Arts & Culture
Michelle Obama and the End of Feminism As We Know It
By Rebecca Walker / November 20, 2008
There were several unforgettable moments in the Obama campaign—Barack’s impassioned speech about race, the DNC finale at Invesco, Madelyn Dunham’s death just before her grandson became president-elect—but none meant more to me than a two-minute bit of tape, a simple but monumental exchange between Michelle Obama and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. In her interview with Michelle, Soledad circled around the issues placed at the center of every discussion about female identity by second-wave feminism. O’Brien wondered how Michelle felt about following a dream that wasn’t hers. She asked about leaving a "high-powered and highly compensated" career. Michelle acknowledged the challenges. She graciously offered that she missed her colleagues and her work. But, she continued, she could always find another career. With only the slightest hint of irony, she said if she had more time, she might bemoan the loss, but she "had a lot on her plate" and what she was doing was "pretty significant." I thought, "You go, girl!" As if working with the love of her life and the father of her children to become the first family of the United States while radically transforming the world as we know it isn’t the most empowering choice a brilliant and self-determining woman could make. But the real moment came in the next beat, 30 seconds that remain forever etched in my mind as the final blow to an ideology in which women’s empowerment is narrowly defined by financial independence, emotional autonomy and professional advancement. O’Brien went in for the kill, the coup de grâce of second-wave feminism. "But sometimes your career helps to define who you are," she said, probing. "It doesn’t for me," Michelle said immediately. "What I do in my life defines me. A career is one of the many things I do in my life. I am a mother first. Where do I get my joy and my energy first and foremost? From my kids." As a mother, I understood the second half of what Michelle said. But as a woman, as a human being, it was the first part of her answer that I realized I—and the rest of the world—needed and still need to hear. What I do in my life defines me. Not my career, not money, not awards or accolades, but the whole thing, the sum of all of the parts. My life. You know, life? The one that includes showing up and embracing all of it: financial pressure and anniversary dinners, security details and ballet recitals, demeaning attacks and uplifting stump speeches, grueling late-night conversations and awesome feats of self-sacrifice, tidal waves of overwhelming satisfaction and grim truths of mistakes made and opportunities lost. The hungry kids and the empty gas tank, the deadline, the Pilates class, the Apple store, the "Shit, I have got to go get my hair handled, today!" The showing up for the people you love no matter what. The growing confidence in the decisions you made. The wonder at the way your life is unfolding. In that life, the one that isn’t defined by ideology or obligation, openness is the guiding principle. You keep your eye on cherishing your partnership and protecting your family. You keep your mind sharp and your soul deep. And, if you are Michelle Obama, you do it all in a fabulous red dress with your good-looking husband and well-educated children by your side. Michelle Obama embodies feminist goals, and in her determination to live in sync with a vision larger than her gender and individual ego, she surpasses them. This is no time or place to be paralyzed by dogma. She cannot lie in bed and wonder if her choices are feminist enough or whether they send the correct message to women around the world. She can accept her role at the center of history and rely on her aspiration to be her best self to transcend narrow categories of feminist identity and, in doing so, inspire others to the same. In other words, Michelle Obama doesn’t need a message. She is the message. But there is even more to this story. For the last 30 years, feminist discourse has struggled to be inclusive of the perspectives of women of color, to honor "the way we do things." At the heart of feminism’s slippery promise of diversity lay its white centrism, its monopoly by women over 50, its de facto placement of the rest of us in the margins. The rise of Michelle Obama challenges that centrism by following in the footsteps of female intellectuals and women of conscience like Anna Julia Cooper, who fought on behalf of women and all those who were oppressed. "The cause of freedom," Cooper wrote, "is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity." Unlike the leaders for suffrage who abandoned the cause of women of color in order to get the vote, women of color have historically refused to abandon any part of themselves or their community in the name of political expediency. All must be saved or none. My sense is that Michelle Obama’s scope and influence will be equally broad. When she voices her concerns, she mentions "working folks," "a balance of work and family for women" and military families left out in the cold. Michelle offers a possibility for change, a new kind of female leadership. And this, my friends, is a major turn of events. The wild card, of course, will be the response of those currently at the center of the women’s movement, who will no doubt find themselves displaced, pushed more into the margin than ever before. How will second-wave feminism find relevance when a devoted partner, full-time mother and credentialed black powerhouse becomes first lady, and doesn’t feel victimized by the job? That will be for them to wrestle with. Not Michelle.
Cross posted at my blog at The Root.
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"You help the way I tell you, and don’t talk back." Embroider that on a flag.
The right kind of man finds that OK. Sweet, even. Impressive. Possibly even scary. Mother wolf. But he understands she knows what she’s doing, and we should all go along. He also knows it’s what his kid needs, to develop into a fine kid. The right kind of guy defends, her so nobody can disturb her moves. He knows the process is complicated and valuable. It is one of the grandest things in nature, and he has front-row seats, to watch a previously normal, affable, nice, girl or woman, turn into an Officer. Mama.
Women who never do this remain Junior Grade all their lives. They have never pulled guard duty at 4 am. They never grow up. And that goes for the men, too. NEVER take serious advice from someone who isn’t married. And you will do better if they have children. Nice children.
Don’t waste bandwidth telling us all how unfair that is. Some people can’t find a spouse and some spouses can’t have children. But life is not a bowl of cherries and no, it isn’t always fair.
:) My message to the community is much simpler: "I bring kid. You help the way I tell you and don’t talk back." Now, if we’re talking about power in the Jewish community, I must say, there’s nothing like having the kid, esp. in non-Orthodox communities. This is evanescent, sure, but in the meantime it’ll help. It’s unfortunate that more Reform- or no-background Jewish mothers don’t understand how this works, btw, because I find that many get surprised and put off by the incessant requests for big money, and they leave and don’t come back. You can stop all that arm-twisting with one look if you’re the mother of a kid-aged child, but I don’t think these women really understand that.
The electric candles she could watch you light, and sing over, with covered eyes, might be good. Just for a few years, until you feel better about open flame. Or even go electric forever. G-d is definitely interested that she should see you do this, and sing with you. In time, she might even have her own smaller electric candle to light too. This stuff is important. You get a little scarf tied around your head, just to light. But she has to wait until she is a married lady for that, a badge of maturity. Something to look forward to. Something to have in common with Jews everywhere. Think about them all, when you light. You are singing with them all.
She isn’t going to stay in that little town forever, and this way she will have a passport to many unknown friends, in as yet un-dreamed-of places.
Vegan daycare or not, she is going to have to be a citizen of something. Claim her before they do.
Consider what kind of parents her children should have. You are going to be sitting at a table with this future couple, heaven help you.
