dehumanizing. Ah yes, and then there is "home, to these women, is more than a place to watch TV at the end of the day and motherhood more than a partial identity." But what is home and fatherhood to the men, I wonder?
Let's look at the research...
The article isn't all just skewed opinions, it is also sprinkled with some research.
Before they marry, college students of both genders almost universally tell social scientists that they want marriages in which housework, child care, professional ambition, and moneymaking will be respectfully negotiated and fully shared.
But that is just a pipe dream (or a "contemporary mating call"), apparently. Men don't really mean it and women are just dreaming in technicolour.
Despite their stated position, men still do far less housework than their spouses. In 2011, only 19 percent spent any time during the average day cleaning or doing laundry; among couples with kids younger than 6, men spent just 26 minutes a day doing what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “physical care,” which is to say bathing, feeding, or dressing children. (Women did more than twice as much.)
These statistics don't lie, but I don't think that means that women are simply more suited to child rearing and housework than men. I think it means there is still as much (if not more) inequality in the home as in the workplace. So how do couples handle that? Apparently plenty of conflict, the woman simply taking on more (i.e. a full time job plus most of the housework and parenting), or the woman opting out for the more rewarding lifestyle that Kelly opted for. Tackling the inequality through respectful cooperation and shared ownership of the household and parenting is apparently just not possible.
Passing on Values to Our Children
Kelly says that she, and other stay at home mothers, are "standing up for values, such as patience, and kindness, and respectful attention to the needs of others, that have little currency in the world of work." Those are important values for sure, ones that should be incorporated into the workplace and ones that should be passed on from father to children as well.
Showing our daughters that they can choose a career or to stay at home is important, but showing our sons the same thing is important too. Tackling inequality in a marriage and finding a respectful cooperative way to manage the household and raise the children isn't just good for the marriage. It will also help show our children that there are different ways of doing things and that a belief in equality is more than just an empty mating call.
That doesn't mean that being a stay-at-home mother is bad or unfeminist. It just means that for every home where a woman stays home, we also need one where the man stays home. If we don't do that, then we can't ensure that for every male CEO, there will also be a female CEO. Ann Marie Slaughter was right, women can't "have it all", nor should they. No one gets to have it all, but by working cooperatively and justly in our families and our communities, we can collectively have it all.