Last week Lisa Belkin’s 2003 New York Times Magazine article “The Opt-Out Revolution” reared its ugly, mommy-wars inspiring head yet again, when Washington Post reporter Donna St. George took the time to parse 2007 census numbers on stay-at-home mothers. The conclusion? The majority of at home mothers aren’t former lawyers or MBAs who have opted out of stressful, high-powered careers. As the article says:
Stay-at-home mothers tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. They are more likely than other mothers to be Hispanic or foreign-born…Given this portrait, mothers at home appear to be “the more vulnerable women, for whom I would argue the issue is lack of opportunity,” said sociologist Pamela Stone of Hunter College. “They have a hard time finding a job and finding a job that makes work worth it.”
In other words, Belkin’s piece got it wrong (as many of us have long suspected). There is no “revolution” among women at the top sending the best and the brightest running from the corporate world.
In an odd misreading of the Post article, New York Times Economix blogger David Leonhardt comes to Lisa Belkin’s defense citing statistics that the absolute number of stay at home mothers has, in fact, increased — and that’s true — nearly a quarter of women are out of the labor force versus roughly 20% in 1994. But that’s not what St. George is saying in her article. She is pointing out that the phenomenon of wealthy, upper class mothers “opting out” doesn’t represent the vast majority of at home mothers. Leonhardt condescendingly concludes with a “modest proposal” (one that none of us silly, over-emotional girls have thought of before):
Maybe we should stop arguing so much about whether women are staying home in greater numbers and focus instead on the policy questions. How can companies be persuaded, or pushed, to make part-time work a more serious options for both mothers and fathers? How can part-time work — or, for that matter, years spent outside the labor force — become less of a career killer? What can be done to encourage more fathers to take paternity leave? How can we create better, more comprehensive pre-school programs, so that middle-class and poor parents of 3- and 4-year-olds can feel more comfortable working full time?
As blogger Dana Goldstein points out, flex-time and part-time options are not the answer for women at the bottom of the working totem pole. In fact most of Leonhardt’s “solutions” work for women in corporate office jobs, probably not the 68% of at home mothers who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and certainly not the 20% who don’t have a high school diploma. For these women there needs to be massive change in social welfare at federal, state and local levels, not just cosmetic changes in corporate policy. Those changes can’t just be about children; they have to also provide opportunity for women to further their education and get better paying jobs.
This doesn’t let the women of Belkin’s article off the hook. Though they may be fewer in number than The New York Times suggests (not just in this piece, but in many others over the years), the 32% of at home mothers who have a college degree or higher are surely hurting the collective by opting out. They are the influencers and decision-makers who could foment change in both government and corporate policy. Instead they leave male colleagues in the most powerful jobs, essentially abandoning their female support staff.
That means that some of Leonhardt’s suggestions are relevant, but they aren’t the only, or even the largest part of the solution. And this is one of my biggest problems with media coverage of working mothers — invariably the conclusions drawn are most applicable to the lives of people with jobs that are inherently flexible, can be done from different locations, with varying degrees of intensity and at varying times — jobs like writing. Time and again I see flexible and part-time work touted as one of the most important solutions to the work-life crunch.
Yet the reality is that these are a small part of the complicated matrix we need to weave to make working mother’s lives better. Much bigger pieces of the puzzle include adequate social services, including, but not limited to, universal access to high-quality early childhood care, universal health care, quality public education and after-school programs, and assistance for the many mothers who are not at home by choice.
Related links:
- Judy Berman writes about the Donna St. George article at Salon’s Broadsheet.
- Katie Allison Granju at Babble writes poignantly about opting out, and why women need to think carefully about the choice to stay home.
- The New America Foundation explores policy implications of the new census data around at home mothers.
- More from The Mama Bee on media coverage of working mothers here, here and here.
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