No, it’s not too soon. Your ability to influence her in a definitive way, "yes to this", "no to that", has only a very few years to run. What is she, six? You have maybe three years. Tops. Three years to nine. The changes start then, and they eye gets a distant look in it.
Your message to the Jewish universe should be: "Look, I married. I had a kid. Not everything went swimmingly. But, you know what? I’m handling it all, and I have no regrets, and I have a kaddish, for Pete’s sake. Someone will care when I’m gone. It’s not an atomic bomb, it’s just a baby. This is life, and it’s fun, and it is the best thing I ever did. And I have done a lot in my life, too - I am not a domestic retard. And I am not poor, or oppressed. I am not so easy to oppress. Maybe you noticed that about me. I’m a Jewish woman. Yeah, fine. I’m a Jewish Mother. You got a problem with that? You wanna take it outside?"
Anon 12/08, you’re pretty mixed up, or maybe just not reading well. Yes, my daughter goes to a daycare that’s like a trip back to the 1970s — it’s run by Quakerish microbus hippies. The main caregiver is a guy who looks like Burt of the Bees; the kids run around barefoot with the dogs, the food’s vegan, there are a lot of longhaired classically trained musicians, and there’s a heavy barter component in how they get their (beautiful, organic) food and home repairs. The place has multiple two-mommy families. It’s a beautiful place, and they take table manners and respectful communication seriously, but I don’t think Mr. Nixon would be comfortable.
Your headline is annoyed at Michelle Obama’s old-fashioned 1970′s Mommyhood …BUT… you choose a ’70′s atmosphere as best for your child! Which it obviously is. You are right. You just aren’t being very honest………..
You are left-wing when right-wing doesn’t work out. Forty minutes of talk later, you acknowledge that right-wing is better. It’s Plan A. Left-wing is Plan B.
Don’t sell us leftism when you don’t like it yourself - when your own chld is involved. You want the best for her. The best means, as shown by your actions, an atmosphere as far to the right, culturally, as your unusually high level of empowerment can obtain for her. Gee wiz! Who knew!
You paint this picture: small town America and the American South are where people are still caring, involved, nice …. and not left of center. We don’t see you on the Coasts. You are in the middle of the country, where a boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl. Your quarrel isn’t with Michelle Obama, it’s with Bill Ayers, who wants to Queer Elementary Education (google it).
All this is fine with me! But you are going to be drummed out of the next Lilith meeting.
Your lessons are good, but you are withholding some of your wisdom, and we have to tell the whole truth…. Shabbat Shalom
I can’t go without this, about luck –
A couple of weeks ago I got sick with something going around — it really knocked me down. This little girl would not stop trying to do things to help me feel better, and when I lay down, she ran out of the room, got her softest blanket, wrote "I LOVE YOU" on it (washable marker), and spread it over me. I said to her, "I’m very lucky to have such a loving daughter."
She puts her hand on my arm, looks dead-serious and all Marlene-Dietrich, and says huskily, "No. Not lucky. I do it because of what you taught me. This is what you do for me when you’re taking care of me." Can you believe it? Then she sat back, satisfied, and we watched some TV together.
"HOW did you find such a genuine, old-fashioned, concerned, motherly woman?"
:) I am incredibly lucky. Really, she’s a wonderful woman, and formerly a client of mine — actually my ex introduced us, he’d worked for her company. (She left the job to go do church work for a while; she’s back to work as a freelancer herself now.) She grew up in the South and takes friendships and caring for people very seriously, and she did some daycare work in college. She’s the kind of woman who, when you’re a kid, really makes you feel wonderful, and like you’re a terrific person. Her house is full of art supplies and toys and kid-sized stuff, and she’s navigated stepmom territory pretty beautifully, too.
She’s also, God bless her, a great friend in times of need. My ex’s disability has become an issue while I’m away — he was supposed to take over from my friend today — and my friend stepped in again until I arranged other help and told her to go do her own work, of which she had plenty waiting. Really, she had me kind of choked up, and she got annoyed and called me a Yankee. :)
So yes, even when I’m far away from home and on the job, the mother job is alive and well. I was up till 5 am last night emailing and phoning back home to make sure my daughter would be taken care of, things wouldn’t be scary, etc. Luckily I had the day off today, so the only thing that suffered was shopping for presents (and I’ll be up a little late prepping for tomorrow). This is where the women from shul and the rabbi came in — several women have rallied around, and are standing ready to look after my daughter for a day or so. I’m also lucky in having a child who’s a good and thoughtful little guest. Frankly, in a sad way, I think it’s nice for her, too, staying with other families. She has no siblings, and doesn’t often see whole families with kids together — she sees kids, mothers, her father, her father and grandparents. But not functioning families with kids. Which, granted, are not always as functional as they look, but still it’s good for her to see, and she likes being there.
The stipends and childcare — well, the internet makes the learning curve steeper. I have 6 years’ study in Mother With (Mostly) Functioning Mind. I should have a PhD. It helps to know something about the politics of family-friendliness and budgets. I’ve found, incidentally, that if I go in saying "this will happen" rather than "please may I", a lot more goes my way, whether or not I have the standing to push anything through. You don’t have to be openly brass-balls about it, just completely serious and willing to follow through with some energy.
As for luck…well, as my old advisor says, "not lucky enough"! I don’t know what my girl’s learning from me about it; I hope I’m teaching her to pay attention to what she wants and what she sees, to be curious about the world and find it normal to inquire, to think ahead, to take responsibilities seriously, to work until the job is done. From her wonderful daycare people — really, they’re amazing, and it’s like a little corner of 1970 there, sun-dappling in the backyard and all — she’s learned much about respect for other people and animals, how to get along, how to solve social problems, how to take care of and teach younger children with patience and love, how to eat well.
To be more serious about the luck, I chose intentionally to raise a child in a safe, easy, inexpensive, well-kept place where responsibility, education, and courtesy are the norm. (No, I won’t say where, but there are still others like it.) All the good-gardening metaphors apply. The place struck me as a good, well-protected place to have a child long before I had any intention of becoming a mother. I also chose to wait until I believed I could raise a child well on my own, if necessary. In my 20s, I saw enough divorced, impoverished friends struggling to raise themselves and their children simultaneously to convince me not to jump into motherhood. Every one of my friends had believed her marriage would last forever. Every one had believed she could rely on the man and his family. Their own parents offered some help, but not without a heavy price, and not nearly as much as was needed.
I was also born smart and given a good education by my own family. And — this is important — I did time as an honorary man. I was treated that way from the first day of my freshman year of college until motherhood, and I really learned a sense of entitlement. Not to things or money, but to the ability to set things up how I wanted, and do the work I wanted. I learned doors should be open to me, and that if they weren’t, something was wrong, and I had every right to shove them open. I hear from a lot of young, single mothers who are not educated, and they don’t have that sense of entitlement. It makes a tremendous difference, and it can take them decades to learn that yes, they’re entitled to look for and take opportunities. I didn’t appreciate that until a few years ago.
