Ann Althouse has a comment on this New York Times piece on a woman who resents the life she chose.
She calls her marriage a good one. She also has the benefit of a once-a-week housecleaner and had live-in help while the couple’s two children were growing up. She did not pursue a tenure track because she wanted to be more available for her children while they were growing up...
"Men lock the door and leave. Things could be a wreck or whatever and it doesn’t affect their other world," [said NY lawyer Dawn Santana]. "I walk out and worry about the house looking nice, because the kids have play dates, etc. Someone has to worry about that, and it’s usually not the dad."
Ann rightly takes this woman to task for whining about the choices she made. Lets' face it. This isn't the 1950s when there were certain expectations that women had to do certain things once they married and had children. We don't fire women for being pregnant, after all.
I figure there are going to be a lot more of these mid-life feminists coming out of the woodwork: women who chose to stay home with their kids because they knew it was better for them and that the family could afford for the mother not to work. These same women, at 45 or 50, look back and realize they probably won't make partner in a law firm no matter how hard they try now, nor will they reach CEO. And they are bitter that the Enjoli ad was just another way to sell perfume.
Bernie Goldberg in his book Bias pointed out that daycare is one of those third-rail issues the media doesn't like to talk about in an objective manner. This is very true, and I'll even agree with Echidne that "working mother bad" stories get way more play.
But here's the deal: life is full of choices, and for women, those choices are very complicated. You go to school. You get a degree. You meet Mr. Right and get married. Then you want to have kids. What then? Do you stay home and raise the kids or work and put the kids in daycare? Either way, your choices are tough.
If you stay home, you spend 15-20 years not using whatever degree you got, so it's virtually worthless by the time you go back to work. And no employer considers motherhood to be equal experience with time spent on the job, even though moms exhibit virtually every quality necessary for business on a daily basis. You wonder if you are wasting your life, and, if you resent it, if you are just being selfish.
If you go back to work, you juggle getting the kids to and from daycare while you work anywhere from 6 to 12 hours (or more) a day. You have pictures on your desk of children someone else is raising, and you wonder constantly what they (and you) are doing. You tell yourself that 15 minutes of "quality time" really does equal being there all day, even though you know deep inside this can't logically be true.
And the choices these days aren't really any better for men. If they work hard and long so their wives can stay home with the kids, they are workaholics who don't care about the family. If they refuse to work overtime or take jobs with more money but more travel time, they are "unmotivated."
The difference, as Ann points out, is that most men are better at compartmentalizing their emotions, which allows them to focus on work at work and not worry about whether the house is clean enough or all the laundry is done.
We've come a long way, baby. In some ways. But women are still complaining even when they can make almost any choice they want.
|