I Choose My Choice...

Here is a quite good article on motherhood, feminism, and career from the Atlantic Monthly: I Choose My Choice! (H/T Escape Brooklyn).  I strongly recommend it to SAHM, working moms, feminists, all women, really.  It makes me wonder how I have not heard of this author (Sandra Tsing Loh) before today.  Here are some of my favorite passages.

Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment, "mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have 'real' jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities."

Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.

Being an academic wife, this is a tension that I can unequivocally say I feel, daily.  In fact, one of the most tragic conflicts I have with my husband is his perception that I am giving my career undue weight.  For example, over the past year and half, there have been many, if not hundreds, of instances where I get a late afternoon call from a senior associate or a partner which requires me to change my original plans to get home and have dinner with J and my girls.  As far as J is concerned, this throws an almost unbearable wrench into our domestic tranquility.  First, it means a certain amount of last minute wheeling and dealing to make sure that the nanny can stay or that everything is in place for J to take over.  More importantly though, J finds it an unacceptable that I would make these sacrifices in the name of my job/career.

To some extent, I suppose his feelings are warranted.  I have made no secret of the fact that I have no intention of making partner at my current law firm, or any law firm for that matter.  Given my lack of "commitment", J simply doesn't understand why I can't or won't set stricter boundaries.  Why I don't tell the partner that I cannot stay late that day, or that what the partner needs will simply have to wait.  For me, it comes to my own sense of obligation - my competitive nature, and a generations deep work ethic, prevents me from working any less hard than those around me.  Furthermore, knowing what I do about the firm culture, I know that I'm not the type that can hold her head high while bearing the unfortunate tsk tsk-ing that will inevitably happen behind my back if I start to "slack".  (And not to mention, my firm has no beef with lay offs.  It has laid-off several associates this year already, under the guise of poor performance, and there are daily rumours about what group, what class will face the axe next).

Of course, J's infinitely flexible academic schedule makes him particularly insensitive to the pressures I feel at work.  He doesn't understand the grind and numbness of the daily work, the dread of being called into a partner's office unprepared, the endlessness and thanklessness of the work that lawyers do.  So to some extent, he is jealous, because he would far prefer to "work" than to have to labor at home doing the thankless job of taking care of our children, made even more thankless when I'm not around.

But aren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file. Unless he’s an abusive alcoholic or something similar, [it would be difficult for a husband] to be more oppressive than a “real” job...

But surely women’s economic independence is worth it? Oy. Wrong again... 

[While] the economy benefits [as double income means more discretionary income], for working-class families with young children, so much of a second income is eaten up by child care and taxes and other costs related to holding down a job that, after purchasing the microwave—now necessary to produce hot meals in the 10 minutes left for food preparation—and the de rigueur DVD player, the second wage earner might as well have stayed at home. Gilbert concludes, then, that financial need is not the force behind women’s shift in the past 50 years from work in the home to work in the market­place; rather, it is the desires of those who have made out like bandits in this new order, the tiny minority (3.5 percent in 2003) of women who earn $75,000 or more. Members of this occupational elite have created a host of cultural norms by which their far less privileged sisters—who, again, make up the vast majority of working women—feel they must abide. [emphasis mine] For Hirsh­man’s doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors, work has been terrific, so it’s no wonder they’ve advocated social change, imposing on society between the 1960s and the mid-1990s “new expectations about modern life, self-fulfillment, and the joys of work outside the home.”

This is scary for me, and it makes me fear for its veracity.  Although I interact with all socio-economic levels of women, the truth is, based on their educational backgrounds, most women I am close with belong to the described "privileged elite".  I think the measure is wrong - many of my non-profit breathren, for example, earn less than that keystone $75k.  But for most of them, they have done so as a choice.  Many of these women could have higher earning jobs as lawyers or bankers or upper managers, but they have chosen to take unconventional career paths that they find rewarding (much in the way that J has chosen his career path for its psychological rather than financial rewards).  Some of these women can afford to do so because they have husbands in more conventional careers providing a safety net.  Others, without the support of a partner, live paycheck to paycheck, but in some measure secure in the knowledge that if this particular endeavor were to fail, they have the kind of educational foundation (and socio-economic savvy) that would make it easy for them to reinvent themselves into more financial security.

I hate the feminist argument that if I don't succeed, I am letting down those generations of women before me that have paved the way for me.  I am grateful that we have seen cracks (18 million of them, according to Senator Clinton) in the glass ceiling.  I love the fact that I have never personally felt impeded by my sex with regards to the things I have chosen to do.  But I hate the idea of replacing one set of unattainable ideals (the stepford housewife) with another set of unattainable ideals (the ball-breaker super-woman).

SATC's Charlotte, whose plaintive wails of "I choose my choice! I choose my choice," when given flak for quitting her job to please her smug first husband may have been the too-loud protests of a woman in denial, but it behooves us to listen carefully when a woman declares that she has chosen her choice.  Sometimes, she has.

Comments

[cynematic]

Oh, Sandra Tsing Loh! Of _A Year in Van Nuys_ and _Ikea! Cry of a Lost Generation_ fame. Saw her one-woman show here about the absurdity/hypocrisy of liberals who shun the public school system (*Cynematic slowly raises hand*) and instead send their kids to private school. Mother on Fire, it was called (http://www.sandratsingloh.com/index.php?pr=Mother_on_Fire). Had me laughing til I cried and then also feeling tremendously guilty.

Love La Loh. Off to read the article now.