This whole boomer mentality of "I raised you; I’m done and I’m off to St. Barts" is not, I suspect, long for this world. The American economic gianthood that spawned it is, well, gone. And now we know it’s gone. Don’t forget, though, that many grandmothers really do help quite a bit. But they’re often still working, too, or far away from some or all of their children. And if they’ve retired, especially if they’re not in great shape, I think there’s a limit to how much energy you can expect them to expend for the grandchildren. My ex’s parents essentially help him take care of our daughter every weekend. But they’re retired, they never did take care of themselves, and they’re poor. At some point they will not be able to help him like they do. My mother is busy taking care of her own 87-year-old mother and, when she can, helps with my nephew, who was born prematurely; she also has a stepfamily, and until recently was working fulltime. My father is nearing 70, lives a thousand miles from me, and is not well. So in many respects I think the golden age of Grandma is also past. It really requires that family members live near each other and are either so rich that relatively young people can retire, or so poor that they’re forced into each others’ laps.
OK, I’d better get to work. Thanks for the encouragement and kind words.
Great. Thanks for the details about stipends and childcare. THIS is going to make marriages possible, and keep marriages together. Hurray for your positive contribution – maybe we won’t go extinct after all. This should be copied by everybody.
The daily contact of the father with the child should be fought for, by everybody, too, if appropriate.
Good for you. You seem particularly lucky, but you are also teaching HOW to be lucky, which is useful. HOW do you have a girlfriend who is so fascinated by your child she is like an honorary aunt and takes care of her so well? Many real aunts don’t do this! HOW did you find such a genuine, old-fashioned, concerned, motherly woman?
My peeve is the older women who don’t help out so their daughters can’t have kids. And a woman who is not in a comfortable position to have kids won’t marry either – the guy knows better. It’s the old ladies’ fault! WHO SAID they are done with the job?
People should have fun, and fulfill themselves, as they go along, not save all that up for Later and run off useless.
I am for a MIX of child care and work or at least outside interests kept up – not a hundred percent domesticity, which is indeed terminally boring, as you say. Anybody who does that isn’t trying. Everybody has a half hour a day to read, after the baby is nine months, anyway.
1. Linda Hirshman. Get to Work.
2. I ask for bonded, trained, on-site conference childcare providers like Kiddiecorp, which will provide care, meals, and activities during daytime sessions (full or part-time) as well as during dinner/evening hours so conferees can go out and do the bonding/hobnobbing thing that’s important professionally, and which is often the point of the conference. Generally the parents pay a daily or hourly fee. I specifically say that hotel-desk recommendations for babysitters are not adequate — you have no idea who these people are, they’re responsible to no one, and if they show up they essentially sit in the room with the kid and watch TV. You have no idea who else they might be letting into your room when you’re gone.
3. I email desirable invitee (DI), and, as part of invitation, ask if a childcare stipend of $x00 would be helpful if it can be arranged, for use here or there, particularly if childcare is an issue (DI is chronically busy, spouse may not appreciate being left alone with kids again for a few days). DI, surprised, says yes thanks. I go around and ask for money for travel expenses, saying I’m looking for $x00 for DI and/or that I have tentatively offered DI xyz including this childcare stipend (which DI has indicated will help make the trip possible, and which is minor in the scheme of things) and get commitments. I email DI and say you’re all set; DI arrives; money is delivered.
4. Do you want to explain where you found all that to react to in my posts?
5. Perhaps you ought first to ask the women concerned whether they want to be sequestered. I can give you my answer very earthily. I just spent the afternoon interviewing a couple in their 80s — a Jewish couple, as it happens — and the woman went on at some length about how nuts with boredom she was while home with their kids; when the youngest was a preschooler she found work. Don’t delude yourself about how much Every Woman loves the nonstop company of and responsibility for small children. (I haven’t met the kids, who are both my parents’ age, but they’re quite successful and have families of their own.)
Re: strapping kid to back and working: See (5). If you must feel sorry for me, please send some nice chocolates.
Re: "
Sometimes, you will have to stint one of your roles. Which one will it be? You need to be clear, ahead of time, about that." :D Clearly you’re not responsible for the daily care of children. There’s not much you can be crystal-clear about ahead of time when it comes to raising kids. The answer to ‘which one’ is ‘it depends’. For me, today, the answer is ‘mother.’ I’m thousands of miles away from my child; she’s staying with a dear friend and apparently enjoying herself so much there that she doesn’t want to see her daycare friends or go to her dad’s. Another day, the answer will be ‘work takes it in the neck’. Which day? I can’t answer that. It depends. There was another trip I cancelled at the last minute a year ago, for compelling kid-related reasons.
The days of men landing in the hospital for leaving their families are long gone by, and frankly, as just as the beatings may have been, they didn’t do a hell of a lot for the women and kids left behind, and the men could (and did) move and start over. The women also suffered a stigma for having been left, the presumption being that something was wrong with her if she couldn’t keep her man. After having been left, the woman was advised to grab any shnorrer willing to have her — after all, as a woman (aging, yet) with someone else’s children, she was pathetic and not so desirable. God forbid the woman should have value in herself, after all, or see that she could take care of herself and her children better than the shnorrer could. These protectors of society managed to shame the kids, too, for growing up fatherless.
I don’t promise all women will love their work or (not that it follows) be lawyers. However, if they wind up divorced, their odds of keeping their kids safe and out of poverty are much better if they have prenups, current resumes, and useful college degrees. I’m very glad I did wait so long and acquire the resume and assets I did before I became a mother; my kid and I would be in a much tougher circumstance now if I hadn’t.
As for the mothers who do love their work and/or are hotshot lawyers, if they behave as though their liberties are God-given, and don’t protect those liberties, they run the risk of seeing their daughters grow up to be more dependent on the men they marry. More constrained by them, too.
What happened to the man in my picture? He lives a couple miles across town. He sees our daughter daily, and spends more time with her than most married fathers spend with their children. It’s in small chunks or with his parents’ support, so that he doesn’t end up with more childcare at a time than he can handle, given his disability and her age. I fought my lawyer to see that it happened that way, instead of in the usual "every other weekend and dinner Wednesdays" fashion.
Any other questions?
1) WHAT book did you refer to ? Complete name, author, publisher? Hirschfeld? Who?
2) May we have a full, detailed, description of the child-care arrangements you insist on, when you organize meetings or conferences, how that worked, and how you made it work? This is news! Be specific!
3) May we have a detailed description of the "child care time compensation" payments you arranged for, and how that worked? That was for the OTHER parent? This is news! Be specific!
4) RESULTS MATTER: Exactly how many adults do you personally know whose mothers operated this way when they were children? Are they OK? In therapy? All people are equally precious. We don’t want to have a vigorous, productive, fabulous life, at the expense of someone else. We don’t want a victory that is really just delaying the defeat into the next generation.
You are so very sure there is no good reason for all this sequestering of the Nurturing Mother. Is it total baloney, or just not done right? We PITY those women who give birth in the fields, strap the kid on their bent backs, and keep working. What’s so great about that? You are just a Western version of that. You happen to enjoy your work. Does everybody? Have you read Dilbert?
Of course there is a happy medium. A bit of both – kids, work.
Sometimes, you will have to stint one of your roles. Which one will it be? You need to be clear, ahead of time, about that.
5) You posit a Mother who doesn’t need anybody. I admire your skills, but I can’t help wondering what happened to the man in the picture. OK, your case was unusual, a handicapped man.
Time was, if a guy left his wife, in certain neighborhoods, unpleasant things happened to him, on a dark night. Even in polite society, he was looked at cross-eyed, not liked, not invited, not hired, not promoted. Single guys, past a certain age, were given sharp eyeballs then, and found themselves stuck low down. If not on the down low.
Let’s bring all that back. We are far too nice. A guy used to NEED a wife, and it was a living, for the Ordinary Woman.
THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO CANNOT PASS THE LSAT. Why should they be socially sterilized? You are cool, but you are no model for them.
Oh, OK, I see now where this comes from:
"that there are many ways of looking, and that a mono-view of "the lot of
women" is anachronistic at best, dangerously naive at and condescending
at worst. "
I don’t know how naive my statement is — remember, I’m talking about mothers. Over the last few years, thanks in large measure to the aforementioned lack of social life and sole responsibility for the kid after 6 pm, I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time listening to American mothers on the largest mothers’ fora, including professional fora with corners colonized by mothers, and done more research than is healthy on why most people behave so horribly in divorce. (I thought I was having a horrible divorce. Turned out it was a gem among divorces.) It’s a pretty good cross-section; all told I’ve probably read posts from several hundred mothers, possibly as high as the low 1000s.
Here’s what I found:
1. Very few mothers have their own money, much less education and careers that might allow them to walk out of marriage with their children and keep living comfortably. In divorce, it’s extremely unusual for a woman to be able to go out and plunk down a fat retainer for a good lawyer, regardless of her household income. 10 of 13 million households run by single mothers are poor; only a sliver of the remaining 3 million have incomes of $50K+.
2. Most mothers expect (and get) very little from the men, married or not. If a husband is a good provider and is nice to the children, all is well, all hurts are rationalized, and the women will spend serious time attacking themselves for not being sweeter to the men. If the man is not a good provider and spends his days on the couch or at bars, the women will try vigorously to "help" the man turn around, by nagging, wheedling, therapizing, etc. This can go on for months or years before she decides he’s a bum and (add more years) leaves. As for what they get from the men after divorce, well, child support delinquencies hover around 80% of cases nationally. Child support seldom pays half the real costs of raising the child, and does not take into account either the effect of custody on the mother’s ability to work or the value of her time. (In my state, the average support order for one child is about $300/mo; by default, the noncustodial parent is not responsible for any childcare costs.) The states do not view delinquencies being important enough to put serious resources behind either tracking down the men or putting them to work.
3. Most mothers are, without question, primary parents. If they want to or must work, finding and figuring out how to pay for childcare is their responsibility.
4. Most mothers in professions fight daily to be taken seriously, and must be extremely careful in when and where they admit to their kids’ existence. Exception: Some human-services work. Pregnant residents or doctors in group practices can expect vicious blame and accusations if they take time off, manage to get out of on-call work, or want to sit down and rest.
5. Divorced mothers who do not have custody of their children are viewed as monsters.
6. All these generalization survive when looking at the lives of mothers of my acquaintance in real life.
7. If the mother has a professional career, it’s almost always less important than the father’s, and can be sacrificed for the sake of family. Stay-home daddyhood generally lasts 2-5 years, after which the dads get busy reestablishing their careers, and the mothers sacrifice their own to a considerable degree, or entirely.
7. Mothers are not recognized as political actors, except as "soccer moms" – a derisory shorthand for some mythical half-mom, half-minivan beast. Sarah Palin was a surprise because her constituency had not been recognized before, even though it’s comprised a large chunk of American women for the last 15-20 years. These are mothers who work but bring in a good chunk of the household income, do nearly all the family work, are primary parents, and work hard to see that their husbands don’t feel useless.
So no, there’s nothing anachronistic about this. All is current. Dependent, check; discriminated against, check; disrespected, check; poor, check.
All right. I’ve read your related comments on your blog.
I’d agree with this distinction between power and influence:
"I think that power is the ability to directly create outcomes due to
direct control of people or institutions. Influence I see as the
ability to indirectly create outcomes through the ability to impact the
thinking (and therefore the behavior) of others."
Which would I prefer? The former, of course. The latter often flows from it anyway.
My mother and grandmothers were housewives, each raising two children. I remember the day I understood why their behavior, by the standards of women my age, was so very manipulative, why they had whole arsenals of bitchiness and wheedling and patient campaigning, why they seemed so unapologetically sneaky in "trying to get [father] to do something," why they bothered to nag, why they spent so much time on these miserable things. It was because they had nothing of their own, found life without a husband unthinkable, and had no way of acting on anyone but their children and friends except through manipulating their husbands. A woman who was an accomplished husband-manipulator, one who knew what "too far" meant but knew how to play him to his own benefit and the family’s, was someone to admire.
My mother and my living grandmother were often very critical of the choices I made — even as I got ready for college my mother wanted to sign me up for secretarial school, in case I needed something to fall back on. My life seemed to them one terrifying, unnecessary, lonely danger after the next. After 20 years of that, they’re now not only proud of me but admire how I’ve done, how I’ve pulled it off. My grandmother’s asked me how I’ve had the courage and the nerve to do these things, and I told her that for me, especially early in life, there was nothing but open doors. My choices didn’t require all that much courage and nerve, because I presumed (correctly) that I had the power to take them. The older I get, the more I understand that as a political fact rather than a psychological one.
Well, you grew up in a very different time, she said.
Yep, I said.
I like the directness of power, its ease and assurance. I’m less fond of the influence that flows from it, because it leads so many people to debase themselves, but it’s a fact. It has to be guarded and fought for, true. But I like the fight. Someday I’ll be too old and tired, and then I’ll be in trouble. But that’s America; it’s a great country for the strong, and a terrible one for the weak. As far as I can make out, that’s always been so.
"In terms of missing the point- the foundational theory of Second Wave
is ‘the personal is political.’ It follows then that critiquing the
positing of one woman’s personal experience as emblematic of a larger
political reality is an act oppositional to stated Second Wave
philosophy."
Rebecca, this is true. However, the follow-on, in those days, was not that one vanished into one’s own personal choices, and expecting that that was some sort of default political activity. It was that one looked at the political meaning of one’s personal circumstances, and acted politically to change them. What was meant by that? Running for office and driving through legislation that directly addressed that personal circumstance the woman had come from. Acquiring education, position, money, and other forms of power with which to effect political change.
Hillary Clinton is very much in that mold. She never successfully hid her disgruntlement at the public’s insisting she make herself into a smiling, silent First Lady; if you read her bill texts now, you’ll see a staggering commitment to improving women’s lives directly, with the most powerful tool we have in this country: the law. I used to be a Congressional staffer, and I read candidates’ bill texts carefully before I vote, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw HRC’s bills, because I had never seen any texts so intent on helping women. There was one in particular that impressed me with how minutely she understood a great many women’s lives: the bill would have changed the definition of "part time student" to "any student taking classes below fulltime".
That sounds minor, but it would have freed millions of women to go to school and make themselves employable to the point where they could support their families. A getting-by working mother might be able to manage one class per semester, but only with financial support; even state schools run $1-3K/course these days. However, one class doesn’t give her part-time status, which means she can’t apply for loans or qualify for scholarships and grants, including childcare grants. An awful lot of women are willing to stretch themselves thin for years to get to that degree, and Hillary’s law would’ve seen they had the money to do it. You do that, and you greatly increase the pool of self-sufficient women, which means that there is more potential for them to be powerful actors in ways that matter directly here.
I understand this Third-Wave view, but think it’s naive and kids itself, and in general flinches from doing what it takes to acquire power. Power is not a nuanced thing, though its application can be nuanced. The "personal choices" of the Third Wave are based on the liberty to make them, but to believe that one has liberty without power is to delude oneself. Of course it’s hard to fight, hard to go out and work like you’re in it for the money, hard to work the triple shift when raising children. I know it every day because I live it. But man, nobody gives you power because you say you’re worthy and morally righteous. The 3rd-wavers are only living off the spoils of the war the second-wavers waged.
Yes, sure, Hillary’s second-wave view is absolutely a headband-wearing view. It’s made for women of a certain class — the one that usually gets voted into Congress, runs companies, sits on judicial benches, etc. The unfortunate reaction to this was a bleeding-heart feminism that sanctified poverty, victimhood, rape theory, and oppression, but it’s been a dead end. It’s won, though, to the point where I don’t really believe young women know what the headbands were all about.
The unfortunate thing is that the headbands were successful enough that young women generally do not feel sexism. You see it reflected in the wage-parity numbers: Young, childless women do about as well as men do. Just as I was, they’re honorary men. The moment they become pregnant, though, that’s all over. And it’s there that the need for some version of headband feminism is apparent — and that’s too late.
The difficulty with it is that mothers will in fact harm themselves, and give up all kinds of power, in order to protect or help their children today. I’ve done it. This is not compatible with second-wave feminism, and all it does for victim feminism is to generate poster children. It’s compatible only with incoherent "whatever you want, it’s feminist" 3rd-wave feminism, which has no legs of its own.
My guess is that the only way to reconcile motherhood with the understanding of the fact that power is a brutal thing gained brutally is this: Women raising children are exempt, the expectation being that when you’re done raising children, you’ll get back on that horse and get back into the fight. To do this, of course, you’ve got a new fight, which is prying open universities and professional careers for older women; slamming mommy-track practices; punishing ageism.
I’d say the universities that incubate feminism are probably some of the worst offenders in that respect. You try starting an academic career at age 40, with children. Unless you’re in a poorly-paid women’s profession like social work, you’re probably a nonstarter. Why? Because hiring committees don’t want 47-year-old recently graduated mothers as tenure-track candidates, even though they’ve got a good 20-40 working years ahead of them. Academics are afraid of age, afraid of not being current. They want that hip kid with the Michael Caine glasses, whose hipness might rub off on the department, somehow, and who might bring presents from the future. And there is, of course, the presumption that motherhood is not serious work, and that these old ladies had just been screwing around flakily for a decade or two before starting school.
I wouldn’t bother much with 3rd-wave feminism. Yes, the critique is correct. It is condescending, it’s dangerously naive in its assumptions about "the lot of women". But power, and the understanding of how one gets it, is never anachronistic. This is why people keep returning to handbooks on power which predate the ’70s by centuries and millenia. Get the power first; then you can worry about understanding what "help" means to this woman and that. Without the power, you’ve got nothing. And in this country, luckily, its acquisition is a fairly straightforward matter. Not easy, but straightforward.
I am 40. From 2002-2005 I took care of a disabled husband; from 2003 on I’ve raised a child mostly on my own; since 2006 I’ve supported her mostly on my own. I have never met such outrage as when I have said, "What I am doing is work, and hard work at that, and I mean to get paid."
Hi AmyAmy, glad to read you over here. Interesting points, and I have read Hirshman’s book. I think it’s compelling and holds a few truths. I’m certainly glad she wrote it.
In terms of missing the point- the foundational theory of Second Wave is "the personal is political." It follows then that critiquing the positing of one woman’s personal experience as emblematic of a larger political reality is an act oppositional to stated Second Wave philosophy.
In other words, Michelle’s personal reality has as much political credibility as a woman sold into sexual slavery. It goes without saying that her reality offers just one view of a complex matrix of power, but then that’s a Third Wave concept–that there are many ways of looking, and that a mono-view of "the lot of women" is anachronistic at best, dangerously naive at and condescending at worst.
http://www.rebeccawalker.com/work/black-white-and-jewish
Oh, I wrote a book. Well, on what site is that more appropriate.
Anon, not to worry. My example is: Do both, sweetie. Both work and children are wonderful. Have money, money is important. Also get the largest truck imaginable and run over any jerk who stands in your way.
It’s true fertility drops off in the mid-30s. The incidence of birth defects goes up too. I have to say, though, I’m glad I waited till my mid-30s to get around to it. I’m much more patient and sensible than I was 20 years ago; there’s more perspective, today is not forever. Ten years is not forever. I’m in good shape, so energy is not an issue. I have money, property, and good degrees, all of which can make the difference between desperation and a comfortable life (including time to spend with your children) when you’re raising children alone. And — I think this is as important as the others — I don’t feel I missed out on a thing. I had a wonderful young adulthood. From 15-35, I did almost exactly as I pleased, I made the career I wanted, traveled, adventured, lived high and low, enjoyed the company of many men, had my mettle tested. I think it might bother me now to be manless if I were 25; as it is,…:) a 10, 15 year break is fine. I’m content to focus on raising my daughter, taking care of myself, helping in the community here and there, and doing my work.
But, you know. Different people want different things. And so we come back to Michelle Obama.
Anonymous, no, I didn’t give up my work. I’d sooner cut off my arm. In fact I leave for an overseas research trip on Monday. I just had to fight — and I do mean FIGHT — to go on with my work in the face of motherhood and divorce. (And learn to get by on less sleep.) Nobody, but nobody, in my department gets in my way now when my schedule’s nonstandard. They know I’ll bring back the goods. But I have learned that if I’m not going to be subject to the ordinary discrimination against mothers, I have to rip many new assholes, be vocal, be aware of the law, and be very willing to use it. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. (I’m also well aware that those laws exist only because of those second-wavers who were willing to dedicate their lives to fighting for women’s rights.)
You bet there are costs to motherhood. And some of them I don’t mind at all. Health is a big one. I miss the days of 8-hour shuteye and the 2-hour workout, and the hiking trips. I used to go to movies, to dinner, have a normal social life. I used to cook grownup food. I used to choose friends based on my interests, not on what’s good for my daughter. I used to walk a lot more, do less laundry — you know the score. That’s all fine, that’s raising kids. What’s not fine is the lack of respect, the way that mothers’ work is taken for granted while being accorded no respect, the financial kneecapping that’s more a result of persistant disrespect than it is of pulling back temporarily to part-time, and the presumption that mothers are flaky morons interested only in their kids.
Did I take a hiatus? Sure. Actually a long hiatus, while I cared for my baby and my ill husband. (Though throughout, I built professional ties, volunteered, studied, wrote, etc.) I think the Scandinavian model of a home-year is a good one, so long as you don’t get the Scandinavian effect on career (women pushed to half-time, less interesting work afterwards). My ex’s sister-in-law is a young lawyer with one child so far; she went back to working 70-hour weeks after a few weeks home, her husband stayed home with the baby a few months longer, and now the baby’s in daycare. Personally, I’m not a fan of fulltime daycare, especially for infants. But they seem happy with it.
Incidentally, most professional women don’t lose their careers entirely after having children. What they lose is respect, promotions, income, opportunity — unless, like my ex’s SIL, they’re willing to pretend there is no baby, or like me, they’re willing to become holy terrors. In which case the crazy-bitch factor is also a negative, though not nearly as big a negative as doing nothing. But the nice women who insist on publicly being mothers lose that respect and income for decades, or permanently, not just in the years when the children need their mother there so much. The women get mommy-tracked, pushed into support positions, or pushed out altogether, and are then told to look for silver linings and take solace in what fine children they’ve raised.
Conference organizers are nervous about hearing from me, because they know I"m going to harangue them about childcare and ride their asses till they hire reasonable childcare services. I’ve had it with the academic idea that if people have the temerity to spawn, there is some 24x7x365 mommytron in the background to look after them so that the Grand Academic Career can go on unfettered 1950s-style. When I bring academics here, and they have kids, I am very explicit about arranging childcare stipends, which puts departments in the position of having to cough up the money (and look terribly progressive for a couple hundred bucks) or embarrass themselves in front of the desirable guest. The stipends are paid. No, it doesn’t make people happy with me. They get over it. But my presumption is that the parent in the background also has a life, and probably a career, and that there’s a real cost to them in losing the spouse’s help with the kids for a few days. The gratitude that you get for a stipend is something pretty special.
So one most certainly can "whelp and war", as you put it. I would call it a necessity. And I am grateful to be able to teach my daughter these lessons. As the economy crumbles, I hear stories daily from nice women who are afraid to say no to their increasingly desperate husbands’ crazy sc hemes. They’re completely dependent on these men. I want my girl to know what she can do for herself and her children.
Single mamas are the true Sabras. Prickly fighters outside the home, soft within.
I must tell you, while I understand the yearning for days of supportive husbands, I don’t miss it. It’s a lot of work, but I like doing it on my own. The price of being supported by a husband is, I think, far too high. When I think about the baloney you go through with a man in having to justify time spent on your own work…no. The vast majority of college-educated men, it seems to me, are happy to talk a nice egalitarian line, but will tackle you without compunction to make sure their careers come first, and that you, not they, are the ones doing the majority of the home/children/spouse-supporting work. I watched my grandmother give up painting just as museums were asking for her work; my grandfather felt art was taking her away from the family. It’s painful for me to look at some of her later paintings; you can see the lack of commitment in them. I would not want to spend my time on wife work again, frankly — it just wasn’t very interesting to me.
Anyway, I wouldn’t counsel any woman to rely on a husband for financial support. I made sure I was pretty well set-up before I got married and had a kid — education, career, property. And thank God I did; we had two years of disability here, even before the divorce. The disability was horribly expensive, but we still came out with much intact, thanks to my pre-marriage prep and ability to manage money.
So, bottom line: I sure don’t mind doing it on my own. I love almost all of my work, and have no problem with making sacrifices for it. What I do mind is the lack of social respect, the bullshit professional obstacles, and the permanent demotions in pay, position, and social standing. There is no reason why motherhood should involve those sacrifices.
I also mind the powerfully sexist presumptions built into custody law: The woman should knows nothing and care less about money, she should not be ambitious; all she should care about is her children, and she should not mind poverty so long as she has her children. She should not think about their education past highschool (you should’ve seen my lawyer’s face when I brought up graduate school); she should not be ambitious for them. She should get a meaningless, disposable job, come home and fold laundry at night, and be grateful for whatever pittance she’s given, as alms. Her time has no value. The man is responsible for…well, very little. Certainly not a hand in raising the children, although he has a right to them — they are his possessions, you see, and he has a right to the title "Father". He should contribute some portion of what he can, but if he doesn’t make much…<shrug> put it on the woman, she won’t mind so long as she has her children with her. If he goes out and has more children, so much the worse for her and her kids; they are, after all, her responsibility.
;) Finally, don’t confuse never-married with childless. Though, frankly, I don’t think being childless is anything to have a silent scream about. I know it’s central for many women, but for me, no. I was very happy to be childless until I was, oh, 33 or so; then I woke up one day and thought, "Yeah, I could do that now." Which didn’t send me out on a manhunt; if it happened, it happened. No shortage of kids in the world, and no shortage of my own work to do, either. I’m still slightly surprised (but, most days, very glad) it did happen.
Watch what you say, both to, and in front of, your daughter. It is a very miserable thing to watch an achieving, confident young woman decide she has heard the message, and nobody’s going to get HER into the mess her Mom was in, oh no. Ouch! No grandkids for you! That is not fun. Look around. Careful what you even think. Children read thoughts.
When is too early, when is too old, and how many years are there between? How big is the Window? Fertility drops off, slowly, but really, at 35.
And no, you can’t change your tune when they are 29. "But MOM, she will say. Stop talking like a yenta. Just cause you’re getting old and sloppy, and sentimental doesn’t mean I’m gonna commit career suicide and end up poor, OK? I wanna LIVE. Have fun. Go places. I don’t want to veg in a playground. I want a promotion. And I’ve got student loans. Puhleeeze." "But daaaarling", you will blubber. "Having you meant the most of what I ever did."
That’s not what I heard growing up, she will think.
I am annoying, but I mean well. Forgive me.
I missed your point. You don’t want social support when you are old, you want to be able to make as much money as you did before you had a child. You don’t want to have a reduction in lifetime earnings because of a hiatus. You don’t even want there to be a hiatus.
However, reality is that one cannot whelp and war. At the same time. You have another claim on your energy and time now, and no, those things aren’t infinitely elastic, and there is going to be a cost, no matter how liberal and supportive everybody else is, and they should be. But we only have so much bandwidth. The presence of a child takes up bandwidth. A lot, actually. And a mother is not a father.
It’s grand to be a mother, as you said, but you are annoyed at the price. The price can be brought down, and should be, as much as possible, but it can’t be eliminated. Nothing good is free. That is a cosmic, not a practical, statement.
But I am on your side.
I completely agree with you.
Your remark about the handicapped curb-cuts and assisted doors was particularly spot-on.
A shul where even one congregant can’t hear or see is out of line. Get a carpenter in, and raise the Bima high enough, so everybody can see and hear. Put in microphones on a Shabbos timer. Figure it out.
I didn’t mean that other work, besides mothering, is mere baloney, just done for money; I SAID people NEED those widgets. I wouldn’t want to do without those widgets for one minute. What would I eat and wear? But who is going to produce and consume if nobody mothers? That drives the whole rest. The artists and writers you mention should honor you, help you carry things, run errands and give you precedence. If they look down on you in the tiniest way, they are brainless and out of line. Are they going to perform to empty chairs?
The ideal paradise would be to combine part-time work - one’s usual work - with child-rearing. Of course a mother needs to keep her membership in the outside world. She’s still a citizen, with a brain. She’s not dead. But, her whole day is not available the way it was before. Not that you need to be told any of this.
Once, women were excluded - either impoverished or bored. Now, they are pulled in two directions - or childless. Thank God you have made this heroic choice, not to be childless. All honor to you. Your sacrifice is even greater, because you were giving up so much. Many women never got as far as you did, in the working world, and have a lot less to miss.
As for the assorted social-worker, or teacher, interferers you mention, yuck on them. I just meant that: you both want societal recognition, and societal involvement, and, at the same time, you don’t. You want to be left alone to do it your way, because it’s your family life, and your kid, and at the same time, you don’t want to be in it all alone. Well, that’s why God invented husbands. And extended family. Those words can be looked up in a dictionary from 1950. There’s not much of that, any more. That’s not your fault.
Child-rearing, and personal maintenance in old age, or any age, is indeed heavily subsidized by our social safety net. Just not for folks like YOU.
It is awful that the minute a woman’s hourly rate of compensation becomes high, because she is highly skilled, it’s just as if somebody cut her ovaries out. She has been socially, not surgically, sterilized. Who can afford her down-time while she raises children? If a woman, who makes six dollars an hour, isn’t at her job for an hour, her family loses six dollars. If a lawyer or executive isn’t at her job for an hour, they lose… what? A hundred dollars? So, which one of these women is going to have a baby? Which baby costs more? The lawyer’s baby. So, the lawyer can’t afford to have a baby, and the minimum-wage worker can. They don’t tell women that, when they apply to law school: "no kids for you, counselor. Your fourteen hours of labor alone will cost $1400. The lady in the next bed’s labor time will cost $84." 84 is 6 times 14.
Society subsidizes poor people’s child-rearing because it’s useful. "Let’s motivate them to stay home. It keeps them out of the labor force. That way, those jobs can go overseas, where they cost a fraction of a US salary, even a very low one" is the theory. Also, look how educated men’s salaries are now half what they once were, now that their labor force has doubled. There are twice as many lawyers now, now that all the women are educated, too. So, each educated worker now costs HALF what he used to cost! Why? Supply and demand. Double the supply, halve the price. No more "head of household" salaries. Can our men support three people now? Himself, her, and a baby? Not easily.
====================
(That pesky animal, the assertive worker, has to be got rid of. But attrition is the best way. Just arrange circumstances so he can’t afford to have kids, and eventually there just won’t be any more folks like him. Eventually, there will be a small educated class, and a large, passive, cheap, supply of workers.)
YOU, in these new horrible circumstances, are actually doing better than many. Good for you. Your complaints, while loud, and reasonable, are not as loud as the silent screams of the never-married women, who are neither very low-level, making $6 an hour, nor very high-level, like you. The sterile middle. There seem to be millions of them. They look at you sideways when they see you with your baby, but you have been too busy to notice. Maybe they could help you carry things.
Extinction looms. Good luck.
Holy crap. I see I managed to bounce right over some of the more insulting things you said, Anonymous.
1. The idea that non-childrearing work is drudgery done for money only. I live in a town full of artists, writers, scientists, scholars, teachers. Don’t even think about characterizing that work as widgetmaking. Do not devalue other work in an attempt to convince anyone of how wonderful motherhood is.
2. You clearly are not currently responsible for raising children. If you were, you’d know that there already is, like it or not, tremendous governmental and social interference in raising children. We have whole platoons of social workers, public health professionals, and teachers intent on keeping their jobs, and they justify their work by interfering mightily in what was once parents’ work.
3. You seem to think I am complaining about how much work childrearing is. Read more carefully. I took on this commitment voluntarily, and I don’t complain about the sacrifice; not only that, but I bet I know considerably more about it than you do. I do complain vociferously about the way adults, and men primarily, push mothers down in the mud and use them, justifying the trampling by tossing around sugary platitudes about how terribly important we are.
I will tell you, Anonymous, that the kind of stuff you’re peddling is transparent to 12-year-olds. How do I know? I remember it. I remember being 12, and being told I had to go sit with the women behind the screen. Back there, where you couldn’t follow the service, couldn’t really see the rabbi, couldn’t hear what was going on. I had never seen or experienced so direct a shove away from the action, based solely on my sex, in my life.
That was really it for me with Judaism. The women in the community were upset, and came around peddling the same kind of lines you’ve got here about how terribly important the women were. And they were, just like apprentice boys and indentured servants were important to the colonial economy of the northeast, and underpaid grad students are important to universities. But even I could see, at the time, that the women had little hand in shaping the rules and institutions than ran their own lives, and were marginalized even at shul. All they could do if they were in trouble was try to wheedle and boss around their men, on whom they were completely dependent, and do things indirectly. "Oh," say the men, "you shouldn’t want power, it’s not that important, it’s not so great." But I notice they sure don’t give it up. "We can’t!" they cry. "Hashem said this is our job, and men do this part of the work!" Oh yes indeed, and I left my wallet in my other pants.
Well, to hell with all that. I am grateful that the local shul is nothing like that, and has a long history of treating women with genuine respect. If it didn’t, if the attitudes of the rabbi and the board were like yours, my daughter probably would not be going to shul. I want to give her an education, yes, but not at the price of teaching her to subordinate herself like that and think it’s a wonderful thing.
"
Being a parent, and particularly a mother, is being given a chance to play God. To the very young, Mommy is God. Anybody who can’t see that as a big deal isn’t thinking, isn’t religious, or something."
Wonderful. When the very young are in charge of hiring and promotion, voting, legislating, judging, and all the other adult things that determine whether a mother will be able to go on with her non-kid-related work in a meaningful way, or whether she’ll be poor in old age, then I’m sure I’ll find this very reassuring.
Your presumptions are sexist to the point of misogyny ("No! I love women! I just think they should focus on the things I like about them, like motherhood! They’re cute, I want to pat them in various places, and I love my mother!") and demonstrate why a feminism that is entirely about personal choice is a failure.
Anonymous — Who here said motherhood’s not important? Of course it is. But so what? This is license for the rest of the world to use and disrespect you? Listen, nobody else pays the bills here, nobody else is supporting me when I’m old, and I’m damned if I’ll sit in a chair in my daughter’s house for 15 years when I get that way. And, when I was pushing that stroller around, I wanted the lost respect back, and was furious that I’d fallen into some "mother=invisible retard" hole. (What? You don’t think it’s so? Spend 15-20 years as an honorary man before you have those kids, and you’ll notice the dizzying drop in respect. It shocked the hell out of me.) You know what used to kill me? Handicapped-entrance pushbuttons and curb cuts. Mothers with strollers have been struggling with doors and curbs for how long? And have made up how much of the population? But we didn’t get those lifesavers until a bunch of disabled vets made it home. Soldiers are important, you see. Mothers, not so much.
My kid, fantastic. Raising her, I dig it. But in no way do I think it’s reasonable that raising children should mean your career and lifetime income are kneecapped and you get treated like a mother. Don’t even get me started on workplace discrimination and the presumptions built into custody and child-support law.
Your "don’t worry, embrace the nurturing side" remarks would make more sense if it were not for the facts that a) many of us have important work that’s not child-related, and this part of us does not vanish on giving birth; b) married or not, you cannot expect that other people will support you.
Being a parent, and particularly a mother, is being given a chance to play God. To the very young, Mommy is God. Anybody who can’t see that as a big deal isn’t thinking, isn’t religious, or something.
And God said, "… and it was good."
And Mommy said, "… that’s nice, dear"
"…my mother’s milk was valid. I will survive…." – Dith Pran. (He survived walking across Cambodia during the war)
There IS something personal about raising a child. It’s only your child. Nobody else is going to get anything direct out of it. That child is only going to call YOU on Mother’s day, not the rest of the folks out there. OF COURSE in the long-term it is in everybody’s interest how your kid grows up. Heck, she will be paying for their pensions, walking their streets, and on and on. But you DON"T WANT TOO MUCH societal interfering and snooping into how you are raising you kid! So, you are alone with it.
Some of what you are bewailing simply comes with the nature of the thing. Humans have a very, very long period of development. That is nobody’s fault, and is not going to change. No, it wasn’t great in the past when people grew up very fast, too fast.
Raising a kid is a very big job, and it is sort of thankless, in an immediate sense, and you need perspective and greatness to see how important it is.
"How was your day?"
"Great. I made some widgets. People need them."
"That’s good. However, I made a human soul today. My day was better than yours."
Don’t say that, but think that.
What is life? Eighty years of tax returns and waiting for the elevator. How people feel while waiting for the elevator is their sixty-cycle hum, their baseline feeling. It is only going to be cheerful if their parents, particularly their MOTHER, in early years, communicated that coming to this particular planet was a good idea.
There is no bigger Day than that.
A mother has the pain or pleasure of the human race in her hands. More than the government, more than the technical experts, more than the rabbis. If she can’t feel the importance of that, that’s her personal limitation.
Nothing gratifies the normal human need to be important as much as motherhood. Fathers are essential people. But wounded soldiers on battlefields do not cry for their fathers.
Rebecca, you miss the point of second-wave feminism, which isn’t about individual choices, but about the power of women more generally in being able to make the rules and run the show societally. Which is not a Dan-Quayle matter of wanting power because it’s there, but a matter of avoiding the poverty, discrimination, dependence, and massive lack of respect that’s the lot of most women who have children.
Put more simply: Women get used, and it costs us dearly. Second-wave feminism was about putting enough women into positions of power to stop that, which is why the older feminists you’ll meet have a footsoldier air about them. It’s not about their personal choices. M.O. is of my generation; we were the first ones to take the second wavers’ victories for granted, and that attitude is beginning to kick us in the ass. But Hillary gets it, and so does Mikulski, whom I met when she was here campaigning for HRC.
I didn’t know that I had any interest in feminism, or that this wasn’t a matter of "personal choice", until I got married and had a kid. I was 35 at the time, and had spent my adulthood as an honorary man. I was no moneybags, but I had a serious career going on and the respect that goes with it, and I took it for granted. I was completely flabbergasted by the social demotion that goes with actually caring for children (note that M.O. was not in fact the kids’ primary caregiver; her mother was). It was like someone took my passport away and stamped "mental defective" on my forehead. That wasn’t feminists’ doing; that has to do with the fact that the worlds of business and the professions do not take, and never have taken, "women’s work" seriously. Also with the fact that one generation was not enough to do the second wavers’ work, though I’m sorry to see HRC leaving her Senate post. She was hammering away at it there, and any intl-feminism work she manages to get done at State will be far more diffuse.
At that point I became a feminist. I have recovered my status somewhat, since I’m now no longer a wife, my conversation isn’t (and never was) primarily about children and cooking, and my child’s no longer in my lap. But I have a much better understanding of the depth of the problem now.
Try Linda Hirshman’s book. You won’t like it, but she’s right.
"How will second-wave feminism find relevance when a devoted partner,
full-time mother and credentialed black powerhouse becomes first lady,
and doesn’t feel victimized by the job?"
Well first of all, Michelle Obama is and never has been a full-time mother (although one can argue that all women, working and non are always full-time mothers. But I think the author is referring specifically to stay-at-home moms). And considering all of the duties a first lady must perform, I don’t think she’s going to become one anytime soon.
Not that being a stay-at-home mom is incompatible with feminism. But the author is making Michelle out to be something she’s not.
Plus I wonder when our society will evolve to the point where men like Barak Obama will also be able to say "I’m a Father first."
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